Fine Dining

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, All of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Sometimes the greatest institutions can come from the most unlikely places.

The money-sharing app Venmo wasn't created by a tech company, but by two musicians looking for an easier way to split costs for their band.

Nintendo tried its hand at playing cards, taxis, and even instant rice before landing on video games.

And in 1900, two French brothers created one of the greatest honors in fine dining, all to sell tires.

In 1888, brothers Edouard and André Michelin launched a business together, the Michelin Tire Company.

They hoped to cash in on the new automobile industry that was just starting to take over France.

But by 1900, their sales had stalled.

The issue wasn't their tires, though.

It was the cars, or rather the lack thereof.

Because cars were new and expensive, there were only 3,000 3,000 on the road in France at the time.

So the brothers knew that they had to expand their business, and to do so, they would need to get more French people into cars and wearing out their tires.

The brothers began publishing a free travel guide to France, which included instructions on car maintenance, maps, lists of mechanics and gas stations, and most importantly, recommendations for where to eat.

The guide was immediately popular.

There might have been only 3,000 cars in France, but they were able to distribute over 35,000 copies of their first guide.

They quickly published guides to other countries as well, like Belgium and Germany.

But the part customers seemed to like the most was the dining recommendations.

When people were out on the road in a new part of the country, they wanted to know what was good to eat and where.

So the Michelin brothers decided to change the guide from a roadmap to a culinary compass.

They hired a team of critics and food lovers to act as anonymous inspectors and sent them to restaurants across France.

These secret judges started putting together a list of some of the best restaurants in the country, and the Michelin brothers decided that such great food deserved an award.

In 1926, the Michelin company began awarding stars to fine dining restaurants.

At first, it was just one star.

It simply meant a very good restaurant in its category.

Then in 1931, they expanded their system.

One star was still a very good restaurant.

Two stars, though, meant that it was worth a detour.

And three stars, that was the best of all.

Any place that got three stars was worth a special journey to earn these stars the restaurants were tested rigorously michelin would dispatch their anonymous inspectors multiple times sending different people at different times of the day and on different days of the week they were judging restaurants based on five categories ingredient quality technical mastery chef personality value for money and consistency.

And since then, the only time Michelin stopped publishing guides was during World War II, when Germany occupied France.

However, their older guides came in handy in a different way during the war.

When the Allies stormed the beaches at Normandy in 1944, many soldiers carried a 1939 edition of the Michelin.

The reason why?

It had the most recent available roadmaps in France.

Over the years, Michelin expanded its star system around the world, beginning with England in 1974.

Today, Michelin publishes guides in nearly 30 countries across the globe.

In 1997, 1997, recognizing the limited accessibility of some of the Michelin star restaurants, they added a new category, Bib Gourmand.

A restaurant that earned a Bib Gourmand designation meant that it had exceptionally good food at a moderate price.

Over the decades, the pursuit of a Michelin star became an all-consuming quest for the world's top chefs.

Receiving a star was also no guarantee of keeping one.

Michelin inspected all of its designated restaurants annually, and many have been downgraded or lost their stars entirely if they failed to remain consistently excellent.

As you'd imagine, some chefs have criticized the Michelin system for this, complaining that by getting a star, they were effectively locked into the menu items that earned it.

This meant that they could be punished for innovating by losing their stars.

Others have argued that Michelin had a bias for fine dining restaurants with tasting menus and elaborate plating, often overlooking the incredible food from restaurants who didn't fit that mold.

Regardless of these objections, a Michelin star today is still usually an indicator of an amazing meal.

They help people identify some of the best restaurants in the world and celebrate the chefs that make the dining experience unforgettable.

They become such a trusted and desired marker of quality, they're almost like the food world's version of a Nobel Prize.

Not bad for a tire company.

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Everyone knows that chess is an ancient game.

The European version has been around for many hundreds of years.

Earlier forms originated in the medieval Islamic world before traveling west and becoming a crucial part of chivalric culture.

Knights would play chess with each other to demonstrate their ability to think strategically and outmatch their opponent.

The appeal of chess is one that remains constant into the present day.

Its rules are complex but contain no hidden information.

Once you know how all the pieces move, you've pretty much got everything you need to be a chess master.

There's no hand of cards to hide behind, no fog of war, no power-ups that make an experienced player more physically powerful on the board.

Both players have the same pieces before them and the same layouts on the board.

Chess is all about starting on equal footing and learning to anticipate how your opponent thinks.

Now, the oldest mention of the European version of chess comes from a Spanish-language book called The Book of Games.

It was published way back in 1283 as a synthesis of chess rules from Arabic sources.

And it's books like these that show us the long cultural lineage of a game.

But even they do not predate the oldest chess pieces ever found.

In 1831, on the coast of the Scottish Isle of Lewis, someone made a discovery that altered our perception of the game forever.

It was a small trove of chess pieces, which were carved of ivory and may have been as old as the year 1200.

These archaic figurines were exhibited for a while in Edinburgh, though some would find their way to the British Museum where they would become the most iconic symbols of medieval chess.

There are 79 pieces in all.

Eight kings, eight queens, 16 bishops, 15 knights, 13 rooks, and 19 pawns.

Compared to an average chess set that holds 32 pieces, that's quite a lot.

No one really knows if these constitute at least one complete set or multiple incomplete sets that got mixed and matched over the years.

The ivory they're carved from is from walrus tusk and sperm whale teeth.

At the time of the discovery, some had the trace stains of red mercury sulfide, implying that this was their original color before wear and tear reduced them to the color of aged ivory.

As for how they wound up being buried in a beach on the Isle of Lewis, that's anyone's guess.

Stories circulate about their origin to this day, but even the person who found the pieces is a mystery.

The carving styles suggest that they're Norwegian in origin, and the Isle of Lewis was owned by Norway in the 12th century, so it's likely that they came from traveling traders on their way to northern Ireland.

What happened between Norway and their intended owner is anyone's guess.

Now, local folklore naturally has the most colorful version of the events.

A Gaelic legend says that the chess pieces were part of a horde of valuables stolen off of a ship in the 17th century.

The sailor fled the scene on foot, buried the treasure, but was unable to return to collect his hidden prizes.

He was captured and sentenced to death as a thief, leaving the horde of chessmen to wait until their discovery in 1831.

And weirdly, there's also at least one of these pieces that exists independent from the rest of the set.

It's sold at auction for over 700,000 pounds, quite a sum for such a small piece of ancient ivory.

It's impossible to predict what objects will and will not hold value in the future.

Much can be said about the declining value of stamp collections and the fiasco that was the beanie baby's bubble.

It honestly seems that the only reliable predictor of value is human interest, a concept proven by the Lewis chess pieces, because there are still chess fanatics today, just like there were back in medieval times.

Few parts of social life have remained so consistent.

If you learn how to play chess in our modern day, you are sharing a skill with the knights of the Middle Ages, which means that chivalry, in some ways at least, isn't quite so dead, after all.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com.

This show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works.

I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

And until next time, stay curious.

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