Fat Guy

As I said, it doesn't help, so I'll bow out and hope that the topic gets back to the topic. However, I do think you've drawn pretty much all the wrong conclusions from the articles you've cited.

But that's exactly why the tomato example needs to be repeated again and again every time anyone starts going on about traditional Italian cuisine: because the tomato is so clearly a part of Italian cuisine now, yet at one time it -- just like, say, cooked food -- was an innovation. So once you close yourself off to innovation, you close yourself off to Italian cuisine ever finding the next tomato.

While those are valid examples, the metaphor specifically refers to "Happy Days," when Fonzie literally jumped over a shark while on water skis.

I won't go on all day debunking these ridiculous generalizations, both because it's not all that relevant to the topic and because it doesn't seem to help, but one more round: The age differences are not all that significant. Age distribution for Manhattan Community District 8 Under 5 years 9,853 - 4.5% 5 to 9 years 7,126 - 3.3% 10 to 14 years 6,017 - 2.8% 15 to 19 years 5,131 - 2.4% 20 to 24 years 12,403 - 5.7% 25 to 44 years 89,609 - 41.3% 45 to 64 years 56,030 - 25.8% 65 years and over 30,894 - 14.2% Age distribution for Manhattan Community District 3 Under 5 years 6,975 - 4.2% 5 to 9 years 7,497 - 4.6% 10 to 14 years 8,446 - 5.1% 15 to 19 years 9,975 - 6.1% 20 to 24 years 15,109 - 9.2% 25 to 44 years 59,637 - 36.3% 45 to 64 years 34,667 - 21.1% 65 years and over 22,101 - 13.4% District 8 is Yorkville and the Upper East Side, and District 3 is the East Village, Lower East Side and Chinatown. If anything, I'd have to guess Chinatown pulls the District 3 ages down a bit, such that if you exclude Chinatown you may get very similar distributions. Needless to say, if you believe every neighborhood is a predictable monolith, it's kind of hard to argue that a neighborhood can be the older neighborhood but also the starter neighborhood. Yet, since neighborhoods are diverse, it really is possible to be both, and indeed all the established neighborhoods have pockets of both types of people. If the Upper East Side is only a starter neighborhood, and if nobody is moving there from other neighborhoods, who's buying all the multi-million-dollar apartments on the Upper East Side? Recent immigrants from China's Fujian province? I doubt it. Again, this sort of generalization doesn't reflect the diversity of preferences in New York City. I know lots of people who now live on the Upper West and Upper East Sides, who had their first apartments in the East Village. While there are pockets of starter apartments -- Normandy Court, etc. -- on the Upper East Side, it absolutely is not a "starter neighborhood." Come on. It's the most established, establishmentarian neighborhood in New York, with the greatest concentration of schools, wealth, etc. Fifth and Park Avenue prewar coops are some of the most expensive real estate anywhere. TriBeCa now has some of the most expensive individual buildings, but the luxury neighborhoods of the Upper East Side overall are still some of the most desirable addresses. I'm sure the data are compiled somewhere, and maybe I'll check the actual numbers, but I can say that my observation today just by walking around was that it's pretty obvious that the people walking on Madison Avenue in the 90s this morning were more likely to have been born in New York City than the people walking on Astor Place.

Pairing tomatoes with anything was an esoteric food pairing when it first happened. It's the same as bringing some esoteric fruit from Asia to Italy today and putting it on pizza. What today's traditionalists are saying is that we should no longer try to do what got us to where we are in the first place.

