At any time of the day, Collado will receive a delivery of wines, ranging from 2 cases to 60. “I’m dressed in usually ripped-up jeans and a T-shirt when I’m receiving those wines—it can be a bit of a dirty job. Caring for the wines, receiving them, entering them is a job that a team of sommeliers do for about two and a half hours,” she says.

Just before the guests arrive, at 5:30, the lights are dimmed and two captains from opposite sides of the room meet at the door, opening it together: it’s showtime. “I like to think we are artists,” says Siue. “As I say to the team all the time, the regular guest is like a girlfriend or a boyfriend. We know the name of the parents sometimes, the name of the dog. And to make a connection you have three hours…. When you succeed, you’re an artist, but you have to start again the next day—or the next table.” And when more information is needed, servers are not above Googling their diners or overhearing their conversations, all in the name of good service.

Buford attributes Boulud’s loss of the star to the New York Times food critic Pete Wells’s “hatchet job” in July of 2013. Though Wells described Boulud’s “exquisite refinements on French peasant food,” he took umbrage that a diner at the next table supposedly did not get the same attention that he—a recognized critic—received. But then, that neighboring diner turned out to be a colleague of Wells’s, there to help sample the service.

“I like Pete, but I thought that was bullshit, unwarranted, and uninformed,” Buford says of Wells’s review. Buford appreciates that Boulud is “working very much in a French tradition. He’s known all his life what it means to be a three-star Michelin chef. It’s a very elite club. There’s no question that he belongs in that club. It was a very big deal for him to be officially recognized—and then, to take it away! It just feels irresponsible…. I don’t get the sense that Michelin is corrupt, but I don’t think it’s as impartial as it pretends to be.” Michelin, he feels, is juggling stars as “a journalistic ploy.”

If Wells is often recognized, one important guest the staff will almost never recognize is the Michelin inspector. On a phone call with an inspector, arranged by Michael Ellis—we were not allowed to know her name—she explained that for the job the inspectors, on average, eat two restaurant meals a day almost every day of the week except weekends, at least 200 meals a year. They are on the road constantly. “It’s not that we’re trying to be secretive for its own sake,” she said, “but … we want to maintain the quality and integrity of the process.”

Like Ellis, the inspector insisted that they much prefer to award stars than to take them away. “We’re almost giddy when we find a new star,” she says, “or when we go back to a one-star that is maybe headed towards two or three. That’s something we still get very excited about. And in the case of a decision like Daniel, we go to a restaurant over and over and over again.”

When asked to define what the stars actually mean, she explained, “A three-star experience should be almost perfect…. There should be something memorable about it—something that sparks. At the three-star level, it’s a meal you’re not going to forget.”

When you start as a Michelin inspector, your first weeks of training are abroad, she says. “You go to the mother ship in France. Depending on your language skills, maybe you go to another European country and train with an inspector there.” There’s no prescribed path to becoming a food inspector, “though inspectors are all lifers in one way or another,” she explained, and they usually come from families devoted to food and the table. “One inspector was a chef at a very well-known, three-star restaurant, another came from a hotel…. I think you’re either built for this or you’re not,” she added. “You have to really be an independent personality. You have to be somewhat solitary but also work as part of a team. You have to be comfortable dining alone. Most of the time, I think, inspectors all live in a perpetual state of paranoia. That’s the job: the C.I.A. but with better food.”

Cooking Up a Storm

Of the six three-star restaurants in New York, five of them are in Manhattan: Masa, Eleven Madison Park, Le Bernardin, Per Se, and Jean Georges. Masa, in the Time Warner building, at 10 Columbus Circle, on the same floor as Thomas Keller’s Per Se, is the only sushi restaurant in New York to have earned three stars. Masayoshi Takayama is the owner, creator, and chef. The room is small, with only 26 seats, and I entered through a massive door opened by a welcoming Japanese woman.