Jonathan Day

The reality we perceive is rarely congruent with the "physical reality" or "objective reality" that is in some sense "out there". Look at http://www.sandlotscience.com/Distortions/...ortions_frm.htm for (numerous) examples of visual illusions -- note that many of these demonstrations take a bit of time to load, since they use Flash and Java. Illusion number 2 ("ball and shadow") is particularly striking, but there are also old favourites like the Muller-Lyer illusion. Same holds with food. Setting and context matter. My dinner at Ledoyen on Monday was different because of the lovely setting and the warm service. Had the same molecules been slapped on a tin plate on a rickety table by a snarling waiter, I can't imagine the experience being anything like what it was. All of which is to say that I struggle to understand how we could ever access purely "objective" taste. As you read this screen, there are "objective" interactions between photons and the rods and cones on your retina, but the brain goes through a lot of work to turn that into image and then into sense. This isn't an issue of picking up one element of the dish before another, or of concentrated aromas, or anything like that -- presumably Steven would say that these are "objective" as opposed to "interpreted" elements, e.g. if the tin reacted with the food, it would "objectively" taste bad. And I agree, let's rule that out. I'm talking about contextual elements that don't alter the chemistry or temperature of the food in any way. And I still think these are very hard to separate from "objective" taste. (Having said all this, I must admit that I also struggle to see why the Blue Hill egg dish should come across all that different in a decorative egg cup of as opposed to a plain egg cup. But then my sensibilities may not be all that finely tuned).

One thing that limits my "pure" gastrotourism is a general inability to eat and drink heavily for several meals or days in succession. I simply can't handle a really serious (2/3-star) meal in each of 3 successive days, without losing appetite and a sense of well being. And for me, that sense of equilibration and well being is such an important part of enjoying fine dining that I am usually reluctant to fit too many meals into a given trip. This is less true in Japan, where the food is often lighter (less fatty) than it is in France. That means that my gastrotourism is either a quick strike (as with tomorrow's trip to el Bulli) or a more extended period, allowing for pauses between heavy meals and alteration of lighter meals / salads with more serious eating.

I didn't find the truffle flavours dominant in the sauce -- the balance seemed almost exactly right. I would have liked it with a tad less salt, but the chicken flavours came right through. I forgot to mention the timbale of macaroni, which was fine (and a nice way to get more of the sauce!) but slightly messy to eat.

Dinner on Monday at Ledoyen. A lovely room, warm service. The atmosphere is warm, welcoming, not stuffy, but what the French call correct -- everything precisely in its place, everything done as it should be. Warmth without a trace of informality. A tray of amuse-gueule: the little "spring roll", the cheese pastry and the foie on toast points mentioned in lizziee's review, plus a stunning little tartlet of pea purée, topped with a perfect pea. This was a slightly formal business dinner, so there wasn't a chance to taste my German colleague's dishes, to quiz the waiter very much, or to discuss them in any detail. We drank a glass of Deutz blanc de blancs '96 champagne to start. As my second amuse-gueule they brought me a perfect shrimp in aspic, and my colleague had a similar aspic made with vegetables. As a starter I had the signature langoustines, my colleague (who can eat no fish) the most beautiful asparagus dish I have ever seen. The langoustines combined crunchiness and smooth meat from the tail, split in two and served with an olive oil emulsion. Then my colleague had veal liver and I had "volaille" (abattis de volaille) -- crests, sot-l'y-laisse, kidneys, all sorts of other delicious bits, served in a deep brown sauce that was perfectly clear, the sort of technically perfect sauce so rarely served these days. The waiter warned about what was in the chicken dish -- perhaps he thought I expected a grilled breast -- but I assured him that I wanted as many weird bits (morceaux) as the chef wanted to serve me. Simple, but superb. He was astonished by the liver -- we both fell completely silent as we ate our main course. Then we split the "5 desserts", which if I recall correctly encompassed chocolate, berries, citrus, caramel and pineapple, the latter served in a meringue. And then mignardises. Only gaffes were the mint tea that they brought me after the service -- tepid and almost flavourless -- and the somellier's insistence that we had to drink a red wine with the liver, a white with the chicken. My colleague opted for a white -- though I know he would have preferred a red. But with that brown sauce, a lighter red would have been perfectly suitable with the chicken, and he should have known the dish well enough to suggest that. Instead we drank a '98 Puligny Montrachet. It was very pleasant, rounded and slightly spicy, and the waiters kept it just at the right temperature, not too cold. The cheese offering looked astonishing, but we turned it down. Bill for two with champagne, wine and calvados (le Pere Jules 20 years) was exactly €500: not cheap, but very good value for what it was. You could easily have paid far more than this in London for food, wine and service that came nowhere near this standard. I was struck by the essential simplicity of each dish: each item tasted exactly of what it was, and nothing else. My signature quote from Curnonsky, which means "Real cooking is when the foods taste of what they are", applies more to this chef's style than almost anywhere I have dined. And indeed the menu items are simply headed "Asperges" (asparagus), "Langoustines", "Volaille" (chicken), etc., as if to focus your attention on the core ingredient. Next time, I will dine at Ledoyen while on holiday, with a companion who is "into food" -- and perhaps thus be able to give a more detailed report. I reserved two weeks in advance for an 8 pm table on a Monday evening.

