Michelin's First Guide to the American Southwest Found Six Stars in Four States
On 26 August, in a ballroom at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas, Michelin read out the contents of its first guide to the American Southwest. The selection covers four states, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, and runs to 64 restaurants: five of them starred, 18 with a Bib Gourmand, 41 listed as recommended. Six stars in four states.
A first guide is a strange document. It is not a report on a year of cooking, the way a mature edition is, because there is no previous list to move against. Nothing is promoted and nothing is demoted. It is a first impression of an entire region delivered all at once, and its distortions are worth reading as closely as its judgments.
Four States, Very Unevenly Weighted
Nevada took 24 of the 64 listings, Arizona 19, New Mexico 12 and Utah 9. That spread is defensible on population alone. The distribution of stars is not so easily explained.
Four of the five starred restaurants are in Las Vegas. The fifth is in South Salt Lake. Arizona and New Mexico, with 31 restaurants in the guide between them, took no stars at all. Five of the region's six stars sit inside casinos on a four-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard.
So the Southwest, as Michelin has drawn it, is one city with a fine dining industry, one surprise in Utah, and two states that cook well enough to be recommended and not well enough to be decorated. Whether that describes the region or the guide's own instincts is the question the selection leaves open.
What the Tourism Boards Paid For
Michelin does not expand for free. Its arrival in the Southwest was underwritten by the four states it covers. The Arizona Office of Tourism contributed $200,000. Travel Nevada, New Mexico True and the Wasatch Culinary Collective in Salt Lake did the same. Michelin's longstanding position is that the money buys the inspectors' presence and has no bearing on what they write, and these results support that with unusual bluntness.
Arizona paid the largest disclosed sum and received zero stars. What it received instead was seven Bib Gourmands, more than any other state in the guide, and the region's Young Chef award, which went to René Andrade of Bacanora and Huarachis Taqueria in Phoenix. That is a real result, and for a state selling itself on food it may be the more useful one, since a Bib Gourmand is a promise about the bill as well as the kitchen. It is not the result the press release was written for.
New Mexico placed 12 restaurants and took five Bib Gourmands, also without a star.
The Stars Are French, and Indoors
The four Las Vegas stars went to Restaurant de Joël Robuchon at the MGM Grand, which took two, and to Guy Savoy at Caesars Palace, L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon at the MGM Grand and é by José Andrés at the Cosmopolitan, which took one each.
Two of those four are named for a chef who died in 2018. One is named for a chef whose only restaurant outside France this is. The cooking is done by people whose names are not above the door, including Eleazar Villanueva, who came up through the Robuchon kitchen over eight years before taking it over, and who collected the region's only two-star award.
é is the exception worth dwelling on, and not because of the star. It is nine seats at a chef's counter, tucked inside Jaleo at the Cosmopolitan, running a Spanish avant-garde tasting menu across two seatings a night, with reservations opening three months out. The most modern thing on the guide's star list is not a grand room in a new resort. It is a nine-seat counter hidden inside a bigger restaurant. Andrés also took a Bib Gourmand for China Poblano at the same property.
Utah's First Star Is in a Distillery
The sixth star went to Monte in South Salt Lake, and it is the first Michelin star in the history of Utah.
Monte opened in the summer of 2025 inside Beehive Distilling. The dining room is a working distillery with gin barrels stacked against a wall, concrete floors and a small number of widely spaced tables. Martín Babío runs the kitchen and his wife Karen runs the room. Babío is Uruguayan, trained at the Instituto de Alta Cocina in Montevideo, cooked his way across South and North America, and has been in Utah for nine years. He sources roughly 80 percent of what he cooks from inside the state and treats that as an obligation to the farmers and foragers he buys from rather than a line of marketing.
The menu is five courses for $95 on Wednesdays, and seven for $115 or twelve for $175 from Thursday to Saturday. Koji-aged chicken ravioli in lemongrass. Trout ceviche. Coffee-cured venison with truffled potato purée. For those prices, in a distillery, in a suburb.
Babío had spent years telling people he would bring a star to Utah, and he told the room in Las Vegas to dream hard, because dreams come true when you dream hard enough. He was the only person in four states who walked into that ceremony with a restaurant most of the region had never heard of and walked out with a star.
Las Vegas Has Done This Before
The one state in the guide with a Michelin history is Nevada, and it complicates the picture considerably.
Michelin published a Las Vegas guide twice before. The 2008 edition, released in November 2007, covered 127 restaurants and gave 21 stars to 16 of them. The 2009 edition, out the following October, covered 140 and gave 22 stars to 17: one at three stars, three at two, 13 at one. Then the recession arrived and Michelin left.
Las Vegas now holds five stars across four restaurants. Three of those four are names from the old list, and both of the ones that could fall did. Restaurant de Joël Robuchon, the only three-star Michelin has ever awarded in the city, now holds two. Guy Savoy, at two stars in 2009, now holds one. L'Atelier held its single star exactly where it was. Nobody was promoted.
The explanation is not that standards rose. Eighteen restaurants held a star across the two old guides and 11 of them have closed. André's Downtown had a star in a guide published about two months before it served its last dinner on New Year's Eve 2008. Daniel Boulud Brasserie and Restaurant Charlie closed in 2010, Alex at the Wynn in 2011, Bradley Ogden in 2012, miX in 2015, Alizé at the end of 2017, Mesa Grill in 2020, Aureole in 2023. Picasso, which ran at the Bellagio for almost 26 years and held two stars, closed in August 2024. Le Cirque followed it out of the same building on 23 August this year, three days before the ceremony, after nearly 28 years.
Four of the 18 are still open without a star. Michael Mina at the Bellagio and Wing Lei at the Wynn are both in the new guide as Recommended, which is Michelin's way of saying a restaurant is worth eating at and not worth a medal. Nobu, which outlived the Hard Rock and now sits inside Virgin Hotels, and DJT at Trump International are not in the guide at all.
What a First Guide Measures
Read only the star list and the Southwest looks like a region with one serious restaurant city, and that city looks like it peaked around 2007. Read the whole selection and something else appears: 18 Bib Gourmands spread across four states, seven of them in Arizona, in a region whose own cooking is Sonoran and New Mexican before it is anything else.
Michelin left Las Vegas in 2009 because of the economy and returned because four state tourism offices paid it to come. What it found was a casino corridor holding a fraction of its old position, and one restaurant 420 miles north, in a distillery, doing the thing the guide claims to exist to find.
