Fat Guy

Probably more like an hour, because it takes us half an hour just to get to where Gastonia hits I-85, but maybe we'll do that for this afternoon's break.

The Beacon Beefsteak. No, that's even more excessive because there's so much alcohol involved. But the difference is that it's not fried food -- you can wake up the next morning after the Beefsteak and actually get something accomplished. Fish Camp is far more aggressive from a systemic viewpoint.

We don't have to throw them away. Something like 99.9% of restaurants will always serve derivative dishes and their menus will never demonstrate significant evolution. What we're talking about here is the special case of four-star dining at the apex of the American restaurant market. At that level, there is a premium placed on ongoing creativity and progress. Restaurants at this level are no longer about signature dishes -- they are about cuisine at a higher level of abstraction. Four-star restaurants that create a few great dishes and serve them for a decade will eventually find themselves in the three-star category. Look at Le Cirque and Chanterelle. Jean Georges can either progress or become the Chanterelle of 2006.

As you know, I'm capable of some superhuman feats of eating, but I'm not sure it's possible to eat two fish camp meals in a week. It's one of the most excessive dining experiences I can recall. I mean, you can go to buffets all over and eat all you like, but this is high quality expertly fried fish in unlimited quantity, fresh from the fryer brought to you immediately by extremely efficient waitresses -- not from a steam table. Any full order is automatically all-you-can-eat, though I imagine only about 1% of the population could make it to a second plate. I might be able to do it on a dare. Maybe, just maybe, I can work up to Twin Tops for Thursday. But of course we also have various locals saying "oh, those two places on New Hope suck; they're totally commercial and for the tourists; you have to come to the real fish camp with us, where the locals eat . . ." as though there have been any tourists in Gastonia in the past decade besides us and Holly Moore, unless they mean that people from Charlotte are tourists. So, who knows . . .

I like the food and the room -- I guess I'm an optimist -- and would go as far as saying Jean Georges has one of the most attractive dining rooms in the USA. Especially at lunchtime, when the light pours in those windows, the room really works for me. I didn't always buy into Adam Tihany's design -- my eye takes awhile to accept modernist architecture -- but over time the lines, the colors, the chairs, the way the booths fit into the walls, the light fixtures, and even that checkerboard carpet have won me over. I've got no problem with the food as such -- I just think there's a point at which, if you don't progress, you get left behind. Eventually, people are going to get bored of young garlic soup and scallops with cauliflower and raisin-caper emulsion.

So here I am in our friends' cabin on Lake Wylie, South Carolina. I'm supposed to be working, and I am -- I really am (it is especially important that this be said in the event my agent and editor are lurking) -- but my obsessive instincts can't be contained so Ellen and I have been chatting with all the neighbors about the best places to eat around here. There were a few promising-sounding recommendations that didn't pan out -- the barbecue in this part of the state (and the adjacent area of North Carolina) is weak, as we learned the hard way, and the local "fine dining" we've tried has been one step above what you'd get at TGI Friday's. But we got a hit this morning that I knew had to be serious: "Fish Camp." This turned out not to be the name of a restaurant per se, but rather of a phenomenon with Gastonia, NC (a city to the West of Charlotte along I-85) as its epicenter. A fish camp is a warehouse-size fish-fry restaurant where you get immense portions of fried catfish, flounder, and/or perch with hush puppies, coleslaw, and fries. All indications were that, of the half dozen or so fish camps in and around Gastonia (not to mention a number of pretenders farther afield and nearby), the two reining institutions at this time face one another across the intersection of South New Hope and Union Roads in Gastonia: Graham's Fish Fry and Twin Tops Fish Camp. That sounds as though it's easier to determine than it really is, because locals don't generally seem to know the names of these places. They just say "fish camp" and assume their circle of friends knows what they mean. Anyway, we sort of determined that "the place on the left" was slightly preferred to "the place on the right" (this assumes a northbound trajectory), though both had supporters and some said they were the same. But the place on the left, Twin Tops, is closed on Mondays so we went to Graham's. The meal was terrific, especially the fried "salt and pepper" catfish fillets and the fried shrimp. And for $16 two of us ate so much seafood it was insane. So, on our way out of the parking lot of Graham's, Ellen points to the big road-sign in front of Twin Tops. And do you know what it said in fire-engine red letters: "Check us out on HollyEats.com" This is why I hate Holly Moore.

