Tonyfinch

Now that's what I call advice! I ate here twice in the early nineties and two lovely meals in the gorgeous setting which your report fully evokes. Never stayed there though, which is clearly the ovbvious thing to do.

Classic projection. That is exactly what YOU do all the time. You are the ONLY person here hung up on what is best because you live in a world where everything has to be either better or worse than everything else. Nobody here makes any claim to be eating the best food but you. No-one is claiming that "cassoulet" or "pasta" is better or worse than any other food. Speaking for myself I couldn't give a monkey's hoot whether what I eat is considered by you or anyone else to be the best or not. That is a neurosis possessed entirely by you as far as I can see.

The question was about Italy's relevance to "modern gastronomy". It is you who insists that that means its relevance to a very specific type of dining in very expensive 3 star restaurant,which you repeatedly refer to as "the standard" Many people on the thread have chosen to take a far broader view of the term "modern gastronomy" and come to the conclusion that it represents a spectrum of modern eating patterns which both derive from and work towards a range of traditions and influences and which suit a range of eating needs and lfestyles. Italy's relevance in that sense has been meaningfully and intelligently discussed and the general consensus is that it remains very much alive.

But maybe that meal doesn't sound so attractive to people other than those who rate that kind of meal above all others. Maybe to others it sounds pretentious, prissy fiddly-widdly,gussied up and self indulgent,with no connection whatsoever to tradition or terroir or anything in fact which might appeal to Italians. They dont WANT that kind of restaurant and they dont WANT that kind of food. If this means that they refuse to join the self appointed cognoscentis view of what is and is not "relevant",well so be it and good bloody luck to them. Woe betide us if in an ideal world every restautrant ended up like that one.

That's a description of what it is, not how it is relevant. Some of us are trying to discuss in what way it is just as relevant to people's lives,if not more relevent,than French haute cuisine and why.

Steve the horse is dead. Stop flogging it. By your definition of "relevant" you are right. The discussion had moved beyond that and we were trying to come to a consensus about which way Italian cuisine IS relevant.

I forgot to add a Chinese resaturant called New River which is situated in New Crane Wharf and has a nice river view. The food is pleasant enough without being in any way exciting or surprising.

This is what Rogers and Gray tried(and still do) to replicate at The River Cafe in London. Sourcing the beat ingredients and serving them simply was in fact groundbreaking stuff in terms of upscale restaurants where people's expectation is of very worked and transformed food. Suddenly people were paying top prices for considered simplicity and rusticity. The restaurant caused massive controversy (is it worth it?) but it gave the London restaurant consumer a new lens through which to view Italian cuisine and they embraced what they saw by buying the cookbooks in their millions. Suddenly people began to think if I can only get the ingredients I can cook meals just like they serve in a very expensive restaurant. In that way Italian cuisine cretaes a connection between home and restaurant that is the antithesis of everything a top French restaurant tries to do.And maybe within that very antithesis lies its "relevance".

Working in Wapping? I didn't know you were an Estate Agent. Whereabouts will you be? Wharf is an excellent Thai restaurant. Next door to it is Il Bordello,a perfectly decent upmarket Trattoria with huge pizzas and some decent fish and seafood specials. On Wapping Lane there's a Pizza Express and an Indian/Bagladeshi restaurant (2 separate menus) called Le Spice. The food is ordinary but you can BYO. As I've said before, Wapping Food can't make up its mind whether it's a restaurant in an art gallery or vice versa. The standard varies but I enjoyed the last meal I had there a couple of weeks ago. It's got a short but very good all Aussie wine list. More towards St Katherine Dock is Smollenskys. Simon M, extolled the virtues of a steak he had there on this board and I can vouch for that as I had an excellent steak there too. There are several pretty riverside pubs in Wapping but the standard of food is very ordinary. Your best bet is the restaurant on the first floor of The Captain Kidd which buys its meat from the good butcher on Wapping Lane. In fact that butcher is the only decent food shop in the area and there's certainly no cofee bar like Konditor and Cook,although the little coffee bar on the ground floor of my block of flats,Merchant Court, is OK for a coffee and a quick lunch pit stop. PM me with where you're going to be and maybe we can meet up for a meal.

