The Miele Guide Voting Opens

Hi y’all. I’ll get back to regular blogging in a bit (and for once I have quite a few posts lined up). But first I wanted to tell you that voting for the 2009/2010 edition of The Miele Guide, Asia’s first independent restaurant guide, has just opened. We need your votes.

The Miele Guide was created in 2008 in order to better recognise and celebrate Asia’s best chefs and restaurants. It was our attempt to create, for the very first time, a standard of recognizing our best restaurants that was on par with established non-Asian guides. Our 2008/2009 edition ranked Asia’s top 20 restaurants and profiled an additional 300 great places in Asia in which to dine.

Restaurants will be selected after four rounds of judging. The first round of judging consisted of creating a shortlist of great restaurants as determined by the region’s top full-time restaurant critics. The second and third rounds of judging are being conducted simultaneously via online polls. You, the public, in addition to a jury of food professionals and prominent food lovers are invited to cast your votes. These votes–your votes–determine which restaurants make it into the final, published guide. Voting ends 24 May 2009. Finally, our in-house team, with help from contributing editors across Asia, will be dining anonymously at the most highly rated restaurants to confirm our annual ranking of Asia’s Top 20.

The second edition of The Miele Guide will be even bigger and better than before. In addition to ranking Asia’s Top 20 restaurants, we will be listing the top five restaurants in each country represented in the guide this year. We discovered so many fantastic restaurants in Asia through voter participation last year. By adding rankings for the top five restaurants in each country in our next edition, we believe that we will be able to offer a stronger showcase for our region’s top chefs and restaurateurs, and deliver a more useful product at the same time.

For the first time, the guide will also feature an overview of each featured country’s dining scene. Written by contributing editors who are top restaurant critics and food writers in their own right in their respective home countries, the country introductions will provide rich insider perspectives of what the current highlights of dining out in each Asian country are.

Finally, the 2009/2010 edition will feature 400 restaurants across Asia (80 more than the previous edition’s list of 320) and broaden the guide’s representation of the region by evaluating two more countries, Mongolia and Nepal. In total, restaurants in 18 Asian countries will be evaluated. The inaugural 2008/2009 edition of The Miele Guide evaluated restaurants in 16 Asian countries—Brunei, Cambodia, China (including Hong Kong and Macau), India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

So, please, spare a moment to vote. Oh, did I mention there are some awesome lucky draw prizes for voters?

To vote, please click over to http://www.mieleguide.com/register.