Why Michelin’s U.S. Expansion Favors Tourism Budgets Over Local Food Culture — Should Boston Have Been Included?

The tire company that tells us what to eat

In the winter of 1838–39, Charles Goodyear’s accidental discovery of vulcanization in Woburn, Massachusetts, helped unlock the modern rubber industry — and, many decades later, made the mass production of tires possible. It’s worth remembering because the Michelin Guide, today the global arbiter of fine dining, is created by a French tire company whose earliest travel guides were designed to encourage driving and sell tires.

From roadside tips to a global dining standard

For about twenty years Michelin has steadily expanded its footprint across the United States. Its first major U.S. effort awarded 39 stars in New York City in 2006. Guides followed — San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas (2007–08), although Los Angeles and Las Vegas were suspended in 2010. Chicago (2011) and Washington, D.C. (2017) joined later; San Francisco’s guide expanded to cover all of California in 2019. In recent years Florida, Colorado, Atlanta, Texas, and an American South guide have been added, and the guides for Philadelphia and Boston were announced most recently. At the time of writing, the U.S. has 276 Michelin-starred restaurants versus 642 in France.

Pay-to-play? How local tourism money fuels the guide

What has changed is how these guides are financed. Where Michelin once published guides as a cost center to sell tires, many recent regional guides are underwritten by local tourism organizations and convention bureaus. Those organizations — hoping to attract high-spending visitors — often use hotel-room taxes and other tourism levies to pay Michelin for coverage. The price for Michelin’s assessment is typically not publicly disclosed.

Boston’s case: Meet Boston, the nonprofit Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau, received a new 1.5% hotel-room assessment in 2021. Its reported revenue rose from $16.2 million in 2021 to $39.9 million in 2022, and in 2024 about $34.8 million reportedly came from that 1.5% fee alone. Philadelphia made a similar choice: the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau’s hotel-tax receipts were reported at $9.4 million in 2024, and total revenue rose from roughly $18 million in 2018 to nearly $23 million in 2024.

"Many consumers are unaware that Michelin is a pay-to-play review system sponsored by the city or region," says Jonathan Deutsch, director of Drexel Food Lab. "Do diners assume that a city without Michelin stars was second-rate? Not at all — our strength is diversity across price points, neighborhoods, and cultures."

What this means for cities and local food scenes

There are three interconnected concerns:

• Whom does the guide serve? Funded by hotel taxes, the guide is primarily aimed at visitors. Local residents rarely vote on whether their tax dollars should underwrite a private company’s ranking of neighborhood restaurants.
• Does it reshape dining? Michelin’s rubric can incentivize chefs to cook to international inspection standards rather than to local tastes and communities, potentially producing restaurants that are excellent yet interchangeable across cities.
• Is the advantage diluted? As more U.S. cities buy in, the guide’s relative prestige may erode. If every major city boasts Michelin coverage, the listing becomes less of a unique draw.

Some economic analyses suggest a positive return on investment for destinations that host a guide, and earning a star can transform a chef’s career. But those gains must be weighed against questions of transparency, local accountability, and cultural fit. Will Michelin-starred rooms in Boston reflect the city’s character — the duck boats, the local seafood, the neighborhood institutions — or will they primarily serve an international fine-dining template?

Conclusion and recommendation

The character of a city’s food scene is shaped by its people: chefs, suppliers, servers, and everyday diners. Critique and acclaim should acknowledge that local reality. Tourist dollars currently fund an anonymous cadre of assessors who judge our restaurants according to criteria set by a foreign tire company. Cities should be transparent about the costs and trade-offs before underwriting such guides. If the goal is to showcase and support local culinary identity as much as to attract visitors, then that mission must be explicit and accountable — otherwise the Michelin Guide risks reshaping American dining to fit its own mold.

Recommendation: Before investing more tourism money, cities should demand transparency, measure local impact, and ensure that any external guide complements — rather than replaces — the voices and tastes of local communities. And as for Michelin: maybe it’s time to hit the road.