Jonathan Day

No more personal invective on this thread, please. Disagree with other posters all you want, but personal remarks about them are out of order here. Thanks.

Mark's comment makes a lot of sense to me. A look at both of Adria's books shows that he has constantly taken risks and tried new ideas. This is about as far from "safe" cooking as you could imagine. I wouldn't expect that every dish would appeal to every diner. In our dinner of 30 courses, most were delicious, one or two were so-so, none were unpleasant. Even if El Bulli doesn't hit that level every night, the restaurant is doing well if, say, 25 of the 30 were good, even if a few actively displeased some diners. When he does "connect", his food is surpassingly delicious, as well as intellectually intriguing. My sense is that this happens far more often that it doesn't.

Apparently Matthew had a less than ideal experience at El Bulli. I understand that Steve Plotnicki, who dined there the same evening, also failed to find merit in his meal. I hope that the two negative opinions were reached independently. There have been many eGullet posts and other writeups praising El Bulli to the skies. There have been others that were unenthusiastic. The same is true for almost any restaurant, including the French Laundry -- see, for example, Robert's post from last year (click here), from which I will quote a few paragraphs. I think Michael Lewis's point was simply that we need to consider several possibilities when one group of diners enjoys a restaurant and another does not. The restaurant may in fact be a weak performer. It may have been off its usual form that evening. Or one group's palate or insight may have been deficient. I am reminded of the story of the American dowager on her first visit to the Louvre. She marched from painting to painting, saying, in a strident voice, "I like this one ... I don't like that one ... I like that one." Finally the museum guard spoke up: "Madame, it is not the paintings that are on trial here."

More floor space is not always a good thing in a kitchen, if your goal is efficiency of operation. Our kitchen in France is relatively small (say 150 square feet) but is laid out and equipped for high-volume preparation, since the previous owners entertained constantly, 30 to 50 guests at a time, and employed a chef from a Michelin 1-star. Most restaurant kitchens are surprisingly compact. Our kitchen in London is much larger, something like 800 square feet in all, but its layout has, until now, been fiddly and almost impossible for more than one cook to work in at a time. And as a result, it is now in the midst of being ripped apart and rebuilt.

I think there's broad agreement that it's very hard to make money running a restaurant. There probably isn't one single reason for this, but rather a combination of causes: (1) Difficulty of creating a truly distinctive customer proposition, something that keeps the reservation book full and customers willing to travel long distances and pay high prices. (2) Relative ease of setting up a restaurant ("all it takes is money"). (3) A very small number chef/owners who make it to the big time and earn fame and money -- note that this is not true for occupations like plumbing. Very few restaurateurs or chefs become famous, but the ones who do become household names and can earn money in the millions. Cheffing is more like acting than plumbing: lots of people seem to want to do it, and a few win big. (4) A romantic belief on the part of many entrants that running a restaurant will be fun, the work won't be hard, and that they can make it to the big time. (5) As a result of 2,3, 4, a preponderance of (economically) irrational competitors who effectively sell restaurant meals for less than it costs them to make them. By "what it costs" I mean the full and fair market value of labour, materials, capital and the like, including the owner's labour contribution. (6) A large number of consumers who are less than discriminating about quality, and in many localities (e.g. tourist destinations where many customers are visiting for a first and last time) an absence of any effective market system for rewarding good quality and punishing poorer quality. All this is not to say that chef/owners are in any way stupid: as Basildog has demonstrated, a lot of personal and psychological satisfaction can be derived from running a quality restaurant, even if the takings only just covers the direct costs. I know a lot of lawyers, for example, who make very good money but don't seem to enjoy their work very much. Edit: added "economically" before "irrational" in paragraph (5) above. To an economist, anyone who sells something for less than it costs is irrational. Fortunately, economists represent a tiny minority of the world population, and very few of those economists actually behave in line with economic theory.

Tom, many thanks for participating in this Q&A. The bio posted here suggests that you are a capable cook and that you have spent at least some time working the line in serious restaurants. Could you do as good a job as a critic and food writer if you weren't able to cook? What difference does knowing how to cook make in the way you review a restaurant? A music critic need not be a musician, after all, nor an art critic a painter or sculptor. Could a food critic learn her or his trade simply by dining and reading?

