All those hours spent perfecting your technique in ‘Rock Band’ and ‘Guitar Hero’ don’t, I’m afraid, add up to any real finger-picking skills.

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They’re only cooking lunch – but for chefs, a Michelin star changes everything, writes Tim Dowling

‘Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.” That’s what three Michelin stars means, according to the guidebook first published in France a century ago to help motorists locate petrol stations and find a place to eat while they were waiting to have a tyre changed.

We all know that even one star means a lot in terms of reputation, success and profit. In Michelin Stars: The Madness of Perfection (BBC2), food writer William Sitwell asked where the relentless drive to gain and maintain this particular badge of honour is taking the restaurant business.

He starts by visiting Marcus Wareing’s restaurant at the Berkeley Hotel, where fish and chip soup is on the menu. Wareing already has two stars and wants a third, a quest that demands a 15-hour working day, constant innovation, and an obsessive attention to detail. Sitwell’s very presence in the kitchen presents a threat to Wareing’s current ranking: when he’s allowed to plate-up a starter, he puts the slivered chestnuts on at the wrong angle, and uses too much pepper. He doesn’t see the problem, and that, apparently, is the problem.

“So it’s a one-star dish?” he asks. “No-star?”

“It’s a two-star dish, it’s just that you did it wrong,” says Wareing. “Whichever way you look at it, you fucked it up.”

Sitwell isn’t at all sure how he feels about this. “At the end of the day,” he says, “what were we doing in there? Cooking lunch. Is that going to change the world?” But he knows that for the chefs, a single Michelin star, given or taken away, changes everything.

Not surprisingly a lot of chefs resent Michelin’s power. “It’s a system,” says Marco Pierre White, who some years ago tried to send his three stars back but couldn’t, because they don’t send them to you strung on a necklace; they’re just dots in a book. “It’s about understanding the rules of Michelin.”

Michelin director Jean-Luc Naret, a sober head nestling inside a Harry Hill collar, explained how he calls chefs the night before the guide comes out, to break the news. When you call a three-star chef,” he says, “They know it’s not because you created just for them the fourth star.” There is no better example of the destructive pressure of the third star than chef Bernard Loiseau, who killed himself in 2003 because he feared he might lose his. The Michelin people had said of his sauces that there was “no fire in the lake”.

Sitwell wanted to make a bit of a detective story out of tracking down a real-life Michelin inspector, but it was never going to be like meeting Deep Throat, just a man who dines out anonymously 300 times a year. “I suppose it makes you feel like a secret agent,” said the shadowy figure, “Licensed to eat.” It was one of the many reminders that the whole thing is just a weird game, albeit one with enormous consequences.

There was more fraught competition in Too Poor for Posh School (C4), which followed 11 boys of limited means who wanted to attend Harrow. The Peter Beckwith scholarship covers the entire cost of their boarding school education, but there were only two places. A long day of testing and sucking up awaited them.

The film wisely did not linger on the monstrous injustice of all this; it was clear enough that we were observing a Dickensian solution to a modern problem. Harrow costs £28,000 a year – 98% of UK families couldn’t afford to send a child there. Instead, it gradually fell under the spell of Harrow’s seductive charm, while focusing on the hopes of the children.

Tumi was a talented mathematician. Krishnan had an IQ of 141, and was precocious to the point of being a little irritating. Numham’s unemployed dad devotes hours to testing and tutoring his boy. Then there’s Alexander, who has grade seven on violin and piano, and was a chorister. Krishan was a shoo-in for the first place. Tumi wasn’t home when his call came, and in the interim we saw Alexander being offered the second place. I started to leave the room when Tumi finally picked up the phone – were they really going to make me watch Harrow reject this child? – but his face broke into a grin. They’d decided to offer a third place; a bit like suddenly creating a fourth Michelin star, but it spared me a few tears. There was a creepy lunch at the end where old Beckwith boys sung the praises of their benefactor. Very Dickensian indeed.

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Four years ago New York City’s health commissioners banned artery-blocking transfats in restaurants. Now, if a legislator has his way, the chefs at every eatery in the Big Apple and across the state will have to make do without salt.

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Typical Americans! When I went to the US with my son recently, we saw these two ladies sitting at their dinner.

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Sony has clarified that, although four of the Move wand controllers can be used at a time, the PS3 motion control system only supports two Move controllers and two of the offhand “sub-controllers” at once.

There’s a cap of four controllers total, explained Justin Cooney, a senior account manager for developer support at Sony Computer Entertainment America, in a GDC session.

That includes the nunchuck-style wireless offhand controllers. “I always think of it as the left side of a Sixaxis,” Cooney said,

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BioWare’s announced the Kasumi’s Stolen Memory downloadable content for Mass Effect 2.

Due 6th April, this introduces the last and twelfth recruit to the roster: Kasumi.

You’ll find her – a thief – on The Citadel, and help her on a top secret recovery mission should you feel helpful. Joystiq said the task requires a disguise and leads to a run-in with an art collector.

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Blizzard senior engineer Dominic Fillion revealed the extent of the developer’s perfectionism at GDC today. During a presentation on programming StarCraft II, he quipped that the vast majority of the developer’s effort goes into the final polishing stages of the game.

“They say that the last 20 per cent of your effort gets you 80 per cent of your game,” Fillion said, quoting the the common game development maxim.

“With us it seems to be the other way around. 80 per cent of our effort goes into the final 20 per cent of polish.”

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Games & Consoles at the Lowest Prices Available Online Today

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