OK, it's all becoming clearer now: Gefilte fish: bad Quenelles, Chinese and Italian fish balls: good Bagels, pastrami, chopped liver: good Appreciating something in a cultural context: bad Completely consistent with the theory as expressed so far.

To Steven's point: to some extent the consumer is paying for more than just molecules of food on a plate. Why does the setting matter, for example? Or the service? Even the history of the restaurant. What about the progression of meals you have been eating before the meal being evaluated? All that said, I agree with Steven that we have to start by "eating with the mouth rather than the brain". But should a critical assessment end there? I think not. Martin, the memories of passover dinners I was referring to involved fish with freshly grated horseradish. To me, this is a wonderful combination of tastes, but it seemed particularly important then. And I like the taste of matzo, but as a change rather than a staple. I guess the inference we are to draw from Steve Plotnicki's post is that the Dutch collectively lost their tastebuds somewhere along the way and are thus to be excluded from the 50 million Europeans who know what's good and what isn't.

Both. I was tempted to be Fergus Hendersonesque and stop there, but I'll go on. Knowing the "back story" affects, for example, what you might serve with what. Or when you might choose to eat a particular dish. Or understanding that a particular taste may bring pleasure even though it is bitter (e.g. the bitter dishes served as part of the Passover meal). We are not disembodied intellects. But neither are we mindless sense machines. Interpretation makes a difference.

Steven, I'm not sure that the three categories are completely independent. Consider the rhythm of feasting and fasting in the Catholic countries. Quite a few French and Italian dishes evolved as they did because they were "fat" or "lean" foods, intended to be eaten either during a period of abstinence ("lean" foods) or after ("fat"); and this applies even more strongly in the Orthodox countries like Greece. And there is an interesting dynamic between "real" fasting and dishes like brandade de morue that are notionally dishes of abstinence but manage to convey a pleasing degree of richness. In this case, the context (the "back story", if you like) is not merely an amusing anecdote about the origin of the food. It is a key determinant of why the food is prepared in the way it is. At a physiological level, of course, the molecules of a brandade de morue that go into your mouth are the same, whether or not you know about the broader context. So the "actual taste" is the same. But I would assert that a great deal of "actual taste" is in fact in the mind, not the mouth; what we think affects how things taste. I think I posted once before about a group that cheerfully dined on red-cooked ducks' tongues, right up to the point that they realised what they were eating. Taste is more than molecules.

In general I agree with Robert's assertion, but we need to ask him to unpack it a bit. Robert, are you saying that restaurants now degrade faster than they did before because the environment changes faster, or because they are forced to be more commercial than they once did? Obviously all restaurants follow some upward path from the time they start to the time the cycle of decline begins. Examples of decline in London: Tante Claire, Mirabelle, Suntory (Japanese). The Moulin de Mougins, as well as Vergé's other restaurant in town, L'Amandier, gently slipped into mediocrity, losing a total of 3 Michelin stars. On the other hand, there are examples of renewal: the Grand Vefour seems to be back on form after several years of decline, and even the Moulin has regained one of its stars. Companies generally tend to follow a path of steady decline after a period of growth, which is one reason why very few single firms have ever outperformed the market index over a long period. Some of this is due to the negative effects of size, some to the prevalence of non-economic motivations (the CEO gets more interested in a knighthood than in improving the company). The exceptions seem to be firms that have gone through some period of crisis which, if the company survives it, can release a lot of energy and creativity. But it's hard to manufacture a crisis.

Robert Brown developed this topic but I am posting it since he is out of New York. ------------- As time goes by, the quality, service and value-for-money provide by any given restaurant almost always becomes worse rather than better. I can recall a time when a chef-owned restaurant generally improved over time as the chef gained experience, technical skill and sense of refinement or good taste. But this pattern seems increasingly rare now that fewer chefs are self-employed and have to conform to the orders of a restaurateur pulling the purse strings. Of course there are exceptions: sometimes a restaurateur replaces one chef with a better chef. However, among the restaurants that I follow both as a customer and in the media, I see far more examples of restaurants on a downward slope than on an upward one. Robert Frost's poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" seems apropos: Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. Do you agree with Robert's rather pessimistic point of view? What examples of restaurants would you cite to either confirm or challenge his assertion? What factors in the world of today's restaurant business would lead either to improvement or degredation in any given restaurant?

