Fat Guy

The restaurant is called Jasmine and has been there at least five years, I think. There's information on the Bellagio site, including a dining room photo that gives you and idea of the level of refinement we're talking about: http://bellagio.com/pages/frameset_noflash.asp On another point, Frank Bruni's first Diner's Journal has appeared: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/dining/11JOUR.html I'm very glad that Bruni doesn't hide his cards here the way Grimes feebly used to do. He gives strong and opinionated first impressions. Way to go.

I think there's a fine line between being a booster and being a champion of excellence, and it's possible and appropriate to be a little of each so long as you operate within the boundaries of credibility and independence. That's often the case with all sorts of arts critics. I agree that when boosterism pushes us into a grade inflation situation, that's good for nobody. Too many people are walking around New York thinking our restaurants are better than they are. Then again, too many people are walking around New York (and watching New York from elsewhere) and trying to put the square peg of our restaurants into the round hole of the Michelin system and concluding inferiority where they should be seeing a certain type of diversity of approaches. The arrival of ADNY and Per Se truly creates, in my opinion, a new category of New York restaurant. In my lifetime only Lespinasse under Kunz was possibly in that category of places that were oriented towards the spacious, slow, super-duper-luxe scale of Michelin three-star dining and the meticulousness, complexity, and raw power of that kind of cuisine. This is going to create a problem, as the four-star category becomes bifurcated. It is possible that the best solution would be to create a five-star category for these two places. Otherwise it becomes very difficult by comparison to see the others as four-star restaurants. I think it is inevitable that we will have a Japanese four-star restaurant, and I don't think that will represent a departure from the current system. While it has been oft repeated that the French places have the fix in with the Times system, I believe the reality is simply that right now only the places that happen to be worthy of four stars are the French-influenced ones. Nobody has yet built the Asian four-star restaurant (although, if I am not mistaken, there was a Chinese four-star in the 1970s?). I've been to restaurants in Asia, such as at the Conrad in Singapore, where I could easily see the potential for a New York Times four-star review of a similarly organized restaurant in New York. I'm not sure if anybody here has been to the gorgeous luxe Chinese place at Bellagio, but if you have maybe you can see the argument for that kind of place being a competitor in the four star category. Likewise, the scope and scale of Japanese places in New York has been pushing towards that sort of four-star aesthetic. It doesn't sound as though Masa has quite hit it, but it could be done. Ditto for Italian, and I think Frank Bruni just loudly announced to the world: Put a few million dollars behind a better non-dinosaurish version of San Domenico, don't play any music and I'll give you four stars. And it is only a matter of time before someone like Danny Meyer builds the first four-star American restaurant. I am thinking a lot these days about Modern, which I suppose will inevitably be at the French end of the New American spectrum, but I think it will be American in ways that differentiate it from the current four stars. I'm not sure what the game plan is there in terms of the level of luxury, but I hope it's ambitious.