If by mandatory it is meant that slaughterhouses were compelled to pay for grading, that would be incorrect. It may be that during wartime, in order to control the black market, the government provided grading for free. Either way, let's get this topic back on track now.

The evolution of people's tastes as they age is an interesting subject, but let's push it onto another thread. Here, we're talking about the evolution of restaurants.

Meat grading has always been, and remains, voluntary.

Time Warner may be across the street, but I don't necessarily see it as a question of competition across the street. What Jean Georges will have to compete against, going forward, is progress. Jean Georges isn't drawing a neighborhood crowd -- it's a destination restaurant and therefore competes with restaurants everywhere else in the city that have four and three stars. There's no question that it's still one of the top restaurants in the city, but the place has failed to improve or progress at all since its opening year. New York has been in a restaurant rut since before 9/11, and the city is just starting to emerge. ADNY was the first hint of things to come, but it was lost on the media and much of the public. Mix too. But all you have to do, Felonius, is have a meal at Per Se and you'll realize that Jean Georges' several years of successful coasting have come to an end. And once Kunz and Trotter get into the game -- not to mention Delouvrier -- it's hard to imagine that Jean Georges (or Le Bernardin, Daniel, or Bouley) will be at the top anymore. Unless Vongerichten has some amazing tricks up his sleeve and can recapture the vitality his cooking used to have, he will indeed go the way of the dinosaurs before him. He may still be able to make a shitload of money on Jean Georges and his lesser places, and he'll no doubt have a decade of Zagat inertia, but he'll stop mattering to the top level of educated restaurant consumer.

Do you also believe the customer is always right? It's easy to lay down axioms of this nature, but the reality is that there are lots of excuses for bad service: servers are human beings not machines; service is a highly variable interpersonal phenomenon subject to many interpretations; and, most importantly, SHIT HAPPENS. I've experienced poor service incidents in some of the top-rated restaurants in the world: Taillevent, Daniel, and French Laundry, just to name a few. The eGullet boards are chock full of bad-service stories about Michelin three-star restaurants all over Europe. Life throws you curveballs like that sometimes. I wish it never happened, but it does. So you have to go to Plan B and ask what you're going to do about it. There is some positive news, though: direct intervention can turn bad beginnings into good endings. It's a given that every restaurant in the world, no matter how good, will fuck up once in awhile. What distinguishes the men from the boys is how those fuck-ups get handled once brought to the attention of management. That's the true test of a restaurant's mettle. What I've found is that, in the best restaurants, if you speak up about a service or food problem, they often handle it so well that you not only forgive the error but also develop newfound respect for the establishment. Of course confrontation on-the-spot is difficult, even for bastards like me. So sometimes letter-writing after the meal is the only option -- but it's always a second-best option. I should point out that, in the case of Le Bernardin, my mother-in-law wrote them a letter of complaint a couple of years ago and got a full-page hand-written response from Ripert. Unfortunately, I didn't find the response particularly helpful -- it was to my mind a bit condescending -- but at least it was something. Nonetheless, I can't help but think that had she brought her complaint to the attention of management on the spot, she would have had better results.

Tammy, the "bars" become very tired very quickly. I'm talking about something less salad-bar-like: a deconstructed family-style meal. The idea isn't to create versions of the taco bar; the idea is to serve the kinds of foods one would normally serve, but to break them down so they're more easily tailored to individual preferences. It's not a huge distinction, but long-term I think people are bound to prefer a less cafeteria-like approach. For example, you spoke of making a veggie stew from the Moosewood cookbook. But why stop there? You can also make braised stew meat, chicken legs, or any of a number of other meat items -- the food cost on these cuts of meat is extremely low -- and serve them on a platter alongside the veggie stew. That way, you effectively have two stews, but you don't have to do a "stew bar" or anything of that nature.

