<\/p>\n
Despite the way it has flooded the zone for the past few decades, I find it hard to enjoy most food television as it exists in 2025. Glitzy fine-dining porn like Chef\u2019s Table<\/em> is just that \u2014 an overwhelming series of zero-context money shots. I used to love the instructional \u201cdump and stir\u201d shows of the type pioneered by Julia Child and refined in the early iterations of the Food Network, but they were long ago edged out by competition shows heavy on stage-managed drama and light on learning. While gentler technique-focused series have made a comeback in recent years, they\u2019re now hosted by the likes of Selena Gomez (Selena and Chef)<\/em>, Meghan Markle (With Love, Meghan<\/em>), and Pamela Anderson (Pamela\u2019s Cooking With Love<\/em>), photogenic amateur enthusiasts who use their celebrity to justify veering into a lane once reserved for professionals.<\/p>\n So I didn\u2019t expect to like Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars<\/em>, the new Apple TV+ docuseries produced by Gordon Ramsay, precisely because of the Gordon Ramsay of it all. Since first appearing on Britain\u2019s Most Unbearable Bosses<\/em>, in 1997, the chef-turned-TV star has built a brand around his abrasive style of personnel management, creating and hosting a half-dozen shouty restaurant reality shows (among them Hell\u2019s Kitchen<\/em>, Kitchen Nightmares<\/em>, and Gordon Behind Bars<\/em>) in which cooks and waiters endure lacerating abuse by the chef, who is ostensibly there to help a restaurant improve its operations (but really to provide entertainment via humiliation).<\/p>\n More from Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n Before all that, however, Ramsay was the subject of a five-part fly-on-the-wall ITV series, Boiling Point<\/em>, which follows his efforts in 1999 to open and operate an eponymous London restaurant under enormous self-imposed pressure to earn three Michelin stars. It\u2019s a gripping verit\u00e9 portrait of a chef and his team struggling to achieve the profession\u2019s most coveted designation.<\/p>\n Now, more than 25 years later, Knife Edge <\/em>feels like a full-circle moment. The eight-episode series embeds for three months at a time in the kitchens, dining rooms, and homes of about two dozen chefs in North America, Europe, and the U.K., capturing the emotional, physical, and financial sacrifices required of those who pursue Michelin stars. Knife Edge<\/em> deftly captures the risks inherent to the endeavor: A New York restaurateur says he is losing $20,000 a month in his pursuit of a star, and many of the chefs, their spouses, and children make plain that the pursuit of Michelin glory makes for painful absences. One chef sees a star as the key to bringing his wife and children to the U.S. from Mexico; another knows that a star will help her shake off her nepo-baby reputation. Along with the well-earned triumphs, there are lots of tears, meltdowns, and a few bitter disappointments in the kitchen and at each city\u2019s Michelin ceremony, where an invitation to attend is no guarantee of glory. The stars themselves are bestowed by anonymous inspectors who briefly appear on camera, but whose names, faces, and even voices are completely obscured.<\/p>\n Even 10 years ago, deep into our national obsession with chefs and restaurants, discussion of these stars would have been niche, given that the Michelin rating system only crossed over to North America from Europe in 2005. But as Michelin has rolled into more and more cities and regions, stars are now signifiers of excellence so familiar in American popular culture that they became a major plot driver in the second and third seasons of the enormously popular FX series The Bear<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cKnife Edge<\/em> has been in the works for years, so as the pursuit-of-a-Michelin-star storyline of The Bear <\/em>progressed, we would be messaging each other, like, \u2018This is amazing.\u2019 It was really playing into the conversation and the awareness of Michelin stars in America,\u201d says series host Jesse Burgess, who also hosts a long-running YouTube food and travel recommendation series called Topjaw<\/em>. \u201cThe Bear<\/em> was perhaps the reason Michelin were a bit more open-minded [to the idea of participating in a docuseries]. Many TV production companies have tried to get a documentary show going with Michelin over the years, and they\u2019ve always said no way. Perhaps they\u2019ve seen The Bear<\/em> and the interest [in Michelin] from the younger generation of cooks and diners, and that might have worked in our favor.