Michelin mess: How Apple Maps fumbles location details
Apple Maps navigation might be on par with Google’s these days, but Apple’s location data is not. Google offers broad coverage for many points of interest, while Apple’s data has mostly relied on knitting together bits from competing business partners. This attempts to mimic Google’s comprehensive coverage without Apple having to do the foundational work itself.
Apple recently announced it would integrate data from Michelin Guide (prestigious/exacting), The Infatuation (trendy/young), and Golf Digest (retirees/executives/awful world leaders). While initial partnerships seemed shrewd for bootstrapping Maps data, Apple now appears content to make the entire platform out of boot straps.
This approach layers on top of existing partners like Yelp, OpenTable, TripAdvisor, and Foursquare, not to mention numerous international partners. Let’s focus on restaurants, the core of the Michelin Guide’s focus.
Guides by Michelin Guide, not Michelin guides
Michelin integrations remain limited to the U.S., three months post-announcement. (Sorry, France!) However, I don’t think anyone is truly missing out, as the Michelin integration offers very limited value.
Curiously, there’s no “Michelin Guide” within Apple Maps’s Guides feature. Instead, some cities feature Apple Maps Guides created by Michelin Guide to highlight specific restaurants. For instance, “Best Korean BBQ in Los Angeles” spotlights Korean BBQ restaurants, but only one has a Michelin rating, and its specific rating isn’t indicated within the Apple Maps Guide interface. You must visit each linked location to find out. Why are the rest unrated? It’s a mystery.
To find all Michelin-rated restaurants in Los Angeles, users must search for “restaurants in Los Angeles” and manually toggle filters for every type of Michelin Guide rating in the Maps view.
Everyone gets a rating system
What do these ratings tell us? Consider three Nancy Silverton restaurants operating from the same building:
- Osteria Mozza — Michelin-rated with one star and a green star. It has a 4.8 on OpenTable.
- Pizzeria Mozza — This casual pizzeria has a Bib Gourmand. Its Michelin “about” section focuses more on the proprietors than noteworthy dishes, and it’s rated 4.7 by OpenTable.
- Chi Spacca — It has a Green Star1 from Michelin and a 4.8 on OpenTable.
It’s striking that Apple Maps has captured not a single Apple Maps rating for these three notable restaurants, nor for the vast majority of Michelin-rated restaurants in LA.
Apple Maps never presents all available ratings and reviews for a location. Yelp and TripAdvisor have lower ratings for these restaurants, but because these three use OpenTable for reservations, only OpenTable ratings and reviews are shown, which consistently trend higher.2
Consider two other nearby restaurants with differing review systems in Apple Maps:
- Jon & Vinny’s — The original Fairfax pizza and pasta location somehow has a Bib Gourmand and a 3.5 on Yelp. How does one compare this to Pizzeria Mozza (Bib Gourmand, 4.7 on OpenTable)?
- Gucci Osteria da Massimo Bottura — This Beverly Hills restaurant has a Michelin star, a gushing Michelin “about” section, and a lower-than-expected 4.0 on Yelp. How do you choose between this and Osteria Mozza if you’re picking a Michelin-starred Osteria in LA?
Searching Maps for “restaurants” and selecting “Top Rated” reveals no clear pattern for what “Top Rated” signifies. It pulls from a patchwork of rating systems and random Apple Maps Guides. Some listings only have Apple Maps ratings and no other reviews, even when Yelp or TripAdvisor data exists. An “Overall” score of 84%3, for example, is supposedly enough to deem a place “Top Rated.” Not in any school I ever attended, but sure.
How will this hodgepodge improve when The Infatuation’s 0-10 ratings data is added? What new assortment of metrics will define “Top Rated” then?
The menu problem
Deciding on a restaurant often hinges on its menu, yet this isn’t a primary consideration in Maps. It’s almost always hidden behind a “More…” button. Apple frequently relies on third parties for menus, often displaying “Menu” with a Yelp icon, rather than linking directly to the restaurant’s website menu.
Apple is indexing the whole internet, but can’t index restaurant menus? While many restaurants fail to keep their online menus updated, an effort is still needed. This failure to index menu information also explains why searching for specific dishes or cuisine in Apple Maps is ineffective. A search for “khao soi” in LA yields only “Khao Soi Thai,” not the many restaurants offering the dish. “Khao soi noodle” incorrectly suggests places like Lan Noodle, which doesn’t serve it.
Yelp, an Apple partner, handles this search better within its own app, as does Google Maps, both displaying the expected Thai restaurants.