Thanks for launching this feature, Anna, which I think is so right for eGullet. We've already, of course, had some of the definitive food-book discussions, especially with regard to Adria's book, about which it seems nobody (well, nobody we like!) writes an article without reference to the related discussion on eGullet. I want to touch on a book that I think is in a similar vein – a book that stands out and is more than a cookbook. I see a lot of books. If the United Parcel Service maintains an enemies list – and I'm certain it does, because every UPS man somehow knows to hate me – I'm definitely on it. Several times a week, I receive cartons of books from the big publishing houses. Many of them send me review copies in triplicate, addressed to me at Fat-Guy.com, eGullet.com, and Elle magazine. Sometimes Elle sends books over that were delivered to me at the magazine's offices (in which I have never set foot). And ever since Carolyn Tillie attended some big food conference in California and offered eGullet as her media credentials, I've been getting packages meant for her. I handle the logistics as follows: Most of the books are awful, so I put them in a pile near the door. When people come over to my house, I offer them a book from the pile. Some of the books are pretty good, so I designate those for specific people and deliver them in due course. I'm holding The Lavender Cookbook for a pastry chef friend right now, and my extra copy of Peterson is going to some friends in Connecticut. Of the better books, I set aside a dozen or so every couple of months and ship them off (again, no doubt infuriating the employees of UPS) to Margaret McArthur and she uses them as prizes for the eGullet writing competitions. And once in awhile, I keep a book. Alain Ducasse is definitely not on the UPS enemies list. He doesn't use UPS. When he sends you a book, at least if you live in one of the cities where he has a restaurant, a guy in a suit shows up with it. It's delivered in a Ducasse-imprinted shopping bag. Although, I'm not sure he could use UPS anyway. His new Spoon Cook Book is so bizarrely huge – it is the single most imposing cookbook I've seen in my life, a foot wide, about 15 inches long and a couple of inches thick, printed on 460 pages of paper that could survive a Vermont winter – I'm not sure it would fit within the UPS guidelines. Nor does Ducasse utilize a normal publisher. The only publisher indicated is a mysterious “Editions D'Alain Ducasse.” Ducasse also seems utterly unconcerned with selling the book. I have no idea what you'd even need to do if you wanted to buy it. I've never seen it in a bookstore, though it has been out since March. It's not on Amazon.com or bn.com or, as far as I can tell, on Jessica's Biscuit's eCookBooks.com site or even Alain Ducasse's site. I didn't notice it in Kitchen Arts & Letters last time I was in there – and I would have noticed it – though I'm sure they could get you a copy. Or perhaps Amazon.fr would ship it to you. That is, if there are any copies to get. The book was printed in a limited edition of 5,000. My copy is number 4,652.* Not that it's priced to move, at 150 Euros (around US $180). I've not seen the book reviewed. Nor have I noticed a single mention on eGullet. So what exactly is this thing? Surely, Ducasse is in part responding to Ferran Adria's El Bulli 1998-2002, with which it shares many characteristics both aesthetically (imposing physical presence; photography with a fine-art feel to it) and substantively (the drive to catalog and document a cuisine). In pure Celebrity Death Match terms, the Spoon book has a more imposing footprint, breaks the 10-pound barrier (the El Bulli book is just shy), and exhibits equal if not better production values. And pricewise, only by this peculiar comparative standard, the Spoon book is cheap. There are now, as far as I know, seven Spoon restaurants in the Ducasse empire, in both expected (Paris, London) and unexpected (Carthage, Mauritius) locations. Having never been to a Spoon – and I can't say it had ever been much of a priority – I don't know first hand what kind of cuisine is really served at the restaurants. But if this book represents that cuisine, a trip to Spoon suddenly feels necessary. The basic concept at Spoon at first seems incompatible with the form of a cookbook. A cookbook is, after all, a collection of recipes for finished plates. At a Spoon restaurant, the customer to a great extent assembles the plate. The menu is based on a concept that Ducasse calls “1, 2, 3,” wherein you pick a main ingredient, a sauce/condiment, and a garnish. The cooks then assemble that for you into a plated dish. The level of focus of the recipes in the Spoon book, then, tends to be on the components. There is a whole section, for example, on condiments – 75 of them in all, I believe, including several of Ducasse's signature “marmalades”, which are multiple-textured essences of a product that are in my opinion one of the strongest suits of the cuisine at his higher-end restaurants. The book has also taken the liberty of pairing dishes in more elaborate combinations than the pure Spoon restaurant concept would seem to allow. My understanding is that this has also in part occurred at the restaurants, but I will need some first-person experience before I can go further on that point. Perhaps as this thread develops, I'll make it to a Spoon restaurant and have more to say from that perspective. It will take me months, perhaps years, to process this book. My initial impressions are that it represents a cuisine hovering somewhere between the anything-goes of culinary post-modernism and the agriculturally-based traditional cuisine of the late 20th-Century French culinary masters. There is also an aspect of “fusion” to many of the presentations. This seems to track the aesthetic, as I