Fondutas may not be but polenta certainly is. It's been on the menu in some form in several non-Italian restaurants I've been to recently-mainly of the 'Modern European' type. Also risotto is turning up in unexpected places and in different forms as an accompaniment rather than as a course in itself.

A couple of years ago Andrew Lloyd Webber sold off a large swathe of his cellar including all his 82 Claret. In an article about it he railed against the 82s. I can't remember his exact words but "weedy","thin", "dried out" come to mind. OK he's only one guy but I've since read a number of revisionist comments and pieces on the 82s, with "be wary" being the current watchword. But 82 was promoted at the time as being a wonderful vintage with some extolling it as one of the vintages of the century. I don't remember hearing a dissenting voice. So what's going on? Were all those famous palates wrong? Is it a matter of taste? Are we being conned?

Higgins,you mean you haven't wandered a few hundred yards down the road towards Kennington to The Lobster Pot-the most ludicrous OTT fish restaurant in London,with seagulls on the soundtrack and the staff all gussied up as French fishermen etc.? Actually its a hit and miss place. I've been twice and both times quality veered wildly within the meal. There's a retail outlet next door so everything is spanking fresh. Its not cheap but it'll certainly take your mind off the lovely Elephant &Castle for a couple of hours.

Britcook,could it be that many of those making Claret in the 80s still hadn't realized how winemaking standards were shooting up all around them,not only in the New World but in parts of Spain,Italy and France as well? People are much more knowledgeable now and we'reused to high quality wines wherever we look.Maybe these wines just don't compare as well as they once used to.

Steve,you'd be lucky to find Haut Brion '85 here at £100 per bottle. According to Decanter magazine the current auction price is £2035 per case.

There's a lot on this board about the recently opened Racine- a French restaurant on Old Brompton Rd (I think). Apart from that Bombay Brasserie in Courtfield Rd is one of London's best upmarket Indians, and Cambio de Tercio, also on Old Brompton Rd, is now rated by many as London's best Spanish.

Maybe not now but all the old haute cuisine restaurants employed a sauce chef and all the sauces would be separately made. What you have described is not a classic h-c technique. There would be a basic array of fonds de cuisine and the sauce cuisinier would tinker around and develop sauces from them. In all the top old restaurants the sauce chef was the one who had access to all the cooking alcohol and they often had to keep a close eye on how much he was tippling in case he ended up face down in the demi-glace.

I happen to have drunk quite a lot of claret recently. Not first growths admittedly but good growths from good to excellent years(82.83,86) They are very expensive to buy now. I'm sorry but I just don't get it. Compared to some Rhones (especially Cote Roties) and Burgundies I've had recently, not to mention some brilliant Italians, these wines seem one dimensional,ludicrously austere,tannic and fruitless. Are they still too young? What am I missing?

Don't get too self congratulatory. It could just mean we're bored.

Here we go! I detect Steve now beginning to intermingle the terms "high" and "best": "cuisine expressed ay the highest level" sounds suspiciously like "the best cuisine" to me,whether it works in every individual case or not. Haut Cuisine is not "cuisine expressed at the highest (ie. best) level". It is one form of cuisine. The language analogy holds. Is Italian a "higher" form of expression than French? Is Punjabi a "higher" form of expression than Mandarin Chinese? These are meaningless questions to the point of being stupid ones. Within each language you have those who speak it coarsley and those who speak it beautifully and all points in between but comparisons only work within the codes. Thus what the Fat Duck does with crab can only be asessed within a certain culinary language. The word "haut" only applies because the French are obsessed with hierarchies throughout their cultural world. Haut as opposed to Bas, but not "highest "compared with what a top chef in Taiwan or Hong Kong may be doing with crab,which will have nothing to do with ice cream and guava jelly but which will be just as "high" an expression,believe you me.

"Fine Dining" probably works as well as anything else. "High Dining" might be about your state of mind when you sit down at table but I noticed "high end dining" has been used around this site on a number of occasions. I agree completely with FG that haute cuisine can be awful. That's because it describes a level of ambition which is more prone to failure. The more ambition to "work" the food into something which transcends the basic ingredients that a restaurant shows the more chance there is of a kitchen or chef who is not up to the job cocking it up big time. I've often come out of restaurants,especially in Britain and the States, thinking "if only they'd kept it simpler it would have been SO much better". That's why if an ambitious restaurant does have a named chef its probably a safer bet as he/she's staking a reputation on a successful outcome.

