Jonathan Day

Robert's comment about chefs focusing on the classic dishes brought to mind a 1921 letter from George Bernard Shaw to an aspiring American actress, Molly Tompkins, who on Shaw's advice had enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. An excerpt: ...what you want is work, or rather sheer drudgery to put up your muscle, and give you the hard driven professional touch that comes from doing a thing every day for ten years and in no other way. Without that, although you may know how a thing should be done, and understand it a thousand times better than a hack fifty-dollar-a-week actress, she will "get it across" more effectively than you. I dont know whether you are a musician. If not, you dont know Mozart : and if you dont know Mozart you will never understand my technique. If you are, you must have noticed sometime or another that though a composer may play his music ever so much more beautifully and intelligently than a professional pianist, yet he cannot produce the same effect in a concert room because he hasnt got the steel in his fingers. You have to get steel in the muscles of your face, and steel in your heart, by hammering away every day (or night) until you can hit the boy at the back of the gallery in a three hundred pound house. (From To a Young Actress: The Letters of Bernard Shaw to Molly Tompkins) Something similar might be said for aspiring chefs. There is also a connection with this discussion of a UK television programme in which a young "chef" prepares fancy but disgusting dishes (scallops on disks of black pudding with hollandaise sauce) but cannot make an omelette.

This last point is a good one. Let's also remember that Escoffier led the "industrialisation" of many aspects of the production of haute cuisine, in his codification and his development of the brigade system, all of which enabled greater efficiency in the kitchen and the delivery of much greater choice on the carte. I can imagine people in Escoffier's time writing letters of complaint about the rigidity and uniformity that he imposed on cuisine, the loss of artistic scope in the service of speed and efficiency.

I'm guessing that Jellybean is going one step further. In my experience, having high-calibre, haute cuisine restaurants in a town benefits the "cheap eats" places in that area. The local suppliers are more "on their toes" and apprentices who work in the area are likely to have spent time in a haute cuisine kitchen, even if they eventually work in a bistro. And the local customers are more aware of fine food and more demanding, even in the informal restaurants. This "clustering" phenomenon appears in other industries -- in Germany, for example, where many firms produce printing equipment and inks, it's no accident that consumers will return their morning paper if the ink on one page is at all smeared. Ceramics in Italy. Restaurants in Lyon -- both haute cuisine and otherwise. This is simple economics at work, not snobbery.

Thank you for a marvellous story! I would like to contrast your approach with the one taken by Raymond Oliver, in his La Cuisine. I have a lot of respect for M. Oliver, who was formerly chef at Le Grand Véfour, but the differences suggest why some of the dishes people tasted at Chapel were so unforgettable. In discussing purée de carottes à la crème he says to peel the carrots, cook them in boiling salted water until tender, mash them "as you would potatoes", then cook the purée, stirring over low heat until the moisture has evaporated; then butter, salt, pepper and crème fraîche are added. So this leads me to a few questions: 1) Why simply rub the carrots, why not peel them? 2) Why cook the carrots in a small amount of water, only adding more when the existing water has evaporated? 3) Does it make that much difference that they were rubbed through a sieve rather than mashed, or, as we would today, put through a robot-coupe? Of course I am sure that superb carrots, butter, cream -- and cooking water -- made a big difference!

I was Vivre's dining companion for this event. I broadly agree with his judgement of the plates and of this meal, but my overall assessment would be a bit warmer. It wasn't the best that I have had at Gordon Ramsay, but it had lots of the precision, subtlety and elegance that he tries for and usually delivers. There are 3-stars in France that can do better; there are few here. I love consommé as a way to begin a meal, but this one was just a bit restrained, though the aroma of the truffles came through nicely. The foie was very good. The turbot was outstanding, perfectly cooked and full of flavour. Then the trotters, which if I recall correctly we had substituted for another dish. Good, but not what we had expected. As Vivre said, the sweetbreads didn't really make an impression. I don't think this dish was oversalted. Gordon Ramsay and the chefs in his "school" tend to use salt liberally, but where I have had badly oversalted dishes at Pétrus, Ramsay goes right up to the line and stops there. I thought the venison was fine. The sauce was not as bold as it might have been, but it was clean and direct, and the texture of the meat was very good. It just isn't Ramsay's way to make big, "wow" sauces -- his work is always elegant and a bit restrained. I believe we had cheese before dessert. If this isn't a false memory, the cheeseboard was in fine condition, and the waiter was knowledgeable about the offerings. Those salty caramels were wonderful and it was hard to stop eating them. I arrive at the restaurant rather jangled, after a morning of crazy meetings and calls. I left feeling refreshed and relaxed. Some of this came from the food -- which this time I would have rated as "two stars+"; some from the lovely setting and the caring service; and much from Vivre's conversation, which definitely merits three stars.