understand it, of the restaurants: an emphasis on modernity (from Spoon's press materials: “Induction, steam, vacuum-pack, spit-roasting, wok, plancha, grill, in cocotte … Not only the most modern but also the most traditional methods of preparation, cooking and storage are to be found in SPOON's open-plan kitchen designed by Soremath. In addition to the optimum working conditions, they enable one to respect the fare thanks to short cooking times and preparations made 'at the moment'”) and internationalism (“SPOON proposes a bilingual (English/French) menu sprinkled with American, Asian or Latin influences; vegetarians will be delighted with some of the dishes. Moreover, some recipes from the United Kingdom have pride of place. New tastes are born out of encounters between techniques and ingredients from distant lands. Each person can create hitherto unknown combinations thanks to the choice of condiments and garnishes. At the end of the feast, classic American desserts have inspired Frédéric Robert to conjure up some original creations.”). As Ducasse puts it in his introduction (and I have it on good authority that he actually writes), referring to the Spoon concept: Ducasse's comments are more comprehensible when read in light of his position at the top of an academic pyramid of chefs in what is essentially a Ducasse school. Spoon is like one of the academic departments within that school, which also has departments devoted to the kind of haute cuisine served at Ducasse's luxury restaurants, the more traditional bistro cuisines of some of his other ventures, and national cuisines like Italian in which Ducasse dabbles. Indeed there are textbooks for each department, so many of them I can't keep track. I believe this is the second cookbook from the Spoon department, or perhaps the third. On the Alain-Ducasse.com site, there is a list of what Ducasse has turned out thus far: The Spoon Cook Book isn't even on that list – Spoon Food and Wine is a different book altogether, from 2003 – and I could swear I've seen a book called just Spoon that's a year or two older. So, who knows how long the real list is? I'd be impressed with anyone who could even read all these books, no less write them. Or, as is more likely the case with Ducasse, write some parts but mostly supervise their creation. Nonetheless, when thinking about the comparison to Adria and his big El Bulli book – which is clearly the more groundbreaking volume – the sheer volume and breadth of Ducasse's oeuvre are noteworthy. The book is a collaborative effort of Ducasse and several of his Spoon chefs-de-cuisine, key players in the Ducasse organization, and specialists brought in to do the design work: Christophe Moret, who worked at Louis XV in Monaco, was the opening chef of the first Spoon in Paris, and is now the new chef at Alain Ducasse at the Plaza Athenee; Massimo Luvara, also a Louis XV alumnus and the Chef at Spoon Mauritius; David Bellin, who has worked at Louix XV and Plaza Athenee, and is the chef at Spoon Tokyo; Frederic Robert, Ducasse's worldwide head of pastry, whom he met through Alain Chapel; Christian Laval, the dining room manager at Spoon Paris (and formerly of Louis XV and Plaza Athenee); Frédéric Vardon, another Chapel connection, who supervises all the Spoons; Thomas Duval, the fashion photographer; and Philippe David, the book's art director. There is also a preface by Anthony Rowley and an introduction by Patrick Jouin. At first glance, the recipes strike me as technically precise. And they appear to be workable, assuming you have access to a tremendously diverse palette of ingredients and kitchen tools. Weight measures are used. Every recipe is in both French and English, with both metric and imperial measures. But I don't think, any more than the El Bulli book, that this is a book meant to be cooked from. It is really a book of ideas and, moreover, a sort of culinary art book. I think it may most of all be intended to demonstrate to other chefs what Ducasse's team is doing within a particular contemporary genre. I can certainly see looking to this book, over and over, for high-level inspiration regarding ingredients, combinations, and techniques of preparation and presentation. The photographs are brilliant, with the core theme being translucence. In the white-background photos, there are many thin slices of food that are almost fully translucent, and the thicker pieces develop illuminated edges. Whatever the technical means used to achieve this, it is a tremendously effective method of getting us to consider the inner nature of each product. Although it is not one of the better photos in the book, and this is not the best rendering of it, the cover shot illustrates the basic visual approach: Other photos are taken with a black background, which gives incredible dimensionality. The compositions are sometimes representative of a finished plate, sometimes focused on ingredients, and sometimes seemingly abstract. The two most interesting sections of the book to me right now are the pastry section and the section on condiments. But I'm not going to talk in detail about the recipes and what they represent yet. I'll need much more time to develop opinions – I will post several follow-up reports. If any of the other 5,000 owners of this book happen to be on eGullet, I hope we will hear additional perspectives. Suffice it to say, for now, I will be keeping this book. I just have to find a place to put it. ~~~ * On account of the especially rare nature of this book, if you are in the New York area and are willing to put in some hard time in the kitchen with the Spoon Cook Book for the purposes of contributing opinions to this discussion, and if you promise to be extremely careful with it, I will lend it to you. Contact me via Personal Messenger or e-mail if you would like to arrange that. Thanks.