Dan, many thanks for sharing so much information. It is a pleasure to read your posts. Could you tell us a bit about the oven at St John Bread and Wine? Electric? Gas-fired? I am assuming that it is not wood-fired. What oven characteristics did you look for in planning the new venture?

LML, perhaps you could expand on this last statement. Do you mean that the majority of Britons hold no shared beliefs or prejudices with regard to the foods they enjoy eating or the ways they like to eat them? Or that Britain is so diverse (north vs south, recent vs less recent immigration, wealthy vs less wealthy, older vs younger, etc.) that any generalisation makes no sense? Or something else?

In a recent Symposium thread we discussed "The American Way of Eating". I would now like to propose a discussion on "The British Way". British food is a topic that has seen some prior discussion on eGullet, mostly on its origins and on the forces that have shaped it over the past few hundred years. I would therefore suggest that we focus this thread on British cooking and dining as it exists today. Let's not debate whether British food has been bad in the past or whether it lost touch with its peasant origins as a result of industrialisation. Instead, let's look at the current dining scene in Britain, both at home and in restaurants. My two propositions would be that Britain has seen a revolution in its attitude toward food and dining, in a way matched by almost no other country in the world, and that there is more to like than to dislike in "The British Way of Eating". Start with attitudes toward food. M.F.K. Fisher tells of the young Walter Scott, who, exceptionally hungry, exclaimed to his father, "Oh, what a fine soup! Is it not a fine soup, dear Papa?", whereupon his father instantly a pint of cold water into Walter's bowl, "to drown the devil". There was unquestionably a time when it was considered vulgar or coarse to talk about food, when chefs were regarded as menial servants. Today's chefs, whether loved or hated, are national celebrities -- and they are British chefs, as opposed to the (imported) French chefs who once were seen as the only source of culinary skill. At least amongst the middle classes, people talk about food without shame. Britain has a deep and high quality vein of academic and "serious" writing about food, including Elizabeth David, Mary Douglas, the Oxford Symposium on Food, Petits Propos Culinaires and Alan Davidson. Many British universities offer courses on food and nutrition. Food is both serious business in Britain and a serious topic for conversation. The availability of ingredients in Britain has undergone a similar revolution. It is possible to find tired, tasteless vegetables and industrialised meats and cheeses in Britain, as it is in France and Italy, but for the most part the quality available is very good. Even within the supermarket chains, a wide and high quality range of ingredients can be found if you are willing to be selective. Britain's farmers' markets and open-air markets can offer outstanding produce, and there is a large number of artisanal producers offering cheeses, meats, smoked goods and the like. Unusually within Europe, British shops also offer a wide range of imported ingredients. A top French supermarket or épicerie will stock many French foods, but will be weaker on Italian, Asian, Spanish and Mexican ingredients: not so the corresponding shop in the UK. The revolution gathered momentum as early as the 1980s with chefs such as Anthony Worrall-Thompson, Alistair Little, Stephen Bull and the young Marco Pierre White. We look at British television chefs as a modern phenomenon, but Gary Rhodes first appeared on the screen at least ten years ago. The revolution may be moving quickly today, but it has been underway for a good while. I have deliberately stopped at this point, leaving open the debate about British restaurants, as well as whether the many positive experiences that I have had in London would translate to other parts of the nation. What do you think? What is the current state of British dining? Whether as a visitor or a resident, what do you like and dislike about "The British Way of Eating"? * * * Thanks both to Simon Majumdar and to Wilfrid for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this post.

Nimzo, welcome to eGullet! I have only translated selected passages from Secretos (which I think has some of the most interesting writing in any food book I've seen in a long time). If you have done a complete translation, I'd love to see it, and I am sure other members might as well. It is a book that deserves a wider audience.

We're going to start a separate thread on "The British Way of Eating", so let's focus this one on the American way...

