> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thebeyondpodcast.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# The Man Who Ate at Every Three-Star Restaurant on Earth: Andy Hayler on 150 Kitchens, 13 Trips to Japan and a 29-Foot Tapeworm
- URL: https://www.thebeyondpodcast.com/blog/andy-hayler-every-three-star-restaurant/
- Published: 2026-10-31T19:31:53.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-31T20:32:37.000Z
- Description: Andy Hayler is the first person to eat at every three-Michelin-star restaurant in the world. The story of how, and what 150 kitchens taught him.
- Author: Aleksandra King
- Tags: insight, Andy Hayler

![Andy Hayler in a navy jacket and open white shirt, seated on a blue velvet sofa beside a studio microphone](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5e/74/5e74ba0c-c249-4586-8ce5-03deb56fdf93/content/images/2026/10/andy-hayler-on-the-beyond-podcast-set-the-beyond-podcast-16x9-3.jpg)

Andy Hayler, the first person to eat at every three-Michelin-star restaurant in the world, on The BEYOND Podcast. Photo: The BEYOND Podcast.

Most people who love food have a list. Andy Hayler finished his. He is the first person to have eaten at every three-Michelin-star restaurant in the world, around 150 of them at any one time, and he first completed the set back in 2004\. Then the list changed, as it does every year, and he kept going until the pandemic finally stopped him.

That is not a hobby. It is a twenty-year project that has taken him to Japan thirteen times and India twenty-four, to a restaurant perched on the rim of an extinct volcano, and to a small museum in Tokyo whose prize exhibit is a tapeworm twenty-nine feet long. What it has produced is a very unusual kind of expertise: a man who can tell you, from direct experience, whether a €400 tasting menu is ever worth the money.

On this episode of **The BEYOND Podcast**, Aleksandra King sits down with [Andy Hayler](https://www.andyhayler.com), the independent food critic behind [andyhayler.com](https://www.andyhayler.com), to find out how a person ends up eating everywhere that matters, and what it does to the way you see a plate of food. [Listen to the episode](https://www.thebeyondpodcast.com/youre-paying-too-much-for-bad-food-andy-hayler/) or [watch it on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c).

### The Critic Who Pays His Own Bills

The first thing to understand about Andy is that nobody pays him to eat. He is careful to point out that Michelin earns the respect of chefs for a single reason: "they don't take any money, basically, from restaurants". The inspectors are anonymous, the restaurants do not know they are coming, and that independence is what makes a star mean something. "The vast majority of other restaurant review guides and influencers take some kind of fee or payment or hospitality," he says, "and therefore they can be influenced. That's the very definition of the word influencer."

Andy has built his own reviewing life on the same principle, and the money for it comes from somewhere most of his readers never suspect. Most of the people who read his website, he admits near the end of the conversation, "were not aware that I work in technology", which is "the way that I can pay for my restaurant bills". The data habit shows: his site holds a hundred reviews of Tokyo restaurants alone, and he talks about Michelin's methodology the way an analyst talks about a model with hidden parameters.

![Andy Hayler and Aleksandra King on blue velvet sofas either side of a round wooden table on The BEYOND Podcast set](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5e/74/5e74ba0c-c249-4586-8ce5-03deb56fdf93/content/images/2026/10/andy-hayler-aleksandra-king-in-conversation-the-beyond-podcast-16x9-5.jpg)

Andy Hayler and Aleksandra King on The BEYOND Podcast. Photo: The BEYOND Podcast.

### A Volcano, a Beef Tartare and the Dishes That Stay With You

Ask Andy what the point of high-end dining is and he does not talk about luxury. He talks about memory. "The ability of a really great restaurant to produce a very special experience," he says, and then he gives the example that has clearly never left him: a French restaurant in Japan set on the rim of a volcano that lost its top thirty thousand years ago, the only building on the slope a hotel, the dining room looking down over the crater lake. "That's something I will remember, something you don't get to do every day."

