Jonathan Day

A major step forward in the conversation. Reasonableness, not accuracy, should be our goal. These are statements not about the abstract nature of things but about the views of "a certain group of people". For our purposes it is useful -- reasonable -- to talk in the way we tend to on these boards. This advance lets us move away from "objective" as a descriptor of statements about food and wine without descending into the nonsense of pure relativism. I think a philosopher (Wilfrid, JAZ, where are you when we need you?) would say that these judgements are neither objective nor subjective but intersubjective -- i.e. "adopted by a certain group of people." We are still left with a problem: how to identify members of "the certain group of people"? We can say that "most gourmets agree that rare steak tastes better than well-done steak". But how do we distinguish a gourmet from a non-gourmet? These statements about food sound a bit like "99 out of 100 dentists agree that BrightWhite is a better toothpaste than GumsBeGone", but perhaps they are closer to "Most informed political observers agree that ... etc.". The members of the class are harder to identify. I can check on a dentist's credentials: academic degrees, professional license and the like. As far as most people are concerned, a gourmet is anyone who says he or she is a gourmet. I go back to Smith, Jones and Wilson, my hypothetical food experts. Each is "well dined", but they disagree. Apart from schemes like the Master of Wine (which may well be flawed) we have few objective tests of connoisseurship.

But we are interested in performing extensive research to find a bargain. That's the main reason we are here. All sorts of things drive prices out of line with "merit" (and we have still not agreed how to measure that, but set that aside): restricted competition, single-round games (as at tourist resorts, where it is unlikely that a visitor will return and it is in the restaurant's interest to charge as much as possible for as low quality as possible), high factor costs; but even more, fads and trends: aceto balsamico was "hot" a few years ago, so let's serve it with as many items as possible and add $3 per spoonful. Other products and preparations are "passé". Like the securities market, this one is beset by bubbles and crashes. Securities prices at the height of the internet boom were poor guides to future profitability. Even in the long run, endogenous phenomena (overshoot, undershoot, and otherwise flawed models on the part of investors) account for a huge percentage of long-run equity price variance. (For a lot more on this, click here -- the second paper sets out most of the theory, though it takes a long time to download). Food critics are not QA employees for the industry; their duty of care, to the extent that they have any, goes in exactly the opposite direction: to the consumer. I study Cabrales's and Plotnicki's and lizziee's and other eGulleteers' experiences so that I can avoid paying high prices for rubbish, and so that I can find low-priced places (DiFara's, La Cave, Le Pigalle, etc.) where the quality of the food is out of line with its price. Where I can't "do extensive research to find a bargain" is on business travel, something I do a lot. And I can assure you that, on the road, price alone is a very poor guide to quality. All this is not to say that prices do not provide useful information. They do. But if, as you say in another post, price were "the only available system allowing us to objectively assess products", then we would have no need for the so-called "objective" assessments of other posters on this site.

FG, I have not had pizza in Sardinia, but I have had variations on pane carasau -- e.g. pane frattau where they turn the flatbread layers back into a kind of lasagne, by dipping them in salted water and then layering them with tomato sauce, cheese and finishing with an egg. It tastes much better than it sounds. Pane carasau -- if that is what Otto are serving -- would not work well for pizza. It is too thin and crisp to hold topping ingredients. In any event it is not made on a griddle, but in a woodburning oven much like a pizza oven. I have seen griddle breads called, I think, piadine. But these are Roman. And they taste nothing like a pizza.