"Commander", let me join the chorus of welcome to eGullet. Rarely have two first posts been of that depth and quality. I hope we'll see many more from you! Just to support your point about the status of recipes in the made world, I remember looking over the notebook of a French friend who is a pastry chef. The "recipes" were the sketchiest you could imagine in some cases, nothing more than a list of ingredients and perhaps a few ratios. And this was for pastry, the most precise form of cookery, one that my friend described as "chemistry" (la chimie) because of the need for precision in weighing and measuring things. In this case -- and I would guess that this is true for most professionals -- the recipe is hardly an object, more a way of retrieving a set of memories of the physical experience of making Paris-Brest or Napoléons or whatever. The knowledge here is tacit, not explicit. The recipe is far less explicit than a music score, for example.

This isn't the first time that Gordon Ramsay has done a makeover on a wannabee chef. There was a programme called "Faking It" a few years ago in which a burger flipper had to pass himself off as a chef -- at a much higher standard of cuisine and customer -- and had about a month to retrain himself. Gordon was one of the retrainers. What I found interesting was that the burger-flipper genuinely engaged in what he was being taught -- he worked hard, put up with the fuckspeak and abuse, and in fact did remake himself: not only did he fool a roomful of food critics, but he ended up changing careers and becoming a real cook. The "chef" last night started out in a fantasy world, believing that he would become a television chef, creating "artistic" dishes, when in fact he couldn't even clean his kitchen. His response to Gordon's tirades was consistently passive: he would try to comply but would consistently lapse back into bad habits. Through incredible effort, they filled the restaurant one night; a month later, the kitchen was filthy and the bookings back to 4 customers. No "transformation" had in fact occurred, and in this sense I guess Gordon failed in his mission. What Gordon was shouting at the "chef" was sound: establish a relationship with your manager! Clean the kitchen! Care about the quality of the products you cook! Find a few dishes that your customers enjoy and make those well! Take charge of what you're doing! Forget about cheffy fantasies! Nothing wrong with any of that advice.

The UK is moving to chip-and-PIN cards, as already used in France. With a bit of luck these will be compatible with the French system of cartes à puce, and it will just be a matter of feeding in your card and keying your code. Having one of these cards makes life in France far easier. Before we had a French bank account, I remember running out of petrol during a local supply crisis and begging the person behind me in the queue to accept banknotes in return for use of their card, since the pumps would only accept chip-and-PIN cards. Incidentally, I don't think it is particularly difficult for foreigners to hold an account with a French bank, though the commercial terms are truly awful -- no interest paid, high fees for everything. But a very regular gastronomic traveller might want to open one of these in order to have easy access to Euro payments.

What was amazing (apart from Gordon's use of "fuck", "fucker", "fucking" or some derivative thereof roughly every 6.5 seconds) was the way the young "chef" aspired to culinary greatness -- twizzling sauces around his dishes, stacking scallops and black puddings, making pilgrimages to see Gary Rhodes -- yet had a complete and utter contempt for food. A very memorable programme.

Let me pose the following question to this group: suppose that eGullet were to sponsor a restaurant rating or ranking or more formal reviewing system. Further suppose, contrary to fact, that resources were not an issue. - What would you want the rating system to do that our forum-based reviews don't do right now, if anything? - How would you go about rating or ranking restaurants? What criteria would you apply? What methodology would you use to apply those criteria? - How would you deal with some of the issues already noted on this thread? This isn't an attempt to design an eGullet system, more to shift the conversation from the critical to the constructive. Who knows, perhaps Restaurant Magazine could adopt our approach next year...

Er, isn't fraîche the feminine form of the adjective frais, meaning either cold, new or unchanged? And isn't crème feminine? So I don't think you would find crème frais (or crème liquid for that matter: it would be liquide). Grammar apart, I think bleu is correct: crème fleurette is unfermented, and is the same thing as crème liquide and crème fraîche liquide. Crème fraîche also known as crème fraîche épaisse is the fermented product. But perhaps a real connoisseur of crème, someone who understands la crème de la crème can set us straight on all of this.

