Jonathan Day

I've just deleted one post that used this thread to complain about another anonymous poster. As I said upthread, that's not on. This topic isn't a referendum on the Psaltis thread, or on any specific Society member. The topic Michael Ruhlman raised is interesting and much broader either than eGullet or any single thread in our forums.

The importance of disclosing a name depends on the person involved. If a person is a private individual, there is no value or legitimate interest in readers knowing that person's name. If a person is a big celebrity -- a movie star, let's say -- there may be plenty of interest but little actual value for the purposes of what we're doing here. The only time it probably matters is if the person in question works in the food business or writes about it, yet for some people in the business, the arguments for concealing names are most compelling. As I noted above, if we can't offer pseudonyms to servers or line cooks in restaurants, we won't have very many of them posting here.

Folks, we're going to move this thread over to the Food Media and News board, where it started. And let's broaden the topic to anonymity on food and wine boards -- the original title, "The Downfall of eGullet", is a bit too dramatic, so that's going to change as well.

Something like the following language has been part of our member agreement for as long as I can remember: . Every member of the staff -- hosts, managers, specialists -- is required to disclose their name, either by changing an anonymous screen name or putting their name in the signature line, as Fat Guy does. We hope this sets an example for our members. We balance the encouragement to use real names with And we add, New members, as they register, are required to provide a verifiable name and telephone number, and we check these; this data is maintained in confidence. So a member who is anonymous to the public is usually not anonymous to the management. At the same time, we are alive to privacy, harassment and stalking concerns. So the Member Agreement continues Privacy matters to our members, as a number of posters on this thread have suggested. If we forced everyone to disclose their names, we'd lose a number of interesting posts from cooks and waitstaff, for example, who might fear dismissal if they commented on their employer's restaurant. Incidentally, one corollary of this policy is that we won't allow posts to the effect that, "Your argument has no worth until you tell us your name." This kind of language violates the harassment provisions of the Member Agreement, and we will tend to delete it when it appears in the forums.

Let me ask a question: suppose the North Southport Grill opens in a big city (NYC, London, Chicago). An eGullet member whose real name is Susan Smith dines there and posts a negative comment on the place. Let's further suppose that Susan is not in any way a public figure. Does it make any difference whether she posts as Susan Smith, S Smith or TreeHugger? Whitepages.com lists 244 names under "S Smith" and 9 matching "Susan Smith", in New York, New York. Where does the additional accountability come from?

Michael, you are right. Our hosts and managers are supposed to send a PM to any member whose post is deleted, explaining why it was deleted. Sometimes this step gets skipped, e.g. when a post is completely blank or when it simply quotes another post. Occasionally we get behind, and the PM doesn't get sent until some time after the post is deleted. The system keeps a log, by the way, so that we can almost always find out who deleted a post. But if a substantive post of yours is deleted, and you aren't informed who did it or why, we want to know about that. I'll respond separately on the anonymity issue.

Black puddings / boudins noirs? Farid or others knowledgeable about halal and kosher rules: if the blood is cooked into a black pudding, does that make it OK? Of course I should have added: if the blood had been taken from something other than a pig...

Some of them also seem to prefer noise. I once talked with the head of interior design for the Conran restaurants. Why are they so noisy, I asked, thinking of places like Quaglino's where it was virtually impossible to hold a conversation on a busy night. He indicated that this noise was by design: they eliminated soft furnishings and put reflecting surfaces on the ceiling to create "buzz". Some of these smaller places must suffer from a kind of catch-22: people won't go to them unless they see others flocking to get in, tables crammed to fill every available space, noise filling the room. Perhaps the restaurateurs could hire actors -- surely there must be acting students who would "work" for a free meal -- to fill the place, chatter noisily, queue at the door, create a sensation of buzz. Then again, all four of the restaurants I've cited above are located in places where few people would notice the queue.

