Dining out with Michelin’s most dedicated followers

Friday 24 April 2026 12:00 am  |  Updated:  Thursday 23 April 2026 2:05 pm

French tyre company Michelin has been deciding restaurants’ fates for decades

The all-powerful Michelin Guide has garnered a cult following of enthusiasts. Carys Sharkey goes star gazing

Slap-bang in the middle of March, the impressively drawn-out awards season reached its zenith. First comes the trailers, then the films, then the media rounds, then the SAG Awards, the BAFTAs, the Golden Globes and finally the Oscars. The Brits and the Grammys also take place within the first, trophy-laden quarter of the year. It’s a glitzy season with the biggest stars on the planet grabbing headlines ad nauseam. But out of the spotlight, another set of stars is being lined up, somewhat more literally.

The Great Britain and Ireland Michelin Guide awards ceremony – which took place this February in Dublin – is a distinctly un-Hollywood affair. It is made for people in the industry – chefs, sommeliers, waiters, tourist boards – which makes for often uncomfortable viewing. Chefs put on the spot do not make natural orators. The ceremony is awkward and unpolished, with stars dished out en masse like a university graduation day. But like actors crave an Oscar, this is the accolade all chefs want: a star, or three, from the bulbous French tyre giant. The Youtube livestream (the revolution, it turns out, will not be televised) was only watched by around 2,000 people but what it lacks in size, this audience makes up for in dogged devotion to stargazing. 

And they were not happy. A heated chat saw one watcher dub the ceremony and its lack of new three star restaurants a “pile of shite”. There is something bizarre about the whole affair. From my desk, I watched people fight over whether certain restaurants merited two or three stars, while a gout-ridden mascot made of stacked tyres ambled around on the stage. This fine dining is not Patrick Bateman obsessively trying to get a table at Dorsia, rather it’s an online community forensically categorising restaurants, flipping the lens firmly onto the destination instead of the diner.

On platforms like Reddit and Instagram, star chasers gather to pass notes. Devotees of Michelin dissect their meals and experiences. The language used to describe culinary firsts is often akin to that used when speaking about sexual awakenings. Users reminisce on their ‘first three-star’ with the same reverie as a teenager losing their virginity. A one star is like getting to first base. 

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The Michelin Guide Ceremony for Great Britain and Ireland 2026

But obsession breeds expertise, and the reviews often offer an entirely new way of thinking and writing about restaurants. In the work of traditional restaurant critics the food often plays second-fiddle to their neurotic rumblings and elbow-in-rib glibness. But here the food is re-plated in extraordinary – and frequently tedious – detail. Amateur photos flattened by bad lighting become evidence in reviews that read like lab reports. The minutiae of detail is reflected in a rating system that champions the decimal place. There is also a tendency towards solo dining, the food demanding total concentration. I must admit to sympathising with this: nothing is more annoying than eating with someone unbothered by what’s in front of them. It’s not just the food: star chasers are also hot on the idiosyncrasies of service. In one user’s report on Marylebone’s AngloThai, notes that despite the “attentive and friendly service”, “table-side saucing of dishes was sometimes a little messy, with spills and uneven pours on a couple of dishes”. There’s wonderful absurdity in such pedantry.

Certain chefs and restaurants have garnered a cult-like status, marked for fierce debate. While British star chasers are divided over whether Gordon Ramsay has still got it, there is almost universal agreement that three-starred Sketch in Mayfair should be immediately stripped down to one star. Indeed, one Baltimore-based chaser told me that although stoned college summers spent watching Kitchen Nightmares was his gateway into fine dining, eating at the three-starred Restaurant Gordon Ramsay during his 15-stars-in-10-days Euro trip was a let down. The Michelin Guide demands both idols and iconoclasm. Signature dishes like Massimo Bottura’s Five Ages of Parmigiano Reggiano and Thomas Keller’s Oysters and Pearls take on a mythic quality, passed around and pored over like track listings on The Dark Side of the Moon. And then there are the bêtes noires. Take tart moulds, for instance:

“Why does every two-three star place use the same lotus shaped tart mould?”

“I’ve been bored with tart shells for at least a year. Surely we’ve reached peak tart shell.”

“I legit don’t get it. The last 30 tasting menus I’ve seen have the same fucking tart shells. I’ll take some fucking spheres over this shit.”

I’ve heard similar conversations in the pub on a Saturday afternoon when the manager starts the same team that was thrashed the weekend before.

‘Let’s chase stars’

This intensity of conviction has allowed some fine dining aficionados to build up huge followings with millions of views on their videos as the pendulum of influence swings from critics to content creators. One of the most influential is Alexander the Guest, a broad, suited and booted Hungarian with an insatiable taste for Krug. His videos have amassed a huge following, and paying subscribers are given the chance to watch extended dining experiences “like you’re sitting right next to me”. Many of these run over an hour long, which reflects the endurance required of some tasting menus. But clipped up videos of individual courses garner millions of views on social media. With some tasting menus costing well over £1,000, many stars will be lived vicariously by people unable to splash that much cash. 

“Since you’re going out and spending a few hundred dollars – or a small fortune – it doesn’t hurt to know that you’re actually putting that money somewhere worthwhile,” Alexander tells me.

Read more The Galvin brothers: Our Toast the City award means the world

And he’s not the only one to feast on the frisson of exclusivity.