In an offline conversation, Robert Brown described, in lyrical terms, a carrot mousse that he had enjoyed at Restaurant Alain Chapel. Guy, could you tell us more about this, and how it was made? Is this something that can be produced at home?

As you will see, the conversation with Guy Gateau has already started. Please join in! You can pose a new question to Guy or to any of the roundtable discussants by starting a new topic, you can comment on Guy's essay in The Daily Gullet (click here to read it), or you can post on any of the topics already in the forum. We won't use a moderation queue on this forum, so we're counting on you to keep your comments and questions on-topic and constructive, and to give everyone a chance to speak.

I don't think this question can ever be answered in the abstract: it depends entirely on what you like. Aikens and Ramsay both care a lot about finding good ingredients and cooking them well. But Aikens's food has a wildness complexity that Ramsay's doesn't. The dishes at Gordon Ramsay have a simplicity and purity about them that is very appealling. Those at Aikens have a wild complexity (think of a style a bit baroque, a bit Dr Seuss) -- this-and-that-and-the-other-thing, all together -- that is also appealling, because in general his combinations work. But it is very different, and if your palate is tuned to the simple and classical you could experience something of a grinding of mental gears when you sit down at Tom Aikens's place. Personally, I would go to both. But as I said above, it depends entirely on what you like.

The Moulin is closed on Mondays -- which is one reason we went to the Auberge de la Fenière -- report is here. Food was good, some of it very good; wine list excellent value, service sometimes reminiscent of Fawlty Towers. Well worth a visit, though.

I agree with Vedat's point: have things changed at the very top of the field, or for diners in general? I've addressed this issue in a separate topic. On Guy Gateau's important question: it seems to me that there has been a large advance in recent years owing to the new and more science-based understanding of temperatures and cooking methods. When I first learned to cook (late 1960s) there was a great deal of "lore" around, with little understanding of why a particular food was to be cooked in a certain way. Green beans had to be boiled in enormous amounts of heavily salted water -- and it worked, but probably not for the reasons people thought. Mushrooms could never be washed, only gently brushed. The big step in the last 10 years, between experimenters like McGee and Hervé This and such chefs as Blumenthal, Gagnaire and Adrià is that these dogmas, these bits of "lore" are being challenged and subjected to experiment. Washing field mushrooms only adds minuscule amounts of water to them. Green beans can be boiled in smaller amounts of water, if the water has the right characteristics. We know how proteins react to temperature changes. We know not only how to produce pommes purées as Robuchon does, we know why his method works. Are we at the start of a golden age? I'm not sure, but it is clear that a stronger understanding of food chemistry and physics has opened up new possibilities for chefs. At the very least, we have the potential for a golden age, if we can figure out how to realise it.

Some of these word pictures are more vivid even than the great photographs you've been posting. Thanks for taking the time and care to make this week memorable for so many.

To learn more about the Maîtres Cuisiniers de France, click here

I have a lot of sympathy with Marcus's point of view. It has to be more than an impressionistic list if it is to be useful. My impression from Andy's report is that Restaurant Magazine used more of a Zagat-type poll -- conducted by highly professional raters, of course, but not based on a single point of view or framework about what "better" really meant. Nor did they require every rater to have visited all or most of the restaurants reported on. Michelin and G-M work from a framework, and their raters compare judgements and strive for consistency. In some cases, they work from an agenda, as when G-M became an advocate of nouvelle cuisine. I think it is useful to have a list of the top restaurants in any particular category -- in this case, I guess the implicit category was "haute cuisine", with some implications about price point, elaborateness of service, and degree of the kitchen's intervention with the products before they reached the table. If what you wanted was perfectly cooked seafood, unadorned but fresh, with the simplest of service, I would be surprised if any of these 50 made the list. And I would struggle to place either category ("haute cuisine" or "perfect seafood") above the other; hence the notion of 50 absolutely "best" restaurants in the world is absurd. But this is a topic that has been debated extensively on these pages!

I'm well aware of the constant pressure to rank and compare, and the almost visceral desire we have to know who is number 1, number 2 and so on. But the idea that one can rank restaurants of this calibre or declare that the French Laundry is in all respects "better" than Gagnaire or the Fat Duck "better" than el Bulli is simply absurd. Better for whom or for what? They would have been better served either by an alphabetical listing of the top fify or, if ranked prizes were absolutely needed, by grouping the top restauarants in 10s or 20s.

