Tonyfinch

Yes I think that's true. Or even if that class did get split the upper section were still perfectly at home in the Brasserie and did not feel the need to demand an extra tier between brasserie and formal restaurant.

Right. Am there tonight. Good oh

As a result of ridding themselves of their aristocracy the French do not associate waiting in restaurants with servility and downtroddeness. Waiting is not a class issue in France. As a consequence waiting is regarded as an honourable and worthwhile profession where skills can and are encouraged and developed. Beyond a certain level this involves a complicit "dance" between server and served with the aim of achieving mutual satisfaction. However it is a dance which involves certain set steps and if you change the steps you change the dance. This is why there is no better or more highly evolved concept of service than there is in France BUT it involves a level of formalitee which neither server or served can change without it compromising the whole operation's essential Frenchness. And that just isn't going to happen as the French hang on to every shred of cultural hegemony that they feel they have left.

Above a certain level the French expect and desire formality. Social interactions in France are governed by the rules of "politesse" They are the glue that holds French society together and all social classes buy into them. The French would feel insecure if in a restaurant above a certain level they were NOT greeted formally by waiters in tuxedos. They feel at home with the rituals. They reinforce their increasingly fragile sense of their own Frenchness, constantly perceived as being under threat from pernicious Anglo influences from America and Britain. They invented this style of dining. They're good at it and they're damned well going to hold onto it. I would hazard a guess that any restaurant above a certain level which tries to operate informally would be shunned and reviled by the French. It would not be playing by French rules and these days an increasing number of French people feel that from a socio-cultural point of view these rules are all they've got.

I find Michelin far more useful abroad than in the UK, especially in countries like Spain and Portugal, as well as France of course. Maybe its because there's far less restaurant diversity in those countries so you don't feel that the guide is wilfully ignoring whole swathes of cuisines like it appears to do here. Personally I am not a fan of the mystique it creates around its judgements. If people's livelihoods can stand and fall by its verdicts then I think the way it arrives at those verdicts should be open and transparent. As for MPW-don't forget he and Nico "handed back" their stars on the grounds that the criteria needed to maintain them were "no longer relevant to the needs of modern diners in the UK"

that doesn't bother me because i like that style of cooking, Gary, we ALL like that style of cooking. But lots of us like other styles of cooking as well. And other types of restaurants. I find the fact that Micheln appears to be so important to so many people rather odd. Like Macrosan I've never bought a copy and I hardly ever consult it. Michelin's refusal to reflect even a fraction of the diversity of cuisines available in the UK is to be deeply condemned IMO. Why do people accord this guide such status?

Surely that's the nature of Michelin, Tony. Absolutely.I was just consolidating my point in answer to Andy that the minds of the Michelin men are, in fact, drearily predictable.

So no radical predictions then. All French fine dining establishments apart from Locatelli which is an Italian fine dining establishment. Ho hum.

Well as has been pointed out elsewhere there is food writing and there is restaurant reviewing. The job of the reviewer is not the same as that of a critic. The reviewer starts from the basis that you have not been to the restaurant and that its his/her job to tell you what it's like and enable you to decide whether or not you wish to go. This cannot make for "great journalism". The critic assumes you and he are equals engaged in a discussion to which you come with foreknowledge of the subject. A great book about Hitchcock will assume that you've seen Hitchcock's films and that you're prepared to explore with the critic all their artistic aspects. This can lead to in-depth and profound analysis which can indeed be "great" if the critic is a "great" one. Some restaurant reviewers aspire to greatness. Jonathan Meades in the UK Times used to try to incorporate aspects of culture, history, politics, sociology etc. into his reviews. Trouble was if all you wanted to know as whether you could get stuffed and pissed for not much money then wading through his reviews could be a bit of a tall order. I think there's a place for a "great" book about restaurants and their relevance to all aspects of life over the last couple of hundred years. Does anyone know one?

Do you think the minds of the Michelin men are that difficult to read? I think the award of stars, in the UK at least, is a predictable affair really. You may question why this one or that one was promoted/demoted but in general its not hard to see which restaurants fit the Michelin criteria and which ones do not is it? What would be interesting is if a non- Frenchified Indian restaurant got a star. Or a Chinese restaurant, or a Middle Easten restaurant. I predict that the only new star awarded to a non French or French type restaurant will be Locanda Locatelli. When are the awards due?

I would imagine Embassy will get a star. As for Hibiscus, doesn't it lack a level of formality and fussiness which would bring it a second star?

Well I suppose Jay and his editors know better than me about the price consciousness of Observer readers, but I have to say that I would be surprised if loads of them thought $100 per head to be particularly outrageous for a top meal in a top city. The tasting menus in quite a few British restaurants are not dissimilar in price. I would have thought that Observer readers have more disposable income than most to be spent on eating out and the fact that the paper publishes a monthly food magazine would appear to indicate that the interest is there.