There could have been a misunderstanding on the waiter's part, however. Sometimes we ask one question and a waiter hears another question, and the answer to the wrong question sounds incredibly obnoxious to the person who asked the right one. Or it's possible that your waiter was an asshole. Either way, I hope he is confronted.

It's a large group, and my general experience is that the type of person who lives in experimental community tends to run a higher risk of being vegetarian or otherwise restricted. At the same time, that demographic tends not to have the standard conservative-palate objections to robustly seasoned foods. The best way, as I've learned over time, to feed a group like that is to create dishes that can be constructed to personal preference from different elements. For example, on New Year's Eve we did cassoulet for roughly that number of people. We had one big pot of beans that were cooked to a relatively traditional recipe, and one smaller pot of vegetarian beans. We separately cooked duck confit, lamb shanks, and Aidell's chicken sausage -- we also did a vegetable medley that could be used instead of meat. All this was laid out and assembled to individual preference. The real vegetarians had beans plus vegetables. The sort-of vegetarians had veggie beans plus chicken sausage. Most other people had a little of everything, though there were those who didn't like duck, didn't like lamb, etc. -- and they were all accommodated no problem. This general concept can be used in a variety of settings: you choose your base product -- beans, rice, pasta, whatever -- you make a ton of it, and you offer a variety of other items as "garnishes." You round it out with salad, bread, dessert, etc., and you're all set.

If a tree falls and nobody hears it . . . The complaint about the waiter should be taken to the restaurant's owner, in writing. Hopefully the waiter's name, the table number, and the time of the meal are on the receipt -- they usually are. If everything happened exactly as stated here and there's no issue of miscommunication, misinterpretation, or anything of that nature, then the waiter needs to be taken aside by management and given a stern warning. But the waiter also needs to be allowed to explain himself. Worse, he could have been operating at the direction of middle management -- there is a tendency for this sort of thing to come from above.

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Haute cuisine dishes are almost universally more refined, and therefore less rustic, than their non-haute counterparts. The bouillabaisse served at Le Bernardin is, in my opinion, an excellent dish in its own right that is probably best described as "inspired by bouillabaisse." What I take away from winemike's post is that I won't be booking a late table at Le Bernardin. Not that I often book late at any restaurant -- it's very often a problematic sitting. Kitchens and managers tend to put a lot of pressure on waitstaff to get the last sitting's orders in right away. Then they can bang out the food, ascertain that things are on autopilot, and go home, leaving the waiters and pastry assistants to stand around all night waiting to close.

