A Star on The plate-Part IV

Beyond the Star — India, a Culinary Continent, and the Limits of Measuring Taste

If the Michelin star began as an act of classification, and matured into a global language of culinary excellence, its encounter with India feels less like an arrival and more like a reckoning.
India is often described as a country, sometimes as a subcontinent, and occasionally—by those who have tasted it deeply—as a continent of cuisines. These descriptions are not rhetorical flourishes. Few places on earth compress such staggering culinary diversity within a single political boundary. Climate, geography, religion, caste, migration, ritual, and history have all left edible traces here, layered one upon another across millennia. To speak of “Indian food” is therefore already an act of reduction.
A Civilisation That Eats in Many Tongues
Indian cuisines are not merely regional; they are situational. What is eaten depends not only on where one is, but on who one is, when one is eating, and why. Food shifts with season and rainfall, fasting days and feast days, birth and death, temple ritual and domestic routine.
Some of the most elaborate culinary systems in India are not found in restaurants at all, but in temple kitchens, home courtyards, tribal settlements, and community gatherings—spaces governed not by menus or authorship, but by memory, prescription, and shared belief.
Here, food is rarely an isolated aesthetic experience. It is relational. It binds families, marks time, reinforces belonging, and sustains faith. A meal is often less a performance than a continuation. This is not a culture that eats to be seen.
The Michelin Encounter: Recognition with Conditions
When Michelin enters India, it does so cautiously and selectively. Nowhere are the structural limits of the system more visible. 
It recognises restaurants that align—at least partially—with its evaluative grammar: professional kitchens, identifiable chefs, stable menus, and controlled presentation. Within these spaces, the star performs its familiar role. It affirms discipline, rewards innovation, and signals global parity.
There is nothing illegitimate about this. Modern Indian chefs working within fine-dining frameworks deserve recognition, and Michelin offers it with seriousness and intent.
Yet this recognition represents only a thin vertical slice of Indian culinary life.
The greater mass of Indian food spreads horizontally across everyday existence—home cooking, street food, ritual meals, seasonal preparations. It is abundant, improvisational, often anonymous. It does not aspire to permanence or prestige, nor does it submit easily to inspection. 
The star, precise by design, cannot illuminate this vastness.
What the Star Can See—and What It Cannot
Michelin excels at recognising intentional excellence: food cooked to be judged, refined, repeated, and perfected within a professional frame.
But much of Indian food is cooked not to be judged, but to remember, to sustain, to belong.
A grandmother’s recipe survives not because it is optimised, but because it is remembered. A temple meal is revered not for novelty, but for fidelity. A roadside vendor’s brilliance lies not in consistency across years, but in instinct on a particular day—responding to weather, crowd, and mood. 
These are not lesser forms of excellence. They are different epistemologies of taste. They resist abstraction because they resist separation from life itself.
Reliability, Revisited—One Final Time
Is the Michelin star reliable in India?
Yes—if one understands clearly the question it answers.
It is reliable as an indicator of technical mastery within a global fine-dining framework. It is reliable as a signal of seriousness, discipline, and professional ambition. It is reliable within the narrow beam of light it casts.
But it becomes unreliable when mistaken for a comprehensive map of Indian culinary excellence.
The danger lies not in the system itself, but in the expectations projected onto it—especially by those unfamiliar with India’s deeper food cultures. A star can tell you where refined cooking is happening. It cannot tell you where food becomes prayer, inheritance, or daily sustenance.
The Star as Guest, Not Judge
Perhaps the most respectful way to think of Michelin in India is not as an arbiter, but as a guest.
A guest may admire, appreciate, and even celebrate what is placed before them. But a guest does not rearrange the household. They do not redefine value. They listen.
Seen this way, Michelin’s presence need not be adversarial. It becomes one voice among many—useful, informed, but not sovereign.
India does not require validation to know its food is profound. Its cuisines have survived invasions, famines, migrations, and modernity without losing their soul. They have been sustained not by stars, but by repetition, devotion, and adaptation.
Returning to the Question
Let us return, finally, to the question that began this inquiry.
Who decides what the best food in the world is?
The answer now feels clearer.
No single institution decides. No star, however carefully earned, can crown a universal truth. Excellence exists, but it takes many forms—some loud, some quiet, some fleeting, some eternal.
Michelin offers a philosophy: one way of recognising a particular form of excellence—disciplined, professional, and repeatable. For that, it deserves admiration and gratitude.
But the deepest meals of our lives—those that shape who we are and where we belong—often unfold far from inspection and applause.
A Closing Note (and a Quiet Dedication)
When my grandson spoke excitedly of a Michelin-starred restaurant in Manhattan, he was not really asking about stars. He was asking about value—about how the world decides what is good. 
Perhaps the most honest answer one can give a child is this: that systems help us see, but they should never teach us to stop looking. That a star may guide us to a fine meal, but curiosity will guide us to understanding.
And that in a world as abundant as ours, the truest measure of food is not how it is rated, but how deeply it is remembered. 
That is a lesson worth carrying—long after the plates are cleared and the stars have faded, and lost their relevance.

(Uday Kumar Varma is an IAS officer. Retired as Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting)