jordyn

I was fairly certain that I had made reservations for one through OpenTable in the past, and just verified that it was possible to select "1" diner within the "Make Reservations" screen and to correctly display a list of available tables. (Interestingly, Ilo is listed as an option despite discussions here in the past that they will not accept reservations for one.) Suzanne: Do you simply not see an option for one diner when making the reservation, or does the system give you some sort of error when you make the selection? Either way, it sounds like a bug that you might want to report.

Nina: Thanks for bringing this program to my attention and giving me motivation. I've also signed up for this fall's Intermediate course, and am looking forward to it.

Cabrales -- Is there a reason that Annisa is no longer one of your preferred restaurants, or did you simply get distracted by other restaurants?

I ate at Jane for the first time last night. Here are my first impressions: service nice but not particularly knowledgeable; casual but elegant room with nice dark wood tones; very loud; and with average food. The menu is composed of three flatbread options, about a half-dozen appetizers, three pasta choices, four or five fish options, and four meat items. The winelist is short but somewhat interesting (it even includes two bottles from New York state), with white and red wines subdivided into sections such as "Crisp" and "Gentle" (in the case of whites). I sampled the goat cheese flatbread with carmelized onion. This was a bad description, as the flatbread was covered almost completely with onion, with a relatively small amount of goat cheese. The onion was quite sweet and rapidly became overwhelming; this dish would have been better had the goat cheese been the dominant element. As an appetizer I had fried clams, accompanied by a citrus and jalapeno marmalade. This was fine, but I felt that the marmalade would have been better if it had more jalapeno kick. As it was, it was somewhat bland, although the coolness was a refreshing contrast against the crispy, fried exterior of the clams. Also sampled was the market salad, which was quite good. Very fresh and intensely flavored vegetables. Simple but refreshing. My entree was an asparagus and parmesan risotto. Once again, I found the flavors here to be a bit overwhelming. The dish could have used slightly less cheese, perhaps, and the flavor of the asparagus could have been brought out a bit more cleanly. Also sampled was a farfalle with sweet peas, chives and truffle butter. This dish is usually accompanied by shrimp, but my dining companion is vegetarian, so he requested that they be removed. Unfortunately, the dish was not very interesting without the shrimp: competently executed, but somewhat boring.

I'm not sure how much I trust their judgement, but a few years back Time Out wrote up a syopsis of a bunch of different wine courses in the City: http://www.timeoutny.com/eatout/128/128.ea...ne.classes.html More recently, one of their writers tried the class given by the American Sommelier Association, which also includes (shorter) synopses of other programs: http://www.timeoutny.com/eatout/282/282.eat.feat.html

Actually, wasn't she shocked to discover that Le Cirque 2000 treated everyone pretty well? I think it was the original Le Cirque that she downgraded to three stars for uneven treatment, but the archives don't go back that far.

Ha! I am faster at finding things.

I found the review, and you don't even have to pay. She gave ithe restaurant four stars, and listed the soup as one of the recommended dishes.

I don't remember whether or not the soup had truffles in it, but she did say that it was awfully good.

I'm obviously a product of my environment, having only started to eat at "good" restaurants in the second half of the 90's. Having said that, I like the New Dining. I find it more interesting to see what a chef will consider to be a meal rather than a list of appetizers and entrees. I find that having a smaller but sufficient number of staff hanging around makes for a more comfortable dining experience. The times I've been to one of the few remaining palaces of the Old Dining, I've found them a bit cold and more stiff than suits my taste. Also, while I don't know enough to speak to the potential loss of a repetoire of great dishes, I have found that many of the restaurants I am familiar with that are perhaps most representative of the New Dining seem to be the most accomodating of special requests, alterations or wholesale replacements of the menu, whether it is theoretically set or not. In the New Dining, the chef has not stopped cooking for the benefit and delight of the customer, although he or she will gladly put together a complete meal for you prefer to trust their judgment about the composition of the meal. Perhaps as the New Dining evolves, we will see menus at good restaurants start to resemble the repetoires of dance companies. When you go to a dance performance, you don't get the same choices available every night, but eventually quality older items are served up again, often in conjunction with new ones as well. The dishes of days gone by do not need to be abandoned if they are not served every night, but can return from time to time to invigorate the menu. Some classics may be so good that they are almost always available (in dance, this is something like Ailey's "Revelations"; in food, something like Thomas Keller's "ice cream cone" of salmon tartare), while others will be on and off the menu as the season and the rest of the menu dictates.