I don't agree with those statements at all. But I suppose there's no way to document the claims factually one way or the other. Still, to me, at a more fundamental level, the whole notion of a "downtowner" is suspect. If you examine a few randomly selected people who live downtown, you'll most likely find that 1- some of them work in Midtown and have a child in school on the Upper East Side, therefore giving them three neighborhoods in which they operate with frequency, 2- some of them have lived in several locations around the city, 3- most of them are not from New York City originally, 4- their ages range from 0 to 120 just like anywhere else in the city, 5- some of them are artsy types who conform to the hip, downtown stereotype and some of them are white-collar professionals who live in multi-million-dollar condos and maybe even vote Republican, 6- they all have MetroCards and travel around the city to do stuff. Meanwhile, if you examine a few randomly selected Upper East Siders, you'll find that plenty of them live there because it's cheap and convenient, but that they do most of their going-out downtown -- at least, if you talk to Upper East Side restaurateurs, they'll complain that this is exactly the behavior pattern that makes it so hard to operate an interesting restaurant on the Upper East Side. The city is far more blended and ecumenical than the broad brushstrokes indicate. One can call Chelsea a "gay neighborhood" but Chelsea is not even majority gay. Rather, Chelsea is a gay neighborhood because in most of America X% of the population is gay but in Chelsea 10X% of the population is gay. It's the same when you look at the groups that define neighborhoods like the East Village. It's not that a majority of East Village residents conform to a stereotype. It's that more of them conform to that stereotype than in the next neighborhood up. In that sense, many neighborhoods are defined by their minorities. The point being, while location is critical to restaurants, no type of dining is the exclusive possession of a given neighborhood's population. And if a given type of dining is concentrated in a given neighborhood, it's never a permanent state of affairs.

But Mark, that kind of thinking puts one in the camp that would have said, "Ha, now you're going to tell me they'll put tomato sauce and mozzarella on a pizza and we're supposed to like that!" or "Ha, now you're going to tell me someday we'll eat these little round red fruit things. Yeah, right." It's not the case that 100% of experiments are going to work out. But if you have no experimentation, you fossilize. And while it's easy enough to come up with funny examples of avant garde cuisine gone awry, the reality is that powders and foams are no more manipulative than the processes for making dried pasta, gelato, espresso, bread or salume. And, as with all those things, when it's good it's good and when it's not good it's not good. But if you cut yourself off entirely from new techniques and approaches, there's little room for improvement.

Traditional Italian cuisine wouldn't exist if anybody had listened to the traditionalists. The notion of a traditional cuisine is, as a basic concept, deeply problematic. It assumes that a snapshot of a point on the continuum of culinary evolution constitutes traditional cuisine -- nothing after. But without that continuous process of evolution, we would never have arrived at the snapshot moment, and if we stop at the snapshot moment the everything stagnates. Nobody in Italy would be using tomatoes if the snapshot had been taken in 1400. Nobody would be eating pizza Margherita if the snapshot had been taken in 1850. Nobody would be drinking espresso . . . etc.

Atelier isn't a New York restaurant, but the factors that caused Robuchon to open Atelier in Paris are the same factors under discussion on this topic. For example, this part of an article that appeared last year in Business Week, about Robuchon, could just as easily have been written about New York City: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/conte...07/b3971077.htm Per Se isn't a New York restaurant either, but these sorts of designations make less and less sense in the modern era. In the case of Per Se, for example, Thomas Keller was a chef in New York, then set up shop in Yountville, then had a triumphant return. The French Laundry couldn't have existed without New York, likewise Per Se couldn't have existed without the French Laundry. Atelier, for its part, isn't exactly a Paris restaurant. It's a global restaurant, inspired as much by Japanese and New World restaurants and dining culture as by Paris. When it opened, I imagine Atelier seemed more foreign to Paris than it would have seemed to New York, where haute-cuisine bar dining, open kitchens, sushi bars, tapas bars, small-plates restaurants -- all the elements of Atelier -- have been around for ages. That said, I do agree that Atelier, and Mix in New York, and (it seems) the forthcoming Adour venture, have been tone-deaf to the personality of New York. I think this is more subtle than the basic model being flawed. Rather, the implementations have been weirdly clueless. I think this has to do with the way these global businesses delegate and manage their openings. Eventually, they should take some lessons from the New World about that as well.