What follows is written in some ignorance of actual practices in restaurant finance (though not of corporate finance in general). It would be good to get comments from those more knowledgeable about the actual financing of restaurants and its implications for their management. I wonder whether an outside-investor model works for a restaurant -- that is, ownership in the hands of people who don't also have human capital invested in the operation. Equity investments in most restaurants, I would guess, are private placements; I cannot imagine Ducasse or Boulud, however ambitious, trying to float their restaurants on public markets. Chicago's Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises is still in private hands. We know that some businesses should never be owned by outside investors -- law practices, for example, where even if were not generally illegal to have non-lawyer partners, there is no way that an outside investor or her agent could properly evaluate the actions of lawyer employees. A similar argument may apply to medical practices and explains many of the problems of the HMO movement in the US. And I think something like this may apply to serious restaurants, where the chef's first goal may be to hit some sort of culinary standard, with financial reward a secondary, if important outcome. Outside investors need margins and they need growth. The business cannot stop where it is and work on quality: it must keep growing. To this add the fact that many investors nowadays have entirely unrealistic growth aspirations (e.g. consumer businesses growing at several times the speed of the economy). Once a chef becomes responsible to outside investors it is hard to see how he or she could stop seeking new growth, new options. And this means diversification: downscale menus, variations, additional locations. It is hard to see how this cannot lead to some decline in quality.

If price = merit (or even if it is the best guide we have to it) then why would we need tools like restaurant guides, eGullet and restaurant critics? Could we not save time and money by simply choosing the most expensive item in the most expensive restaurant in town?

Martin, we must be visiting very different parts of France and Britain. The quality of produce in the French supermarkets has definitely declined, but on average it is still far better than anything I find at Sainsbury's and Tesco's in London. And the customers are fussier: they are more likely to reject limp vegetables, for example. For example, pre-sliced salads in polyethylene bags are becoming more popular, but nothing like they are in England. The traiteurs and charcutiers in France are still miles ahead of anything I have found in Britain or the USA -- though not necessarily Italy. And the supermarket fish (which we tend not to buy, because there is a splendid fishmonger in our area) is far better than anything I've seen in a UK supermarket. That said, I agree that there is a myth that every French person is a discriminating gourmet and a fine cook. I have had some amazing meals in French homes; equally I have had some dreadful ones. British home cooks (again, speaking in broad generalities) tend to attempt simpler and less ambitious dishes, often with superior results.

My only comment here is that there is a process of learning and development. Suppose, for the moment, that you believe in a simple and linear scale, where 3-star refined French cuisine reaches greater absolute heights of quality than simple cuisines -- this as opposed to a more multidimensional or "fitness for a particular context or purpose" scale where a pizza and a dinner at Arpège could both be a 10. Even in this world, it seems unlikely that anyone could learn, instantly, to discriminate and appreciate at a high level. A person's idea of a "10" will change over time, as he or she experiences new places and new cuisines. Palates develop, as does our ability to frame intellectually the subtleties of a meal and the chef's intent. Most novices, confronted for the first time with a true 3-star meal, will miss a lot of what is going on. So I would propose four issues around high standards. First, can we identify a series of developmental stages or steps in "palate development" where an aspiring gourmand could learn taste and discrimination? This has practical value, for example, in teaching children how to eat. If I recall correctly, there is something in Brillat-Savarin about stages of gastronomic development, and even tests of development, but these might usefully be updated for modern times. Second, is it possible to "switch off" one's discrimination and, from time to time, stop eating analytically? (I think that it is, and I find this a useful capability.) Third, to what extent are there diminishing incremental returns in excellence as you go from (I am just making this sequence up) Chibois to Passard to Adria? Is the difference between 10 and 9 as big as the difference between 5 and 6? Or does the function go the other way, where the last steps are the biggest ones? Fourth, do high standards lead to unhappiness, as one ends up jaded and disappointed?

Forgive me, oraklet. My opening sentence was not clear. I did not mean "you have done no more than summarise", but rather "You have neatly summarised"..."just'" as in "just now". And I agree, it is not black or white. Donato states it that way, but that's the kind of bold statement that deconstructionists like to make. I am sure that there was a Tante Célestine. I doubt that Vergé simply made her up. The question is whether his cooking was influenced more by her or by his experience of "city cuisine".

