The MICHELIN Guide Arrives in Hong Kong and Macau 2009


















“Hong Kong has elegant, top-quality hotels offering impeccable service as well as restaurants featuring a wide variety of
cuisines. Nicknamed ‘the Las Vegas of Asia’, Macau has become very popular with tourists in recent years and offers a very
wide selection of hotels and restaurants. The two cities attracted nearly 30 million visitors each last year, making them full-
fledged tourist destinations”, explains Jean-Luc Naret, Director of the MICHELIN Guides.

Michelin inspectors have been on the ground in Hong Kong and Macau since late 2007. They conduct visits and
anonymously dine in restaurants and sleep in hotels to judge the quality and consistency of meals and services and make
a pre-selection of these establishments in both cities.

The MICHELIN Guide offers a selection of the best hotels and restaurants in various comfort and price categories. Comfort
is rated by fork-and-spoon symbols for restaurants and pavilions for hotels. These pictograms indicate the establishment’s
equipment, service, cleanliness and general upkeep.

Stars judge only what’s on the plate, meaning the quality of the cooking. Regardless of the country or type of cuisine, five
criteria are taken into account: product quality, preparation and flavours, the creativity of the chef’s cooking, consistency over
time and across the entire menu, and value for money. The number of stars that may be awarded ranges from one to three.
These criteria are appropriate for all types of cooking, including Chinese.

The stars always mean the same thing, whatever the country:
One-star: ‘a very good restaurant in its category’.
Two-stars: ‘excellent cooking, worth a detour’.
Three-stars: ‘exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey’.

Decisions to award stars are made collectively. All the inspectors who have evaluated a meal in a given restaurant present
and support their opinions, based on their experiences and reports. A restaurant that receives one or more stars is not only
one of the best in its city or country but also one of the best in the world.

Thanks to a rigorous selection process that is applied independently and consistently around the world, the MICHELIN
Guide has become an international benchmark in gourmet dining. The selection is prepared by anonymous inspectors
who are both hospitality industry professionals and Michelin employees, and who pay their hotel and restaurant bills in full.

When they invented the first car tyre in 1895, co-founders André and Edouard Michelin revolutionised the world of
transportation and, subsequently, travel. Since introducing this technological breakthrough designed to enhance mobility,
Michelin has remained firmly committed to making life easier for travellers by providing them with information that is
objective, accurate, clear and understandable.

The first MICHELIN Guide France was published in August 1900. Distributed free of charge until 1920 and originally
intended for chauffeurs, the Guide contained a wealth of practical information, including tips on using and repairing tyres,
city street maps, lists of fuel suppliers, hotels and garages. For the Michelin brothers, the objective was to speed the
development of the car, and consequently the tyre market. They wanted to promote and improve travel by making it safer
and more enjoyable – in other words, by enhancing mobility, which is still the common goal of Michelin’s maps, guides,
atlases and other publications. The practice of awarding stars to the best restaurants was introduced in 1926 and
expanded to include two- and three-star ratings in the early 1930s. Since then, Michelin has become the undisputed
benchmark for gourmet dining around the world.

Every year, in more than 90 countries around the world, Michelin publishes some 14 million maps, atlases, tourist guides,
and restaurant and hotel guides – always with the same focus on quality. Last year, more than one million copies of the
MICHELIN Guide were sold worldwide.

Michelin is dedicated to sustainably improving the mobility of goods and people by manufacturing and marketing tyres for
every type of vehicle, including aeroplanes, cars, bicycles/motorcycles, earthmovers, farm equipment, trucks and the space
shuttle. It also offers electronic mobility support services, on ViaMichelin.com, and publishes travel guides, hotel and
restaurant guides, maps and road atlases. Headquartered in Clermont-Ferrand, France, Michelin is present in 170
countries, has more than 121,000 employees and operates 69 production plants in 19 different countries.
After Tokyo, the MICHELIN Guide is pursuing its development in Asia with a new guide to
hotels and restaurants in Hong Kong and Macau.

The MICHELIN Guide is constantly developing. In the United States, four cities are now
covered (New York since 2005, San Francisco since 2006, and Los Angeles and Las Vegas
since late last year). In Europe, the MICHELIN Guide collection covers 20 countries, spanning
the continent from Scandinavia to Italy and including the Czech Republic and France. And
lastly, in Asia, where the first MICHELIN Guide Tokyo was successfully launched last
November. Hong Kong is the next destination that will be added to the collection, with a new
Guide scheduled for release just a few months from now. In all, the collection covers 23
countries.

In December 2008, the first MICHELIN Guide Hong Kong and Macau will be released, in
Chinese and English.