Michelin introduced the Green Star in 2020 for sustainable gastronomy. Around 500 restaurants now hold it across roughly 30 countries. Some genuinely earn it — biodome architecture, on-site lunar-calendar gardens, multi-generation family farms inseparable from the menu. Some clearly don't. In October 2025 Michelin quietly removed the Green Star as a searchable parameter on its guide website, while continuing to award it. This is the honest map of which Green Stars are real, which are marketing, and which are worth a special journey on their own merits.
Azurmendi sits in the Basque countryside outside Bilbao. SingleThread is in Sonoma wine country. Mirazur is on the Italian-French Riviera border. Maaemo, until its closure, was in northern Norway. Eating at these restaurants generally means travelling. The reasonable response is to compress the travel into the most efficient form — fewer trips, fewer flights, but each one routed well.
Plan an efficient Green Star route via JetLuxeThe Michelin Green Star was launched in 2020 as a separate designation from the traditional one-, two-, and three-star ratings. The official purpose, according to Michelin, is to "symbolise excellence in sustainable gastronomy" — restaurants leading in environmentally responsible practices that go beyond what mainstream commercial kitchens do. A restaurant can hold a Green Star concurrently with any combination of regular stars, or as the only Michelin distinction it carries.
The evaluation criteria, as Michelin describes them, span several dimensions: sourcing of local and seasonal ingredients with traceable provenance; relationships with farmers, foragers, ranchers, and producers using environmentally responsible methods; food waste reduction practices, often involving root-to-stem or nose-to-tail cooking; energy efficiency in restaurant operations including kitchen and dining-room infrastructure; reduction or elimination of single-use plastics and other waste-stream products; integration of sustainability into the chef's culinary philosophy and menu communication; and education of diners about the restaurant's sustainability practices through menus, books, or other communication.
Crucially, the Green Star is awarded by the same anonymous Michelin inspectors who award the regular stars — there is no separate application process. Inspectors observe sustainability practices during their normal evaluation visits and assess whether the restaurant clears the bar for the designation. As with stars, the Green Star is reviewed annually and can be lost in subsequent guide cycles.
The original 2020 launch awarded around 50 Green Stars globally. By 2022 the count was approximately 426. By 2024 it had passed 500. The growth rate has been broadly comparable to the rate at which Michelin has expanded into new countries — Slovenia, Thailand, Mexico, South Korea, Saudi Arabia — combined with the rate at which existing restaurants in established markets have demonstrated meaningful sustainability practices.
In October 2025, Michelin quietly removed the Green Star designation from the searchable parameters on the official guide website. Travellers can no longer filter for Green Star restaurants in a specific city or region the way they could the previous year. The award continues to be given — Michelin issued a statement confirming Green Stars still exist and are still being awarded — but the search interface no longer surfaces them.
The official reason has not been published. The practical implications, however, are significant and worth understanding. First, Green Star restaurants now require manual identification through individual restaurant pages, where the designation is still displayed. Second, travellers planning trips around sustainability-rated restaurants must use third-party lists or the Michelin print guides rather than the searchable website. Third, the change has been widely interpreted in the food press as a quiet acknowledgement of concerns about consistency in how the Green Star was being awarded across different country teams.
The honest reading is that Michelin's institutional concern about Green Star dilution had become real enough to warrant a search-interface downgrade. Several food critics had publicly questioned why restaurants with relatively modest sustainability practices were being awarded Green Stars alongside genuinely transformative kitchens like Azurmendi or SingleThread. The October 2025 change reads as Michelin's tentative response — preserving the award but reducing its prominence on the platform — rather than a definitive resolution.
For travellers, this means the Green Star is now a flag worth investigating rather than a filter worth trusting blindly. The strongest Green Stars remain meaningful indicators of serious sustainability practice. The weakest add little signal beyond what reading a restaurant's own published values statement would tell you. The user's job is now to read past the designation to the underlying practice.