Oraklet, you've just summarised the main point of the starting post. This "nation of gastronomes" is a part of the French identity; it is an assumed persona. Now the myth, as I understand Donato's claim, is that this gastronomic acuity arises from the land, terroir, life lived in agrarian simplicity. Grande or haute cuisine was an aristocratic and therefore urban sophistication of simple, provincial cuisine. And therefore there may be benefit in stripping away the frills and furbelows of haute cuisine and getting back to basics, back to terroir. Whereas--again, according to Donato-- the reality may be that the "back story" is a construct, an after-the-fact rationalisation of something very different. Is the "Betty Crocker" story a similar idea in American cooking? -- i.e. a big food company (General Mills?) came up with a range of dishes that would somehow promote their products, and invented a housewife/cook (Betty) who had supposedly created them. Somehow the French "back story" seems more subtle than this.

My experience is surely biased because I live in a village that is extremely bourgeois, not really in the country. Nonetheless, a few observations: most French shoppers go to the supermarket, where the consumption of pre-made foods is very high. Our village is going through a major crusade to cut down on household trash and encourage recycling. The idea that a week's kitchen trash would fit into a coffee can is laughable. the artisanal shops (butcher, baker, fishmonger, greengrocer) are very good but very expensive. the itinerant and fixed markets (e.g. Forville in Cannes) are still more expensive than what you find in the supermarket. And yet this is all overlaid with a romantic PeterMayleish idea of "Provence", countryfied living, red-tiled roofs and stone walls. At his sermon at midnight mass in 2001, the village curé (a cantankerous intellectual who loves to annoy his congegation) delivered a harangue about how Provence "no longer exists", that it is a romantic idea foisted on us by the media. He repeated this several times: "Provence n'existe plus." The Moulin de Mougins, which I referred to in the topic starter, promulgates this Provençal idea: a romantic, countrified hideaway, where you enjoy the plats doucement mijotés, quietly simmered on the stove, that Vergé learned from his aunt Célestine. In reality, it sits next to the Cannes-Grasse motorway, and the ingredients arrive in refrigerated trucks. Some cousins of mine, visiting from Missouri, put it perfectly. They were sitting in an outdoor restaurant in Mougins, a village so achingly perfect that it sometimes feels like a movie set. Water splashed in a fountain in the square. "Jeez," said one, "I keep waiting for the Pirates of the Caribbean to pop out from around the corner." All this said, the experience is pleasant, the food very good (though not at the Moulin) and the pirates never arrive, so I have no problem spending time in this particular constructed reality.

Adam, I was aiming at French cuisine as a category -- which in France, of course, it really isn't, it's just "cuisine". It has acquired a series of romantic notions and a "back story": the life lived close to nature, fresh-from-the-garden vegetables, and so on. Not that these things aren't good. In our place in France, last summer, we had a vegetable and herb garden, and very good it was too. But it was planted and maintained at enormous effort and expense. Those shiny aubergines, those perfect courgettes each cost a fortune compared to what we would have paid at the local supermarket, or even at our greengrocer. We will do it again this year, in part because the children enjoyed it so much. But the romantic ideas, no matter how pleasurable, are constructed. For a very recent example from The Washington Post, click here. Here we have the "French housewife" who Then, when she gets home, Well, perhaps I get to the market too late to witness these paragons of efficiency in action. But I don't think so. And to be clear, I don't think Marcia Mitchell is making all this up. But I suspect she is reading a lot into what she sees. And I think we tend to do that with French cooking more than with some other cuisines.

Cabrales, I have no quarrel with that. Restaurants (especially independent ones) are dicey businesses, and I would prefer to see more of them prosper rather than falling to the chains. The issue for me is profit maximisation in the short term versus the longer term, a one period game vs a game played out over multiple cycles. Suppose that I, as chef, over-ordered chicken and now have a piece that is not truly off, but is flabby and past its prime. There is no way that you, as diner, can ever know this until the dish arrives at your table. It is a classic "lemon" problem. I could push this dish on you in a variety of ways. If my goal is one-period, short-term profit, I will do exactly this. Now of course there are ways around this. You could select the restaurant with great care, checking multiple reference sources. You could taste the chicken and send it back, though most customers prefer to depart quietly (this is all written up, better than I ever could, in Hirschman's Exit Voice and Loyalty). You could try to signal to the chef, before the fact, that you are a discriminating and enthusiastic diner, and that you will be returning many times if the food is good. You could even try to signal that your experience will affect thousands of future diners' choices, e.g. by pretending that you are a professional food critic. But sometimes this fails -- as I think it did in the Dumaine coq au vin episode that you described in another thread. You went to the maximum to select the restaurant and then signal your discrimination and interest. The restaurant promised to do the same for you, and it broke its promise. That was an example of what I would call gouging, deceptive practice on the part of the restaurant. And this was a bad business decision for Greuze, given an objective of profit maximisation. It wasn't your fault. I think this also explains why the quality of the average restaurant in many tourist areas (Cannes, Nice and much of Paris and London come to mind) is so low: the assumption -- on average, correct -- is that most customers will be visiting but not returning. This doesn't mean that all restaurants in these areas are bad, and it is counterbalanced by the "cluster" effect that Porter and others speak of. But when the game is played once and only once, it's hard to see how the quality of the average joint will be strong. I think we've had this conversation at least once before, so I'll stop here.

