Montreal is about to get a Michelin guide. What do they have that Minnesota doesn’t?

MONTREAL – Normand Laprise gets goosebumps talking about polyester.

Considered the father of modern Québécois gastronomy, the chef was once a young restaurant trainee in France, where he stayed at a hostel with cheap, synthetic linens that made his skin crawl.

A couple of weeks into his stay, he ate at a two-star Michelin restaurant. “And I just put my hands on the tablecloth,” he remembered. “I said, ‘Wow, where am I?’”

Thirty-two years later, his downtown Montreal restaurant Toqué is still thought of as a trendsetter, luxurious Egyptian cotton tablecloths and all. But as respected as Laprise is in the Montreal dining scene, he does not have a Michelin star.

It’s not a snub; Montreal — like the Twin Cities — has never had its restaurants rated by Michelin.

That changes this month for the French Canadian city and its province, Québec, which get their first Michelin guidebook May 15, joining North American metros like Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles and Mexico City.

Not the Twin Cities. Though Minneapolis’ tourism board lists Michelin among its goals in its Destination Plan, and the Minneapolis Downtown Council put Michelin in its own 10-year plan, Minnesota’s road to Michelin is still uncharted.

With sights set on luring the prestigious restaurant rating system to our corner of the world, it begs the question: What does Montreal have that we don’t? We went to this French Canadian city to find out.

While not the only restaurant power-ranking, Michelin is the most globally famous, doling out ratings to restaurants in a three-star system, three being the highest. The stars are awarded annually; restaurants may gain or lose stars when they are re-evaluated each year.

Inspectors who visit the restaurants are anonymous, and the process of determining the awards is vague. Michelin cites five “universal criteria,” though: quality of ingredients, harmony of flavors, master of techniques, personality of the chef, and consistency.

The recognition can be transformative for a business.

“I can’t tell you how many times at Cafe Boulud, you would walk out to the restaurant during lunch or dinner service and 20 percent or more of the tables would have that little red guidebook on there,” said Gavin Kaysen, the chef and owner of Minneapolis’ Spoon and Stable, Demi and Mara. Kaysen was the head chef at one-star Cafe Boulud in New York City before returning to his native Minnesota to open his own restaurants, and he’s become a vocal proponent of bringing Michelin to Minnesota.

Beyond a restaurant’s reservation rolls, Michelin can change tourism for the entire city. Kaysen gave an example: Just one 100-seat Michelin-starred restaurant might draw 48 out-of-towners on any given evening. “That’s 24 hotel rooms,” he said. “When people travel to a Michelin city, they stay a day and a half longer to eat around the city. They’ll go to more coffee shops, they’ll go to more boutique stores, they’ll stay in a hotel or an Airbnb. It’s tourism.”

Kaysen believes in a regional approach, teaming up with cities in Wisconsin and Michigan to pitch an Upper Midwest guide.

The benefit is about much more than a single restaurant basking in a star’s glow. “Michelin is bigger than us,” Kaysen said. “It’s bigger than our city.”

Last summer, 150 chefs from Québec gathered for the annual meeting of La Table Ronde. The chef and restaurateur collective formed in the midst of the pandemic to ease communication and share knowledge among businesses, and it’s become a respected middleman between the restaurant community and the local government.

One of its early initiatives was to boost the tourism draw of its culinary scene by inviting Michelin to the province. There was enough interest that La Table Ronde invited a panel of chefs from other cities, alongside Michelin representatives, to discuss the impact of the awards.

At the end of the meeting, they held an anonymous vote about whether the restaurant community should lobby Montreal and Québec’s tourism boards to bring Michelin to Québec. The measure passed, with 65% in favor.

“A lot of people were saying, ‘Maybe I don’t want Michelin, but I’m doing it for the sector. I’m doing it for history,’” said Debbie Zakaib, La Table Ronde’s executive director.

Michelin does not simply show up when a city decides it wants them; it requires a significant financial investment on the part of local government-run tourism bureaus. Michelin is, after all, a marketing tool. California’s tourism board, for example, paid Michelin $600,000 to have the guide encompass Los Angeles, San Diego and other cities beyond its first Michelin region, the Bay Area. Colorado contributed $1 million; Florida, $1.5 million.