The specifics are what make him worth listening to. Twenty years on he can still describe a "particularly spectacular, very elaborate take on beef tartare" at El Celler de Can Roca in Girona. His favourite dish in the world is not a showpiece but the langoustines à la nage at the Ritz in London, which he has eaten an "embarrassing number of times", certainly dozens over the years, and his dessert of choice is a classic lemon tart. He calls himself a "simple guy", and after an hour in his company you believe him.

Aleksandra recognises the pattern from her own travels: twenty years of holidays blur, but the chocolate mousse in a tiny restaurant in Begur on the Costa Brava she will never forget. Andy's reply is the closest the episode comes to a philosophy. Food is "a very big sensory experience", he says, "and it's something that lingers in the mind."

### Thirteen Trips to Japan and One Ramen Cook Who Sleeps on the Floor

Put on the spot for the best food country in the world, Andy does not hesitate. "Japan," he says, before Aleksandra has finished the question. He admires the great German kitchens and will defend them against anyone, but Japan wins for reasons that run deeper than any one restaurant. The produce, he says, is the best in the world. When he visited Tokyo's fish market it had 65,000 people working there. Even the language takes food seriously: wagyu "literally means Japanese cattle", so there is, he points out, no such thing as Texan wagyu.

The story he tells to prove it is not about a three-star restaurant at all. It is about a ramen shop in an obscure part of Tokyo, three changes of subway from the centre, run by a man in his late sixties. "He sleeps on the floor of the restaurant so he can get up during the night and stir the stock for the next day." A soup and a beer costs about ten pounds, the queue is already long at half past eleven for a noon opening, and the depth of flavour is "absolutely fantastic". That, for Andy, is the whole ecosystem in one bowl: a population obsessed enough with food that chefs can demand great produce, and farmers can afford to grow it.

On his first trip he was puzzled to be served the same fish at very different restaurants night after night, until a chef explained that this was the fortnight when that fish was at its best, and that next week it would come from a different lake. Japan, he was told, has twenty-six micro-seasons. "That level of seasonality just doesn't exist anywhere else, and certainly not in the UK."

![Andy Hayler gesturing with both hands as he explains a point on The BEYOND Podcast set](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5e/74/5e74ba0c-c249-4586-8ce5-03deb56fdf93/content/images/2026/10/andy-hayler-making-a-point-the-beyond-podcast-16x9-7.jpg)

Andy Hayler explains how Michelin inspectors actually score a restaurant. Photo: The BEYOND Podcast.

### The Parasite Museum

Not every stop on Andy's itinerary involves a tasting menu. His wife is a medical microbiologist, which is how he has come to visit the Parasite Museum in Tokyo's Meguro district three times. "I probably wouldn't have gone three times on my own," he says. The museum is the size of a large house and devoted entirely to the flukes and tapeworms people pick up from fish, and its prize exhibit, rolled up because it is too long for the cabinet, is a twenty-nine-foot tapeworm that came out of a man in Hiroshima.

It leads to a fact most diners never hear: in Europe and the US, he says, fish for sushi is frozen by law to kill parasites, while in Japan it is not. (The rules vary by country and have exceptions; the episode notes point you to your local food safety authority.) Aleksandra, just back from a family trip to Japan, is not entirely grateful for the timing. "I thought it best for you not to know," Andy says, "for your trip."

### Actionable Takeaways for Anyone Who Loves to Eat

- **Trust a person, not a star rating.** Andy's own advice for diners without his experience is to find a reviewer "whose tastes coincide with yours and that you come to trust", then follow them. Crowd-sourced scores can be gamed; a track record cannot.
- **Chase experiences, not price tags.** The meals he remembers are the ones that produced something he could not get anywhere else, whether a crater lake or a ten-pound bowl of ramen, so spend your money on those.
- **Learn the seasons where you are.** The Japanese cook who knows which lake his fish should come from this fortnight is paying attention most of us never do. Start with what is genuinely in season near you.

Listen to the full conversation with Andy Hayler on [The BEYOND Podcast](https://www.thebeyondpodcast.com/youre-paying-too-much-for-bad-food-andy-hayler/) or on the [Aleksandra King YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c), and browse the other episodes for more conversations with people who have gone further than almost anyone in their field.