Adam Gopnik, in Paris to the Moon, speaks about popular views of the origins of haute cuisine: a widely held belief, Gopnik then offers the views of the deconstructionist critic Eugenio Donato (1937-1983) on this subject. Though Donato’s published works seem to have focused exclusively on literary criticism, he spoke extensively to Gopnik, who says that Donato’s Donato claims that this 'colonisation' started as late as 1855, the year the Médoc wines were classified into the famous five growths in which they remain today, "the form of metropolitan rationalization being extended to the provincial earth, in the guise of the reflection of an order locked in the earth itself." "Not everyone can have a tante Célestine", runs the advert for the cookery school attached to the famous Moulin de Mougins, "but now you can learn the very same tricks and techniques that she taught Roger Vergé." According to Donato (via Gopnik), the idea of tante Célestine's country cooking leading to the haute cuisine practiced by Vergé is a fraud, though perhaps not an intentional one. It is similar to the view that the Victorians 'invented' many of the traditions surrounding the British royal family. Would French cuisine be any less enjoyable if we believed that it is a constructed art, with the "back story" of peasant origins and terroir as an ex post construct? On eGullet, also see the "Peasant Origins" thread -- here.

Janet, you've hooked me with that last sentence...in fact with the entire quote. What do you mean? (Or is this the basis for a new thread on menu design for cocktail parties? -- if you think so, why not start one?)

Let me note, first of all, that this interesting topic originated with JAZ. A software limitation means that it had to appear under one of the moderators' names. I find cooking and being served completely different (but equally pleasurable) experiences. For me, there is an element of performance in planning and preparing a dinner, especially one of any ambition or complexity. I think hard about how I'm going to get it done, mentally work out timing, do a mise en place, all that. I don't relax until after the last dish has been served to the last guest. An unfortunate implication of this is that I drink very little wine, if any, during dinner parties unless I am with very close friends who will be relaxed about minor errors. I've done some teaching, where the need for vigilance and focus is even stronger, but that's almost a different enterprise even though both involve cooking. Being cooked for, on the other hand, is a relaxing experience, one I enjoy almost no matter how the food comes out. It's not the avoided work, but the sense that someone has taken the time to care about a dinner, to choose the foods and set the table. But it's a completely different mindset. I tend to lose my critical faculties when dining with friends and neighbours -- the food always tastes good. That said, the quality of home cooking in Britain right now is very good. Excellent ingredients are widely available, and a long tradition of good home cooking has come together with a new awareness of food in a very positive way. Now if the restaurants would just pick this up...

I'm not going to try to argue this point by point. The market for high-end restaurants is light years from "reasonable efficiency", let alone perfect competition. There are deep seller-buyer information asymmetries, which even the most diligent diner will struggle to overcome: the restaurant wine buyer, for example, does nothing but buy and sell wine, attends auctions, visits vineyards. She will always know more than will all but a very few customers. I am not at all recommending regulation as a solution for these information problems or predicting that this is the only outcome. I would observe, though, that the industry is already more than a bit regulated, especially in the EU: product nomenclature, preparation temperatures (this in the US as well), etc. And I don't see that a diner can be "held accountable" (by whom?) for gouging on the part of restaurants. I, at least, don't blame myself when a restaurant serves me a dish that doesn't live up to its description or isn't worth what I paid for it. It happens. It's either bad luck, or shoddy work on the part of the staff; alas, too often the latter.