\u201d<\/p>\n As a refresher, The Bear<\/em>\u2019s fictional chefs\u2019 Michelin ambition surfaces in Season Two, as Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) and the gang begin transforming his family\u2019s sandwich shop The Beef into the fine-dining restaurant The Bear. In that season\u2019s first episode (\u201cBeef\u201d), while appealing to would-be investor Cicero (Oliver Platt), chef Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebri) declares, \u201cThis is going to be a destination spot. This is going to be an excellent restaurant, and I know that, because we\u2019re going to get a star.\u201d<\/p>\n Chicago chef Curtis Duffy, whose two-Michelin-star restaurant Ever was an actual set and a named location on The Bear<\/em>, whose own Michelin star-tattooed hands are shown plating dishes in the fan-favorite episode called \u201cForks,\u201d and whose professional experience in some ways echoes that of the fictional Carmy, agrees that The Bear<\/em> has fast-tracked viewers\u2019 understanding of the Michelin system.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Bear<\/em> has brought diners and viewers as close as one can get to the everyday life of a chef, and as a chef, I\u2019ve always felt that a Michelin star is the most important award that you can earn,\u201d says Duffy, whose now-closed Chicago restaurant Grace held three stars from 2015 until it closed in 2017.<\/p>\n As with any stratospheric achievement, Michelin stars are a mixed blessing, conferring excellence that will fill a dining room and a bank account but imbued with built-in pressure to maintain them, as this bit of dialog from \u201cBeef\u201d deftly illustrates:<\/p>\n CICERO: OK, so you get a star. Now what?<\/p>\n SYDNEY: We\u2019re dialed.<\/p>\n CARMY: We\u2019re trapped.<\/p>\n In other words, for some chefs, the juice isn\u2019t always worth the squeeze. British chef Marco Pierre White famously \u201creturned\u201d his three stars to Michelin in 1999, bemoaning the creative monotony it would take to maintain them. Throughout the Knife Edge <\/em>series, more than one chef actually abandons the Michelin race before the awards are announced, recognizing the unsustainable toll on their families, health, and even the restaurant\u2019s bottom line.<\/p>\n For most others, though, the Michelin pursuit is a non-negotiable, to borrow a term from The Bear<\/em>. In Mexico City, chef Lucho Martinez explains his motivation to chase a Michelin star for his restaurant Em, saying, \u201cEm is how I try to tell the world that Mexico is world-class, and Mexico is not no more mustache<\/em>, and fuckin\u2019 donkeys<\/em>. I want that star because it\u2019s a dream to be part of that. I want the people that work for me to believe this is something that we<\/em> can achieve. But the work it takes, and the responsibility, it\u2019s not fun.\u201d<\/p>\n Far more fun is accompanying Burgess and the cameras into the kitchens, dining rooms, and homes of some of the world\u2019s hardest-working and most optimistic chefs.<\/p>\n Best of Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for RollingStone’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Despite the way it has flooded the zone for the past few decades, I find it hard to enjoy most food television as it exists in 2025. Glitzy fine-dining porn like Chef\u2019s Table is just that \u2014 an overwhelming series of zero-context money shots. I used to love the instructional \u201cdump and stir\u201d shows of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2083959,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[350992,345647,392096,23067,392095,23667,371769],"class_list":["post-2083958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-gordon-ramsay","tag-julia-child","tag-knife-edge","tag-meghan-markle","tag-michelin-stars","tag-selena-gomez","tag-the-bear"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Chasing-Michelin-Stars-Is-\u2018The-Bear-Made-Real.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2083958"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2083960,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083958\/revisions\/2083960"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2083959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2083958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2083958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2083958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}