The Green Star distribution roughly tracks the underlying density of Michelin coverage, with some notable variations. Italy holds the largest national total. France and the US follow. Tokyo punches above its weight given the city's structural emphasis on seasonal cooking. Several smaller markets — Slovenia, Denmark — have unusually high Green Star concentrations relative to their starred count.
| Country / Region | Green Stars | Notable holders |
|---|---|---|
| Italy | 69 | Le Calandre, Reale, Villa Naj |
| France | ~60+ | Mirazur, Arpège, Maison Pic |
| Spain | 57 | Azurmendi, El Celler de Can Roca, Aponiente, Cocina Hermanos Torres |
| Germany | ~25 | Bareiss, Vendôme, Sosein |
| United States | ~25 | SingleThread, French Laundry, Atelier Crenn, Chez Panisse, Harbor House Inn |
| Tokyo (Japan) | 14+ | L'Effervescence, NARISAWA |
| Denmark | ~12 | noma (until closure), Geranium |
| Netherlands & Belgium | ~30 combined | De Nieuwe Winkel, Bord'Eau |
| United Kingdom & Ireland | ~25 | L'Enclume, The Ethicurean, Wild Honey Inn |
| Rest of world | ~100+ | Pujol (Mexico), Borago (Chile), Restaurant Hua (Slovenia) |
One pattern worth noting: the highest Green Star density relative to total starred count appears in countries where Michelin's overall coverage is newer or smaller. Slovenia, where Michelin began coverage in 2020, has roughly one Green Star per four starred restaurants. France has roughly one per ten. This asymmetry suggests Green Stars are sometimes used as a recognition device for restaurants in less-covered regions where the regular star count is still building.
The clearest examples of meaningful sustainability practice among Green Star holders. These restaurants would be operating sustainably whether Michelin recognised it or not — the practice predates the designation.
Azurmendi (Larrabetzu, Spain). Chef Eneko Atxa's three-Michelin-star and Green Star restaurant outside Bilbao is built into a custom-designed bioclimatic glass building with on-site vegetable gardens, rainwater capture, geothermal heating, and a sapling of the Tree of Gernika at the entrance to symbolise Basque ecological commitment. The Welcome Picnic course of the tasting menu is served in a glass-enclosed indoor garden. Azurmendi won the World's Most Sustainable Restaurant award from the World's 50 Best Restaurants programme before the Michelin Green Star existed. The Green Star designation here is a confirmation of practice, not a marketing tool.
SingleThread (Healdsburg, California). Kyle and Katina Connaughton's three-star inn and restaurant in Sonoma operates a five-acre on-site farm that supplies the majority of the kitchen's produce, eggs, and herbs. The menu changes daily based on what's harvested that morning. The restaurant won a Green Star in 2020 in the inaugural class. The on-site farm pre-dated the award by half a decade. The economic structure of the property — restaurant plus five-room inn — exists specifically to make the farm model financially viable.
Mirazur (Menton, France). Mauro Colagreco's three-star Riviera restaurant sources from its four on-site gardens — orange, vegetable, herb, citrus — terraced into the Italian-French border cliffside. The menu is structured around the lunar calendar: each day is classified as a fruit, flower, leaf, or root day, and the courses follow that day's classification. Colagreco has separately campaigned for ocean-conservation measures along the Riviera coast and serves only sustainably-sourced fish. The Green Star here aligns with public-facing advocacy beyond the restaurant itself.
L'Enclume (Cartmel, UK). Simon Rogan's three-star restaurant in the Lake District operates a 12-acre farm at nearby Our Farm in Cumbria, supplying nearly all the kitchen's produce. The relationship between the farm and the restaurant is constitutive — the menu is what the farm produces, not the reverse. L'Enclume holds a Green Star and three Michelin stars and is one of the clearest UK examples of farm-to-restaurant integration at the top tier.
The pattern across all four: sustainability is structurally embedded in the restaurant's economic and operational model, not bolted on as a marketing layer. The Green Star, in these cases, recognises something that exists with or without recognition.