I’ve recently been to four restaurants in London that don’t seem to be getting custom that’s in line with the quality of the food they are putting out. I wonder whether this is because they are badly located, or whether it’s for some other reason. All three happen to be operated by French chef/owners and to serve French food. None of them are perfect, but all offer honest food, generally well prepared. The welcome is warm and the service good in all three. Yet all seem curiously less than busy. Given the complaints aired elsewhere on this forum about high prices, bad food and shoddy service, it’s puzzling that these have attracted so little attention. One is called Mini Mundus – it’s on Trinity Road, just south of Wandsworth Common. This is an an area full of families (it’s been called “Nappy Valley”) and restaurants; the leading light in the area is Chez Bruce, a stone’s throw from Mini Mundus. MM started out with a series of menus from various regions of France. It has now reverted to a far more ordinary French menu. But the food is decent and not overpriced, and the service warm. 218 Trinity Rd, London, SW17 7HP - 020 8767 5810 Another is L’Auberge, in East Putney. It is family-operated and simple; again, the food is not 3-star quality, but it compares reasonably to smaller restaurants in France. 2 Upper Richmond Road, London, SW15 2RX - 020 8874 3593, www.ardillys.com The third is The Food Room, on Queenstown Road, in the premises formerly occupied by Stepping Stone, the fancy Australian joint. The food here is a step above the others in this note, in ambition and in execution. I could fault the dishes just a bit for being a little fancier and more complicated than the kitchen is capable of handling, but only slightly so. Some of the dishes we had – e.g. a Tarbais bean soup, pork belly, scallops, pheasant – were first rate. It isn’t overpriced, either, and the service was excellent. The cheese tray was small but of good quality. 123 Queenstown Road, SW8 3RH - 020 7622 0555 And the fourth is Nathalie, which I’ve written about here. I’ve been back 6 or 7 times since that first report, and the food has remained good. Eric, the chef, has catered for large groups and small lunches and dinners. Yet time after time, we are the only customers in the place. 3 Milner Street, SW3 2QA - 020 7581 2848, www.nathalie-restaurant.co.uk * * * It’s true that three of the four restaurants are south of the Thames and subject to the usual silly prejudices about that. But Nathalie is in the heart of Chelsea, though in a slightly quiet location – an advantage, from my perspective, but a problem if you’re looking for local ‘buzz’. It’s also true that none of the three are offering food aimed at Michelin stars or celebrity chef status, though The Food Room is clearly pushing upward in its ambitions. I’m also sure that, given lean staffs and economic pressures, all of these restaurants could stumble on a bad night or a very busy one. At the moment, though, that doesn’t seem to be their problem. And I’m curious as to why this is so.

A few more small places in the Alpes Maritimes. Biot: Les Arcades -- comments here. The marinated herrings are good; they bring a big bowl, and you take as much as you want. Off-menu dishes are often excellent here. Mougins: Le Bistrot de Mougins -- good for kidneys, civets and the like; pleasant in the winter, when the long-cooked dishes they like to make taste particularly good. Mougins: Resto des Arts -- good tête de veau, decent rabbit. Similar dishes a few metres away at Le Petit Fouet. Nice: Aux Rendez-Vous des Amis, up in the hills near Falicon. Also La Merenda, near the old flower market. Cannes: La Cave, in town. Sadly, they seem to be using the microwave more and more, and I haven't been back in a few years. In Gorbio, a village just above Menton: Beau-Séjour; in the gastronomic desert that is Menton, this was a pleasant oasis.

Just a quick note on the translation -- only posted because it's very relevant to the food. Elaborée in that sentence doesn't mean "elaborate". It means "developed", or "built from" or something to that effect. The sentence means, "Invited to taste their cooking, which has been developed from products and little secrets of the immediate area, ... ". In other words, the food at chez Norbert could be very simple. This is a great thread, I hope we can all add our favourite "bonnes addresses".