It measures what people prefer to buy. There may be a difference.

This is, of course, absurd. Consumer Reports has a system for evaluating products that has nothing to do with price. They give it a red dot if it is a good product and a black dot if it is a bad product, and a white dot if it is a medium product. The New York Times has a restaurant evalutaing ssystem that theoretically takes price into account, but values factors such as cuisine and service significantly more heavily. They give restaurants that are exceptionally good four stars, ranging down to not particularly good restaurants which get no stars. Roger Ebert has a mechanism of evaluating films; if they are good, he gives them "thumbs up" and if they are bad, "thumbs down". Price is the way that markets evaluate items. Supply plays as much of a role as demand, and "quality" is merely a factor that influences these other elements; it does not, in and of itself, lead to a pricing calculus in a free market. (On an unrelated note, in New York City at least, there is farily robust competition for pay phones. First, there are many non-Verizon pay phones. This probably explains why New York has had relatively lower payphone prices than most other places since the FCC deregulated payphone prices. Second, cell phones also compete with pay phone usage.)

As long as we're asking questions--just how hard is it to get a reservation at El Bulli, and what's the best approach to securing one?

Not to keep answering questions with questions, but how cheap is cheap?

So, are you agreeing that economics is the overriding factor? The Mets play at Shea Stadium because they can sell a lot more tickets there than at Hunter High. Jean Georges cooks (every once in a while) at 1 Central Park West because he can charge a lot more there than he could at my linoleum join in the East Village?

What I really like is having my options open. If Jean Georges Vongerichten wants to serve me a meal in a dining room with lots of linoleum and where I need to walk up to the kitchen pass through and get my own food, I imagine the food would still taste plenty good. Sometimes that's all I want--really good food, without all the trapping of the fine dining experience. This turns out not to be very easy, though. Some chefs probably believe that the experience of their food is intimately tied to decor and service elements. I suspect another factor is economics: you can probably earn more money from your food if you fancy it up a lot.

Holly's post has got me wondering why there is such a strong correlation between high end food and high end service. Almost invariably, the complex, high quality food that many of us so enjoy is accompanied by expensive decor and fawning service. Often, this is nice. For special occasion meals, a lot of people probably want the pomp. But what if I want to eat really amazing food every night? Do I need to put myself through a formal multi hour eating ritual? I know that there are good quality bistros and the like, but the food in these places is generally simpler as well. Why aren't there places with fancy food but not fancy digs?

People are often willing to pay more for better quality. The markets are usually fairly efficient. Neither of these means a $4.99 per pound tomato is necessarily better than a $.99 per pound tomato, which was your original claim.

I'm with Tommy. I think March can't be beat for dinners for two. It has an intimate feel that is nice for that particular number, and I've always found the food to be excellent. I think Jean Georges is more interesting than Lespinasse, and the room is more to my taste than Lespinasse, so it would be my second choice.

So, Steve P, are you trying to say: "Most of the time, you have to pay more to get more" -OR- "Most of the time, when you pay more you get more" These statements are very different, I think. The first is much more likely to be true than the second.

Steve, you're right that if there were nothing interesting or compelling about scarce products, they still wouldn't sell for very much. My point is simply that scarce products are not accurately priced relative to their quality. I bet you could name a whole bunch of wines better than Screaming Eagle for half the price. Paying more in such a case gets you something unique, but not necessarily of better quality than the cheaper item.