I've got to say I think Sammy has nailed it. More specifically with regard to Babbo, I would suggest that if Frank Bruni believes Babbo serves four star food (and I'm not yet convinced that this is the unequivocal reading of his review) then I think he falls into a reductio ad absurdum wherein the best hot dog gets four stars. The type of cuisine represented by a hot dog can never get four stars. The type of cuisine represented by Babbo can never get four stars, at least not to my way of thinking. And when I say "the type of cuisine represented by Babbo" I am not talking about Italian cuisine in general. Because it is extremely easy for me to imagine a four-star Italian restaurant. I just can't imagine a four-star Babbo. A restaurant like San Domenico, if it simply did what it does but did it much better, with more vitality, better ingredients, a nicer dining room, etc., would be a four star Italian restaurant serving four star Italian cuisine.

Just because society is more casual doesn't mean we live in undifferentiated casualness every moment of the day. Fine dining is still a special occasion. People don't dress up for it to the extent they used to, but it's still very much about being pampered -- it's just that today we prefer to be pampered in different ways. Luxury is still alive and well at the high end of the restaurant business -- it's just that today we have more of a low-key expectation luxury. Moreover, while I'm hearing a lot of "Babbo has four star food in a three star environment" I am resoundingly unconvinced that Babbo serves four star food. Babbo serves outstanding food, but I think it is three star food through and through. Just as the four star ambience has an edge of luxury and formality to it, so does four star food. Babbo's cuisine is fundamentally rustic, without the refinement of the four star restaurants. Even from a kitchen-mechanics perspective, Babbo's food lacks the kind of effort and discipline that is reflected on a plate at ADNY, Per Se, Jean-Georges, Le Bernardin, or Daniel on a good day. Which is not to say Babbo would be better were it to go in that direction. I think Babbo is pretty much the peak logical expression of Batali's style of food. I love it but would never give it four stars. Ultimately, I agree that the star system is problematic. I would be in favor of doing away with it. But it is not entirely valueless. It is, at least, always interesting to discuss.

As far as I know, the critic has absolute control over the restaurants he chooses to review. Critics at the Times operate, I believe, in a highly independent manner and only really report to editors in terms of the extremes of overall career direction and line-editing. They can get input if they want, but they are empowered to be independent.

James, thanks so much for your thorough and informative answer. I think I speak for all eGulleters when I say I've been thrilled with the depth and care with which you've answered every question in this Q&A session. I feel a bit bad, looking over the whole package thus far, that we pitched you as "Master Baker James MacGuire" because I think you have so much interesting commentary within you on so many issues having nothing to do with baking. You have, as they'd say in opera, an incredible range. I imagine you don't sleep much. I'm glad you mentioned Delouvrier's book. I've been carrying around a feeling of guilt for the past few months on account of my failure to get behind this book and spread the word. I agree it is a flawed volume in many ways, but it is one of the better, as you say, near misses of recent times. Like you, Delouvrier makes no compromises. When I got the book, it was December and one of eGullet's managers, "Dave the Cook," was coming up to New York City from Atlanta to cook New Year's Eve dinner with me. We had 40 people to feed, and given the bizarre circles we inhabit about 30 of them were in the category of people who could go to a restaurant like Lespinasse or French Laundry or Passe Partout and say "That was a decent meal; here's what was good and here's what was bad about it." We settled on Delouvrier's cassoulet recipe as the core dish for the evening. Dave, my brother-in-law Michael (who interestingly is a cop with an interest in fine dining; the other week he and I went to Ducasse and I wondered if he was the first customer ever to dine there wearing a firearm), and I spent the better part of two days working through the recipe, which begins with the deadpan, "This recipe is quite long but it is very straightforward." It prompted me to say out loud to nobody in particular, as kids do these days, "Whatever!" In any event, it was a deeply enjoyable recipe to follow and, in the end, to eat. So for that reason, and others (I have long felt that Christian is the most underrated of the "four-star chefs," because his contributions to cuisine are introverted and based on refinement of classic recipes, techniques, and ideas, in contrast to the more identifiably creative efforts of someone like Jean-Georges Vongerichten), I felt badly that the book entered the marketplace without much notice and was quickly moved off the front burner. For what it's worth, I'd have done a lot more advocacy for it had I not been preoccupied with my own manuscript. In part it was an impossible book to market, however, because of the closing of Lespinasse and the collapse of the Terre and Restaurant Delouvrier projects. Nobody knew when the book came out that Christian was soon to be Ducasse's man in New York. He was instead a chef without a restaurant. The photographs in the book situate it in the defunct Lespinasse. The marketing propaganda situates Christian in two restaurants that never opened. It was a mess, which is too bad because the book itself is quite good. James, thanks again for participating in this memorable Q&A. I hope you know that you are always welcome to chime in here on eGullet, on any of our forums, after the Q&A is over. We hope to see you around, and please do let us know as soon as you have news of your next steps. Warm regards.

