What’s next for the Michelin Guide ahead of this week’s American South ceremony

The Michelin Guide ceremony for restaurants in the American South will take place Wednesday in Nashville amid new questions about the rating system’s credibility.

Will any Atlanta restaurants gain a second star, or lose one? Will more Georgia restaurants be included? Will the mood be dampened by recent criticism of the organization?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will be at the Pinnacle in downtown Nashville on Wednesday evening to answer these questions and more.

Recent criticism

The century-old restaurant guide is famous for its secrecy; its inspectors are anonymous and the company releases only vague information about their evaluation process.

But the Michelin Guide has also rapidly expanded in recent years, including in the Southeast. In 2025, the Atlanta guide was incorporated into a new, wide-ranging region called the American South, which includes Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The rest of Georgia is not included.

The speedy addition of so many new territories has led many in the restaurant industry to question the guide’s credibility. With nearly 20,000 restaurants listed in the global Michelin Guide, is it possible for their inspectors to visit every restaurant each year?

The imperious organization has also suffered some stumbles as its territory has grown.

Last year, a news release listing all the restaurants in the American South Michelin Guide was posted hours before the ceremony, spoiling the evening’s biggest surprises. The Atlanta section of the guide saw hardly any changes, leading many attendees to wonder if inspectors had spent much time in the city. And this year, D Magazine in Dallas published an analysis that indicated several restaurant descriptions in the Texas Michelin Guide had been written with AI.

What has Michelin said about claims of AI use?

The D Magazine investigation came after the Texas Michelin Guide was released Oct. 8. A Dallas restaurateur became suspicious that the Michelin Guide’s notes about their restaurant were written with the help of an AI tool, so they emailed D Magazine restaurant critic Brian Reinhart to see if he could find out.

Reinhart used an AI detection program to test the Dallas restaurant blurbs in the Michelin Guide and the results indicated AI had been used. Wary of false positives, Reinhart reached out to his brother, a statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who published a paper last year with his colleagues about identifying passages written by AI tools. The CMU professors also felt some of the Dallas-area Michelin blurbs were written by AI, and zeroed in on a specific AI model: ChatGPT-4o.

In its response to the D Magazine investigation, the Michelin Guide denied using AI to write the Dallas restaurant notes.

“All inspector notes appearing on the Michelin Guide website and app are developed collaboratively by the inspection team based on their firsthand dining experiences. AI is not used in the writing of these reviews,” representatives said, according to D Magazine.

Reinhart tested several other sections of the guide, in Texas and elsewhere, but did not find other instances of suspected AI use.

The AJC inquired about the investigation and requested to speak with a Michelin representative, but none were made available. Instead, the organization released a statement.

“Since its creation more than a century ago, the Michelin Guide has based its recommendations on the firsthand experiences of its anonymous and independent Inspectors,” a company representative said in a news statement. “This human, on-the-ground approach is the foundation of our mission and lies at the very heart of the MICHELIN Guide’s DNA. It is central to the relationship of trust we have built with our consumers.

“The information and descriptive texts published on our website and app are based exclusively on the evaluations carried out by our Inspection teams, following a proven methodology that is applied consistently around the world,” the representative said.

The Michelin Guide’s impact on Atlanta restaurants

Despite the stumbles in recent years, the effect of the Michelin Guide on Atlanta’s dining scene remains positive, and achieving a Michelin Star is still a crowning achievement for most chefs or restaurateurs. Last year’s ceremony, in Greenville, South Carolina — home of Michelin’s North American headquarters — still buzzed with excitement and drama as so many dreams were realized before a crowd of respected peers.

The Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau, the organization that first brought the Michelin Guide to Atlanta, touted the financial impact the restaurant ratings have made on the city’s dining scene.

“Following the launch of Atlanta’s inaugural Michelin Guide, qualitative feedback from local restaurateurs suggested recognized restaurants experienced increases around 30 percent,” ACVB CEO William Pate said in a news statement. “The impact also extended beyond those featured in the guide. We heard anecdotally that Atlanta’s broader restaurant community experienced growth of around 10 percent.”

The emotional impact was obvious, too, with many cheers and tears from figures in the Atlanta restaurant scene at last year’s event, despite few changes in the guide. Retaining a spot in the guide year after year is clearly a point of pride for the restaurants that achieve such recognition.

What to expect at the 2026 American South Michelin Guide ceremony

Judging from the pattern followed by the Michelin Guide’s first few years in Atlanta, the second year of the American South guide will feature incremental changes.

With its two-year head start, the Atlanta area has eight starred restaurants, more than any other metro area in the South. And Atlanta actually lost a starred restaurant last year after Staplehouse changed its service style from a chef’s tasting menu to a casual, counter-service cafe.

Atlanta felt a bit overlooked last year amid the excitement of the expanded guide, so it will be interesting to see if any new restaurants earn Michelin Stars or if a one-star restaurant is elevated to two.

There are a few good candidates that could earn their first stars this year, such as Avize, which was the only Atlanta restaurant named to the inaugural North America’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Koshu Club, from the same team behind one-star Mujo, could be another candidate. And So. Fox has drawn both local and national accolades after it was named to The New York Times’ list of the country’s 50 best restaurants.

More big questions for this year’s ceremony: Will New Orleans (four total stars) cut further into Atlanta’s lead? Will any restaurants in Alabama or Mississippi earn Michelin Stars? Have any other regions of Georgia been evaluated by the inspectors?