Video: Michelin guide restaurants: why does a restaurateur decide to return the star? The Donatella case
2024 Author: Cody Thornton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 12:26
It is said Michelin star a coveted goal, pursued throughout the career of a restaurateur with effort, organization and patience, finally proudly exhibited to its customers. Not something you find by chance and return to the lost property office.
For Donatella And Mauro Bellotti it was not so. After seven years, the owners of the Donatella restaurant in Oviglio, in the province of Alessandria, have decided to return the star to the Michelin guide for a "lifestyle choice". As if to say that the stars are not everything, not even the Michelin stars.
I wanted to know more, above all to understand the reasons that lead to such a counter-current gesture in the competitive world of catering. How much anxiety accompanies a decision that is so meditated and painful. How customers are taking it, cheers and pats on the back or threats never to return. So I called the restaurant and Donatella Bellotti, despite the prohibitive hours, answered my questions with great availability.
"We have decided to give back the star for a choice of life - explains Donatella - The Donatella Restaurant will close and become Bistrò Donatella, characterized by a" kitchen where the raw materials will always be of quality but simpler, the service smooth and less set, a place where families can return to our satisfaction ".
With passion Donatella recounts the evolution of the restaurant and the feeling of estrangement that has grown over the years due to a series of circumstances - including the economic crisis - which have removed the place, in the past a place of refreshment and aggregation of friendly and familiar faces, from a reality that the couple wanted to keep.
"The province of Alessandria suffered greatly from the economic crisis, we felt unglued from the people we see every day, who followed us from the beginning and then, at a certain point, were no longer able to come to the restaurant".
The Donatella Restaurant was no longer a refreshment for friends and acquaintances, confidential and reassuring faces that in a town like Oviglio, inhabited by less than 1300 souls, you find in everyday life; it had become a place of gastronomic pilgrimage for complete strangers, willing to travel to reach the starred restaurant but whose real lives take place far away.
“We have reasoned a lot, it is not a decision made in five minutes. Sometimes people's priorities change, for us as people before they have changed as restaurateurs and we have decided to give up the star by writing to the Michelin guide. Out of transparency towards customers, we thought it was right to return an acknowledgment that in a certain sense defined us.
A question of definition, therefore. Define priorities and re-define your identity, also considering nature and inclinations: at the Donatella restaurant they are far from the contemporary idea of catering, greedy for marketing and communication:
“We are simple people, my husband is shy and does not expose himself, he does not show himself in the hall; waits for customers who want to meet him outside the door to accompany them to the gate - confesses Donatella - today many restaurateurs give their best under the spotlight; we like to cook, serve people, make them feel good, we are not very good at performing”.
The star goes away, bye bye Michelin guide:
“The fundamental role for the restaurant will not change, that of my husband in the kitchen; I'll stay in the room, the passion and the transport for this job will be the same. Let's go back to cooking for people and not because we are part of a certain situation.
The restaurant in its new guise - baptized Donatella Bistrò - will open at the end of June. It won't be easy, but at least judging by the many comments on the restaurant's Facebook page, the Michelin star wasn't all that important.
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