It's in teresting that h-c was described as "the creamiest" a while back and that what turns Novelli's terrine into h-c is a beurre blanc. I have a book called Secrets of the Great French Restaurants by Louisette Bertholle from 1972. There are recipes in it from every Michelin starred French restaurant at the time. At a rough guess I would say that 95% of those recipes contain butter, cream,alcohol or a combination of those and often all three. I have an Alan Senderens cookbook from the 80s in which every recipe contains cream. Even allowing that things may not be quite the same now, I still think that h-c is expected to involve certain established ingredients to which the chef's technique is then applied. Other standard ingredients are foie gras truffles and beef fillet. Is there an haut cuisine restaurant anywhere in the world that doesn't have a preparation of foie gras somewhere on the menu? So a pre-condition for h-c is a very specific set of ingredients which facilitate the creamy,silky finish to a dish so prized bu those who rate French h-c food above all others. A chef who applies all his/her technique to a completely different set of ingredients may produce fine food but in most people's minds it will not be haute cuisine. It will be a different language and,of course,to some an inferior one.

There is an Italian restaurant near where I live. It is basically an upmarket trat. with pizza and pasta and some extras and specials and salads etc. There are dozens of places serving similar food in London. It is not cheap,but it is always packed to the gunwhales. It is mobbed out every night. Slam next door is a brilliant Thai restaurant which is always half empty. It seems to me that in London Italian food is "safe food". It is familiar and predictable. People feel relaxed with it. It is not challenging or demanding or cerebral or emotional. It's more like a familiar family member or an old mate. Some Italian restaurants are pushing boundaries but when people say they "fancy an Italian"(meal,that is) the're not really talking about Locatelli or the River Cafe because the experience of going to those places is more of a haut cuisine experience. They're talking about the trattoria down the road,tarted up with art on the walls for the local yuppies,but a trattoria nonetheless. They feel at home there in a way they never would in a French restaurant . What this says about "relevance" I'm not sure but it would take a brave resterateur to tamper with a formula that has turned their restaurants into cash cows.

It's definitely the former. If people wanted it there would be those who could do it all right. Fashion and design are the great creative areas of Italian cultural life. Interestingly they are now making more complex and developmental wine than ever before. I had a Brunello the other day which really showed me what it was all about. But with food they want Mama. They don't want haut cuisine. They want to be reminded of home and family and childhood . Eating together is an active expression of the unity of family and friends and this unity is represented by the perfectly cooked mushroom rather than the Flan de Champignons.

I think that's right. People may want different thjings from high end French dining but I suspect words like "simplicity," "purity", "staightforward", "quality of ingredients" are not what is at the forefront of most people's minds. As has been said,they want the food "worked" by the chef, they want complicated food combinations etc. This is what made The River Cafe in London such a radical restaurant when it opened. It claimed itself to be Italian and stressed a philosophy that was the antithesis of what was considered to be cutting edge dining. Pure,high quality ingredients mucked about with as little as possible. Less was more. Italian restaurants in Italy feel much more like extensions of the family home than French restaurants do in France. You can imagine a lot of the food being cooked in the home. It's what you might cook at home yourself. This is the total opposite of French restaurants,so once again the question of "relevance" depends totally on one's pre conceived ideas about what dining in restaurants should be about.

I think that's a key point. As someone said a couple of pages ago, Italy was only unified as a country very recently in historical terms. It has always needed to maintain unifying influences and that need means you can only experiment and change in a limited number of public arenas. Italy chose fashion and design as the areas in which to fly free. And food and football remained as symbols of a kind of pan-Italian conservatism As Steve pointed out you can have players in the Italian football team from Milan and Naples and points in between -but the team always plays in the same cautious,conservative way and the regional differences are played right down. Change and experimentation in this context becomes a threat to unity and leads to cries from the likes of Peter P. when faced with new ideas that this or that is not "real" Italian food. Maybe Italy's concept of itself as unified entity is more fragile than we think and as a reult it is still more concerned with culinary consolidation rather than experimentation.