My point about travel and passports -- which I didn't make very clearly -- was that an insular nation will have more difficulty accessing culinary traditions of other countries and hence developing a body of consumers who are critically aware and demanding of quality. Local variants of a traditional cuisine will not be rejected and may become popular. This can be, as they say, "a bad thing" or "a good thing". Some superb dishes developed as a result of the French influx into Louisiana. Some Italian-American cookery is very good. But there has been a tendency in the US (and in Britain, to some extent) to seize on some salient aspect of a "foreign" cuisine -- the Italians' use of pasta, for example, or the French penchant for sauces -- effectively substituting that for the real thing. It is a substitution of a part for the whole, as if a Martian landed in New York, went to hear a symphony concert and decided that wearing fancy clothes, waving a wooden stick in the air and bowing after the performance were the essence of the lovely music. I find it striking that "real" Chinese and Italian cuisine (as opposed to chop suey, etc.) did not become widely accessible in US cities (excluding New York, perhaps) until at least the late 1970s. Good French cuisine arrived a bit earlier, perhaps, but I am guessing that most "French" restaurants in 1960s America were pretty bad. I would like to re-emphasise the points made earlier about technology, which connects strongly with the economic theme that VivreManger and others have raised. In the 1960s, "instant" was good -- and even better if "instant" had a high-technology connection. I remember being given "Tang" (a hideous chemical drink made from a powdered mix) because "the astronauts used it", and it was therefore good for children. For a lovely analysis of this aspect of the period (focused more on design than food, but relevant nonetheless) see Thomas Hines's Populuxe -- click here to order, or here to see the author's website. One last example, which may be tangential but seems apropos to the discussion. The film Dinner Rush has a revealing scene in which the "star chef" of a trendy New York restaurant is in deep trouble: the place is full, his sous-chef has walked out, there are gangsters in the restaurant, and the nastiest restaurant critic in New York has arrived. So he whips together a hideous looking dish: he deep-fries cooked pasta into a sort of raft -- this is an Italian restaurant, so there's lots of pasta around -- and boils two lobsters. He makes a stack of lobster shells with the pasta raft between them. To achieve greater vertical height, the stack is positioned with radio antennae of vanilla pods. Then lobster and rock shrimp surround the stack, and the chef festoons the whole (shells and the raft as well as the food) with a sauce that looks like vomit but is supposed to contain champagne, vanilla, lime juice and shallots; and then he scatters caviar over everything. Nasty Critic, of course, is overwhelmed. "You are a culinary genius", she burbles to the superchef, as she licks caviar and pasty-looking sauce off lobster shells. My point is that "gourmet" ingredients (lobster, caviar, champagne, etc.) and a "gourmet" presentation have been substituted for a dish that might please a real gourmet. The owner of the restaurant keeps asking the superchef (his son) for "real food". Not without reason.

There are a number of "reverse" examples in Alice Waters and Richard Olney -- Olney, for example, has an example of a herb pasta served either with a light cream sauce or as a kind of gratin, the pasta dough made with all sorts of young fresh herbs picked on the hillsides of your Provencal garden.

Restaurant kitchens are hot, noisy places. Not a good setting to eat in, for the most part, just as you don't really get the most out of a play when viewing it from backstage. Having said that, I can see situations where you have enjoyed a particularly innovative meal and would like a better understanding of how it is produced and served. El Bulli has an 8-person chef's table in the kitchen, not at all removed from the action; Ferran Adria writes somewhere that a real understanding of his cuisine is enhanced if you eat in this way. I would see a chef's table as an occasional change of scene and style, not at all something "more desirable" than a table in the dining room. And I would not want to eat at a chef's table until I had done so in the dining room and formed a strong view of the restaurant's style and performance.

Or vice versa. But at least they are different: beef vs. chicken livers. What wouldn't work would be ravioli filled with dark chocolate served in a dark chocolate sauce. (Now, no doubt, someone will say that some famous chef has been wowing the critics for a decade with exactly this dish...). Whereas (when you aren't going for encapsulation) it is perfectly fine to serve, say, roast lamb with a lamb jus, or beef with a sauce derived mostly from beef and veal flavour components.