A small but growing group of restaurants hold both three Michelin Stars and a Green Star. This is the most exclusive overlap in the entire guide — restaurants performing at the highest culinary level while also operating with meaningful sustainability commitment. The current list, as of the 2026 guides:
Spain (6 restaurants). Azurmendi (Larrabetzu, Eneko Atxa), El Celler de Can Roca (Girona, Roca brothers), Aponiente (El Puerto de Santa María, Ángel León — known for sea-foraging and marine biology research), Cenador de Amós (Villaverde de Pontones, Jesús Sánchez), Cocina Hermanos Torres (Barcelona, Sergio and Javier Torres), and Casa Marcial (Arriondas, Nacho Manzano — newly elevated to three stars in 2025 with concurrent Green Star).
France (3+ restaurants). Mirazur (Menton, Mauro Colagreco), Arpège (Paris, Alain Passard — known for the radical decision to remove red meat from the tasting menu in 2001 in favour of vegetable-focused cooking), and Maison Troisgros (Ouches, Michel and César Troisgros — recently committed to a 100% local sourcing programme).
United States (3 restaurants). SingleThread (Healdsburg, Kyle and Katina Connaughton), The French Laundry (Yountville, Thomas Keller and Yountville garden programme), Atelier Crenn (San Francisco, Dominique Crenn).
United Kingdom (1 restaurant). L'Enclume (Cartmel, Simon Rogan).
Japan and elsewhere. Tokyo's three-stars do not currently overlap with Green Stars, though L'Effervescence (two-star) holds a Green Star. Italy's Le Calandre near Padua holds three stars and a Green Star.
This overlap group represents perhaps 15 to 18 restaurants worldwide. It is the most defensible map for "exceptional cooking with meaningful sustainability" — restaurants where both designations carry independent weight. For travellers building a deliberate sustainable-luxury food trip, this is the right starting list.
The honest critique. A meaningful subset of Green Star holders practise sustainability at a level that any thoughtful kitchen in 2026 would also practise — local seasonal sourcing, no plastic straws, food waste reduction, energy-efficient kitchen equipment. These practices are normal commercial-kitchen baseline now, not exceptional commitment. When the Green Star is awarded to restaurants doing only baseline sustainability work, the designation becomes diluted relative to the genuine cases.
The mechanism that produces this dilution is structural. Michelin's country teams differ in how stringent their Green Star evaluation is. Some teams set a high bar — only restaurants with constitutive sustainability practice (on-site farm, custom architecture, multi-decade producer relationships) get awarded. Others appear to set a lower bar, awarding the Green Star to restaurants with documented sustainability policies but more modest underlying practice. Without a unified global standard, the designation's signal value varies by country.
The food press has been increasingly explicit about this. Independent reviewers have noted Green Star recipients whose published sustainability statements amount to "we source locally where possible" — language any competent kitchen could write. Several food magazines have stopped using the Green Star as a filter for sustainability coverage, treating it instead as one data point among many.
The October 2025 search-removal is best read in this context. Michelin's institutional concern about consistency had become real enough to warrant action; removing the search filter reduces user reliance on the designation as a single source of truth without requiring Michelin to publicly rebuke its own country teams. The honest implication is that the Green Star, in 2026, is a flag worth investigating but not a verdict worth trusting.
The Green Star is a useful starting list, not a final answer. Read each restaurant's actual sustainability statement on its Michelin Guide page before assuming the designation means meaningful practice. The genuine cases — Azurmendi, SingleThread, Mirazur, Arpège, L'Enclume, noma (before closure) — operate at a level no marketing department could fabricate. The weakest 30 to 40 percent of Green Stars do not. Discriminate accordingly.
The framework that works. Five questions to ask of any Green Star restaurant. If the answer is yes to at least three, the designation likely reflects substantive practice. If the answer is no to most, treat the Green Star as marketing rather than signal.
1. Does the restaurant own or operate its own farm, garden, or production facility? SingleThread runs a five-acre farm. L'Enclume runs Our Farm. Azurmendi has on-site bioclimatic gardens. Mirazur has terraced gardens. These are structural investments that take years to build and cannot be retrofitted as marketing. A "yes" answer here is the strongest single signal.
2. Did the sustainability practice predate the Green Star award? Most genuine Green Stars were practising sustainability seriously for at least five years before 2020. Azurmendi opened its bioclimatic building in 2012. Arpège removed red meat in 2001. These are not retrofitted positions. If the restaurant's sustainability story starts in 2019 or later, the Green Star designation is more likely to be the reason for the practice than the recognition of pre-existing practice.