Jeanne, why don't you write to the Michelin people and report this experience? They claim that they reinspect restaurants when they receive negative comments. The red guide contains a comment form. Or you can go to viamichelin.com, register (it's free), look up the restaurant, click for detailed information, then click on the "Your Comments" link. This brings up a form identical to the printed form in the red guide. Last year I registered a negative comment on a place in the Pas de Calais -- a horrid hotel that had gone for massive volume and rubbish service. They quickly wrote back to me, saying that they would follow up. This year, it disappeared from the guide. Who knows whether my note triggered a re-inspection? Sadly, our experience at Maximin, some 5 years ago, was not much better than yours. Some of the dishes were good -- I think we had the lobster menu -- but the service was cold, cold, cold from the time we arrived until we paid the cheque and left. The welcome and the food had a sort of clinical quality to them. Prices were significantly less than those you report, but of course this was before the general price hike that came with the switch to the Euro. Quite a few eGullet comments on Maximin have been lukewarm or negative...you'll see similar thoughts from Robert Brown, who has years of experience dining in the region (and lots of other places); his view is that Maximin has a "self destructive" quality. I hope this bad experience won't put you off the area. There are many pleasant places to dine there, as you'll see from searching the forums.

If I recall correctly, a dinner at Ledoyen cost us EUR 500 for 2; lunch at L'Ambroisie was EUR 750 for 2. Both included wine; in both cases, the wines were of roughly the same price. Of course, depending on the quantity and price of the wines you chose, you could go much higher. Nonetheless, L'Ambroisie didn't seem expensive given what it delivered. I think Robert put it well: the place was expensive, yet generous at the same time.

Bill, this last post is more than helpful. You're telling us about your culinary aesthetic, your criteria for what makes a restaurant good -- "your model", we might say. You're saying that the Piemontese tendency to enrich sauces with egg yolks, etc., clashes with your model. Others may view things differently. You've stated your criteria with passion and clarity. Now, I can do a better job of interpreting your comments on restaurants. This is quite a different thing to saying that so-and-so has a "superior palate" (especially when the purported difference is minuscule) or that "I encourage all of you to be totally dismissive of anyone on this board that cannot recognize this as one of Italy's, and maybe Europe's, finest dining experiences". Unquestionably, there are errors in cooking. Some ingredients are fresher and of higher starting quality than others. Fish can be overcooked. There are classic recipes, and if a restaurant is going to call something Sole Véronique then it ought to have green grapes and sole in it, not whiting and grape jam. But let's distinguish differences in aesthetic preferences -- "model clashes" -- from assertions about whether someone has a better palate than someone else, is "better dined" than someone else, is the Sultan of dining, etc.. To be clear, I'm not saying that the second kind of assertion is off limits here. Go down that road if you must. But it rarely leads to anything but anger and upset.

As Robert Brown suggests, there are quite a few books of the "I was there" sort, stories of development in various professions. A quick search on Amazon churns up The Making of a Surgeon The Making of a Psychiatrist The Making of a Surgeon in the 21st Century The Making of a Surgeon: A midwestern chronicle The Making of a Woman Surgeon Skin Deep: The Making of a Plastic Surgeon The Making of a Flight Surgeon (all these were written by different surgeons) The Making of a Poker Player (How An Ivy League Math Geek Learned To Play Championship Poker) The making of a lawyer: My experiences in court Medical student: Doctor in the making Herbert: The Making of a Soldier Ten-Shun: The Making of a Soldier Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest and many others ... All of these were written by the "made" person themselves, and there are far more if you allow for "The Making of" stories written by others, e.g. Nicholas Kenyon's account of "The Making of a Conductor" (Simon Rattle). As far as I can tell, few of the writers became particularly famous, or were using the books for nefarious purposes. My guess is that most of them felt they had a story to tell. Kitchen Confidential was a fun read not because Bourdain is a great chef (he is the first to emphasise this) but because, like the other "making of a" books, it provides a look inside places we normally can't go.