MobyP, it seems to me that there are two reasons for stuffed pasta: to economise on the stuffing ingredients, and to encapsulate flavours so that they either stand out (as a figure against a ground) or go into the mouth in as concentrated a way as possible. The first clearly has no place in haute cuisine. I think there are cases to be made for pasta as a flavour "smoother", e.g. when you have an ingredient like anchovies or garlic that might be too strong on its own, but not, in a 3-star restaurant, as a way of saving money on lobster, pigeon, truffles, etc. The second reason, encapsulation, makes a lot more sense to me. I have had many superb ravioli dishes where the pasta was in a consommé or a very light sauce, and having the main ingredient surrounded by the pasta made the contrast of tastes sharper and more distinctive. The essential requirements are: a very light, thin dough; a filling that is deeply flavoured, not at all neutral or bland; a sauce or consommé that doesn't overpower the filling. The purest version I've had of this was a pea purée "ravioli" at El Bulli, where the skin (which I don't think was made of a flour paste) was so light that it vanished in the mouth. Superb.

Tony, a warm welcome to eGullet and Symposium. Could you say a bit more about how sustained the American food movement really is? Are we talking decades here? Julia Child's first cookbook appeared in 1961. Some people said that it sparked something of a revolution that has been gathering energy since then. Or would you go back further?

Perhaps one further cause of "The American Way of Eating" (both positive and negative) is that the vast majority of Americans don't leave their country that often. Most Europeans (and virtually all Australians) hold passports from a very early age; I'll bet that the proportion of Americans who hold passports is, by comparison, very small. Hence, except for those who do go abroad, fewer opportunities to taste "foreign" food in situ and more of a chance for "Americanised" versions of French, Italian, Spanish cuisine to develop in idiosyncratic ways.

A friend in Louisiana once served me goat that he had prepared in a home smoker -- it was wonderful. You occasionally see kid (chevreau) served in France, but it is very rare.

I agree with almost everything in Steven's post, which I found clear and convincing. Just a few points to discuss: What US programmes or literature are you talking about here? There is actually a lot of serious food writing in France, although some of it goes under categories other than gastronomy -- e.g. anthropology. There is a deep tradition of academic food writing in the UK, again, under a range of disciplines. Living in Europe you quickly become aware of the idea of "one's station". A lot of European restaurant culture is patently hierarchical, or at least a throwback to a (recent) time when who you were, rather than the money you were able to muster, determined entirely whether you were admitted to a club or restaurant and the treatment you got once inside. It is debatable whether this is better or worse than a system where good treatment depends on $50 bills slipped to the maitre-d'hotel, but that's another topic.

It's very easy to drift into a caricature of America that looks a bit like the restaurant scene from Terry Gilliam's Brazil, where people scarf down tasteless green gloop while looking at photographs of fancy dishes. And a corresponding caricature of France and Italy (think Peter Mayle, think Frances Mayes, think olive oil adverts here) where pure, natural food springs from garden to kitchen, people live a slow, reflective life, traditional foods are lovingly prepared and savoured by the family from great-grandmother to infant, sitting around a happy outdoor table, as the sun sparkles on the grass and a fountain burbles in the background. Oh! those freshly picked tomatoes are so delicious with just a bit of basil (from the garden) and olive oil (from the local mill). Life is beautiful. In both cases the reality is different. Plenty of US homes have gardens, some of them very fine indeed. There are many skilled, passionate home cooks in America. I can assure you that the French eat at McDonald's, that French fast lunch joints are often full, and that frozen and pre-prepared dishes sell very well at French supermarkets. If most Americans eat their breakfasts in diners (I don't think this is true) plenty of French and Italians either breakfast on a cup of coffee or grab a croissant and eat on the run. I have been with Italian families who have eaten with the television playing, focused more on the football match than on the hastily thrown together food on the table. Yes, you can get lovely local vegetables in France, but the best are fiendishly expensive, and the peppers you pull off the shelf at the supermarket are likely to be hydroponically grown in some Dutch veg-factory and thus tasteless. Having said all this, I strongly agree with Robert that there is a strong self-consciousness about American gastronomy. For many restaurants and diners eating well doesn't seem to come that naturally. It seems to call for a lot of rhetoric and discussion. The most powerful indictment of this I have seen is in John and Karen Hess's The Taste of America which condemned the national obsession with "gourmet" foods and recommended a return to traditional American dishes. The Hesses were experienced diners (they lived in Paris for many years and John Hess covered restaurants for the New York Times) and Francophiles. Their point was that the search for gourmetude often took away from a focus on what was good; at the time of their writing (early 1970s if I am not mistaken) "French" restaurants in America often took bad ingredients, cooked them sloppily, and then covered up for bad cooking with sauces, truffles and the like.

