Jonathan Day

I'll repeat my question. Let's take it as a given that mainstream media food critics will continue to be employed -- hence ruling out any response like "The first thing we do, let's kill all the food critics." And let's take the negative statements about food critics as read. They have a lot of power. An ignorant food critic can seriously harm the fortunes of a restaurant, with little or no chance of redress. Granted. So what do we want food critics to do? What does good food criticism look like? Is it the sort of byte-by-byte description of menus that we sometimes see in eGullet? Should it try to paint a more impressionistic picture? What does it look like? (edit: crossposted with Moby)

So what do you want a critic to do, then? What is the critic's job?

We heard something very similar from Ferran Adria the other day: Gill's view (which I increasingly agree with) is the other side of the same coin.

Stovetop, I agree that some establishments work hard to select a target clientele and then tailor the decor, menu, etc., to that group. For the most part I carefully avoid places that are deliberately trying to be "buzzy" e.g. by removing soft furnishings and putting reflective panels on the ceiling so that ambient noise is very high. Or by playing loud music. As you say, a customer can choose to dine elsewhere. What I find annoying are restaurants where no such choice has been made but where the staff on the day put on music, not because it's part of a customer experience, but because they like to listen to music. I've had more than one manager admit that they've had loud music going because the waitstaff prefer it that way even though the customers don't. (Yes, it's still OK to say this sort of thing here in the UK, though it is becoming less common). I've never cut a wire and wouldn't do so. I did remove a cable, without damaging it, and returned it on leaving the restaurant. In that case I had very politely asked a waiter to turn down the music. He turned on his heel and walked off without a word; a few moments later the volume went up! So I made sure it went down again.

Alan Davidson says something like this in the Oxford Companion to Food, though he doesn't provide sources. Still, I wonder why we have the modern distinction between pâte (feminine) and pâté (masculine), with the former referring only to the pastry crust and the latter either to the combined crust and filling, or to the filling only. You couldn't have a pâte en croute (piecrust in a crust) but you could have a pâté en croute. Somehow Davidson's story seems incomplete to me. Perhaps this is an example of the rhetorical trope (I forget its name -- some sort of metonymy I guess) that James Thurber described in one of his memoirs as "the container for the thing contained". Thurber then wondered if he could find an example of a "thing contained for the container"; the example he dreamed up was an angry wife, threatening to brain her husband with a milkbottle and shouting "Get out of here or I'll hit you with the milk!" Or the vaudeville performer, asked why he is bleeding and bruised, who replies "I was hit with some tomatoes during the show." "How could a few tomatoes do that to you?" "The tomatoes were in a can." Somewhat marginal to the topic, I know, but at least about food.

As long as we're talking irrelevant philology: pâte is from the low Latin pasta which means both pasta as we know it today and pastry -- hence pâte feuilletée, puff paste; pâte brisée, short paste; pâtes (plural) are noodles, macaroni, etc. It can also mean a person's constitution, character or temperament: Elle est d'une pâte à vivre cent ans = She's the sort who will live a hundred years; she's built to live a hundred years. pâté, with the accent on the e, means the meat or fish preparation discussed in this thread, either cooked in a pâte or in a terrine. I'm not sure whether the connection is that the pâté was originally cooked in pastry or because of its paste-like consistency, but I suspect that the second explanation is correct. pâté also means an inkstain on a piece of paper and a cluster of houses isolated by roads. And the wet sand children play with on the beach is also called pâté. pâtée (two e's, feminine) is the mash used to feed some farm animals -- "a mixture of foods reduced to a paste (pâte)". Here endeth the lesson. And Trillium, that does look very tasty.

Never. I believe everything that every financial advisor tells me. When they say "buy" I buy. When they say "sell", I sell. This strategy is very efficient at reducing my income taxes.

What I continue to find surprising is the notion that any critic, no matter how skilled and diligent, can reliably extract the glassy essence of any restaurant and proclaim that it is "good" or "bad" or anything in between. I think there's a lot of scope and value in a critic describing this meal he had at this restaurant on this night. It helps if the critic has been a careful observer, knows something about food and cookery, and dines out enough that he has some basis of comparison between restaurants. It helps if the writing is clear. In deciding whether to dine at that restaurant, I can then have some basis for choice. What doesn't help is a lot of talk about whether the critic liked the food or didn't, even less helpful a single star rating or numerical score. My tastes may be different to the critic's. The restaurant may be improving or declining. Random events may intervene. As I write this, IBM stock last traded at $91.32 per share. That information, alone, tells you virtually nothing. Nor does the fact that a critic gives La Beanerie 1, 2, 3 4 or 5 stars. I find it irritating when Gill spends most of his column on some trivial thing unrelated to food, then tosses off a review in a few sentences. I really don't care whether he "rated" this or that restaurant; what I want to know is what he ate there. He is capable of doing better: for example, he devoted most of a column, a year or so ago, to a careful, detailed description of La Petite Maison, a restaurant in Nice at which I've had some splendid meals. That was a useful review.

