Fat Guy
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Posts posted by Fat Guy
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The entire eGullet team wishes Suvir all the best in his restaurant venture, Amma, and his forthcoming book, Indian Home Cooking: A Fresh Introduction to Indian Food. I have no doubt that we'll all be watching closely, along with the rest of the food community online and off, as both of these projects shoot to the top of the charts. We thank Suvir for all his hard work on eGullet over the past couple of years and we're looking forward to those Amma dining reports!
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http://www.cookspalate.com/pages/demo.htm
Looks like an interesting product. Let us know if it has the power you need.
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There is a lot of discussion involving what constitutes the avant garde in various artistic media but with little consideration for the differences between the arts.
One issue is that food has to be ingested. Though I suppose there are avant-garde possibilities that don't involve ingesting food, edibility is the current dividing line between food and not-food.
The requirement that food be ingested carries with it a number of limitations. Perishability means that food, unlike music, painting, film, et al., can't be preserved -- it essentially has to be cooked to order. Consumption means that the object of the art is destroyed soon after it is created. The human digestive system is much more limited in terms of what it can handle than, say, the human eye: it doesn't matter how ugly a painting is, it's never actually going to hurt you.
On a related point, is it even possible for a restaurant to be truly avant-garde, in the sense that avant-garde implies a certain radicalism and anti-establishmentariansim that seem somewhat incompatible with the bourgeoise enterprise of running a restaurant where affluent consumers make reservations, dine in comfort, are served by a compliant staff, drink expensive wines, and pay the bill with American Express?
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I'd love to see some photographs (particularly if you have a fusion-powered camera).
Isn't it amazing how incompetent so many kitchen designers are? Has any middle-class person had a good experience with a residential kitchen designer? Or are all the good ones working exclusively on high-end and restaurant kitchens?
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I think it's important to distinguish between "avant-garde restaurants" and "the culinary avant-garde." The latter surely includes all sorts of people who don't work in restaurants. The American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian both display chocolate sculptures by Steve Klc. A chef can be a teacher. Bo Friberg has been one of the most influential pastry chefs of the past three decades not on account of serving food to people in restaurants or pastry shops but, rather, by virtue of being a teacher. Likewise, has Julia Child ever worked in a restaurant? Both Friberg and Child are seen as establishmentarian now, but I think it's fair to say that, at one time, they were avant-garde within the American culinary milieu. And even non-chefs are part of the culinary avant-garde: critics, commentators, academics, etc.
[edited and expanded]
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Fat Guy, the way I define a "successful" avant garde artist or composer is in whether I consider him/her artistically successful.
But if the standard is simply artistic success regardless of audience, anybody can contribute to the avant-garde whether it's the musical avant-garde, the avant-garde of painting, or the avant-garde of cuisine. The composer who doesn't have his work performed or enjoy any commercial success or the painter who doesn't sell or exhibit very many paintings is the same as an avant-garde culinarian without a restaurant. The culinary artist's art is created in the mind and expressed on the plate. That the same plate gets served to nobody, one person, or a thousand people is only as relevant as the number of people who hear a composition or view a painting.
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You're looking to do three things, it seems. And I don't know of a program that does all three well.
First, you're looking for recipe management software. This is likely to be a database-driven product with a certain feature set.
Second, you're looking for word-processing software, because you probably want to write about the recipes and you want to write an introduction and chapter-introductions. I'm sure you have word-processing software already.
Third, you're looking for desktop publishing software. This is a piece of design-oriented software that converts text into attractive page layouts.
To turn a database of recipes into a cookbook, you'd begin by creating the database of ingredients, instructions, and brief descriptions. Then in a word processor you'd create the more substantial textual portions of the book. Then you'd import the text from the database and the text from the word processor into the desktop publishing tool and you'd format it for printing.
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Can you give some examples of successful, influential avant-garde artists who were destitute, drunk, and living hand-to-mouth?
Composers who write music for orchestras can write all the music they want, but without concert halls and symphonies how can they have influence?
Although the Internet presents some possibilities, is it for the most part possible for writers to be successful and influential without publishers? And do publishers not require that what they publish be commercially viable?
Don't painters need galleries in order to publicize their work? Don't galleries exist because people buy paintings?
A chef can create without a penny. Recipes can be conceived in the mind. Plenty of influential culinary authorities haven't even owned restaurants.
I see no meaningful distinction based on the issue of money.
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What the hell is going on here?
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Write a proposal. Have your agent send it to a million publishers. Prepare for lots of rejections and hopefully one acceptance.
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It's a good suggestion. The bits and pieces we've already seen of your life in your TDG pieces prove that being interesting is a condition with which you are afflicted whether you like it or not. So why not take advantage of your unique life and outlook? The introduction to your book is already written in your East Views West piece. And several of your other pieces (especially the Meals on Wheels, Indian Style one) would make good writing samples. I think you could approach a significant publisher about this -- not a niche cookbook publisher, but one of the really big houses.
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Since when are composers, painters, and writers not driven by commercial necessity?
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Be sure to check The Daily Gullet home page daily for new articles (most every weekday), hot topics, site announcements, and more.
