PETER WILLIAMS: Selling food and tyres on the news

Is the cheerleading of expensive eating an appropriate use of TV news time?

Sometimes you just cringe at the content of the television news.

Saturday night was a classic. The New Zealand football team lost, predictably, to Belgium by 5 goals to 1 so ending their World Cup campaign.

They began as the tournament’s lowest ranked team and confirmed that position as they were eliminated after group play without a win.

Yet somehow that result on Saturday, traditionally a slow news day, was worth 15 minutes of valuable prime time television! A quarter of an hour of the six o’clock news is an extraordinary weighting, a duration usually reserved for a significant local natural disaster or the passing of an important figure in New Zealand society – such as Sir Edmund Hillary in January 2008.

(For what it’s worth I thought the cricket test series win in England on Monday night deserved far more than just a story in the sports news but then I’m biased, and cricket is only the world’s second most popular televised sport behind football.)

But if the editorial judgement about the respective merits of those sports stories was lacking, then it was completely without rationale and logic when it came to the Michelin star restaurant awards this week.

Let’s face it. Michelin stars are, and have been since 1900, primarily a way to sell tyres. The thinking back a century and a quarter ago was that those new-fangled things called automobiles needed more tyres the further they were driven. So the Michelin marketing department dreamed up the Michelin Guide with all sorts of handy hints like where were the best places to visit, the hotels, car repair shops and fuel stations there and – the fancy restaurants.

But to give them a degree of certainty about the quality of the meals once the driver and passengers arrived at a destination the Michelin Guide in 1926 started grading the best eating houses in France with stars. The idea took on and a hundred years later New Zealand has joined 25 other nations in having its own selection of exceedingly overpriced restaurants, often accompanied by unnecessarily pretentious service, especially when the server comes to explain the origin of the ingredients and the way the chef has cooked them!

I’m staggered to realise that over the years I’ve eaten at six of the 15 “starred” restaurants. The most recent experience was only last week when my wife and I enjoyed a gift voucher at Essence in Queenstown, the only one awarded two stars. Our gift voucher was very generous but two degustation menus and just one bottle of wine meant we still had to top up the four figure bill.

It’s the kind of place you wouldn’t let Shane Jones near with his government credit card.

That night we were the only customers. We could see four working in the kitchen. As well there was a maître’d, a sommelier and a serving assistant.

The quality of the food was outstanding and the service prompt and efficient, yet I had a touch of the guilts looking at a bill which totalled not a lot less than the median weekly wage. Is any meal with wine really worth over $500 a head?

Essence would have lost money that night but according to Mike Hosking the Michelin stars mean the place is now booked out till Christmas. I can’t quite believe it but I’m not bothered following up the veracity of that claim as I can’t afford to go back with my own money!

Anyway, I digress. The only reason we have Michelin stars on some restaurants is because the government paid the Michelin people $6 million dollars to come here and award some. For a government that promised to cut waste and rein in spending that’s about as reckless as it can get.

Louise Upston, the minister responsible, claims that having Michelin starred restaurants here will result in an extra 36,000 international visitors to New Zealand, a claim that strikes me as being spurious in the extreme. No government cost benefit analysis has ever been published to quantify that claim.

When I go overseas the quality of the food I may get to eat is never anywhere near the top of my list of reasons for going. Everybody’s different but when I go anywhere it’s for the activities and the environment. Eating is something you have to do but as every country I’ve ever visited has a range of restaurants from the dirt cheap to the uber expensive, the choice to visit a particular country is never based on the restaurant fare.

Are there really 36,000 extra international visitors to New Zealand each year who think differently?

If a news service is serious about its profession it should be asking questions about the real value for money the Michelin stars provide the country. After all, $6 million is quite a bit more than Shane Jones $60,000 for his trip to Canada yet the alleged profligacy of that spend has been aggressively canvassed.

The coverage of the Michelin stars was not about journalism. It was pure promotion and endorsement. The PR people in Louise Upston’s office and at Michelin must have been laughing all the way to the table at the con job they did on 1 News in particular.

Not only were there live crosses into both the news itself and Seven Sharp on the awards night but there was a follow up story the next night on Tala, the first Samoan restaurant to win a Michelin star, and another live cross with the chef at Essence, the two star winner.

That’s a lot of publicity for what is just an awards show, a government sponsored promotion for 15 expensive restaurants who will benefit immensely from six million dollars of corporate welfare.

If there’s really a cost of living crisis why is the government spending millions on promoting restaurants that most New Zealanders will never get the chance to eat at?

The media has never been slow in its negative coverage of this government. Here was a classic case of unnecessary spending, yet they were lining up to be cheerleaders for it.

Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Subscribe to Peter William's Substack here