If Listening Became the New Dining — A Note on the Michelin Mindset
I reflect on Michelin’s global influence — and wonders what might happen if listening became as important as dining in how we experience the world.
By Rafi Mercer
Michelin receives more than eighty-six million visitors a year. Eighty-six million people, each searching for a meal that means something — a flavour to remember, a place that lingers in the mind. It’s extraordinary, really, how far we’ll travel for taste. And yet, when it comes to listening, the equivalent doesn’t yet exist. There’s no red guide for the ear. No quiet assurance that somewhere, down a side street in Lisbon or a basement in Shibuya, there’s a space that will change how you hear the world.
It’s a strange omission, because the parallels between food and sound are almost perfect. Both are sensory arts built on timing, balance, texture, and trust. Both reward patience. Both are, at their best, acts of care disguised as pleasure. And yet one is mapped, measured, and starred — while the other remains, for now, word of mouth and whisper.
Sometimes I wonder: what if Tracks & Tales could become to sound what Michelin became to food? Not as a competitor — the world doesn’t need another rating system for ego — but as a companion. A guide not to consumption, but to attention. A way of marking the places where people have cared enough to get sound right. Where listening isn’t a background habit but a way of life.
It’s easy to think that’s delusional. Michelin was born from tyres and travel — a century of infrastructure and influence. Tracks & Tales is still a whisper in comparison: a few thousand cities indexed, a growing archive of bars, albums, essays. But the idea underneath it isn’t small. It’s universal. Because listening, like eating, is fundamental. It’s how we understand ourselves and each other. It’s how we receive the world.
The real question is whether we can teach people to treat listening with the same reverence they already give to taste. What if choosing a listening bar became as instinctive as choosing a restaurant? What if “where shall we listen tonight?” replaced “where shall we eat?” Not because sound is competing with flavour, but because both satisfy the same human hunger — to feel something deeply, and to share it.
The Michelin mindset, at its core, is about excellence quietly recognised. It’s about craft, consistency, and context. A single star isn’t about status — it’s about someone, somewhere, doing something properly. That same spirit lives in the world of listening bars. In Tokyo, where jazz kissaten culture still hums beneath the neon. In London, where rooms like Brilliant Corners and Spiritland blend gastronomy with hi-fi. In Lisbon, where Fado’s melancholy meets modern sound systems. These places curate tone, not just tunes. They serve silence between tracks with the same precision a chef serves courses.
To sit in a great listening bar is to experience the sonic equivalent of fine dining. You feel the care in the acoustics, the flow of the evening, the precision of every transition. The curator — like a sommelier — reads the room and adjusts the mix to taste. What you’re hearing is not random; it’s crafted. The fact that this isn’t yet mapped or celebrated at scale says more about us than about the movement itself. We’re still learning to listen again.
The truth is, we live in an era where listening might matter more than eating. Food fills us; sound forms us. It shapes memory, emotion, and identity. It connects us to place, to time, to one another. The right record in the right room can move you as profoundly as the best meal — and for a fraction of the cost. That’s what the listening culture is quietly proving: that luxury isn’t about excess, it’s about attention.
When I think about Tracks & Tales a few years from now, I don’t imagine Michelin-scale numbers. I imagine Michelin-scale meaning. A trusted map for those who live by ear — a guide to where music is still treated as art, not ambience. The audience may be smaller, but perhaps more awake. The kind of people who understand that to listen well is to live well.
So yes, Michelin may always have the global traffic. But Tracks & Tales has the signal. The places, the people, the patience. And if we’ve learned anything from the century of dining culture, it’s that every movement begins with one small, well-lit room where someone does something differently.
If the world can learn to care this deeply about food, it can learn to care this deeply about sound. One day, perhaps, listening will sit alongside dining as one of life’s quiet luxuries — a ritual that turns the ordinary into art.
And when that day comes, the guides won’t just tell us where to eat. They’ll tell us where to listen.
Quick Questions
Isn’t it unrealistic to compare listening to dining?
Maybe. But both are sensory crafts built on attention and care. One feeds the body; the other, the mind.
What would a Michelin-style listening guide look like?
A curated map of spaces that value sound as seriously as taste — ranked not by hype, but by depth, detail, and human warmth.
Why now?
Because listening is becoming the new measure of culture. As screens saturate and silence disappears, the ability to truly hear becomes the ultimate luxury.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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