Steinberger used to like France. He remembers amazing meals and describes them in ways that belie his economics-writing background. He writes about the dinner where he "swapped [his] wife for a duck liver" — an entire lobe used in an evolved version of baeckeofe, an Alsatian stew, which was "bathed in a truffled bouillon." But this sort of pure food erotica — what a good portion of a book about French food should be, one would think — does not last. Sternberger experiences the unthinkable: A bland meal at a famed former two-Michelin star restaurant, recently demoted down to one. Cue the foreboding music: it turns out this is not an anomaly, it's happening all over the place. So what happened to the Eden of edibles, the promised land of potables? Steinberger vows to investigate.

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The new Great Britain and Ireland Michelin Guides are coming out next week, and Tim Hayward, writing for the Guardian, takes issue. He calls the guides out on irrelevancy for failing to take local cuisines into account, instead rewarding "characterless supra-national beigeness at the expense of authenticity." Hayward writes:

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