Yes, pending confirmation of the date. And thanks for organising this, Simon.

And as Craig says, it makes a big difference if you sauté the pasta in the sauce for a moment rather than just pouring the sauce over the pasta and combining the two.

Today's Sunday Times features a story about Gordon Ramsay, in the front section. Apparently the self-styled "superchef" is in negotiation to follow Jamie Oliver into an "exclusive deal" to promote some supermarket's products -- the speculation is that the company involved is Marks and Spencer. "I have had a very exciting approach from one of them [supermarkets] recentrly and I am considering it," said Ramsay. He said that supermarkets had "improved tenfold compared with a decade ago. They never had in-house bakeries or sold vine tomatoes. You could never find red mullet or sea bass. People don't want to traipse around markets and buy potatoes with mud on them." He also commended Jamie Oliver: "Jamie has been clever and I don't believe he has sold out. You only have to look at the bottom line and the amount of money he puts onto it for Sainsbury's compared with the £500,000 a year he gets for doing it. Personally, I don't think he is getting enough." I cite this not as a criticism of Ramsay or an accusation that he is "selling out" but simply as an example of the enormous temptation that a chef must be faced with to take years of hard-won expertise and reputation and turn it into money -- and the difficulty of doing so simply by running a restaurant.

R.G., you've already made an important step in taking an apartment instead of a hotel. I don't think you will regret it. I hope you'll try a trip to one of the great street markets, bringing your food home. You don't have to cook very much: you can find salads, charcuterie, lovely roast chickens, breads, cheeses. The market I enjoy most is the one on the Rue Mouffetard, though we once had an apartment on the rue Jacob and discovered a daily street market outside our door: small but beautiful. There is one in the 4th, Rue St Antoine, but I don't know it that well. And the marché biologique, Blvd. Raspail, is worth a visit.

Some people travel to see the world. Others on business. Others, to eat. I love to eat, and I try to eat at interesting places wherever I travel. But something stops me from travelling solely in search of food. Part of this is a sense that food has to be appreciated and interpreted within a context. The great Japanese food I have had in Kyoto would not provide the same experience if served in London, even if the identical molecules of food and place setting could have been transported there. I need some sense of the landscape, the buildings, the people. And I'm not particularly interested in going through ugly environments even if wonderful food is to be found inside them. Part of the joy of travelling to France and Italy is about enjoying great food in beautiful settings, in places that you would go to even if the food were not as good. Another thing holding me back is a general dislike of travelling to places where there is personal danger or likelihood of catching a nasty illness. I like places where you can drink the water. And hence I go to Hong Kong more often than the Chinese mainland (though I have visited the latter). Finally, living in a major metropolis means that most foods are readily available, often at high levels of quality. Purely gastronomic travel is often unnecessary. Of course there is only one Arpège, only one el Bulli. But even a forthcoming trip to el Bulli would probably not have been arranged if good friends had not been going there as well. I don't like travelling alone just to eat. I guess this makes me less than a truly devoted gastrotourist. But what about you? Do you travel long distances solely for the purpose of eating? Will you travel alone to find wonderful food? Will you travel through a dangerous or otherwise unpleasant environment, if great food is to be found there?

Basildog, just to be very clear: I think your aspirations are fine and honourable. And I see nothing wrong with what you are doing, and it seems to be working well for you. And if you are keeping things the bills and the staff paid when operating on that scale, my guess is that you are a good businessman as well as a good chef. My point was that an outside investor would probably not realise much of a return from your operation, or from one serving 100 covers a night. You would cover your bills, pay the staff, and the till would be empty. There wouldn't be anything left for the investor. Private finance, the chef-owner and his family putting up the cash, may be the better way for independent restaurants.

