Travel: Potluck on the Road

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Only a Frenchman with an anesthetized palate would dream of setting out on an auto trip without a fat little red book nestled in his glove compartment—the Guide Michelin, France's gastronomical bible, maker and breaker of restaurant reputations from Paris to the Pyrenees. But in the U.S., tourists tend to take better care of their cars than of their stomachs. Four years ago, the dietetically neutral Socony Mobil Oil Co. joined forces with the Simon & Schuster publishing company in a venture to reduce the U.S.'s highway heartburn: a seven-volume domestic imitation ($1 a volume) of the Guide Michelin. Last year, Mobil Travel Guides covering the Northeastern States and the South Central and Southwestern States were released. Last week Guidebooks Nos. 3 and 4 appeared, under the sign of the Flying Red Horse: Great Lakes Area and California and Nevada.

The Dishwater Test. Like the Michelin, which is underwritten by France's Michelin Tire Co., the Mobil guides are partly promotion gimmicks: Mobil frankly hopes that the books "will build our station traffic." Each guide lists local tourist attractions—many of which are so far off the beaten track that they are all but unknown to natives—as well as hotel and motel accommodations; entries duly note the distance to the nearest self-service laundry, and whether sitters are available or pets permitted. But the most important feature of each volume is the restaurant list, compiled for the most part not by gourmets but by reasonably hungry laymen whose knowledge of food could be expected to parallel that of the average tourist.

In charge of the raters are Simon & Schuster Vice President Jason Burger, 44, and Editors Alden and Marion Stevens. Price, service, and even the temperature of the kitchen dishwater—as well as the quality of the food—guided the tasters. Burger, who put in a month's work for Michelin to help him with the Mobil job, reports that some highly rated French eating places would have been ruled out by his staff because of unclean kitchens. A similarity between the Michelin and Mobil scouts: both announce their impending arrival by letter, months in advance; but the inspectors eat incognito, revealing their identity only after they have finished their meal.

Whimsy & Flackery. U.S. restaurants are rated from one to five stars, in contrast to the Michelin's top billing of three stars. In France, Michelin's 1960 edition found ten restaurants worthy of three-star rating; in the four Mobil guides to date, eleven restaurants won the top accolade.* The selections on the whole are remarkably reliable, but devotees of good eating have found much with which to quarrel, particularly in the big cities. Interesting is the fact that two legendary (if perhaps overrated) food towns, such as New Orleans and San Francisco, have only one five-star restaurant apiece, while Chicago, once ignored as a gourmet's town, has three.