John, I'm 100% with you. No music in restaurants! For me, music is either worth listening to on its own, or it is noise. The aural joys of a good restaurant are the clink of dishes, the ring of crystal, the sizzle of a hot dish, and most of all the conversation. Music just gets in the way. Either the music suffers, or the conversation, or, more usually, both. I can't tell you the number of times I've asked staff to turn down recorded music. More than once I've gone and done it myself, including once stealing a cable from a preamplifier after a nasty waiter turned the music even louder. I returned the cable on the way out. I can think of one exception to this rule. From time to time a dinner is organised where live musicians perform, not as background but as a distinct part of the evening. But then people are asked to be silent while the musicians play, just as they would while a speech is given.

Panzano is very good -- the shoes from Fagiani seem to last forever. I have a leather jacket they made for me that is still going strong after a decade. The town is very close to Greve in Chianti, which I believe is deeply involved in the Slow Food movement.

By the way, the treatment for turnips depends somewhat on the quality of the turnips to hand. Fresh salads will work beautifully with young, tender turnips. Older and woodier ones need to be cooked.

Make la soupe de la vierge (virgin soup): peel the turnips, dice them, put them in a saucepan with some melted butter and let them cook for a few minutes over low heat. Then cover with milk and simmer very gently, uncovered, until they are soft. Then whizz them with a blender, food processor, stick blender -- or put them through a food mill. Sieve them if you want to. You could add some chopped, melted onions at the first cooking stage: less virginal, but more flavour. Correct the seasoning with salt, white pepper, lemon juice or yoghurt for acidity. I once made this for a church "safari supper". The number of people arriving at our house kept changing throughout the day: one more, one less, two more, one less, etc.. When it came time to serve, my wife set out 7 bowls, which I carefully and evenly filled. Unfortunately, by this time, there were 8 people dining, and no soup left. So I filled a bowl with milk and brought it in the dining room to my place, and enjoyed a bowlful of cold milk. Our guests never found out. But they enjoyed the soup. For Olney's recipe: peel first, then grate.

Depending on how you do the low temperature step, herbal flavours may be easy enough to get into the meat. Remember that the browning step doesn't really "seal" the meat, despite kitchen lore. See Harold McGee or other discussions of the Maillard reaction on this. You could marinate the meat before browning it, with whatever herbs you prefer. You could embed the herbs in the meat, as Dave suggests. If the low temperature step is in moist heat, a braise for example, you have no problem. If the low temperature is a true roast (dry heat), setting the roast on a bed of herbs will get some of their flavours into it. Or scatter them over the meat before it goes into the oven. Finally, at the end of the cooking you could set some herbs alight (blowtorch again very handy here) and let the meat sit in their smoke for a few minutes. This works beautifully with rosemary branches; also wild fennel, sage, thyme. The herbs do need to be on the dryish side. The warming oven of an Aga works well here: put meat in one pan, on rack into Aga, put herbs in another pan and set them alight, close door. The smoke flavours the meat and departs up the flue.

We've often brought French friends a fine British cheese -- a good Stilton, or Mrs Montgomery's Cheddar, or something like that. They are invariably consumed quickly.

I hate to bring back the old eGullet term "for tourists", but that's what the "top 25" list suggests to me. What about Borough Market, in London? Les Halles, in Lyon? Rungis, in Paris? the Marché Forville in Cannes, which leaves the Cours Saleya far behind? Ventimiglia? Where are they on this list?

Chez Bruce has changed, and for the better. We took the children there for lunch on Sunday; the dishes had a finesse and clarity that we hadn't seen before. I had a cream of fennel soup that was, simply, amazing: a surprising smoothness and directness of flavour. It was served with crisp little "bastillas" of wild mushrooms that were a nice complement to the pillowy smoothness of the soup. Then a dish of mixed veal and calf's offal, the kind of thing Bruce does so well. Kidneys perfectly done, very good sweetbreads (I had somewhat better sweetbreads at Le Gavroche, the previous week) but the sauce was outstanding, much better than the calvados-based sauce that Le Gav had served. The gartinutes and purees served with all of our dishes had a polish that we hadn't seen before. And finally, a griottine cherry ice that was beautifully flavoured; it was served with a warm madeleine that wasn't quite perfect, but was good nonetheless. My son had cheese for his dessert, which gave me a chance to nick morsels of vacherin Mont d'Or, Stilton, Mrs Kirkham's Lancashire, etc.; as before, the cheeses were all beautifully kept. My wife and all of the children enjoyed their meals a lot. It's hard to tell from one tasting. But if this meal is at all typical, CB has risen to a new level of confidence and performance. It's a treat to have a restaurant of this calibre within an easy walk from home.