But is Minnesota ready to make that kind of investment?

“We’re very much in the formative stage,” said Adam Duininck, the CEO and president of the Minneapolis Downtown Council, which has emerged as an unofficial leader in wooing Michelin to Minnesota.

“I think at times we, as a community, have to have a conversation about whether we invest money in these sorts of things,” Duininck said. He equates Michelin to national sporting events or conventions that require host communities to put economic incentives on the table. “We just have to figure out which of those things are really important to us as a community, and to me, fine dining and having a great culinary scene here is something that we should showcase to the world.”

Explore Minnesota, the state’s tourism board, declined an interview, instead sharing through a spokesperson, “We know this is an exciting initiative led by the Minneapolis Downtown Council. However, the state has yet to be engaged in their effort and, at this time, do not have specifics to confer.”

Duininck is motivated to get the ball rolling, but believes a diverse coalition of restaurant owners, hotels, small businesses and government tourism boards needs to assemble first.

“This is something we could do to help put Minneapolis even more on the map,” he said. “I think there’s excitement around it, and people are kind of waiting for someone to lead the group.”

Outside of Montreal’s storybook Old Port district, Carissa Zelinsky was plating parts of a whole calf.

The Chaska native was invited by a fellow chef to help out at a collaborative dinner at Hoogan et Beaufort, an edgy live-fire restaurant in an even edgier part of Montreal.

The dinner was one of dozens organized by Montréal en Lumière, an annual winter festival that culminates in an all-night party called Nuit Blanche. In its 26 years, Montréal en Lumière has brought some 750 chefs to the city to cook alongside local culinary talent.

Dinners such as these are one of the ingredients that may have helped attract Michelin to Montreal, said Julie Martel, Montréal en Lumière’s culinary program manager. Sixty guest chefs flew in for the 2025 festival, which ran through early March. They shared techniques and ingredients, and guests returned to their home cities buzzing about the food scene.

“Human contact between chefs is very important,” Martel said. “Imagine back 25 years ago, there was no social media, chefs were not on TV. The only way we could learn about chefs from all over the world was through their cookbooks. The festival helped bring that international influence.”

Minneapolis is still only a burgeoning destination for visiting chefs. One of the highest profile series of the sort is Kaysen’s Synergy Series at Spoon and Stable, which has brought some of the country’s top chefs to his North Loop restaurant over the past seven years.

“The reality of what Synergy has done over the years is it has exposed chefs, many of whom have never been to Minneapolis before, to our culinary arts scene, to our guests, and to what we have here,” Kaysen said. “We have to bring them here for a reason.”

Marie-Victorine Manoa, an acclaimed Paris chef, came to Montreal to cook for this year’s Montréal en Lumière festival. Among the chefs who joined her at Hoogan et Beaufort was her friend and former colleague, Minnesota’s Zelinsky.

Zelinsky and Manoa met while cooking together at Eleven Madison Park, the three Michelin-starred New York restaurant. Though the pair are well acquainted with the prestige that Michelin and other accolades offer, they’re part of a younger generation of chefs who say the trappings aren’t for them.

“It’s not a big deal anymore,” Manoa said. “There are much more interesting things and important things like having a team healthy, with not too much hours. ... It shouldn’t be just around [Michelin]. It’s not healthy to be a goal, or maybe it’s ego or something.”

Besides, once you have the stars, there’s the added pressure of keeping them. “You reach the top, you know, if you come back down, what’s next?” Zelinsky said.

Most of the chefs we interviewed expect there will be some disappointment rippling through the Montreal scene when Michelin’s picks are revealed. Some surprises, some hurt feelings, perhaps fewer stars than anyone expected. Dallas, for example, had only one star awarded in its first year as a Michelin city.

It’s another drawback to Michelin that Minnesota chefs have pondered, but the reach of international awards might be too beneficial to ignore.

“It would be awesome, right?” said Mike Brown, chef and co-owner of the Travail Collective in Robbinsdale, a tasting-menu-only spot that could be considered, by some, Michelin bait. “But honestly, it doesn’t matter who it is. If Minnesota could get a piece of that, if anybody could get that, it would be so amazing for our community.”

If Minnesota can learn anything from Montreal, it’s that stars can shine bright enough to light up the entire city’s restaurant scene.