I've lost plenty of tastebuds and brain cells thus far, but can still taste and think somewhat coherently. My sensory memory tells me that chicken in the 1970s was tougher than today but had more flavor. That's on the most generic supermarket level, of course, because you can get incredibly good chicken if you want to go to the trouble or pay more money. The subject of chicken raises an issue, though: does anybody order chicken in upscale restaurants anymore? I remember the first time I was on Arthur Schwartz's show, somebody called in and asked me if I thought it was possible to judge restaurants -- as Craig Claiborne did -- on the quality of their roasted chicken. My first thought was that on most upscale restaurant menus today there isn't a roasted chicken to be found, and if there is one it's often only there as a token offering. There is, for example, not a single chicken dish (no less a roasted chicken) on the most recent menu I have from Jean Georges. This goes to the point that there has been a change in orientation at high-end restaurants, from what used to be a contest of who could cook classic dishes best to today's focus on creativity. This is, in part, the reason that the Michelin guides are losing their relevance. But, while I'm in favor of creativity and especially the culinary avant garde, I can't help but think that something has been lost by abandonment of the classics. The classics provided a framework and set a standard; now, there is no point of reference. A couple of weeks ago, when I had dinner at La Cote Basque, I was blown away by two dishes: a simple foie gras terrine, and the restaurant's signature cassoulet. I had just been to Per Se the night before and had a really nice foie gras torchon, but it didn't hold a candle to what La Cote Basque was serving. More important from my perspective, though, is that I felt stupid: had I not gone to La Cote Basque that night, I'd have thought the Per Se foie gras was the top of the New York hierarchy. It also reminded me that reviewers of restaurants today have a very different job than they did in the past. Presumably, back in the day, I could have gone around to every fine-dining restuarant in town and ordered a half-dozen matching dishes -- like cassoulet, or roasted chicken, or whatever -- and easily put those restaurants in rank order based on that comparison. Now, one rarely gets a chance to say "The foie gras at restaurant X is better than at restaurant Y." I can't really even say it about Per Se and La Cote Basque, because the two dishes were different -- but they were close enough. The cassoulet experience was similar. We made cassoulet for New Year's eve according, loosely, to Christian Delouvrier's recipe. It was the best cassoulet I'd ever had. Until La Cote Basque reminded me that I'm an amateur cook. The cassoulet at La Cote Basque was in a totally different league. What was I talking about?

All cuisine is fusion cuisine. Thai cuisine is an excellent example. Capsicum peppers were introduced to Thai cuisine by Portuguese missionaries in the 17th Century. Not that chiles came from Portugal -- the Portuguese missionaries had acquired the taste in South America. Chinese, Dutch, Japanese, Indian, and of course French cuisines have left their marks on Thai cuisine. The risk in cooking original, inventive fusion cuisine is no different than the risk in cooking anything that hasn't been cooked before: creativity is always a risky proposition. The classics of any cuisine are tried and true: all one has to do is cook them accurately and well in order to be considered a good chef. But without those who invent, those who reproduce would have nothing to cook.

I'm humbled by these responses. Ruth, I just read your post out loud to my wife -- we laughed, we cried . . . it was great. And it's especially gratifying to see a new voice here -- welcome Ted Task. Let me try to crystallize a few issues, some of which I'm drawing from the comments here and some of which are simply on my mind. I'm wondering if those who have already posted (and those who haven't) have any comments on the following: - My own memories, back to the 1970s, are somewhat contradictory on the question of ingredients. It seems to me there have been both amazing improvements and remarkable declines. For example, the availability of fresh vegetables of all kinds that we have today would have been unthinkable in the past, yet today it's extremely difficult to get high quality beef and pork. What are your recollections of ingredients back in the 1950s and earlier? What was better, what was worse, and is anything the same? - When was the first time you all dined at a formal restaurant with white tablecloths and tuxedoed waiters? What did you eat? How does that experience compare to dining at a top-rated restaurant today -- a French Laundry, Charlie Trotter's, or the equivalent? - How has service changed? The "my name is Brad" issue has of course come up, but has anything else gotten better or worse? - Who is the first restaurant "celebrity chef" you remember hearing of? How has your own view of chefs evolved over time? Presumably, in the 1950s you couldn't have named a single famous American restaurant chef because there weren't any -- how and when did that change for you, and what do you think about it? - I'm in the South right now, where the vestiges of Prohibition are much more pronounced than in the North. I don't think it occurred to me until a couple of days ago, when our friend Wayne told us about the fairly recent decision to allow "by the drink" liquor sales in his county, and how that led to the almost immediate opening of dozens of new restaurants serving food at a much higher level than what had existed in the county before, how important the history of Prohibition and dry counties has been to the history of restaurants. I doubt we have any eGulleters with clear memories of Prohibition, but does anybody have any thoughts on the liquor-restaurant connection and how it has evolved over the years. - On the international front, I didn't mean to scare anybody away -- I'd love to hear your early memories of overseas travel, and of cuisine in Europe and beyond. - Aside from what I've listed here, what do you all think are the salient points of comparison between restaurants then and now?