El Bulli is driving a school of thought from the mind of Adria. It is unique in the way it documents its work and in its raw avant-garde-ness. What I saw at Tabla was a collaborative effort; a community. And Tabla has through its unprecedented-on-these-shores outreach effort taken up the position as the nexus of that community. Floyd Cardoz is not dictating to the group; he is bringing the group together.

It's possible for something to be significant without involving the UK. However, it was clearly an omission not to have a UK chef represented at the event -- it would have I think offered a much more complete representation of the Western nations that are currently taking Indian cuisine the most seriously: UK, US, and Canada. I'm not sure what more you want. I've made all the arguments I have to make for why this event is important to New Indian cuisine in the West, in North America, in New York, among the chefs involved, and to me personally; that would seem to cover the range of definitional possibilities. If you remain steadfastly unconvinced, so be it. Even if there is an equally important New Indian cuisine movement going in in the UK, however, I fail to see how it takes anything away from the grand accomplishments of this group of chefs.

Its fine to speak as an American if you only comment about what is happening in that area of the globe. I can't wait to haunt you with this ridiculous statement for the rest of your life! My point was that being an American does not give you the automatic right to assume that everything that happens within your shores is of global significance. (Although thinking about it, its probably written in your constitution.) The scope of the event -- bringing together chefs from both coasts and both Canada and the US -- speaks for itself. To me that, combined with the Indian component, adds up to global significance. I guess to you it doesn't, perhaps because no chef from the UK was included. And that does strike me as an omission; but it does not negate the significance of the event or the ideas behind it. In any event, the semantics of significance and perspective are of little interest beyond the fact that for me, someone who is not easily moved by gimmicks and staged events, it was a deeply moving evening that I felt was emblematic of an important moment.

That's a good question and one that I will try and get the answer to. My guess is that there is bound to be shared goals amongst Indian chefs cooking at the highest levels in London, but whether or not they refer to themselves as "New Indian" cooks or feel they are part of a movement, I don't know. I would suggest that if you, as a vigorous observer of your national food scene, don't know the answer, then the question is in part already answered.

The event sold out early and was overbooked; I was able to get in only on a cancellation. At our table were 4 people who were Tabla customers, 2 were Indian (a vascular surgeon and his wife from Long Island) and seemed to know all the other Indians and half the chefs and two were white guys with generic corporate jobs who happened to be Indian food fanatics. And there was a writer from Town & Country. I saw some other media folks around the room, but your table sounds as though it was atypical. Some of the tables were, I'm quite sure, 100% customers. I don't think there were any 100% media tables. I can get the exact demographic from the boss, though, when I ask for permission to post the brochure here.

If this sort of thing is occurring on a daily basis, I must be totally out of it. This was not a media event. It was for the chefs and for Tabla's loyal customers, of which I am one. There were also some media invitations issued, and I was lucky enough to glom onto one so I didn't have to pay the $150. But I would say that not a single article (unless you count what I wrote here) will appear about this dinner, so the media outreach effort here was more along the lines of advocacy for the movement than simple PR for Tabla, which hardly needs more business given its top-20 spot in Zagat and its routinely overflowing dining rooms. Prosperous restaurants like Tabla are in the enviable position of being able to spread some of the wealth, bring in people like Vij, close the place down for a whole night for what was no doubt a money losing event, and do something for cuisine and the cause of excellence. I applaud it. I would certainly distinguish between something like this and a guest chef event or Beard House type dinner. This was a significant assemblage of talent built upon a belief that we are at a certain moment. I'm a Westerner, and American, and I speak from that perspective. I surely hope nobody thinks I am trying to speak from any other perspective. Nonetheless, it's not as though North America is an insignificant perch from which to view the culinary world, and especially new movements in cuisine. And I hope I've made clear that the food served at this dinner, essentially a banquet, was not in and of itself groundbreaking. As well, I have problems with the cuisine at Tabla on any given day. This event was about more than the food served at it, Tabla is about more than what it puts on the plate, and my comments are about more than just a party. If I have failed to convince people of that, so be it -- I expect history will lend some additional perspective that perhaps I as an individual cannot.

If I can get permission, I will post the two-page brochure they sent us home with. It contains a concise statement of principles and bios of the chefs.