I'm taking a risk here, because I don't know the restaurant business "from the inside". But from the outside, the independent restaurant business looks like an economic disaster. By that I mean one where most participants will find it difficult to earn what economists call supernormal returns -- returns above the cost of the funds invested. Returns that an ordinary investor would say are commensurate with the risk entailed. More simply: real money. There are plenty of industries that have been "bad" for a long time. Steel, for example, where irrational competition from "national champions" and capacity that has been easier to add than to withdraw has meant that margins have stayed persistently low. Airlines, where capacity is costly to withdraw (because the critical airport landing "slots" are not easily tradeable) and where the industry is therefore subject to constant price wars. Of course a few companies in just about every industry make real money. Southwest Airlines is profitable, even when virtually every major airline is at risk of bankruptcy. Nucor has outperformed the metals sector. But the curve in "bad" industries is a steep one: only a few companies win. By the independent restaurant business I mean free-standing restaurants, not fast food outlets or chains. Olive Garden, McDonald's: no. Single establishments: yes. Distinctive members of a group, e.g. Café Boulud: yes. What's wrong with the business? I'm going to make a whole series of assertions here, knowing that many of them will be wrong. Those who know, please correct me. First, many restaurants are operated by chefs, skilled in cooking but untrained in any principles of business: marketing, pricing, organisation, people management, cost control. And that's a big problem, because even if you happen to be completely clued in on these things (perhaps you went to a great culinary school and learned them in the management course), you are faced with competitors who often don't know whether they are making or losing money, or why. And the worst kind of competitor is a dumb competitor. The steel industry was crippled because many "national champion" steel mills were operated by civil servants who were unskilled in business and funded by governments who didn't care about their returns. Bad competitors give away "surplus" (again, returns over the cost of capital or "real money") to customers or to suppliers. An example: almost all restaurants give away free options, called reservations. A punter can book and cancel with no penalty. Some members of this board have reported double- or treble-booking, waiting for a sought-after waiting list to clear, and then cancelling the others. Even where a credit card is taken, most places allow a cancellation up to 24 hours before the meal. This is just bad management, yet as long as most restaurateurs allow it, it's hard for a rational restaurateur to break away. Second, the industry is incredibly fragmented, and it's far too easy to enter. Where the money is coming from, I don't know. I suspect that the business works, in part, because employees are willing to take low wages, e.g. chef-owners who pay their employees a minimum wage and themselves less. But, at least everywhere I have lived, new restaurants seem to open frequently. A fragmented industry is usually a "bad" industry, because it's hard to secure agreement amongst participants about the terms and conditions (let alone price) at which things will be sold. Third, it's subject to fads and fashions. Tastes change. An important critic can drastically change the fortunes of a restaurant. Fourth, both the fixed costs and the variable costs in an independent restaurant are high, especially at the top end. This isn't like the software business, where the fixed costs are high, but the cost of manufacturing each new product is almost nil. Nor is it like some service businesses (say, hairdressing, though my sense is that this isn't a great business either) where capacity can be aligned with demand. It costs a lot to open the doors of a restaurant, whether or not any customers turn up. And I will bet that, even at high-priced joints, most of the gross margin on food gets eaten up by labour and administrative cost, leaving little for the owners. Operating regulations in restaurants are rigorous and expensive to comply with. Employees are hard to manage. Etc. Finally, for the most part independent restaurants don't achieve sufficient operating scale to get efficiencies in purchasing, administration and the like. I said earlier that even bad industries have their winners. Usually these are the firms that are prepared to run with a radically different business model than their struggling competitors. Southwest Airlines flies people from place to place, but with a totally different model than American, United or Delta. Nucor developed the "minimill" model, sharply different to its integrated competitors. What are the winning models in independent restaurants? One guess is that scale has something to do with it, so that groups like Dinex (Boulud's group in New York), or the Danny Meyer restaurants, or the Lettuce Entertain You group in Chicago may be advantaged over single-location restaurants. Even here, most of these seem to be privately held: the business may be too volatile to be attractive to outside owners. That in itself doesn't mean that real money isn't being made in these groups: law firms are, by regulation, privately owned, yet many of them make good money. Do you agree with the basic thesis, that most independent restaurants will do no better than break even over the long run? Do the five reasons why this is a "bad" business correspond to your experience? What does it take to make "real" money in an independent restaurant, especially where the owners and employees have aspirations for high quality? And if this is such a "bad" business, why do you think people keep opening restaurants?

For me a big part of the value of "conceptual food" is that it has given me fresh eyes for the foods I choose every day, the foods that are at least as much about satisfying the body as they are the intellect. Once you've had Blumenthal's red cabbage gaspacho with grain mustard ice cream, or Chibois's mushroom salad with potato ice cream, it's hard to look at red cabbage or potatoes in quite the same way. Blumenthal may be unusual in this group that he seems to do "comfort food" as well as "conceptual food". Snail porridge with ham, yes; but also pot roasted best end of pork with a macaroni gratin that isn't conceptually unusual, just entirely delicious. Or perhaps not so unusual, thinking of Trio's "root beer" flavoured short ribs.

