IN THE restaurant cosmos, Michelin stars offer order and hierarchy. They certainly don’t calm the incorrigibly disputatious industry; instead, they provide a focus for rivalry, competition and debate as well as anxiety.

Ferran Adria, the legendary Spanish chef whose legacy has just been spectacularly celebrated in Copenhagen, says that one of the comforts of shuttering his restaurant El Bulli in 2011 – at the height of its powers – was no longer having to worry about retaining its three Michelin stars year after year.

Critics may shower praise (or not), but what counts is your place in the empyrean, determined by that offshoot of a French tyre company.