Andy, the title I gave to this thread was "New Indian Cooking In America, at Tabla and beyond." I have no doubt there are important New Indian restaurants in the UK -- that would seem almost inevitable. However, as to your chronology, I should note that Vij opened in 1994 and was in Vancouver making his case since 1989, and I have no idea when Madhur Jaffrey wrote the first of her 15 cookbooks. The question, though, is do these New Indian restaurants in the UK strive for something akin to a self-conscious movement, or are they just cooking what they cook? I'm asking that as a question. Only a few restaurants at any given time have significance beyond just being great restaurants. By reaching beyond its walls, and by making itself a nexus of a culinary movement, and by doing so with a great deal of credibility and humility -- chosing to share its podium with like-minded chefs -- Tabla joins an elite group of restaurants that think in terms of national and international movements. I do think it is one of the world's most important restaurants, much more important than just another Michelin three-star would be. Tabla stands for something big, and I would suggest that nobody who reviews the assembled culinary talent standing with Tabla the other night could conclude otherwise.

I'd be very surprised to see that. If he is orienting himself towards the long term, he will get a few standard-issue reviews under his belt now -- hit some of the new places that are awaiting first looks -- and revisit these meta-issues here and there over time.

On that note, I should mention that in the next issue of the Art of Eating there will be a companion feature, also by Davis, on food shopping in New York.

For those of us who are, say, 20, can you please go into some detail about what particularly you didn't like about the Grimes era? Not being privy to any other restaurant reviewer eras, I ahve no basis for comparison. I think I'll cast my vote for not letting this thread go off on that tangent. We've had quite a few discussions of Grimes's reviews; maybe I'll catch up with you on one of those threads. Suffice it to say that, love her or hate her, when Ruth Reichl was the Times critic she was a giant in the food community not only because of her podium at the Times but also because of the power of her taste, judgment, ideas, and expressions. Grimes, while a good writer, never filled those shoes: he was a Times reporter doing a decent job as the restaurant reviewer; nothing more. And I'll repeat my request that we keep this thread tightly focused where the attention should be: on Frank Bruni, his first review, and, we hope, good things to come.

For all I know Frank Bruni has never even heard of eGullet; nonetheless he has the soul of an eGulleter. What is so extraordinarily promising about this first review -- and I hope the premature naysayers who judged him without giving him a chance will eat a little crow today -- is that Bruni is clearly committed to creating an oeuvre. The review is about more than Babbo; indeed it isn't really about Babbo at all. Like we needed Bruni or anybody else to tell us Babbo is a three-star restaurant, or that it's good, or what to order? Any yokel could learn all that from a million sources. What we needed Bruni to tell us was something more general: we needed him to tell us that he is going to slam the door extremely fucking hard on the most disastrous era in the history of New York Times restaurant reviewing. It is no coincidence that he harks back to Ruth Reichl -- this is the association he has chosen, from the last time the Times had credibility in this arena. And now he has made that promise, one of joie-de-vivre wrapped around a core of gravitas that strikes just the right note of self-consciousness without going overboard into self-indulgence. In future reviews, of course, he should not dwell so extensively on the mechanics of ratings. But at this early stage it is appropriate and desirable for him to give us a look at what he thinks the standards mean. Let's hope this is the beginning of something very good for the Times, for lovers of food, and for the world of restaurants.

Actually, I like the way John Travolta eats his pizza in the opening scenes of Saturday Night Fever, if anyone here remembers. Double decker. Word.

Chefs working in the US were the driving force behind Asian fusion. You can now go to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan and find restaurants that are imitative of the restaurants of Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Nobu Matsuhisa, and Gray Kunz. In fact you can find Nobu in Tokyo, Vong in Hong Kong, and about a million fancy Asian fusion hotel restaurants throughout Asia that Kunz and others consulted on. Is that at least a partially compelling analog? It's the best I can offer, because I'm by no means knowledgeable about cuisine in India.