I found the first part of Ian's post convincing, indeed inspiring. Then I struggled with the second part, because at least part of the avant garde movement has resulted from increasingly global access to new ingredients, and, more important, new ideas. The good news in globalisation for slow foods and community agriculture may be that small producers will find demand for their products that didn't exist before. I have persuaded a couple of London shops to import Italian foods (pane carasau, bottarga, etc.) which they never believed would be taken up by customers; they now do a moderate trade in these products. But I don't see that Trio, for example, limits itself to community agriculture, even though Grant has clearly forged important relationships with small producers. Perhaps more to the point, this cooking is not really about nutrition (though it does satisfy basic hungers). "Nobody goes to Trio because they are hungry", said Grant, early in the dialogue. I would imagine the same holds for el Bulli.

Many thanks for participating in this Q&A. I love kidneys, cooked in all sorts of ways. I can recall an amazing veal kidney, cooked in its own fat, at the Hostellerie Jérome in La Turbie, France, and served very simply. And, of course, grilled lamb's kidneys. Do you ever serve pork kidneys at St John? Our butcher in London stocks them but says that they are too strong tasting. Is this your experience? Do you prepare kidneys for cooking by soaking them? In what? Milk? Salt water?

In the UK most of the dried pasta you find comes directly from Italy; this is true both in Italian speciality shops and in the supermarkets. The supermarkets' private label pastas are not bad; Sainsbury's even has some high-end lines of artisanal pastas, e.g. strozzapretri and those Sardinian pastas whose name I forget. Not as good as what you can get from esperya.com, but not bad.

I read somewhere that the type ("hardness") of flour used in dried pasta differs between America and Italy because different strains of wheat are grown in each country -- I cannot remember the source of the assertion. De Cecco was the only workable dried pasta that I found when I lived in Chicago, and back then (1980s) it was hard to find. I am sure it is more common now.

As I understand it from Michael Ruhlman's book, The French Laundry, which was a restaurant before Thomas Keller acquired it, took its name from the fact that the building was once, literally, a French laundry. This was "French" in the sense of "French polishing", not that the laundry work was done by French workers or using French techniques. It was part of the general association of France with luxury and a certain type of quality. Thomas Keller, of course, spent real time in France and also trained with a couple of French chefs in the US (Roland Henin? I don't recall the other names). And it looks as though a lot of French techniques and styles, e.g. heavy use of veal stock, liberal use of butter, refined, reduced, strained sauces, etc. are still used at the French Laundry. As, I am sure, they are at Trio. But I have the impression that French methods and styles are not as dominant at Trio as they are at TFL -- they take their place amongst other techniques and styles. Somewhere in the Q&A, Chef Achatz talks about moving away from the brigade as an organising principle for the kitchen. It would be interesting to learn more about this.

In several memoirs and a recent interview with Larry King, Julia Child emphasised that she was a cookery teacher and writer, not a chef. That doesn't take anything away from her enormous achievement, it just means that she didn't work in a restaurant. Apparently the PBS station in Boston chose the title "The French Chef" because it was short and would therefore appear in full in TV Guide and in the newspaper listings. But I want to use this reference to Julia Child to bring us back to the start of this thread. Julia Child's massive publication record (books, articles, videos, etc.) shows how a cooking authority can take her or his knowledge and "disembody" it, so that it is delivered to millions rather than hundreds of people. Of course Julia gave up most of the economic benefit of her work by doing it through public broadcasting (and I think that some of the proceeds from her books and videos went to non-profit causes, but I am not sure). Nonetheless, a lot of money changed hands. I have a strong hypothesis on restaurant economics: at "normal" scale (a few hundred covers, let's say), restaurants are a terrible way to money. This is an industry plagued by bad competitors (who often don't know that they are going under, let alone why), high fixed and high variable costs, fads and fashions, and a tough regulatory environment. This is a topic we might debate on a separate thread, so I won't elaborate on it here. But the empirical evidence is all around us. Even if a chef-owner's goal is not to get rich but just to make a comfortable living, a restaurant is a bad place to start from. Hence the pressure to find media outlets and other vehicles that are less subject to the difficult economic environment of the restaurant business. For some chefs, the TV gig or cookbook may be a matter of survival rather than "going commercial".

Bugialli's Foods of Sicily and Sardinia and the Smaller Islands is wonderful, especially the pictures. Pellegrino Artusi's Art of Eating Well is also great -- I have the Kyle Phillips translation but apparently a new and more complete one has just been published. Ada Boni's Talismano della Felicita. And Elizabeth David's Italian Food, of course.