Cabrales, I've seen you make this point on other threads. If I understand your point of view correctly, it is up to the diner to prepare for a meal (by reading guides, discussing restaurants with friends, eGullet, other forms of research, etc.) and thereby to avoid any (legal) malfeasance, or failure to offer equal quality products, or to offer specials. If the sommelier offers a more expensive wine, one that doesn't match the foods well, and the diner accepts the recommendations, that is the diner's problem. Caveat emptor, or perhaps sauve qui peut. A diner who lets herself be bilked by the restaurant has only herself to blame. Now from one perspective I can understand this: there are no laws requiring the restaurant to give equal quality/size lobes of foie gras to everyone who orders "foie gras", or to stop sommeliers from "bad" upselling (i.e. that drives up the cost/value ratio). I would only point out that (1) exploitative behaviour in a business is a great to lose custom and destroy a firm's reputation; (2) where there are big information asymmetries between seller and buyer, and a tendency in sellers toward exploitative behaviour, the usual next step is regulation. Of course this has already happened in the area of sanitation and environmental control: most customers cannot get behind the kitchen doors and thereby become aware whether foods are being handled properly. So the regulators have stepped in. That's a good thing, in so far as it goes, but my guess is that regulation could get intrusive if it went much further. Think about the controls on product descriptions for consumer food goods. If the behaviour you seem to advocate became common, we could start seeing restaurants being required to write menus in regulatory language: "113 grams of prime beef top sirloin, uncooked weight, lubricated with vegetable oil before being grilled over a gas fire to an internal temperature of 120 degrees F, served with emulsified liquid flavour product with added alcohol (35 proof)". Profit maximisation in the long run (over the life of a customer and the life of a restaurant): a good idea. Gouging or trying to take customers for all they are worth: bad business.

FG, I don't agree with this, unless you reduce the interaction between server and customer to the words they exchange (i.e. what could be communicated in the way we are doing now). In my experience (and the sales management literature bears this out) there is a lot of "selling" that goes on that the customer should never be aware of. It has to do with the moves that the server makes to help the diners feel welcome and at ease, moves to mentally shift the server "over to the customer's side", and the like. It may involve an explanation of the structure of the menu if the server detects that the customer doesn't understand how it works, or even an offer to explain or translate unfamiliar dishes. It could involve calling attention to an attractive special of the day. None of this is upselling, in the sense that it tends to affect the diner's initial choice rather than the final order placed. All of it is selling. Some of it is very powerful.

Bigger checks do, however, mean bigger tips. Restaurants do not for the most part reward their salespeople (servers) on the basis of profits generated, so the incentive is to upsell without regard for profitability. Agree, and this is why a broad strategy of pushing servers to upsell is probably the compromise that most restaurants land on -- assuming, of course, that their goal is to maximise transactional or "one-visit" profitability. I wonder how many restaurants (1) actually think about relationship marketing or relationship management; (2) train their staff in relationship selling; (3) even try to estimate the relationship value of one customer over another, and use this estimate to determine policy on complimentary goodies? We should also distinguish complex sales from simple sales. If I recall the literature on salesforce management, the research findings from groups like Huthwaite indicate that the most effective sellers of complex products and services (large computer systems, construction projects, etc.) spend most of their time asking questions and relatively little time going on about features and benefits of the products. Conversely, if you try the "ask lots of questions" technique for a simple sale (a plain vanilla personal computer, for example), the customers get annoyed because the questioning is intrusive. For obvious reasons, complex products/services lend themselves to relationship marketing more than simple ones do. I think the distinction may apply in restaurants. Some meals, and especially some wine purchases, are more complex, in which case the right strategy is probably to ask the customer questions about her or his previous experience and preferences. At McDonald's, the better move (assuming, of course, that you are trying to upsell) is to say, "would you like a supersized fries for 30p more?" and leave it at that. I love it when a restaurant has a view about my experience and my preferences, but I must admit that this doesn't happen very often. My bottom line: upselling is part of -- not the same thing as -- selling. If it's done badly (for example, inappropriate questioning, or pushy, or aggressively) I detest it. If it's done very well, and I feel that the upsell has added value, e.g. helping me discover a great new wine, I welcome it. Most of the time, I ignore it.