Whether a restaurant critic is "qualified" to be so is less important than a passion for the subject. And that subject is simple-restaurants and food. And I use the word "passion" carefully. Lots of us love eating out and love food. But I, for one, would not want to be a restaurant critic any more than I would want to be a film or music critic, because I don't have a deep passion that takes me to the point where it becomes all consuming for me. The greatest film and literary critics devote their lives to their subject. They become as important to their fields as the artists themselves. Editors do not appear to understand this when it comes to food. We all eat-so anybody who can write can write about food. BULLSHIT. It takes a true level of serious commitment to write restaurant criticism of knowledge and intelligence. In the UK only Fay Maschler of the London Standard even begins to approach the task with the seriousness it deserves. The rest spend half their time either sneering at the diners at a particular restaurant (does a film critic spend his column inches sneering at his fellow filmgoers?) or carping on about decor, or some scattily unimportant aspect of service or whatever. True analysis of food and cooking is absent from restaurant criticism and If I was a restaurateur I too would want to sling them out unless they were prepared to take what I was doing at least as seriously as those who review films and theatre and exhibitions.

Well you have argued cogently elsewhere on this site that food is not art. And I agree with you. Having said that there is no reason why critics could not take a more intellectual approach but I get the impression they are discouraged from doing so by editors who believe the review itself should be "entertaining" rather than analytical or informative.

In the UK restaurant critics do not, as a rule, take their job seriously enough to bring to it the gravitas that other creative activities attract. It as if they themselves feel that they would, if they were given the choice, be international war correspondents reporting on events in Iraq rather than on the latest set price lunch at The Beetle and Wedge. All critics MUST take the art form they are criticising seriously and believe it to be important to people's lives if they wish to be taken seriously themselves. Too many UK restaurant critics try to compensate for their sense of irrelevance by writing about things other than the restaurants or the food they are supposed to be reviewing. They feel they must display their wit, their erudition, their wisdom etc. Thus their review ends up being less about the food than about themselves. And yes the truth is-reviewing restaurants requires very little journalistic skill. As one who reviewed dozens of London restaurants in the seventies for a London listings magazine I can confirm that the job is a total piece of piss. Most reviews can be knocked off in 5 minutes after a three cocktail lunch. But that's allright. There's no law which says jobs have to be difficult to be worthwhile. Too many critics give the impression that because anyone with an interest in food and the ability to write a sentence could do the job then somehow it is not as important or as worth doing as a more difficult job. INTEREST and GRAVITAS. Those are the words critics need burned into their brains. If they show those two qualities and stop being ashamed of their job there's no reason why they can't garner the same sort of reputation of critics in other fields.

Hmmm. So which papers does the non price-conscious Britsh readership read?

Contino's reputation has remained high through a string of excellent vintages in the nineties- 91, 94, 95, 96,97 are all highly rated (although 97 wasn't a particularly good year in Rioja) CUNE have installed a controversial new vinification plant and some people believe that it has had a negative effect on quality.

Jay, do you mean that the British as a whole are "very price-conscious" or the Observer readership in particular?

A number of Indian cookbooks have pork recipes in them and Pork Vindaloo is a well known dish from Goa. Madhur Jaffrey tells how her father used to buy pork from a special butcher in Delhi and her first book contains several pork recipes as I recall. I've eaten in a number of restaurants in various parts of India and I've never seen pork or beef on a restaurant menu, not even in Goa. In contrast we know people(Sikhs) who run an Indian restaurant in Vienna. There the menu is full of pork. When I told the owner that you would never see pork on an Indian restaurant menu in the UK he laughrd and said that if it wasn't on the menu in Vienna no-one would come and eat in his restaurant.

Would that it were fatty food. No, cheese only I'm afraid. And its not revulsion, just a ....er......re-evaluation. Maybe the liver's ABOUT to turn.

I find I'm eating less and less cheese. I find so much of it so salty and I never used to so it must be me that's changing. I've also gone right off cooked cheese-seeing it now as lumps of salty molten fat, whereas I used to enjoy it. I'm not remotely interested in cheese courses in restaurants any more and am beginning to question its raison d'etre, especially as you're usually pretty stuffed by the time it comes around.

Macrosan. I can understand and relate to that idea of God and I don't dismiss it out of hand. However that was patently NOT the concept of God that I and I suspect everyone else here was brought up on. As a Jew I was brought up on the angry, tyrannical, vengeful God of the Old Testament. This chappie was deeply insecure. He was always demanding tests of people, shouting and railing at them, trapping them then blaming them for falling into the trap (Adam&Eve), demanding they kill their children ("only testing, Isaac old boy") making them wander around for years on end and generally threatening dire consequences to all who question or disobey. God is presented through organized religion as a human being. Well is he a human being or is he God? Because he can't be both. As a God he should not demand, order, threaten, punish, forgive etc. Because those are all things that human beings do and it is therefore clear that the God of organized religion as we know him is anthropomorphised in order to control and manipulate societies and cultures. The God in your quote may exist. But he's not the one who issued the dietry laws. THAT one is us

Yes, it's as if the Muslim strictures on alcohol are just completely ignored in Turkey, where booze of all kinds is available everywhere and is dirt cheap. Not only Turkey, but Algeria, Tunisia, and Morroco all have large wine industries, although the total area under vine in these countries has diminished somewhat in recent years.

So. After all that, a Jewish or a Muslim child asks "But WHY can't I eat pork?". What can one TRUTHFULLY say to him/her? There is only one answer. In the words of Topol- "TRADITION!" Its the way it is. S/he can either nod and accept it or question it and look for its rationale. I suppose I'm saying that I believe that the world is better served by those who do the latter rather than the former. Do the former do us any harm? Indirectly yes, by not being ther latter.

"Schneersonanity" If I don't learn a single other new word in 2003 that one will do. Thank you VivreManger