That's the La Matelote just across from "Nausicaa", the aquarium and marine life centre, right? I had a lovely meal there, perhaps 12 years ago. I believe it has stayed strong for a long time. Service in French restaurants can vary a lot, from the rather informal, pour-your-own-wine to the very attentive, two members of staff to every customer. Service style there doesn't precisely correlate either with price levels or with Michelin star ratings. The La Matelote I recall was somewhat informal in style, in keeping with the seafront and fishing motif. Other one-stars can be very formal.

It does look interesting. Translation of a few sentences of the Amazon.com writeup:

See boldfaced passage above. No cheese in a pissaladière.

Pissaladière is delicious, but it isn't a cheese and onion pie. In the shops in southern France, its place of origin, pissaladière is baked flat, on a large sheet pan rather than a tart shell. The baker cuts you whatever size you want from the sheet. Sometimes pissaladière is done using bread dough, sometimes using a short crust. Anchovies are strictly traditional (see below) but are sometimes omitted. Onions, of course, and usually some olives. The onions can be browned before it goes into the oven, or not. No cheese, though. The term comes from pissalat (Niçois peis salat, salted fish). Very strictly speaking, this is supposed to be made by macerating baby sardines (poutine) with salt and herbs. Fresh poutine, by the way, arrive starting in the early summer; you can cook them like elvers or scramble them into eggs -- wonderful. Only the communes of Antibes, Cros-de-Cagnes, Nice and Menton have the right to gather the poutine, so it is a very local dish. Nowadays, pissalat itself is rarely prepared -- but this is why anchovies typically go into a pissaladière.

French version here: http://www.paris-lights.com/french/f_pubs/...urs_claude.html Some of the (obviously machine) translations in the English version are funny: Cream of lenses in the fried foie gras Lawyer's cheese-topped dish and tomatoes, sherbet in the mango (the usual confusion of avocat, lawyer and avocat, avocado) Saint's nut jacques, fried by pleurotes, butters of vanilla Browned of hulls and dissolve of leeks in the citronella

If atmosphere weighs heavily in the selection equation, there's Ledoyen, a lovely room where the food compares well to Grand Vefour. And Lucas Carton hasn't been mentioned... To my mind the decor at Ducasse's restaurant at the Plaza Athenee is squarely in the "global five star zone": fine, but not that different to what you would find in New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo, London or any other world city at the top of the price range. Whereas Ledoyen and the Grand Vefour couldn't really appear anywhere other than in Paris.

In years past, the local authorities have arranged evening visits to the church after closing time, I think on summer nights when there was sunlight into the late hours. You had to book these weeks in advance, but they offered a chance to experience the place in a completely different way. I last did this in 1991 and have no idea whether it it still offered...the local websites give no indication that this is the case. But well worth going for, if you get a chance.

Elizabeth David tells the story of Annette Poulard, proprietor of the Hôtel Poulard who made these omelettes famous. She died in 1931. Her name is apropos, since une poularde is a young, fattened hen -- an English equivalent would be something like Annette Henny. La Mère Poulard's omelettes were so renowned that M. Robert Viel, a Paris restaurateur and collector of cookery books, petitioned her for the secret recipe. She replied: Roughly translated: I've heard nothing but bad reports about the restaurant today. But, even with the hordes of tourists, le mont St Michel is still magic and well worth a visit.

"Confit" is the French word for "preserved". ... The fruit preserves have something to do the sugar content, and I'm not a chemist and don't really understand it.) Anyway, I've always thought that the onion preserves that we make by slowly cooking them in oil are a condiment, more than a traditional method of preserving them (besides, onions keep anyway under the right conditions by themsleves I believe), and so the degree to which you cook them, whether or not the sugars caramelize before the moisture evaporates ... If I understand the metonymic chain here, it's similar to the connection between "preserves" and "jam" in English. Many kinds of fruits confits (jams, preserves, marmalades, etc.) are cooked and sterilised for long storage (confiserie): the heat kills bugs, and the acid/sugar mixture, in a vacuum, keeps for a long time. By extension, onion confit is a jamlike concoction, using onions rather than fruit. You could bottle this stuff, sterilise it and vacuum seal it, but I would guess that most people don't. Strawberry preserves --> strawberry jam --> onion jam, which then gets labelled as "onion preserves" or confit d'oignon and confused with confit de canard, duck confit, which is only linked with fruits confits in that both are methods of preservation. Candied fruits, flower petals and the like are also produced in a confiserie.