Joseph, we still speak of "Nouvelle Cuisine," don't we? We speak of "Modern Art," right? It's possible for a label to be anchored to a time and place. Surely, there will be many future phases of Indian cuisine worldwide, and they will all need to be named. But I think we are in the equivalent of the Nouvelle Cuisine era for Indian cuisine right now, so New Indian seems appropriate as a label. And certainly, nothing is "wrong" with the currently great cuisine of India. But I don't live in India. My concern is primarily with how Indian cuisine will be translated to the West. And while I love traditional Indian cuisine and have sampled some pretty good specimens around North America as well as in the UK, Singapore, and the various other best cities for Indian food outside of India, I find the New Indian cuisine personally exciting. The reason I'd rather not call it fusion is that the whole concept of fusion is amorphous. Where does tradition end and fusion begin? Is not all cuisine fusion cuisine? Please don't make me trot out the old tomatoes-in-Italy and chocolate-in-France arguments. Please.

Five years ago, Floyd Cardoz and Danny Meyer quietly unleashed Tabla on the New York restaurant scene. I don't think anybody – even those who, like me, loved the place from the start – predicted that it would become one of the world's most important restaurants. I'm not sure, even today, that Tabla's significance is widely appreciated. To be sure, it was always a good restaurant. And, in the stubborn manner of all Danny Meyer restaurants, it underwent consistent improvement – steady but, sometimes, frustratingly slow. But it always felt like a whimsical, almost accidental place, especially to those familiar with the backstory: Tabla was something of an unintended consequence of historic preservation. The wall dividing the ground-floor space in the landmark Art Deco Metropolitan Life building on Madison Park left a niche just large enough, after the mega-project of Eleven Madison Park (which was supposed to be the splashier of the two restaurants) was conceived, for a boutique restaurant sporting a seemingly whimsical concept: Indian fusion. Today what was once called Indian fusion has acquired what I think is a more appropriate moniker: New Indian cooking. What was once iconoclastic is now one of the most significant movements in modern cuisine. And Tabla is at its nexus. Asian fusion reached its apex in the 1990s, but India has long held the pole position when it comes to mastery of spices – even the Southeast Asian cuisines such as Thai, Malaysian, and Vietnamese, which utilize spices to such great effect, ultimately look to India as the progenitor of curries and other complex spice blends. And spices represent, to me, the most neglected frontier of Western cuisine. New Indian cooking, though not as sizeable a movement as Asian fusion, is not only about Indian cuisine, and not only about the effect of Western technique and ingredients on that cuisine, but also about what India has to teach Western chefs about an entire category of flavors. Although he was the student and Gray Kunz was the mentor, back in the days when Floyd Cardoz was at Lespinasse he taught Kunz a thing or two about spices. And if you have something to teach Gray Kunz about spices, you have something to teach everyone. I think in the final analysis, the West will learn as much or more from India as from Asia. As Tabla was making its presence felt and slowly working through its early dysfunction over its self-perception (are we an Indian restaurant or what?), its perception in the Indian community (it's not Indian enough), and its perception in the Western culinary community (it's too Indian), there were other restaurants throughout North America working independently towards common evangelical goals. In Vancouver, Vikram Vij was operating the renowned Vij's, which I've been calling the best Indian restaurant in North America since my August 2001 “Vancouver dining comes of age” feature in the National Post. Although, it was my wife Ellen who had alerted me to its existence and insisted on its excellence after a trip she had taken to Vancouver without me for a piece she was doing for Arthur Frommer. In Boston, Thomas John was developing the message at Mantra. More recently, in New York, the team of Suvir Saran and Hemant Mathur have been introducing a new level of rigor to Indian cuisine here, first at Diwan, then at Amma, and soon at Devi. And of course Madhur Jaffrey, the polymath actress, chef, and super-genius, has been laying the foundations of New Indian cooking since the rest of these guys were in diapers. Which brings us to a special dinner last night commemorating Tabla's fifth birthday, when all the aforementioned chefs came together to demonstrate where New Indian cooking is today. Such events need to be viewed on multiple levels. There are the dishes themselves, which are rarely as precise and well executed as they would be on a chef's home turf: the banquet production requirements, the unfamiliar kitchens, and a host of other factors are always limiting. There is the overall meal, which in the best instances is far more than the sum of its parts. And then there is what the event means in a larger context, which can range from nothing to quite a lot. There were some delicious dishes served last night. Suvir Saran and Hemant Mathur were given the task of awakening guests' palates with a series of hors d'oeuvres that included a bracing shrimp rasam with buttermilk and little florets of Mancurian cauliflower (we all need this recipe). They were also responsible for continuing the momentum through the first course: “sprouted beans chat, crispy spinach millefeuille.” It was a remarkable dish, the crisped leaves of spinach serving as the layers in a savory postmodern Indian take on the traditional French pastry. This gave way to Madhur Jaffrey's jumbo shrimp in a sauce featuring fennel seeds, mustard seeds, and curry leaves. I don't think there's a word for the color of this sauce, which fell somewhere between peach melba and coral, but in honor of it I'd like to paint my whole house, my car, and my dog. I asked her if I could have a gallon and she laughed, thinking I wasn't serious. Thomas John, for his part, offered caramelized red snapper with spiced yucca, accompanied by the most vibrant salad of fava beans and watermelon. Jaffrey is a tough act to follow, but John's little bits of watermelon managed to penetrate the fog that her haunting sauce had left over the audience. Floyd Cardoz countered with crispy spice-crusted soft shell crabs over a medley of pickled ramps, long squash, bacon, and crab curry. Luckily I was seated next to a non-soft-shell eater so I got to eat two portions. Finally, like an invading army, Vikram Vij's ghee-braised short ribs (pause to consider that: short ribs braised in clarified butter!) with cinnamon and red wine curry flattened the terrain, and then Helen Turley's 2002 Zinfandel “Duarte” came along to beat the crap out of anybody left standing. I felt violated. And happy. I can't imagine being a pastry chef in this situation, playing to an exhausted house that has had its palates collectively pounded on by the entire flavor range of the Penzey's spice catalog, but Jehangir Mehta, the pastry chef at Aix, served up one of the best desserts I've had in ages: a salty caramel tapioca tart with pomegranate paan reduction, marinated mango, and citrus ice cream. The saltiness of this dessert was a stroke of genius, activating resources of flavor perception I thought I'd lost hours before. Sitting with my back to Tabla's central architectural feature, the oculus, I felt upon my first bite as though I might suddenly tumble backwards through the hole and onto the stone floor below. There were certainly flaws in most of the dishes, along the lines of what I mentioned above – I'd love to try each of them with the home team cooking. But I feel it is necessary to allow some latitude in order to perceive the overall meal experience, which was terrifically enjoyable and wildly synergistic. But what was far more significant, to me, than the meal itself was what it represented. Being at Tabla last night felt like being in a moment, one of those moments you know you'll return to time and again as history unfolds and gives us more perspective. There was a sense of being there, while something important was happening. It could be seen on the chef's faces: what had been a fragmented community of kindred spirits, and had slowly developed into a movement, last night gelled into something more along the lines of a school of thought. And it was inspiring to see the audience, almost evenly divided between Indians and non-Indians, breaking bread together as a new gourmet community. It was quite a night, one I'll never forget.

