In a few days, after a three-month Covid-induced delay, the 2021 UK Michelin Guide will finally be announced online to the delight of pretty much nobody. Even in years unaffected by a pandemic, the arrival of a Guide update has mainly seemed to serve the perpetual outrage cycle more than the actual restaurants. The same criticisms are trotted out every year: there are too many French restaurants, there aren’t enough chefs of colour, there are almost no women. The city of Manchester will claim it is being disrespected before asserting that it doesn’t care anyway.

Some would argue that the disputes over the relevance of the Michelin Guide points towards its demise, that it represents an archaic system of value judgment dreamt up a century ago by a pair of brothers who sold tyres. They would point to other canons that have their finger on the pulse of modern dining: the Anglophone, chef-led The World’s 50 Best, or the US-focused James Beard Foundation Awards.

As a food writer I’ve created my own lists that could be perceived as anti-Michelin, based on how most actual Londoners eat out, rather than star-chasing food-tourists. Meanwhile, platforms such as Yelp and Google Reviews open up the arena of star-giving to anyone with an opinion or axe to grind.

There are those who might even say that Michelin is irrelevant because of this new democratisation of taste; that in this relativist, post-expert world we have denigrated the judgments of those who can identify a turbot cooked à la nacre from 50 places and elevated the opinions of people who can rank the individual dishes on Wagamama’s menu.

And yet, Michelin is not dying at all. The disputes, if anything, only feed the closed circuit of hype that Michelin generates. For the restaurant website Eater London, Michelin day is the busiest of the year. Food obsessives refresh the page to check for the final results, supporting their favourite restaurants like a football club, while chefs hope that the back-breaking work they’ve put in to opening a financially unsound restaurant in central London will be rewarded with a star and an uptick in bookings, or at least meal-kit orders.

It is the one day of the year when the merits of styles of food and aspects of cuisine are debated nationally, when restaurants are treated like the hallowed halls of culture and taste they aspire to be. Michelin remains a powerful arbiter, but more than that it is a conversation starter.

The key to understanding the longevity of the Michelin Guide is first to understand who exactly it’s for. The Guide does not exist to serve the restaurant industry or boost the overly massaged egos of chefs. It does not attempt to be truly comprehensive or represent the tastes of the 99 per cent. No, the Michelin Guide exists for the benefit of Michelin.

In the beginning, this was quite blatant – the Guide was simply a map of places and amenities in France that would be useful to motorists and directly led to the sale of more tyres. Restaurants were, and still are, given stars by how much wear it’s worth putting those tyres under – two stars means a detour from your well-travelled road; three means a journey all to itself. During the era of Mr Ferran Adrià’s seminal three-star restaurant El Bulli, it wasn’t unusual to see bloggers describe the winding journey to the town of Roses in Catalonia in as florid terms as the food itself, probably much to Michelin’s delight.

But in the age of air travel, the guide benefitted Michelin in another, more circuitous way. In 1977, the sociologists Messrs Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron coined the term “cultural capital” to describe forms of capital exchange aside from traditional economic capital. An alternative form of capital can be built up by a cultural elite setting the rules of the game that decides what is great, and what isn’t great at all. This cultural capital can then be transmitted to objects deemed worthy of it – restaurants, for example.

By creating a rigorous framework and set of value judgements to rank restaurants by, Michelin generated cultural capital for those restaurants, but also for itself. In Möbius-strip logic, restaurants became culturally significant because of their inclusion in the guide, and the Michelin Guide became culturally significant because it is full of great restaurants.

Standards of elitism are always in a state of flux, but Michelin has reflected and amplified those new standards. The year 2005 saw the recognition of the US as a powerful new contender in haute cuisine, with the introduction of the New York Guide, and 2007’s Tokyo Guide was the moment the centre of global culinary gravity officially shifted from France to Japan.

And yet, the more Michelin has widened its net, seemingly diversifying its standards, the more homogenous restaurants have become. Take its Asia guides, for instance. China’s highest-ranked restaurant, Ultraviolet, is run by a French chef and serves a cuisine that is rootless and unmoored from any sense of locality; the trouble with the Hong Kong and Macau list is not necessarily that most of the top-ranked restaurants are European, but that even the Cantonese restaurants speak the same culinary vernacular – the same tweezer-aided aesthetic, the same meal structure, the same obsequious service.

While globalisation and the rise of mega-chains have homogenised restaurants at the low end, counterintuitively it often seems like the higher up you go, restaurants begin to converge again, all exhibiting familiar tics.

Michelin has had a huge role to play in this. Rather than diversifying the criteria on which it judges quality, Michelin has moulded restaurants to its own rules, which privilege ruthless consistency and a tyrannical attention to detail and aesthetics above all else.

Haute cuisine increasingly resembles a confidence trick: chefs adhere to the judgments of Michelin because they believe they know best, and customers follow despite food that confounds pleasure at every turn. At the highest level, Michelin rewards creativity, but often a demented, desperate version of it, one that mistakes being creative with creating something no one else would put on a menu. A homogenisation, not of what is on the plate, but of a mindset.

You really want to see the extent of Michelin’s power? I will show you fear in a handful of pink marshmallows served with a cube of burrata covered in honey, as seen at Sketch Library in Mayfair, which was bizarrely awarded three stars last year.

There have been chefs who have stood up to Michelin. Mr Marco Pierre White famously renounced his three stars after realising he was “being judged by people who knew less” than him. More recently, Mr Magnus Nilsson of Faviken, a two-starred restaurant in Sweden, closed his business citing the desire for a better work-life balance. While not blaming Michelin explicitly, Mr Nilsson has acknowledged the immense stress running a kitchen serving starred-cuisine can put chefs and their workers under, with 80-hour weeks and self-imposed guilt for leaving the kitchen.

But for most chefs, including Mr Sébastien Bras who wanted (but failed) to give back his three stars in 2018, this moment of clarity comes after mastering the game. How much more powerful would it be to not play it at all?

We desperately need to find more ways to talk about quality that have nothing to do with Michelin or its imitators. These standards should celebrate difference of perspective over homogeneity, emphasise serving a community over wasteful gastro-tourism, prioritise the wellbeing of workers over the artistic temperament of the chef and should treat the worth of a restaurant as something more than how “perfect” a plate of food is. Rather than expect Michelin to drop the standards that have served it so well, it’s up to chefs, food writers and consumers to demonstrate what these new standards should be.

The first thing we can do, as soon as the awards are announced, is ignore them.