“There are so many food influencers who cover relatively low budget stuff, like burgers and sandwiches, which is accessible to everyone, but in this fine dining space, there is just a natural constraint,” Adam Haugsted, aka The Food Fetishist, tells me. A baby-faced 25-year-old from Copenhagen with an impressive devotion to eating at the best restaurants in the world, Adam says he was born into a food-obsessed family. Birthdays from 14 took place at Denmark’s Noma and Geranium (“I somehow forced my mother to go there”), making an indelible impression on the young gourmand. And now with 223,000 followers, including an impressive list of some of hospitality’s big hitters, Adam invites his audience to “fetishise food” and “chase stars” with him. It’s a little tongue in cheek, but Adam is dead serious about good cooking. In one video, he compares eating at the three-starred Jordnær to “receiving a private concert by Mozart or watching Picasso paint”. 

Adam Haugsted, aka The Food Fetishist, has amassed a following of over 200,000

Speaking to me over the phone from Munich, Adam’s accent is softer than the trademark Nordic bounce that distinguishes his videos. He says he was taken aback by how quickly his channel exploded after focusing on Michelin stars. When he moved to Germany in 2024, Adam didn’t foresee just how popular star chasing would become.

“I had 20,000 followers when I was sitting on the plane going to Munich and was crying and was thinking, ‘How the hell did I accomplish this?’” He says much of his success is down to positioning: somewhere between the “old school food critics” and social media influencers who just “make videos about everything being amazing”. 

And nothing galvanises star chasers quite like a bit of Michelin controversy. Adam describes two meals he had at three-starred Aponiente in Cádiz, where chef Ángel León only cooks using things from the sea, from savoury to sweet. “The first time was an incredible experience, and the second time, everything was borderline inedible. So, yeah.”

Long live Michelin?

And it raises the question: have we reached peak Michelin? Hit TV shows like Netflix’s Chef’s Table or Disney’s The Bear cultivate the chef-as-god image, or total reverence for the pursuit of stars. It’s this idolatry that allowed Noma’s Rene Redzepi, the bully-chef par excellence, to foster cultish status. A recent New York Times investigation, which it must be said was not the first, revealed the extent of the bullying allegations against Redzepi: punching, shouting, jabbing with a barbecue fork. Redzepi responded by saying he was “stepping away”, but the backlash has sent ripples through the culinary world. And it’s a criticism levelled against Michelin that as a guide, they dish out the highest honours to restaurants that are, by necessity, hugely demanding places to work. A big part of fine dining’s appeal or repulsion – to star chasers and casual viewers alike – is the fanatical dedication to doing something radical. Unsurprisingly, it’s the most avant-garde restaurants, places like The Alchemist in Copenhagen, which offers guests 50 “impressions” during a six-hour seating, that prove to be scrolling crack for social media algorithms. 

For Joel Hass, aka High Speed Dining, it doesn’t matter whether people are watching his videos with fanaticism or ridicule: a view is a view. Joel calls himself a “tour guide and a cheerleader” rather than a critic or influencer, bringing his 529,000 followers inside some of the best restaurants in the world. With 1,079 stars to his name, Joel has committed his life to the art of the hunt. Speaking to me from Washington DC, where he started out in the radio and entertainment industry, Joel has just woken up. It’s 3pm there, but eating this seriously demands a dedicated schedule. Any grogginess soon dissipates. Joel talks with an enthusiasm for stars that almost trips over itself. He occasionally pauses mid-flow to count up stars on a particular trip. Dizzying arithmetic in whispered tones. On a trip to London at the start of the year, Joel covered 42 stars in 10 days. And for his viewers, it’s an invaluable insight into the kind of cooking they can only dream of.

“I try to bring you into the restaurant with me. I record live with a live microphone, improvise all of my narration live. Rarely, very rarely, do I come home, write a script and then voice-over. So when you hear me talking about food, you hear it in the restaurant, my real reactions. You hear the sounds of the servers, the clanking of the glasses, the crunching of the food. I bring you into the restaurant”.

At the core of Joel’s starchasing is a total conviction in hospitality. “I only say positive things about restaurants, and just try to support and help the industry as a whole and show off the great time I’m having.” In just one trip, Joel collapsed London’s crème de la crème into bite size videos with contagious, sincere enthusiasm. I ask him if he had a favourite, but unable to pick, he rattles off practically the entire list. A Wong is “mind boggling”, Gymkhana “fantastic”, Hélène Darroze at The Connaught  “just so wonderful”. And The Ritz makes you “feel like a million bucks”.

Despite a following that would make any food writer envious, and merch emblazoned with his catchphrase ‘sauce me up’, passing the 1,000 stars mark has not come cheap. Joel tells me he’s making “10 or 15 cents for every dollar spent”. Over the 10 years or so since he started following Michelin, Joel says he’s spent “six figures several times over”, a sum he qualifies by not having a wife or kids. Perhaps even more impressively, Joel is in great shape (he assures me he has a six pack as he flexes his bicep on camera). It’s clear Joel has fine-tuned his life to fit around the curves and grooves of the Michelin Man, and his dedication has brought with it a loyal following of fans. So where do you go from here? 

“I’m eventually gonna hit 2,000 if I keep my health up and I don’t go broke”.

Well, you know what they say about shooting for the stars.

Read more Toast the City Awards return bigger and better for 2026!

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