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There's a rumor going around that you're a Mongolian, so you don't count.
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I defy any other eGullet member to produce photographic evidence of a made-in-Mongolia product.
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Whoa! Fat Guy got a Chinggis Khaan wallet and key-case! Score!
Are you ready? This is very special . . .
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I think the lack of an agreed-upon definition of avant-garde, both in general and in the culinary context, is creating a disconnect in the conversation.
It seems to me that what Andrew & Karen are talking about when they say avant-garde is different from what Robert is talking about when he says it, which in turn is different from what Pan means by it. Not to mention, Adria and Achatz may have something else in mind altogether.
If the culinary avant-garde is defined as "what Adria is doing" then a number of question are already answered: Where is the epicenter of the avant-garde? In Spain, and specifically in Adria's restaurant and laboratory. What is the culinary avant-garde? See all the photos in The Big Book of Adria (and CD-ROM). Who are the avant-gardists? They're the chefs who have been influenced by Adria, such as Achatz. End of story.
If the culinary avant-garde is defined as "Adria plus the molecular gastronomy movement plus related non-traditional culinary movements" we get some different, broader, answers.
Ten years ago, the term avant-garde would probably have meant something very different to almost everybody when applied to cuisine. It would have meant fusion. How quaint that notion seems today. But at that time, is there any question that the vanguard of cuisine was to be found in fusion and that America was the epicenter?
It seems to me that the Brown definition contains a critical component that limits use of the term avant-garde to practicioners he finds to be skilled. I think Pan does a good job of explaining why that's not part of the definition of avant-garde. Rather, it would be the way to distinguish between avant-garde we like and avant-garde we don't like. Not liking it, or not respecting it, doesn't affect something's avant-garde status.
Would it be trite to look at the trusty dictionary definition for a moment? Merriam-Webster says avant-garde is "an intelligentsia that develops new or experimental concepts especially in the arts." There's an implicit claim here that avant-gardists must be intellectuals. This strikes me as a rather difficult criterion for most chefs to live up to. How many chefs are there who, like Achatz, can sit at a computer and type multiple in-depth intelligent and intelligible message-board posts about the meaning of the culinary avant-garde? That would be the most basic standard for qualifying someone as an intellectual -- you just can't separate intellectualism from education and literacy -- yet even that standard rules out all but a handful of the world's working chefs.
I think, from the context of what Andrew & Karen have said, that their definition of avant-garde is something else entirely. I have a feeling they simply mean that America is highly influential in the development of cuisine -- that the axis of influence is no loger running exclusively from France to everywhere else, and that at this point even the top French chefs are looking to America as a source of inspiration. In that regard, you can't find a more potent example than Ducasse. And you'll find no shortage of quotes from Michelin three-star chefs to the effect that the New World is where much of the world's culinary excitement is right now. While I wouldn't call them avant-gardists, I do think it's fair to say that chefs like Nobu, Jean-Georges, and even Rocco DiSpirito are still the chefs the culinary world is watching. The culinary world is watching Adria too, but his influence is far less direct. Trio may very well be the only explicitly avant-garde restaurant in the US that hasn't gone out of business or fired its chef. How many Nobus are there? And how many Nobu knockoffs? A lot more than one, and they're all over the world.
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Perhaps sometime in the near future we will see a site or a publication (easily available to anyone who wants to read, not just those in the food biz or academia) that aims a little more to the meat of the matter, not just to pick at the crust. I hope so and look forward to that day.
The beauty of online interactive media -- and this is why I think the Internet is the future -- is that you don't have to sit idly by and hope for someone to create whatever it is you feel is lacking. You can proactively take aim at whatever "meat of the matter" you feel has been neglected simply by starting discussions that you think will be worthy. I can't promise that every worthy subject introduced here will gain traction and result in a really good debate -- we have too much going on to hope for that -- but I can guarantee that an atypically high percentage will because all the ingredients are here: we have a sizeable group of super-intelligent and literate users running the gamut from hardcore amateur/hobbyist to some of the very top professionals in the field, we have management that is committed to supporting serious food discussion, and we have the technology to support an infinite amount of it.
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This is a conversation, not a series of competing essays being hurled at one another.
It's an inescapable reality of the message-board universe (at least insofar as open-to-the-public boards are concerned) that intellectually challenging topics are going to draw fewer topic-views than discussions of "The Restaurant" reality show (and it's probably true even if you limit membership to people with Ph.Ds in food studies). The issue isn't whether a discussion of "The Restaurant" will get more hits than this thread; the issue is what management does about it. In a purely mercenary profit-oriented world like that of Food TV, the response would be to say, "Kill the boring intellectual crap, go with more stupid reality shows." Whereas, here, we have a strong commitment to pushing this type of content. For me at least -- and since I run this site on a day-to-day basis my opinion is essentially the corporate position here -- the more frivolous threads are mostly a recruiting tool. We know they bring us media attention, we know they get a lot of incoming links, and we know they get us new members. But our vision for those new members is to hook them with the easy stuff and then pull them into the more interesting stuff. In addition, when we have fun, easy, potentially frivolous threads, we try to make them as interesting as we can. For example, in "The Restaurant" thread, we had plenty of TV-groupie-type discussion. But we also had some weighty argumentation in the mix. I defy anybody to tell me, after reading Anthony Bourdain's posts on that thread, that there was no serious commentary there. I don't recall anybody in print (or elsewhere) doing nearly as good a job critiquing the show as our users (some of whom were insiders) did -- nobody was even playing in our league. Moreover, we covered additional angles in our Webzine in a more edited, journalistic manner -- TrishCT, who is a newspaper reporter in real life, did two interview/profile pieces with ex-restaurant employees and has been trying to get Rocco DiSpirito to agree to an interview as well (so far, no luck).