But do those undeniable commonalities make a given meal more authentic? What I've been trying to say, and I hope I've made myself clear, is that commonality is a poor yardstick of authenticity. Measuring authenticity by shallow commonality -- commonality of form -- gives us the false authenticity of Epcot. Deeper commonality -- commonality of substance -- is to me far more compelling. In other words, to me Mario Batali's restaurants are more authentically Italian than restaurants that slavishly impersonate their Italian counterparts. Moreover, restaurants that seek to minimize imitation -- so-called chef-driven restaurants where the chef expresses a personal culinary aesthetic in his cuisine -- can be entirely authentic on their own terms. In our New World polyglot immigrant melting pot, they and not the imitators represent the gold standard for authenticity.

Oakapple, that was a very specific instance of investigative journalism -- a case where a restaurant has a well-publicized "no substitutions" policy. In such an instance, of course one wants to test the theory in various ways, and anonymity is one tool in the reviewer's toolkit that can help us accomplish that. But I could just as easily had a trusted confederate try the experiment. The more important issue is that later on I introduced myself to Ms. Murphy and was treated to an in-person discussion of the restaurant, its unique wine list, and more, all of which I felt put me in a better position to inform an audience of readers about the restaurant. So it cuts both ways: anonymity can be a tool, and if you believe the be-all-end-all of restaurant reviewing is that limited consumer-protection function then it ends there. But any journalist will tell you that anonymity is also a severe limitation; as I have analogized in the past, it would be hard to function as a sports columnist without ever having face-to-face interaction with athletes. In any event, I don't wish to recycle the anonymity argument here. I simply want to point out that one should not infer from this journalist's unethical violation of his newspaper's anonymity policy that there is a deeper ethical necessity for anonymity. There may or may not be, but it is a separate issue. My sense is that most casual observers will conflate the two, which is what I'm trying to help us avoid.