Michelin Guide — Find a Starred Restaurant & Check Reservation Availability

Purpose

Given a city, find a Michelin-starred restaurant (1 / 2 / 3-star) on guide.michelin.com, open its detail page, and detect whether the restaurant exposes a reservation widget — and which booking partner powers it (Resy, Tock, SevenRooms, OpenTable, or TheFork). Returns the restaurant's identity (name, stars, cuisine, address, restaurant ID) plus the reservation surface (partner, widget type, click-out URL or embedded iframe src).

Read-only — stops at the booking surface. This skill detects and surfaces the reservation widget; it never picks a time slot, fills the booking form, or submits a reservation. If the prompt asks to "make a reservation," return the widget URL plus the JSON envelope below and let a human or a dedicated booking skill complete the transaction. Michelin Guide's widget is always a click-out or an embed of a third-party booking system (Resy / Tock / SevenRooms / TheFork / OpenTable); the actual booking flow happens on the partner's domain, which has its own anti-bot (DataDome on TheFork; Akamai on OpenTable) and is out of scope here.

When to Use

• "Find a Michelin-starred restaurant in {city} and tell me if I can reserve."
• A planning agent scoring starred restaurants by reservability before surfacing recommendations.
• Routing to the correct booking partner — e.g., the user has a Resy account and only wants restaurants where Resy is the booking system.
• Auditing a city's starred-restaurant booking-partner mix (e.g., "what fraction of NYC 1-star restaurants are Resy vs. Tock?").
• Distinguishing "starred" from "Bib Gourmand" / "Selected" / "Plate" — the Michelin Guide's listing pages mix these distinctions if you don't filter the URL slug.

Workflow

guide.michelin.com is fully server-rendered. Every listing page, every restaurant detail page, and the reservation-widget HTML block all ship in the initial HTML response — no JavaScript needed to read partner, restaurant ID, or click-out URL. Lead with browse cloud fetch; the browser path exists only to (a) interact with an embedded TheFork iframe or (b) trigger a SevenRooms JS-rendered widget. Neither --proxies nor --verified are required for the Michelin Guide HTML surface itself.

1. Resolve the city URL

The canonical pattern is:

https://guide.michelin.com/en/{country}/{region}/{city}/restaurants[/{distinction}]

• {country} — ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 lowercase (us, gb, fr, jp, it, de, es, hk, sg, kr, ...). The country segment is mandatory on listing URLs. Omitting it renders "Unfortunately there are no selected restaurants in the area you've searched for" plus a random fallback carousel.
• {region} — kebab-case state / region. US uses new-york-state, california, illinois, etc. France uses ile-de-france, provence-alpes-cote-d-azur.
• {city} — kebab-case city slug.
• {distinction} — optional star-tier filter. Allowed values:
  • 3-stars-michelin — exactly three stars
  • 2-stars-michelin — exactly two stars
  • 1-star-michelin — exactly one star
  • bib-gourmand — NOT a star (Michelin's good-value distinction)
  • the-plate-michelin — NOT a star (Michelin's basic recommendation tier)
  • (omit) — every distinction tier mixed together

For known cities, build the URL directly:

For unknown cities, resolve via the ?q= 302:

# Use --include-headers to read Location; do NOT auto-follow
browse cloud fetch "https://guide.michelin.com/en/restaurants?q=<URL-encoded-city>" \
  --include-headers > /tmp/lookup.json
# Read .headers.Location from the JSON — this is the canonical city URL
node -e 'console.log(JSON.parse(require("fs").readFileSync("/tmp/lookup.json","utf8")).headers.Location)'

If the response is a 302 with a Location header, that header is the canonical city URL (e.g. https://guide.michelin.com/en/us/california/san-francisco/restaurants). Append /1-star-michelin (or another distinction) to filter.

If the response is 200 (no redirect) and the body header contains "Unfortunately there are no selected restaurants in the area you've searched for," the Michelin Guide does not cover this city. Emit { "success": false, "reason": "city_not_covered" }.