Times change, and tastes change with those times. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, nobody would argue, was one of the most important, influential, and innovative chefs of the late 20th Century. But will he remain as relevant in the 21st Century? The jury is still out, but current indicia point to "no." Jean Georges is still an excellent restaurant, but so is La Cote Basque. The problem is that La Cote Basque is an excellent restaurant by the standards of the 1960s and 1970s -- it is shutting down not because it isn't as good as it was then (in fact, at least from an ingredients standpoint, the food is much better) but because tastes have moved on. Unless Vongerichten continues to reinvent his cuisine to keep up with the times, Jean Georges will invariably suffer the same fate as it ages from cutting-edge gastronomic destination to dinosaur -- a progression that will occur with much greater rapidity now than ever before, as cuisine pushes forward at an accelerated pace. Some people age with their restaurants, which is why La Cote Basque is currently populated by a crowd that got kicked out of AARP for being too old. And there will be people who will dine regularly at Jean Georges forever. But one day, if the restaurant fails to maintain its currency, a star will drop away . . . and then another. A certain crowd of devotees will insist, as many did of Lutece until its dying day, that it's the best restaurant in New York. But most people will just say, "I don't get this place. The new four-star places are so much better it's ridiculous even to compare them." As for Vongerichten's other new ventures -- the non-fancy ones that actually pay the bills -- I think he has again fallen into a bit of a time warp. These restaurants are the children of Vong (whereas Jean Georges is descended from Lafayette and Jo Jo). Vong was right for its time, but today the fine-dining consumer isn't really looking for that experience. There is little interest in seeing how a French chef interprets Asian cuisine as such, and while the ingredients and trappings of a Vong or a 66 are wonderful, that kind of cuisine has lost its appeal -- not to mention the unreconstructed ethnic competition keeps getting better and better. The attention now is, I think, focused on the other end of the fusion spectrum: on how chefs will incorporate international flavors while maintaining the integrity of their own cuisines. I think it's safe to say that 66 will remain marginal as a result; but who knows what will become of Spice Market? It is certainly ambitious on a scale that 66 is not. I wouldn't write it off so soon -- I'm eager to try it now and in a year.

The pastry chef has been known to post here. Maybe he'll tell us.

There are some non-foodies who will intuitively "get" Minibar, just as the overwhelming majority of foodies won't. Fundamentally, acceptance of the culinary avant garde is likely to follow the path of acceptance of the avant garde in anything else: a few forward-looking/open-minded types will be early adopters, and eventually today's avant garde may become tomorrow's tradition. We as eGulleters are ideally suited to be at the forefront of advocacy for the culinary avant garde -- we are the logical media and consumer companions to this movement. We've already captured the meaning of Adria, Blumenthal, Achatz, and others in a deeper, more comprehensive manner than print media ever will. I'd also personally like to be a more convincing evangelist for Andres and the culinary avant garde, but first I have to do a lot more traveling and a lot more thinking and writing. At the same time, I think Andres's food is quite accessible. He throws the occasional curveball, but any non-picky eater (yes I realize that's a small subset of the population) should be able to enjoy the food. I think, however, I'd probably recommend the Latino dim sum brunch at Cafe Atlantico over Minibar to most people who aren't super-adventurous -- you get a lot of the creativity of Minibar without the avalanche of sensory information. When we did the dim sum brunch at Cafe last year, we had in tow one unadventurous eater. He did very well, but Minibar would probably have been too much for him. I think it was, but I don't remember for sure. I decided early in the meal to dispense with the formality of taking notes on the dishes. It's not the point of a meal at Minibar. I actually think, as much as I appreciate the printed menu and the video monitors displaying the names of the dishes, that I'd prefer not to have a list of the dishes because, in discussing Minibar, I think the dishes themselves are a distraction from the more important central themes. There's a better way to talk about food at this level; I'm still working on exactly what that way is.