I think it's easy to confuse lack of editing and editors with lack of content or ideas. But editing is a multi-purpose tool. Setting aside the purely commercial aspects of what editors do (selecting content against which advertisements can be sold, etc.), much of what editing accomplishes has to do exclusively with form. Only in rare instances, and only at the very top level of the competence, do editors contribute to the actual development of ideas. And in many (or perhaps) most cases, editors are bad for ideas: they cut, they soften, they compromise. So I think that, while online discussions like we have here do tend to get a little messy (the so-called signal-to-noise ratio), the ideas are here and, while it's always helpful for people to self-edit and think things through, editing isn't the point here.
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There's a time and a place for heavy editing and highly polished writing, and there's a time and a place for off-the-cuff spontaneous unedited conversation. A message board is about the latter, and to fault it for not being about the former makes as much sense as faulting blue for not being red.
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No and no.
I'd certainly be willing to go on a novice- or intermediate-level trek like the one Ellen does in Oregon along the Rogue River. It just happens that the Rogue trip has never worked with my schedule. And we've talked about doing a walking trip in Ireland -- I'm sure it will happen eventually. But the serious back-country travel she does in places like Mongolia, Nepal, and Africa? Forget about it. I'm not the slightest bit interested in that level of discomfort.
She, on the other hand, seems to have an infinite appetite for adventure and doesn't much care what she has to endure as part of the bargain. If I had just survived that Mongolia trip, I'd never leave my apartment again. But here she is, off to Nepal less than a month later, and I'm sure she'd go right back to Mongolia if she got an assignment to go there or if someone hired her to put together a tour.
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Our search engine can handle "Hawai`i." What it can't do, and won't be able to do any time soon, is return "Hawaii" results when somebody searches for "Hawai`i," or vice-versa. One thing that I think is safe to assume is that anybody who knows how to type "Hawai`i" is going to know that you have to search for both "Hawai`i" and "Hawaii." Whereas, the average person (almost everybody, that is) who spells it "Hawaii" is probably not even aware of the other spelling or thinks it's with an apostrophe. So we don't really have to worry about the "Hawai`i" crowd -- they'll find stuff no matter how it's spelled. What we have to worry about it the "Hawaii" crowd finding "Hawai`i" references. So "Hawaii" is probably the more eGullet-friendly term. But if there are valid reasons why "Hawai`i" is a better term, I wouldn't want to overlook those.
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Just to let you all know, Ellen flew off to Nepal tonight and won't be back for several weeks. She left me with the last installment and all the photos and some fairly complex instructions for putting the photos in the right places. Sometime in the next couple of days, I'll get it online. She will have some Internet access in the airports and city hotels and will be checking in on these threads, but there may be signigicant delays in her responses -- so please don't feel neglected if it takes awhile for her to chime in.
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Do you think people want safe food and water? Damn straight they do! Do you think people would be concerned with scarcity of food and water? Damn straight they would!
O'Neill makes a related point:
Some of the most significant stories today — the obesity epidemic, water purity, the genetic manipulation of the food supply as well as its safety and sustainability — are food-related. And while science and business writers, as well as general assignment reporters and a growing number of food scholars have and should continue to address these issues, food writers are uniquely suited to the discussion.Why are food writers uniquely suited? O'Neill says:
In addition to training and experience particular to the edible world, food writers enjoy a rare and intimate bond with readers. Shared tastes imply shared values and aspirations. A food writer is, therefore, trusted to disseminate the issues that can affect what readers put in their mouths.Setting aside for the moment the reality that only about 1 in 100 full-time professional food writers has the intellectual mettle to write seriously about anything more than trends and recipes, this is an important point because it marks the distinction between food writing and food writers. JAZ pointed to Eric Schlosser's work in Rolling Stone, which later became his book Fast Food Nation. This is, without a doubt, food writing. But Schlosser is not a food writer. And if you want to see the difference between what a food writer does and what a non-food-writer does all you need to do is look at how Schlosser defines his mission. "The aesthetics of fast food," he writes in the book's introduction, "are of much less concern to me than its impact upon the lives of ordinary Americans, both as workers and consumers." Too bad, because without a discussion of those pesky aesthetics -- a discussion that would benefit from having a real food writer on the case -- Schlosser's book only does half the job. (As for how competently it does that half, well, that's another thread.)
the Davis test
in eGullet Q&A with Randall Grahm
Posted
Wait a second. There's a difference between red and white wine? I thought the color thing was all about matching the wine to your decor.