Following various pieces of advice from this topic, I had a vastly improved breading experience this evening. I set up three wide, shallow bowls: flour, egg and panko. I added salt and pepper to the flour and egg, nothing to the panko. I dipped each cutlet first in the flour, then in the egg, then in the panko. I laid the breaded cutlets on a half-sheet pan and let them rest in the fridge for about half an hour. They cooked up beautifully. My only reservation is that I think I need to create or get finer panko -- the crumbs/flakes of the brand I'm using are just too chunky.

I really don't think so, Nathan. Mix in New York was a night out on the town. People approached it as they'd approach a supper club. Momofuku Ssam Bar is quick casual -- plenty of people just roll out of bed, hail a cab and grab a bite there -- but with a mixed-haute menu. I understand the claim about the two restaurants serving different populations, but as usual with this sort of claim I think you go to far, following a notion of dialectical materialism whereby neighborhood is destiny, age is destiny, people fall into tightly categorized homogeneous predictable groups, etc. While there are certainly people out there who conform to stereotypes (lots of stereotypes are based on something in reality), New York is also full of people who are much harder to pin down. Take me, for example. I've eaten at Mix and at Momofuku. A lot. My wife -- she happens to be a girl -- she has dined at both places too. You can be sure that, while jeans are just fine for her at Momofuku, she always wore the best stuff to Mix. Sure, we live uptown, but we dine downtown all the time -- just like plenty of other people uptown. Momofuku is most certainly not a neighborhood restaurant. It's in the category of places where people come from all over the city and the country. Not just foodies. Momofuku is out there, the tourists are there, every group is there. They don't all like it or get it, but they're there and they're not dressed for Mix. No way.

I think, in the traditional sense of formal and semi-formal dress, no, it can't still be about that because there aren't any restaurants left that require it. So if it is about formal and semi-formal dress, formal dining no longer exists and that's the end of that. If we think formal dining does still exist -- and I think it does -- then it has to be defined some other way. I think it's more telling, by the way, to look at female behavior than at male behavior in this regard. Men are slobs, at least your average heterosexual middle class man is. Most of them will dress down to the bare minimum acceptable level if allowed to do so. Especially at the expensive restaurants, where the clientele is older and married, the men often just don't care how they look. The women, however, usually care very much about their own appearance. So even today, you can still tell a lot about the state of mind of the customers -- the perceived formality of an establishment -- by how the women are dressed. Of the fake casual restaurants of the past few years, the one I had the most experience with was Mix in New York. I went there quite a lot -- probably once a month or more for the duration of its pre-meltdown run. The notion that Mix was a casual restaurant was always absurd, and the best way to tell that was by looking at the women. For the benefit of my readers and the enterprise of restaurant criticism, I examined the female customers at Mix with great care on every visit. I also, again because I am a thorough researcher, pay close attention to the women at Momofuku Ssam Bar whenever I go there. And I can say with confidence that, when it comes time to get dressed to go out, the women at Momofuku Ssam Bar think of Momofuku Ssam Bar in an entirely different way than the women at Mix in New York thought of Mix in New York.

I think formal service is about service, whereas formal dining is about a variety of factors including service, atmosphere, clientele, tableware, price and, most of all, the cuisine itself.

Well, I'm no fashion historian, but I do think this goes back to the 1920s. The controversial steps in the decline of formality from those days seem quaint to us now, but they were big news then. For example, in the 1920s and 1930s there was plenty of controversy over the declining use of corsets. Women started wearing pants around the time of World War II -- that was a big one. I'm pretty sure it was the 1950s when school uniforms started to be ditched in earnest, but don't quote me. There are still some fashion taboos for women today, for example the debate over the requirement of pantyhose in various contexts is currently raging, or at least that's what my observations are while glancing at what's on the magazine rack at the supermarket checkout line. I'm sure someone with superior knowledge could develop a more accurate and complete historical outline for men and women.