2. Fetch the star-filtered list

browse cloud fetch \
  "https://guide.michelin.com/en/{country}/{region}/{city}/restaurants/1-star-michelin" \
  > /tmp/list.json

The response body is the rendered HTML. Parse restaurant cards:

• Detail-page URLs: href="/en/{region}/{city}/restaurant/{slug}" — note the detail URL omits the country prefix (/en/new-york-state/new-york/restaurant/le-coucou, NOT /en/us/new-york-state/...). That is a Michelin quirk; copy the slug verbatim from the listing-page anchor.
• Star tier per card: data-distinction="ONE_STAR" | "TWO_STARS" | "THREE_STARS". Filter to these three values only. Restaurants in the carousel ("Discover the nearest restaurants" section near the bottom) include cards with data-distinction="BIB_GOURMAND" and others — those are fallback recommendations, not city-matched starred restaurants. Drop them.
• Restaurant name: inside the card, <h3> or <h2> with the linked text.
• Cuisine + price tier: a sibling block showing $$$$ · French.

Pick the first card whose data-distinction is ONE_STAR | TWO_STARS | THREE_STARS (or filter further by user preference — e.g., cuisine).

3. Fetch the detail page

browse cloud fetch \
  "https://guide.michelin.com/en/{region}/{city}/restaurant/{slug}" \
  > /tmp/detail.json

Country code is absent in the canonical detail URL.

4. Detect the reservation widget

In the HTML body, search for the block:

<div class="restaurant-details__booking--deliver-wrapper">  <!-- click-out kind -->
  ...
</div>
<!-- OR -->
<div class="restaurant-details__booking--reserve">  <!-- iframe kind -->
  ...
</div>

If neither container is present, the restaurant has no reservation widget on Michelin Guide — emit reservation.available = false. Look for a phone number, mailto link, or external website link in the detail-info block (<div class="data-sheet__block">) as the contact-channel fallback.

If a container is present, find the element with class js-restaurant-book-btn inside it. It will be one of three shapes:

Both the anchor and the iframe carry these attributes — always parse them:

• data-dtm-partner — partner identifier (resy, Tock, sevenrooms, thefork, opentable). Case is inconsistent — Tock is capitalized in the wild, others are lowercase. Lowercase before comparing.
• data-restaurant-booking — partner display name (Resy, Tock, SevenRooms, TheFork, OpenTable).
• data-restaurant-id — Michelin's internal restaurant ID (numeric string, e.g. 510102).
• data-restaurant-name — display name.
• data-restaurant-distinction — 1 star, 2 star, 3 star, bib gourmand, the plate.
• data-cooking-type — numeric cuisine ID.

5. Emit the result envelope

Build the JSON in "Expected Output" below. Stop here. Do not click Book, do not load the iframe in a session, do not navigate to the partner URL.

Browser fallback (only when fetch is insufficient)

Use a browser session in these two cases only:

1. SevenRooms widget — the Book button is JS-rendered. To capture the actual SevenRooms widget URL or screenshot the booking form, open a session, navigate to the detail page, click [ref] button: Book, and wait for the SevenRooms iframe to mount. The widget's iframe gets injected under #sr-res-root; read its src with browse eval "document.querySelector('#sr-res-root iframe').src". The --verified --proxies flags are NOT required on the Michelin side, but the SevenRooms iframe itself is its own surface — read-only there too.

2. Inspecting the live TheFork iframe — the iframe src (https://module.thefork.com/en_GB/module/...-.../...-...) loads in a session but renders behind a DataDome device-check iframe. Treat the iframe src as the canonical booking-widget URL and stop; do NOT interact with the iframe contents.