3. Is sustainability constitutive of the menu, or supplementary to it? At Mirazur, the lunar-calendar classification structures every plate. At SingleThread, the morning's harvest determines the menu. At Arpège, vegetables are the centre of the cuisine, not the supporting cast. If the restaurant's menu would look essentially the same with or without the sustainability programme, the practice is supplementary rather than constitutive.
4. Has the restaurant taken difficult public positions on sustainability beyond the kitchen? Colagreco at Mirazur has campaigned for Riviera ocean conservation. Passard at Arpège lost most of his clientele temporarily when he removed red meat in 2001. León at Aponiente has done marine biology research. These are signals that the practice involves real institutional commitment, not just menu wording.
5. Is the restaurant in a structurally sustainability-relevant location? Wine country (Sonoma, Mendoza, Burgundy), agricultural regions (Basque Country, Lake District, Tuscany), and coastal regions with active fisheries (Cádiz, Brittany, Sicily) produce the highest density of structurally-sustainable restaurants. Urban downtown restaurants face structural barriers to deep sustainability practice that rural restaurants don't, and the Green Star designation should be read with that context.
A useful adjunct test: read the restaurant's own "Sustainability Emblem" statement on its Michelin Guide page. Genuine practice produces specific, verifiable claims (acreage farmed, producer names, energy-efficiency metrics, waste-reduction percentages). Marketing produces general claims ("we believe in local sourcing", "our chef is committed to sustainability"). The difference is usually obvious from the first paragraph.
The Green Star is not the only sustainability designation in fine dining. The Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA), based in the UK, runs a separate certification programme that several Green Star restaurants also hold. The Food Made Good standard, run by the SRA, evaluates restaurants on a three-tier scale (one, two, or three stars) against measurable criteria across sourcing, society, and environment.
The SRA system is meaningfully more rigorous than the Green Star on documentation. Restaurants apply for SRA certification, submit measurable data, and receive a numerical score. The system is transparent about methodology, scoring weights, and renewal requirements. The Green Star, by contrast, is awarded by inspector judgement without published criteria weights or numerical scores.
Both designations have value. The Green Star has greater global reach and consumer recognition. The SRA Food Made Good standard has greater methodological rigour. A restaurant holding both — and several do — is more sustainability-signalled than one holding only one.
For travellers serious about sustainability as a trip-planning criterion, the honest approach is to use the Green Star as a screening filter and the SRA Food Made Good rating (or comparable national programmes — Slow Food, NAESA in the US) as the secondary verification layer. Restaurants that hold both designations are almost certainly practising what they advertise. Restaurants with only the Green Star may or may not, depending on their country team and individual practice.
The practical framework. A Green Star trip is best structured around the 15 to 18 restaurants worldwide that hold both three Michelin Stars and a Green Star — the overlap group described above. These are restaurants where culinary excellence and substantive sustainability commitment are both verified, and where the trip earns its place on both criteria simultaneously.
A representative Green Star European fortnight: Spain (Azurmendi in the Basque Country, El Celler de Can Roca in Girona) → France (Mirazur on the Riviera, Arpège in Paris) → UK (L'Enclume in the Lake District). Five meals across three countries, paced over two weeks, each at a restaurant where the Green Star meaningfully reflects practice. The logistics are non-trivial — Mirazur and L'Enclume are in particular both 90+ minutes from major airports — but the trip is achievable on flexible regional transport.
For a US-only Green Star trip: SingleThread (Sonoma) → French Laundry (Napa) → Atelier Crenn (San Francisco). All three are within a 90-minute drive of one another and form a natural three-restaurant week. Adding Manresa (Los Gatos, two stars + Green Star) or Saison (San Francisco, two stars) extends to a five-restaurant arc.
The accommodation choice matters more than for a regular three-star trip because the Green Star overlap restaurants are mostly outside major cities. SingleThread runs its own five-room inn; L'Enclume runs adjacent accommodations. For Azurmendi, Mirazur, and Casa Marcial, the choice is either local five-star hotels or curated villa stays. Plum Guide's curated villa inventory across the Basque Country, French Riviera, and Sonoma typically offers the cleanest answer for these locations.
