David Toutain witnessed the birth of the Michelin Green Star in 2020. His eponymous restaurant in Paris was among the first to be awarded while Feuille, his Hong Kong outpost, secured one within a year of its 2023 opening. But even when Michelin quietly retired the award this year, he still never understood exactly how it was assessed. “I have no idea,” he says. “I don’t know the rules. I don’t know anything about it, to be very honest.”
His confusion points to a larger problem. The Green Star was meant to recognise restaurants that, in Michelin’s own words, “hold themselves accountable for both their ethical and environmental standards”. It was a noble ambition, but an opaque one – Michelin never made public what its inspectors had in their notebooks. With the award now gone, an unanswered question lingers: what does it mean for a restaurant to be “sustainable”?
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