The issue of "compromised food critics" has been discussed for many years on this site. The first thread I found (which contains some interesting points of view) started in 2002; it can be found here. I'm sure there are dozens of other threads about anonymity and conflicts of interest between critics and restaurants. This thread, however, is about Turning The Tables, which isn't a book of restaurant criticism. In fact, it's a book that Shaw's relationships with restaurateurs and chefs makes him unusually qualified to write, since it's about exposing the inside working of restaurants to those of us who usually go no further than the dining room. An anonymous critic who was unfamiliar with the workings of the business, no matter how "well dined" he was, would be of lesser value to the reader for the purposes of this book. In any event, Shaw is hardly the only restaurant critic who doesn't operate anonymously and who maintains close ties to chefs and restaurateurs. John Mariani, the Esquire critic, doesn't pay the bills at the restaurants he reviews; he has written a book called The Four Seasons: A History of America's Premier Restaurant, with an owner of the restaurant as his co-author. There's a compromised critic for you. The issue of "compromised restaurant critics" has little to do with Shaw's book. Why not debate this more general topic over on the other thread?

It took a trip from London to Cambridge (Massachusetts), but I finally got a copy of this book and read it. I didn't think it was a great or even a particularly good piece of writing. The narrative plods along, with odd lurches from present to past tense and back again. It's full of clumsy sentences. There are a few themes that hold the story together, though Psaltis never identifies them as such, leaving the reader to slog through detail that never advances the story. One is the difference between "chef" and "cook". Psaltis takes a high view of what it means to be a chef: Hence Psaltis's view that there can only be one true chef in each restaurant, his chafing under Dan Barber (whom he calls Peter in the chapter called "Cooking by the Book") and Thomas Keller; and his appreciation of the hierarchy of the Ducasse empire. The second theme is closely related; it is the notion of a "system"—the Wayne Nish system at March, the Ducasse system, the Keller system—in military parlance, this is called "doctrine". Military doctrine extends from the broad and philosophical, e.g. to the tactical to the very specific (All of these examples come from the US Marine Corps Doctrine division, primarily from a publication called Warfighting). Collectively, doctrine provides soldiers with a set of guidelines or heuristics that they can follow, in the heat of battle, when detailed instructions aren't forthcoming. "System", for Psaltis, plays a similar role. A lot of what Psaltis was doing as he moved through March, Ducasse, French Laundry, etc., was acquiring and building his own system. He spoke with some disdain of Dan Barber, "cooking by the book" and using other chefs' recipes, even though Psaltis, early in his career, cooked dishes from The New Basics, a domestic cookbook. Psaltis's book has attracted a fair bit of attention on eGullet for its criticism of iconic chefs. I struggle to understand why this is so. Psaltis had his differences with several chefs, but he manages to say respectful things about most of them, Barber and Keller included. Contrast this with Jeremiah Tower's California Dish, which teems with angry accusations, particularly about Alice Waters, an iconic foodie figure if ever there was one. According to Tower, Waters fraudulently claimed credit for the vision of Chez Panisse; for the authorship of the first and best known Chez Panisse cookbook (entirely written, says Tower, by Linda Guenzel, whom Waters later described as "the typist"); and for being a chef, when, according to Tower, she couldn't cook beyond grilling a lamb chop or mixing a salad. Tower doesn't even miss a chance to slam Waters in the index: under "Waters, Alice" we find confrontations with Jeremiah Tower cooking style of ["she hadn't cooked in eighteen years"] credit taken by By comparison, Psaltis's account is tame. Most of his differences with chefs or restaurateurs are about their "system" and their unwillingness to allow him to emerge as a chef himself, to create his own dishes, to develop his own culinary aesthetic, to implement the Psaltis system. What I found ultimately disappointing about this book is that we never learn much about Psaltis's dishes, about his culinary sensibilities, or about what the Psaltis system entails, other than keeping the kitchen tidy as the cooks go about their work. Like Psaltis, Tower provides all sorts of irrelevant detail: James Beard's penis size (small), Rudolf Nureyev's taste for pornography, Alice Waters's hats; as well as tedious narratives of champagne drunk, cigars smoked, cocaine snorted and nitrous oxide inhaled. But Tower does share his views about food, wine and menus, and even a few recipes. It would have been nice to have had some of the same from Psaltis.