All things being equal, supply and demand determine price. Usually, a superior product will be in greater demand, but not necessarily. Sometimes items are in demand because they are trendy; sometimes good items are overlooked by the public at large, which allows a savvy consumer to obtain a high quality item at relatively low price. These aren't "unique circumstances" because they happen all the time. Similarly, items that are scarce are abnormally expensive. Fat Guy's example of a ruined crop of citrus may be an exceptional case, but there are many cases of items being continuously expensive because of scarcity alone. Is platinum "better" than gold? It's more expensive, but this probably doesn't have much to do with the relative merits of the metals, and has everything to do with scarcity. Similarly, in wine, does a bottle of Screaming Eagle cost many hundreds of dollars because it is the absolute best wine, or because so little is produced each year? Obviously, a base quality needs to be there for there to be sufficient demand, but if the supply is small, crazy things can happen to price. This has a significant degree of relevance to many luxury food items which are quite scarce.

I think JD's point is just the opposite--the other factors are the cause. The geography has little or nothing to do with it. As I indicated early on, I'm happy to concede that some travellers through France likely propagated some food knowledge. However, this was likely to have ocurred in just about every country in Europe. As a result, this factor is not something that sets France apart from other countries. I think Wilfrid made this argument quite effectively some time back.

It seems difficult to prove the point that French food is "the best". First, I doubt that there is such a thing as an objective way to taste food. I have been wanting to post on the "Raising food-savvy children" topic that our palates must be strongly shaped by what we eat when we are young. I never got around to it there, but I will make the argument here: the fact that Thais like food that is much spicier than most Americans can stand, or that the Cantonese love eating foods that many other cultures find rather unpleasant, or that Americans like flavors that are significantly sweeter than those that most other cultures enjoy cannot be explained any other way. We learn to like the types of flavors that we are regularly exposed to, and I suspect that we learn much of this at a rather young age. Indeed, palates are probably shaped by our geographic location, our culture, and even our socieconomic status. In other threads, there has been talk of "retraining your palate", which I believe is possible, but I'm not sure that it comes as a matter of increased objectivity, but rather a shift to a different type of measurement. Yes, there are people who smell things or taste them for a living and report results that many people agree with. However, McDonalds food is also designed to produce a pleasing flavor that huge numbers of people enjoy. Many of us here would find McDonalds hamburgers unpleasant, but a cassoulet marvelous; there are certainly many people who would have the opposite reaction. In terms of evaluating food, we want to hear from people with similar palates, so the trained palates that Steve P. refers to are probably useful for us; for others, the opinions of these finely honed palates is just so much hot air because there is no useful reference point for them. I look at wine as a clear example of this. If there were such a thing as an "objective" palate, each wine reviewer would have an identical reaction. We know this is not the case, and this is why we have many reviewers. People will learn which reviewers have tastes most similar to them, and presumably consider that opinion with greater weight than other reviewers. It seems likely to me that no two people will have identical tastes, so there will always be some matter for subjective disagreement. We take the same approach with movie or music reviews. There is not a 'universally accepted' standard for movie reviewing objectivity, so we find critics whose opinions generally match our own and go to movies that they recommend. My second main argument is that there is no way to value even a true consensus of the supposed objective Western tasters of food over the consensus views of various other cultures, such as India or China. These cultures are at the very least numerically superior to the entire Western population of the world. Presumably, there are people in these other cultures who are equally trained eaters, and who have equally refined palates. It is the height of narcisism to suppose that our opinions are somehow more valid than theirs.

Here's my experience, based on trying to get a table on a Friday or Saturday. Reservations are taken two months in advance, to the day. It is very hard to get past the busy signals on the phone number. All tables are booked within an hour and a half of the reservations line being opened (which I think is at 10 AM Pacific time). The best approach is to constantly redial over and over and over again. Do not tire and "wait for a little while" before trying again. Keep redialing until an hour has passed or you have secured a reservation. The restaurant is going to be closed for a couple of weeks starting later in July. The day the restaurant opens might be a very good day to try and get reservations. On that day, they will be taking reservations for all of the days that they missed while they were closed as well, so there will be a much larger pool of tables that you are competing for (probably more competition too, though). To get the exact dates, call late at night. They will be closed, but you will get a friendly recorded message with more information about the reservation process and the closure. Apparently, they will take your reservation if you show up in person. If I lived in Oakland I would drive out there and be waiting at the door when they opened. This way you will not have to deal with the constant busy signals that you get on the phone line.