SID=$(browse cloud sessions create --keep-alive | node -e \
  "let s='';process.stdin.on('data',c=>s+=c).on('end',()=>process.stdout.write(JSON.parse(s).id))")
export BROWSE_SESSION="$SID"
browse open "https://guide.michelin.com/en/{region}/{city}/restaurant/{slug}" --remote
browse wait load --remote && browse wait timeout 3000 --remote
browse snapshot --remote  # then inspect the Reserve a table section
browse cloud sessions update "$SID" --status REQUEST_RELEASE

For pure widget-detection and partner extraction, the browser path is ~100× slower than fetch and adds no information — skip it.

Site-Specific Gotchas

• READ-ONLY. Never click Book, never pick a time slot, never submit a booking form. This skill stops at the widget. If a downstream skill needs to actually reserve, hand off the widget URL + partner identifier.
• The country-code prefix is mandatory on listing URLs but absent on detail URLs. Listing: /en/us/new-york-state/new-york/restaurants/1-star-michelin. Detail: /en/new-york-state/new-york/restaurant/le-coucou. Mixing these up is the single most common failure mode. The Michelin canonical anchors on listing-page cards already omit the country code — just copy them.
• Omitting the country segment silently fails. /en/new-york-state/new-york/restaurants/1-star-michelin returns HTTP 200 with title "new-york 1 Star MICHELIN Restaurants" — looks valid — but the body contains "Unfortunately there are no selected restaurants in the area you've searched for" and a random fallback carousel of Mexican Bib Gourmand restaurants from Yucatán. Always verify against the breadcrumb: a valid page's breadcrumb is [USA → New York State → New York Restaurants]; the broken URL renders only [new-york-state → new-york].
• "Bib Gourmand" and "Selected / Plate" are NOT Michelin Stars. Confirm via the URL slug (/1-star-michelin, /2-stars-michelin, /3-stars-michelin) AND each card's data-distinction="ONE_STAR | TWO_STARS | THREE_STARS". An unfiltered listing URL (/restaurants without distinction suffix) returns the full mix.
• The "nearest restaurants" carousel pollutes star-tier listings. Every city/star listing page includes a ## Discover the nearest restaurants carousel at the bottom with cards from elsewhere (often Mexico / Yucatán from a US-West sandbox IP). Those cards carry their own data-distinction="BIB_GOURMAND" etc. — they are not city-matched. Stop parsing cards once you hit the breadcrumb-or-footer <section> boundary, or filter to cards whose href starts with /en/{region}/{city}/restaurant/.
• City discovery returns a 302, not a 200. /en/restaurants?q=<city> ⇒ HTTP 302 with Location: https://guide.michelin.com/en/{country}/{region}/{city}/restaurants. browse cloud fetch does NOT auto-follow — read the headers.Location field from the JSON envelope. (Bare unknown cities like an obscure town may not redirect at all; handle the 200 case as city_not_covered.)
• Five known booking partners with three different DOM shapes.
  • <a class="js-restaurant-book-btn" href="<click-out-URL>" target="_blank"> — Resy (href="https://resy.com/cities/{city-slug}/venues/{venue}?aff_id=0VKMelA"), Tock (href="https://www.exploretock.com/{venue}?utm_source=michelin"), OpenTable. The aff_id=0VKMelA query param is Michelin's Resy affiliate code — pass it through; don't strip it.
  • <button id="sr-res-root" class="js-restaurant-book-btn" data-dtm-partner="sevenrooms"> — SevenRooms. There is no static href. The button mounts a SevenRooms iframe widget inline only after click. Detection-only flows can stop here; flows that need the actual booking-form URL must use the browser fallback.
  • <iframe class="js-restaurant-booking" src="https://module.thefork.com/..."> — TheFork. Inline iframe; the src IS the booking-widget URL.
• data-dtm-partner case is inconsistent. Observed: resy (lowercase), Tock (capitalized), sevenrooms (lowercase), thefork (lowercase). Lowercase before matching.
• TheFork iframe has DataDome bot protection. The iframe loads a DataDome Device Check sub-frame before the booking calendar renders. To interact with the booking calendar (not recommended for this skill), you'd need stealth + residential proxy on the iframe's origin (thefork.com), NOT on guide.michelin.com.
• The detail-page description is sometimes paywalled. A Poool - Module d'accès au contenu bloqué iframe overlays the editor's review with "Discover the entire MICHELIN Guide in one account / Create a free account." The structured data (name, address, cuisine, stars, booking widget, cooking-type ID) is all readable above the paywall — no login required for this skill.
• Server-rendered HTML — no JS / no anti-bot at the page level. browse cloud fetch (no --proxies, no --verified) returns the full HTML including the booking-widget block. CloudFront fronts the site but serves a 200 with the canonical HTML on the first hit. If a future request starts returning a CAPTCHA or 403, add --proxies — but as of this skill's authoring this is not required.
• The Michelin search URL (?q=) handles natural-language city names well but not restaurant names. ?q=le%20coucou redirects to the broader /en/restaurants page, not the Le Coucou detail page. Use it only for city resolution, not restaurant lookup. For restaurant lookup, use the star-filtered list + name match.
• Cuisine filter exists but lives at a separate slug, not a query param. /en/restaurants/french, /en/restaurants/japanese, etc. are cross-geography cuisine filters and cannot be composed with city/distinction filters in the URL — the only composable filters are city + distinction. To filter starred restaurants in a city by cuisine, fetch the full city
  • star tier and post-filter on the parsed cuisine field per card.