Perhaps Google excels because it indexes these menus. A Google Maps restaurant listing prominently features “Menu” after “Overview,” linking to the restaurant website and displaying user-submitted photos of physical menus with dates. It’s imperfect, but it’s an active attempt to solve the problem, not bury or outsource it.
The camera eats first
Photos convey much about a restaurant and its dishes. Apple Maps offers photos, but often without dates or captions, sourced from various third parties, including Michelin Guide, and potentially dating back to Foursquare’s early days. Yelp sometimes requires a deep link to its app to view photos.
There’s no way to filter photos by source service (to exclude those requiring an account) or to show only Apple Maps user submissions. While Apple Maps allows user photo uploads, users can’t caption or categorize images, and there’s no alt text for accessibility. While privacy-preserving in allowing anonymous uploads, the utility is questionable, especially the setting allowing Apple to share uploaded photos with partners.4
Google Maps, however, provides photo captions and can even surface photos of frequently mentioned or photographed menu items.
Reviews you can use
Apple Maps’s scoring system, which presents results as percentages, offers little actionable information. What does 87% for Food & Drink mean? We need words to make sense of “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” feedback.
While user reviews can invite attention-seeking behavior (thanks for reading my column), they contain valuable data best shared in writing, not as a binary metric. Aggregated reviews are particularly useful, and AI summaries, despite their flaws, can highlight the frequency of compliments or complaints.
Ironically, Apple uses AI summaries for App Store reviews (where grievances are common) but not for restaurants, where people are often motivated to rave about a great meal.
I have reservations
Apple’s reliance on OpenTable for reservations overlooks other services. Sometimes Yelp is offered, or Yelp’s wait lists appear under “More….”
The Michelin integration now allows reservations via Michelin, but this isn’t native; it routes you to Michelin’s site, listing services like Resy—which Apple doesn’t partner with, despite my having its app.
Google Maps’s “Reserve” button either offers an app/service picker or a seamless in-Maps reservation process regardless of service. Apple should emulate this, avoiding routing users through Michelin Guide for a service-agnostic reservation list, especially when Michelin Guide covers only a fraction of restaurants.
Thumbs down
I could continue, and certainly for other location types beyond restaurants, but I believe I’ve made my point: every new Apple Maps partner merely adds another incomplete layer of data. The underlying problems persist because Apple relies on these external sources rather than genuinely investing in its own internal ratings, reviews, or photo capabilities. As such, their data remains largely unhelpful.
The Michelin Guide, The Infatuation, or any “expert” source will never cover every restaurant in every city. As for user reviews, OpenTable users are limited by its business model, and both Yelp and TripAdvisor offer more features and consistency in their own apps than Apple provides in Maps.
Google Maps, however, offers a one-stop shop for ratings, reviews, menus, reservations, and even real-time busyness data, all directly comparable to surrounding places and usable worldwide.
It would be beneficial for Apple to expand its first-party data and incentivize users and business owners to contribute fresh, relevant information to points of interest with the same volume and frequency as other platforms. There are so many iPhone users writing reviews, and submitting photos, but they’re not doing it in Apple Maps. Why not incentivize those users to post that data directly at this point, instead of piecing it together from business arrangements made with different providers that do collect the data?
- Apple Maps doesn’t provide any information on deciphering the Michelin rating system for the uninitiated. People know stars are good, and more stars is more good, but they absolutely don’t know why the tire guy is licking his lips, or why there’s a four leaf clover. You can’t tap on them for an explanation. For your own edification, the Green Star is awarded to restaurants that are “role models” for sustainable practices and can be awarded to any Michelin-rated establishment, but shouldn’t be read as an additional star. None of that data maps to any other non-rated restaurant you will look at Maps. ↩
- I have only been able to find a single restaurant in all of Los Angeles that has a rating under 4.0 and it’s a single location of Red Lobster, which has a 3.7. Partially this is the fault of ratings systems relying on 5/5 meaning expectations were met, but it’s also biased towards the high end more than Yelp or TripAdvisor which also have a 5 star scale. None of these 5 star systems can be directly compared, even though Apple places them in the interface as if they are interchangeable peers. ↩
- Overall doesn’t mean that it’s an average of the other three scores. Overall is an independent evaluation, so Planta (a vegan restaurant in LA) has an overall score of 84% from 37 ratings, 95% for Food & Drink from 22 ratings, 90% for Customer Service from 21 ratings, and 100% for Atmosphere from 22 ratings. Mathematically, this is a perfect system for “Top Rated”. ↩
- There is a toggle in Maps settings for: “Allow companies that provide photos to Maps to use the photos that you add to Maps in their own products and services. Photos include their locations but not your identity. If you turn this off, photo providers may no longer use your photos, but this may take a few days to apply.” Seems cool and fun. ↩
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
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