Pre-arrival logistics around the restaurants — particularly food tours, market visits, and producer meetings that often pair well with Green Star experiences — are worth pre-booking. TripAdvisor Experiences runs producer-visit and farm-tour bookings in most of the regions where Green Star restaurants concentrate, often led by people connected to the restaurants themselves.
For ground transport between Green Star restaurants on a multi-country itinerary, pre-booking private drivers through GetTransfer handles the awkward Basque-to-Riviera and Riviera-to-Lake-District legs that scheduled commercial transport handles badly. Multi-country travel insurance via SafetyWing's Nomad Insurance remains the cleanest answer for the cross-border medical and disruption cover.
The broader framework — how to combine starred and Green Star restaurants into a coherent trip, how to handle the reservation logistics, how to use Bib Gourmand restaurants as the connective tissue — is covered in our parallel pieces: the three-star pilgrimage guide 2026, the how to book three-star restaurants tactical guide, and the Bib Gourmand vs Stars framework.
The Michelin Green Star is a sustainability designation introduced in 2020 to recognise restaurants leading in sustainable gastronomy. It is awarded for environmental commitment — using local and seasonal ingredients, minimising single-use products, reducing food waste, supporting farmers and producers with sustainable practices, and incorporating sustainability into restaurant architecture and operations. The Green Star is awarded separately from Michelin Stars, and a restaurant can hold one or more stars alongside a Green Star concurrently. Approximately 500 restaurants worldwide hold a Green Star as of 2026.
Around 500 restaurants worldwide hold a Michelin Green Star as of 2026. The award was introduced in 2020 with an initial group of about 50 restaurants and has grown each year. Italy holds the largest national total at 69 Green Stars. Spain has 57. France leads in absolute count with the largest selection. Tokyo holds at least 14 Green Stars as of recent data. The total grows by 50 to 100 new Green Stars each guide cycle.
A small but growing group of three-star restaurants hold a Green Star concurrently. Spain has six such restaurants: Azurmendi (Larrabetzu), El Celler de Can Roca (Girona), Aponiente (El Puerto de Santa María), Cenador de Amós (Villaverde de Pontones), Cocina Hermanos Torres (Barcelona), and Casa Marcial (Arriondas, newly elevated 2025). In the US, SingleThread, The French Laundry, and Atelier Crenn hold Green Stars alongside their three Michelin Stars. Mirazur (France) and Arpège (Paris) are also Green Star holders at the top tier.
In October 2025 Michelin quietly removed the Green Star designation from the searchable parameters on its guide website. The award continues to be given, and Michelin issued a statement confirming Green Stars still exist. The official reason has not been published, but the practical effect is that travellers can no longer filter for Green Star restaurants on the guide site as easily as before. The change has been interpreted as a quiet acknowledgement that the designation had become diluted, with concerns about consistency in how it was being awarded across different country teams.
There is no formal application process for a Green Star — Michelin inspectors observe and assess restaurants for sustainability commitment during their normal anonymous visits, in parallel with star evaluation. The criteria include locally and seasonally driven sourcing, work with sustainable farmers and producers, waste reduction practices, energy efficiency and architecture, single-use plastic reduction, integration of sustainability into the chef's culinary philosophy, and communication of sustainability to diners. Like stars, Green Stars are awarded annually and can be lost in subsequent guide cycles.
For travellers whose values include sustainability, yes — but with skepticism. The most genuine Green Stars (Azurmendi's biodome architecture, SingleThread's on-site farm, Mirazur's lunar-calendar gardens, noma's foraging tradition before closure) are worth a deliberate journey. A meaningful minority of Green Stars, however, exhibit modest sustainability practices that any thoughtful kitchen would adopt, and the designation in those cases is more marketing than meaningful. The honest approach is to read each Green Star restaurant's published sustainability statement (on the Michelin Guide page) before assuming the designation means substantive practice.
The most genuine Green Star restaurants sit in agricultural and coastal regions, often hours from major airports. Direct charter via JetLuxe collapses a four-stop trip into a routed week with minimum aviation and maximum time on the ground.
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