It hasn't. Go back and look at Bux's comments. He has raised plenty of doubts about the book. Shaw has questioned Psaltis's wisdom on a number of fronts. Members of the eG team have quibbled with Shaw's conclusions. Nor has "everyone else" taken a negative view of the book.

I haven't read the book either, and don't have a point of view for or against. I will note, though, that a lot of gossip and behind-the-back criticism seems to surface in chefs' and food writers' memoirs. Here is a review of Jeremiah Tower's California Dish. Excerpt from the review: Richard Olney's Reflexions travels much the same road, taking shots at Claiborne, Julia Child, Simone Beck, James Beard and many other food world luminaries. This, of course, doesn't excuse falsehood or economy with the truth on Psaltis's part, or anyone's. It does seem to be part of the genre of foodie memoirs, though.

I hope that Lesley was using "the guy was a jerk" rhetorically, rather than as a statement of fact, just as Shaw referred to "the obnoxious server"; I doubt he was saying he had personal knowledge that the server was at fault. But given sensitivities all round, let's try even harder to distinguish fact from opinion. Of course a victim shouldn't be blamed; as most parents say to their children several times a day, "just because he did it to you doesn't make it OK for you to do it to him..." I'm struck by Moby's comment, and some that Tony Bourdain and Farid made. It's clear that hazing and physical harassment were condoned in restaurant kitchens, not that long ago. Verbal and psychological hazing and abuse were not uncommon in professional settings (law firms, hospitals, etc.) as late as the early 1990s, and I'm sure there is still some of this around. In general, though, the last few years have seen increasing intolerance of hazing, shouting at staff, etc., at least in well run businesses. Those who suffer these things now have recourse to support, and those who do them tend to get coaching or dismissal. Is that how it is these days in restaurant kitchens everywhere? Are they no longer the place of cursing and shouting and sticking colleagues with forks, as described in Bourdain's book? That seems like a positive development to me. (For the avoidance of doubt: Lesley is no longer on the staff of eGullet, just a valued member of the Society.)

I'd second John's and Margaret's comments about not eating "special" foods (foie gras, fancy desserts, etc.) at every meal. And I would add three things from observing French friends and colleagues eat: first, gargantuan portions aren't necessary. Second, it's OK to leave some food on the plate. The food police aren't watching. Third, a cigarette or two during the meal seems to reduce the overall appetite.

I thought Matthew Fort's article was spleeny and more than a bit silly. Our Aga cooks far better than my parents' hypermodern GE electric range with "fingertip controls", temperature regulated to a tenth of a degree, and all sorts of gadgets and whizzbangs. Spend some time in a restaurant kitchen. The burners and ovens go on, they stay on, and you adjust the heat not by fiddling with controls but by moving the pots pans around. The oven is hot if it feels that way to your hand. That's how you cook on an Aga. You become more confident as a cook, more in touch with the food, less dependent on thermostats and the like. The Aga ovens are stable, and they heat from four sides. No convection nonsense. Roasts are better, and, as Jack says, you can do low-temperature long-time (LTLT) cooking with ease. It's always ready for you -- no pre-heating, no fiddling around. With no disrespect to Matthew Fort's mother: if she couldn't make a decent Yorkshire pudding, I truly doubt that it was because of the Aga. We didn't buy an Aga, but there it was when we bought the house, and it's stayed in place as we've rebuilt the kitchen around it. I'm not sure I'd go out and buy a new Aga -- I'd be more inclined to install fire protection and use a commercial cooker -- but it hasn't been a handicap at all.

The French draw a distinction between a flat-bottomed bowl and a round-bottomed bowl (click for examples); the latter is usually called cul de poule, or chicken's arse. There are special cul de poule stands to stabilise your cul de poule bowl on the counter. Flat-bottomed bowls are sometimes called saladiers; the example above is called a bassine pâtissière, pastry-cook's bowl. (I have found the site that these examples come from, by the way, reliable. Its products seem fairly priced and of generally high quality. It's called Meilleur du Chef.) Julia Child made a lot of fuss about how you had to beat eggs and eggwhites in a round-bottomed bowl, because, in a flat-bottomed one, mixtures wouldn't move around and therefore ingredients wouldn't combine. She did experiments introducing food colouring into a mass of eggwhites being beaten (by machine) in a flat-bottomed bowl, demonstrating that the colour didn't properly mix into the whites.