Three observations on the formality-in-dress point. First, the trend towards less formal dress is nothing new. It has been occurring since around World War I. Prior to then, if you went to a baseball game, you wore a coat and tie. Women's dress, too, has become steadily less formal. The 1960s and 1970s were the major hot zone in the decline of formality in dress especially for women -- perhaps more significant than the 1990s. Second, the trend can and does occasionally reverse itself. For example, the Reagan/Thatcher era ushered in a resurgence of formality in dress: black tie events, power ties and suits, etc. It's certainly possible that, in 2010, we'll have a cultural shift in favor of formal dress that will reverse some older trends at least temporarily, and that all of a sudden a few restaurants will require neckties for gentlemen because that's what trendy young people expect. Third, structure and hierarchy have the ability to reassert themselves in new ways, no matter how hard we try to rid ourselves of the old ways. California has been out ahead on this phenomenon for awhile. In the mid-1990s, when us New York lawyers would go out to California on business, our local counterparts weren't wearing suits (except in court). But you could still figure out the social pecking order, and not just based on age. The more successful, powerful people were dressed like slobs, but expensive slobs. Their casual clothes were made from luxuriant fabrics, they had expensive haircuts, their watches cost tens of thousands of dollars -- and their shoes, forget about it. That was always the giveaway. So while formality in dress can disappear, hierarchy in dress is hard to suppress -- it's like the "nature will find a way" aphorism ala Jurassic Park.

I guess I'd also suggest that Atelier is a less formal version of a formal restaurant, whereas Momofuku is an haute version of a dive.

There's a piece in Time Out New York that came out the same time as the Fabricant piece, by JJ Goode (I was also interviewed for the piece), where Pichet Ong is quoted as saying: http://www.timeout.com/newyork/article/623...0/four-coursing This analogy strikes me as a good starting point for an explanation of how Momofuku differs from Atelier. There are similarities, but they come at the phenomenon from different directions: ground-up and top-down. When someone like Robuchon or Ducasse opens Atelier, Spoon, Mix, Adour, Benoit, or any of the other second brands, with multi-million-dollar budgets, backed by hotels or other major investors, and an international marketing machine, it's just not the same as when David Chang opens Momofuku with scraped-together money. The informality of Momofuku is genuine: it is a true lack of formality. The informality of Atelier and its ilk is studied: it's part of a business plan, programmed, researched, invented, artificial, imposed. Soft-core informality for people who want to pretend to be informal but who wouldn't actually want to face the Momofuku experience head on.

But the restaurants offering this sort of bread service are the most likely to have prix-fixe menus, where you get three courses, including dessert, no matter what.

I'm thinking your crust may be too thick. A pizza stone demands a very, very thin crust.

"Just leave the basket."

It's no coincidence that the word "formal" contains the word "form." And for ages people have argued that formality is a case of form over substance. But I think there's also substance to formality, similar to the notion of substantive due process in law. I think the new informality is about stripping away the form of formality and getting at that substance. The food itself at Atelier is formal. The approach is fundamentally formal. No amount of bar seating and tee-shirt-wearing can change that. Those things are just atmospherics. It's still a formal restaurant.

I should add, I usually ask for "one of each" when the bread guy comes for the first time. But I can't seem to train my dining companions to do the same, so the bread ritual marches on.

A better definition of formal is probably needed. One of the problems with these discussions is that everybody has a different definition, but nobody says what his or her definition is. Oakapple thinks Robuchon is formal because it's expensive, and also probably because of a general atmosphere of seriousness, exquisite platings, etc. -- a lot of the trappings of formal restaurants are there, just reimagined a bit. Nathan thinks Robuchon is informal because you can wear a tee-shirt and sit at the bar. Those arguments are two ships passing in the night -- do they even really disagree about anything? I think if we brought the definitions and assumptions to the surface, and challenged them, we'd get a lot closer to an understanding of what the changes on the restaurant scene mean.

"any restaurant in Robuchon's price league simply has to be rated in that category." I think it's a different category. This hybrid of willfully casual, yet failing actually to be casual, yet very expensive, yet serving advanced cuisine doesn't really fit into the old categories. It's a new market segment created in Europe by Ducasse and Robuchon with Spoon and Atelier.

P.S. Oakapple, I'm not sure Bryan Miller ever declared the death of fine dining. I recall he referred to other people who did so, and disagreed with them. What reference are you thinking of?