Last year when I visited Café Atlantico, Zaytinya, and Jaleo (all in a 24-hour period) I realized that Jose Andres is one of the most significant chefs in America today. Last week when I visited the Minibar I had to alter my assessment of Jose Andres: he is one of the most significant chefs in the world, ever. I have never, in the space of just a couple of hours, been exposed to so many flavor possibilities and such a diverse array of culinary stimuli. It was one of my most memorable meals. It's not difficult to understand why Andres hasn't gained the recognition he so heartily deserves: he practices in Washington, DC, a town the gastro-elites have designated as firmly second-tier; he doesn't have a fancy restaurant to his name; and his food is "weird." More importantly, the community of critics is ill-prepared to deal with Andres: his cuisine doesn't fit into neat categories; he is too handily (and incorrectly) dismissed, marginalized, or bracketed as entirely derivative of Adria; and the plodding structural needs of today's restaurant reviews -- a thumbs-up/thumbs-down dish-by-dish approach to analysis, certain expectations of luxuriousness and comfort at different price points and levels of culinary sophistication, and easy comparisons to commonly understood flavors and preparations -- are not well served by Andres's approach. What I've seen written about Andres in the mainstream food press has been reminiscent of someone totally dedicated to Renaissance portraiture attempting to use those tools to evaluate Picasso. Which is not to say Andres hasn't done well in the media. He has. He's smart. He knows how to play the game. But what you see in the glossy food magazines is a dumbed-down version of Andres -- the one that will be palatable to gastronomic trainspotters and others who want a neat package they can simply file away. Such coverage is not real recognition. A new set of critical tools will be required to explain Andres, and it's not likely that we will ever be able to keep up with him. But the food media are at least somewhat fortunate in being behind the times: we can look to other art forms for a better understanding of how to get a handle on modernism and post-modernism in cuisine. Andres represents not manipulation of form for its own sake, but rather for the sake of elevating substance over form. To call a meal at Minibar an "experience" trivializes it. But the term is still useful, because the mandatory first step in enjoying Minibar is to embrace it existentially rather than with the preconceived notions of a restaurant customer or reviewer. No serious observer questions Andres's skill or integrity as a chef. He has earned our trust; we can take this leap of faith with him. If you're not willing to let yourself go, if you're not willing to fall backwards into the arms of a different kind of adventure, Minibar will be wasted. Like a series of still photographs strung together into a film, Andres's individual dishes are a collage of light and motion, flavor and texture, temperature and aroma. Yet Minibar is utterly unpretentious. Though the conceptual underpinnings are substantial, the meal is ultimately about fun: fun with flavor, of course, but also the pleasure of interaction with the talented group of cooks and servers -- not to mention the other customers -- with whom you share your space. It's a sensuous, tactile, interlocking, all-encompassing dynamic: the cooks hand you food and you eat much of it with your fingers while they talk you through exactly how best to savor each dish; at the same time, the servers move behind you, darting in and out of your peripheral vision as their arms weave between customers' shoulders to refill a glass of cava or remove a used plate; and you might also be discussing, praising, or arguing about the food -- this is food that demands conversation -- with your spouse, or the spouse of the next person over, or the servers, or the cooks, or yourself. It seems inevitable that Andres will at some point set up a beautiful, luxurious, boutique restaurant somewhere and create an upscale version Minibar. And I'm sure it will be wonderful, along the lines of the more avant garde of the Michelin three-star restaurants of Europe. But for now I enjoy Minibar just as it is: the incongruousness of sitting at a counter in the middle of the bustling multi-tiered Café Atlantico, the ceaseless activity, and the effortless casualness of it all. And those of you who eat at Minibar this year will be able to say you were there at the beginning, because I assure you Andres is destined for greatness.

John: You can assume total cultural illiteracy on my part. Foodnut: If you can remember the '50s, you can play too!