Sometimes it helps, when seeking to understand choices, to explore the extreme cases. At one end, we have the "suspicious diner" model, where the assumption is that most chef/restaurateurs are motivated solely by profit. If he could torch an industrially produced chicken, slice a few canned truffles over it and sell the resulting mess as poulet de Bresse en demi-deuil for 90 Euros a plate, he would. The diner has to barrage the restaurant with questions: was that beef from the Charolais or the Limousin? How many times was the chop turned in the pan? What kind of butter went into the sauce? Was the fleur de sel collected with the left or the right hand? At some point, these questions cross a line from the engaged, interested, knowledgeable diner to the meddlesome one. In any event, ordering in this model becomes a contest between the crooked chef and the canny diner. Only one side can win. At the other end, there is the view that chefs and restaurateurs are "not in it for the money" (a claim that many of them make), and that the diner's best move is generally to trust the restaurant and ask them to order for you. You wouldn't tell your doctor what medicines to prescribe, would you? (Well, some people would. But not in this model.) For me there are times when it's interesting to engage the waitstaff (and sometimes the cooks) in discussion, to visit the kitchen, to ask lots of questions. But I see this less as a way of defeating rapacious restaurateurs who would otherwise cheat me than, as Lucy says, of getting more energy and commitment out of the kitchen. And there are times when it's a pleasure to allow the staff to choose, especially once they've come to know you a bit and you to know them.

Robert's comment reminds me of Escoffier's statement that "It is one hundred times better to serve a very short menu, but well balanced and perfectly executed, so that the guests will be able to savor without haste, than to parade food in front of them and to repeat the torture of Tantalus, a long stream of dishes which they never have the time to touch." (Le Livre des Menus). Escoffer was talking about the switch from service à la française to service à la russe; the former presented the "groaning board" of dozens of dishes, entrées, removes, entremets, etc., either all at once or in two services; something more like buffet service. Escoffier moved to something more resembling modern restaurant service, where "plated" food was presented to guests. And yet Escoffier's ideas of a "very short menu" were more like today's tasting menus than anything else -- here is an example: Frivolitiés Mixed hors d'oeuvres Caviar frais Chilled caviar Blinis de Sarrasin Buckwheat blinis Oursins de la Méditerranée Sea urchins Consommé aux nids d'Hirondelles Consommé with swallows' nests Velouté Dame Blanche Cream soup of the "White Lady" Sterlet du Volga à la Moscovite Sterlet is a rare sturgeon that lives between the fresh and salt rivers in the Caspian Barquette de Laitance à la Vénetienne Soft fish roes in pastry boats Chapon fin aux Perles du Périgord Capon with "pearls of the Périgord" (truffles?) Cardon épineux à la Toulousaine "Spiny" cardoons Selle de Chevreuil aux Cerises Saddle of venison with cherries Suprême d'Ecrevisse au Champagne Crayfish in a cream sauce with Champagne Mandarines Givrées Sorbet of mandarin oranges, probably served in the hollowed-out shells of the oranges Terrine de Caille sous la cendre, aux Raisins Terrine of quail cooked on a wood fire ("under the ashes") with grapes Bécassine rosée au feu de Sarment Pink or pale snipe, cooked over vine cuttings Salade Isabelle Salad "Isabelle" Asperges sauce Mousseline Asparagus with mousseline sauce Délice de Foie Gras A foie gras preparation Soufflé de Grenade à l'Orientale Pomegranate soufflé "oriental style" Biscuit glace aux Violettes Iced cake with violets Mignardises Petits fours Fruits de Serre Chaude Hothouse fruits So I share Michael's view that we haven't reached "the end of history" on menu construction. There is still scope for productive innovation.