Local restaurants snag Michelin Bib Gourmand status

Uploaded: Oct 16, 2013

Michelin Guide announced its annual list of San Francisco Bay Area and Wine Country Bib Gourmand restaurants, a designation that denotes high-quality food at a reasonable price. Bib Gourmand restaurants must offer two courses and a glass of wine or dessert for $40 or less (tax and gratuity not included).

Crouching Tiger, Vesta and Donato Enoteca in Redwood City; Fey in Menlo Park and Evvia in Palo Alto were all bibbed this year. Evvia, Fey and Vesta are new to the list. I've been dying to try Vesta and have only heard good things (sausage + honey pizza, anyone?).

This year's Bib Gourmand list represents 20 different cuisines from 83 Bay Area restaurants, up from 70 last year. It spans the Peninsula, up through San Francisco to wine country and across the Bay to Oakland and Berkeley.

Getting onto the Bib Gourmand list does also mean these restaurants will not earn the sought-after Michelin star(s). Those rankings are set to drop next Tuesday, Oct. 22.

Michelin has also been furiously tweeting their favorite eats from various Bib Gourmand restaurants.

In response to a Vesta fan tweet: "@jmissig agreed! both the red pies (herb-tomato sauce, burrata, basil) and white pies (mozzarella, bacon, potato, rosemary) shine at Vesta."

Michelin promised Eater SF, a San Francisco food blog, that they'll be posting highlights from each spot over the next few days (though "we're better at eating than tweeting," they tweeted this morning).

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Posted by kron, a resident of Meadow Park,
on Oct 16, 2013 at 5:49 pm

dont jump in fron of train. you will just be in another life.might as well stay and talk to friends. next life might not be as good as this.anyway, the darbar has the best sauces on their dishes,perfect korma ,yellow rice, that cauliflower dish with that tangy yellow sauce. all their dishes are well put together, not vague and runny and questionable liker some places. not many mention darbar as being one of best but it is. perfect pakoras too. no other pakoras are quite as good ass theirs. they must have good recipes. if you were a rock star, they would be your cooks.

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Posted by Max Hauser, a resident of Old Mountain View,
on Oct 17, 2013 at 9:22 am
Max Hauser is a registered user.

Something for folks to be aware of if they are not accustomed to reading the actual printed Michelin guidebooks is that most of the useful information in them doesn't surface at all in the "star" or "bib gourmand" lists. Michelin editors promote those lists each year for pre-release publicity, and the lists preoccupy casual online buzz about the Michelin Guide.

But to be included at all in the Guide is a distinction for any restaurant; the few hundred recommended in each year's SF-area guidebook are only a percent or two of all the area's restaurants. Each listed restaurant gets a desciption, recommended dishes, and detail ratings such as forks for food. Almost none of this information surfaces in the bib gourmand or star selection lists, which are more of a highlight (Win, Place, or Show) to the main info in the Guide. Once on a restaurant discussion site I mentioned that Mountain View's Bamboo Garden (Central at Rengstorff, Shanghainese and Dongbei specialties) had just been recognized in the Michelin, but another poster disputed it -- on the basis of seeing just the bib-gourmand and star lists, which are online and "free," unlike most of the Guide's contents. Yet most restaurants recommended in the actual guidebook, including that one, are absent from those lists.

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Local restaurants snag Michelin Bib Gourmand status

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