Some last-minute tailoring does go on at el Bulli; tables are asked whether anyone has allergies or strong preferences (e.g. no pork) and substitutions get made. I wouldn't expect every table to have the same menu on any given evening. My sense (though I haven't verified this and could be wrong) is that they don't treat some tables as VIP and therefore give them complimentary or extra courses.

With some trepidation I will re-introduce an issue that got a good thrashing (or maybe it was a good trashing) a year or so ago: the definition of "artisanal". In France, as applied to bakeries, the term simply means "non-industrial". It could indicate that the bread is made with a levain -- or, more likely, with a combination of levain and commercial yeast. It could mean that it gets a slow rise. It almost certainly means, as suggested by that law quoted above, that the bread is mixed, kneaded, risen and baked on the premises, rather than arriving in pre-formed loaves to be popped into electric ovens. Bakers following the recipes of the flour companies like Banette will proclaim themselves to be "votre artisan boulanger" -- your artisan breadmaker -- and nobody will quibble with this. So "artisan" and "artisanal", at least as used in France, goes all the way from Poîlane to the local shop that follows the flour company's recipe. By the way: I am far from an expert on French bread or baking or bakeries, though I'm deeply interested in these things. I spend 5 to 6 weeks per year in France, either in Paris or in "the provinces", mostly in the South, and have regularly returned to France since the early 1980s. That doesn't begin to measure up to Steven Kaplan's experience. Nonetheless, I will assert that our Steven (Shaw) is painting an overly black-and-white picture. The renaissance has come a long way: there is a lot of very good bread available in France today, both in Paris and in the provinces. There is general awareness of the difference between the good product and the bad. Even the supermarkets are getting into the act: nowadays it is more common to see a branch of a "real" (or if you wish, "artisanal") bakery inside the supermarket, a "store within a store". This is a "dépot de pain", and it conforms to the law: the bread is entirely made within a real bakery, and delivered to the store immediately after it is baked.

Why don't we try to get Kaplan to join us for a Q&A, perhaps with Dan Lepard?

I would add that none of the baguettes in the bakery I referred to above are made with a sourdough, including the baguette à l'ancienne.

No, they don't -- at least in my experience. I've since read a few more articles by or about Kaplan (who, as it turns out, is affiliated with the INBP and is the co-author of that history of breadmaking that I linked to above). I'm fairly sure that by "baguette courante", he means "the common baguette" -- "standard" in terms of what bakeries usually make, rather than something conforming to a particular "standard". As an example, the bakery I most often use sells "baguettes" (in three sizes), which are slow-risen and tasty; also "baguettes à l'ancienne", which have some whole wheat flour and perhaps some spelt flour. The supermarket sells "baguettes" but you know, from context, that they are industrially made. It would be surprising to find a bakery that sold both cheap, industrial bread and also slowly-made bread. But perhaps these are more common in Paris. Here's an excerpt from a Q&A with Steven Kaplan, conducted in the Nouvel Observateur. I've translated, paraphrased and condensed quite a bit. Q. To whom do we owe the re-introduction of well-made bread? A. To the millers, the flour companies. Definitely not to the bakers: they refused to believe that they had lost the tradition of good bread making. They bet everything on white bread, right up to loading themselves up with debt. The flour companies, on the other hand, realised that if the bread was bad, people would stop eating it. And if customers ate less bread, the millers would sell less flour. Q. So what did the millers do? A. They offered the bakers better flour, with fewer additives; they also gave them recipes and easy-to-follow "diagrams" for improving their bread: slower kneading, and so on. Each "diagram", if followed, produced an easy to recognise "branded" bread, and the flour companies paid to advertise these. This is how we ended up with the Bannette, and later Rétrodor, Festival of Bread, etc. Q. So it was this branding that saved good baking in France? A. Without doubt. My sense is that in the US, home baking and TV bakers (Nancy Silverton, etc) may have done more to rescue good bread. I doubt that the big flour companies, with the exception of groups like King Arthur, would have played a similar role. In France, on the other hand, it would be considered extremely eccentric to bake bread at home. Perhaps with the rise of the Atkins diet, we will see more interest in fine bread: after all, if you can only eat small amounts of bread, it had better be good.