Expected Output

Five outcome shapes:

// 1. Found starred restaurant + click-out widget (Resy / Tock / OpenTable)
{
  "success": true,
  "city": "New York",
  "restaurant": {
    "name": "Le Coucou",
    "stars": 1,
    "cuisine": "French",
    "price_tier": "$$$$",
    "address": "11 Howard Hotel, 138 Lafayette St., New York, NY, 10013, USA",
    "michelin_url": "https://guide.michelin.com/en/new-york-state/new-york/restaurant/le-coucou",
    "michelin_restaurant_id": "510102"
  },
  "reservation": {
    "available": true,
    "partner": "Resy",
    "partner_key": "resy",
    "widget_type": "click_out",
    "booking_url": "https://resy.com/cities/new-york-ny/venues/le-coucou?aff_id=0VKMelA"
  }
}

// 2. Found starred restaurant + TheFork iframe widget (Europe-typical)
{
  "success": true,
  "city": "Paris",
  "restaurant": { "name": "Auguste", "stars": 1, "cuisine": "Modern Cuisine", "michelin_url": "...", "michelin_restaurant_id": "..." },
  "reservation": {
    "available": true,
    "partner": "TheFork",
    "partner_key": "thefork",
    "widget_type": "iframe",
    "booking_url": "https://module.thefork.com/en_GB/module/26201-71faf/51207-c0b",
    "notes": "Inline iframe on the Michelin detail page. DataDome anti-bot guards the iframe's own origin."
  }
}

// 3. Found starred restaurant + SevenRooms JS-rendered widget
{
  "success": true,
  "city": "New York",
  "restaurant": { "name": "Gramercy Tavern", "stars": 1, ... },
  "reservation": {
    "available": true,
    "partner": "SevenRooms",
    "partner_key": "sevenrooms",
    "widget_type": "js_widget",
    "booking_url": null,
    "notes": "SevenRooms widget mounts an iframe under #sr-res-root after the Book button is clicked. No static URL; a browser session is required to surface the iframe src."
  }
}

// 4. Found starred restaurant but NO reservation widget on Michelin
{
  "success": true,
  "city": "Paris",
  "restaurant": { "name": "Arpège", "stars": 3, ... },
  "reservation": {
    "available": false,
    "partner": null,
    "partner_key": null,
    "widget_type": null,
    "booking_url": null,
    "notes": "Michelin Guide does not surface a booking partner for this restaurant. Check the detail-info block for phone/website fallback."
  }
}

// 5. City not covered by the Michelin Guide
{
  "success": false,
  "reason": "city_not_covered",
  "city": "Boise",
  "notes": "Michelin Guide does not publish a selection for this city. The /?q= search did not redirect to a city listing URL."
}