The Search Engine will take you to many threads on dining in Istanbul (including some about dining in restaurants with the name "Istanbul" that are actually located in New Jersey). Some interesting ideas are here. I share your hope that Anil will contribute more on Istanbul dining, but the place for them is probably the "Elsewhere in Europe" forum.

Fenocchio is good, and has some interesting herbal flavours (thyme, basil and tomato, etc.). Unfortunately as of a month ago they had stopped offering tastes -- one of the former pleasures of the place was tasting a number of flavours and then composing a cone of two or three of them. "A new policy" said the guy behind the counter. If you are in the area, try Vilfeu in Cannes (19 rue des Etats Unis, near the Gray Albion hotel). Slightly narrower range than Fenocchio, but the flavours are cleaner and better.

I've recounted the following story once before on eGullet: many years ago, I attended a weeklong observation class with Jacques Pepin where the organisers warned the participants, before the class, that we would not taste any of the foods prepared. "Nonsense," said Pepin, "how can they learn to cook if they can't taste what we are cooking?" And, through a sort of modern day miracle of the loaves and the fishes, he somehow arranged for each of us to taste every dish he prepared. I still remember a lot of what he taught in that class. He conveyed not only deep competence (boning a chicken with a few knife cuts, reducing garlic to a purée in seconds, etc.) but also a real love for the food and the work, and boundless warmth toward the participants.

Restaurants have high barriers to entry. It can easily cost £1m to set up a new high-end restaurant. The marginal cost of an extra cover is low. Consolidation doesn't work because the high value chef has limited capacity. Successful chefs opening second restaurants almost always fail, since the standard in both restaurants drop as they take their eye off the ball. Several interesting points here. First, I'm not sure that consolidation will apply to most independent restaurants, since if you are trying to drive a single service concept (e.g. Froggy's Pizza, a chain of pizza places featuring variations on cuisses de grenouilles as toppings) it is probably cheaper to tear down and rebuild than to transform an existing business. One chain can acquire another (McD's takes Pret-a-Manger, for example) but the costs of buying and integrating an existing single-location business are probably higher than those of building anew. I guess the exception would be one where the acquired restaurant is on a prime piece of otherwise inaccessible real estate, and the acquiror is buying the site rather than the business. Is it true that successful chefs launching second restaurants almost always fail as businesses? Exceptions might be Daniel Boulud, Gordon Ramsay, Marco Pierre White (who eventually got in trouble and bailed out, but it isn't clear that this stemmed from his opening a second restaurant), Alain Ducasse, Vongerichten, Nobu. Finally, on the barriers to entry. Opening a high-end restaurant does seem a daunting proposition, given costs for fit-out, kitchen, regulatory compliance, staffing, etc. Still, I am astonished at the number of new restaurants that seem to open every month; most at the low to middle end, to be sure, but some at the high end as well. Somehow there is a ready supply of would-be Gordon Ramsays ready to enter, realise sub-economic returns, and try to make it work. See Aliwaks's post, just before this one. Again, this is consistent with a Winner Take All economic system. Lots and lots of people want to be actors or involved in the movies, even though they know that most of them will fail, and even though they know that every additional entrant reduces the average chances for all the others. So there is a steady stream of people prepared to wait tables while trying to "break in". I think something like this applies to restaurants. The economists's explanation for this (remember that in pure economic theory the only motivator is financial gain) is that each entrant irrationally believes that she or he will be the next big star (Julia Roberts, Jamie Oliver, etc.). The non-economic explanation may be that acting, like running a restaurant or writing novels, is an inherently satisfying thing to do, hence lots of people jump in without calculating the odds of earning a lot of money (or even surviving).