We might usefully make a few distinctions here. First, higher checks do not always mean higher profitability for the restaurant. There are likely to be items (some high end wines come to mind, where occasionally you see prices almost at retail or auction levels) where the gross margins are reasonably slim -- much smaller, for example, than bottled water, where the gross margins are enormous. Equally, there will be items where the additional preparation cost (e.g. because a cook of higher experience and cost is required) exceeds the additional price paid. If restaurants are like most industries (and I include the fast food chains here) it is a safe bet that most have only the vaguest idea of how profitable an individual item is, once all costs are reckoned in. Hence it is even less likely that the waiter would know. Second, there may be other motivations for selling particular menu choices -- e.g. an overstock on a perishable item. If I recall correctly, Leslie Brenner's account of Daniel Boulud has Boulud pushing the waiters to sell a particular dish on a particular evening. Third, relationship profitability and individual transaction profitability are not the same thing. The former is about the customer's profitability to the restaurant over many visits, the latter about the profitability of an individual check. A restaurant that aggressively drives transaction profitability will put off customers that might otherwise return; hence the common practices of giving complimentary drinks, dishes, etc., to good customers. Finally -- and I think this is the point that Steve Plotnicki is driving -- price and the customer's perception of value are different: An "upselling" intervention that moves the customer above the dotted line is "good" from the customer's perspective, and may lead to repeat visits. One that moves the customer below the line is likely to put the customer off. I would add that -- in France especially -- about half of the interventions I have had from waiters are "downselling" ones, where the sommelier suggests that a less expensive wine would go well with a particular dish, a waiter quietly suggests that the lobster that day is not everything it could be, or hints that an extra dish we have requested may be just a bit too much. In this case, the move is to the left and up: lower price and higher value. I find this the most powerful "selling" technique of all, since it often biases me to view the restaurant positively and even, occasionally, to overlook minor faults in preparation.

In PM exchanges following her recent postings in Symposium, Janet (JAZ) raised a series of interesting questions that seemed just right for debate on this forum. There is a broad range of questions here, so we would encourage members to address any that strike their fancy. Given an either/or choice and setting monetary concerns aside, would you rather cook for yourself or eat someone else’s cooking? If your answer is "it depends" then what does it depend on? Does it depend on who else is doing the cooking? If so, who do you want to cook for you? Does it depend on the person you're cooking for? If so, whom do you want to cook for? An active or a passive role Would you describe the difference between the role of the cook and that of the diner as active as opposed to passive? It seems obvious that cooks are active, but can diners become active participants in the dining experience? If so, what form does their activity take? Do they even want to be active? The dining experience What do you most enjoy about eating a meal prepared by others? The quality of the food (including hard-to-find ingredients, un-thought-of combinations, the new and different)? The experience of being cared for, or waited on? The feeling of luxury? When you dine at restaurants, do you ever try to "take control of your meal" e.g. by asking for ingredients or accompaniments or preparations not on the menu? (à la Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally)? If so, why? When your meal is prepared by friends or loved ones, how does your relationship to the cook affect your feelings about the food? The cooking experience What is it about cooking that you most enjoy? The creation process? The experience (tactile or intellectual) of choosing ingredients? The feeling of control over the outcome? The joy of providing food for loved ones? The ability to impress people, to "show off"?

Anil, I was in BA last week. Blue skies, 27 degrees. It was hard to come back. If you haven't tried it before, I recommend Sucre, Sucre 676 in Belgrano, (0) 11 4782-9082. A colleague dined there last week and had a terrific time. I wrote an earlier review here. Enjoy!

Personally I prefer starting between 7:30 to 8:00 pm. Much later than that and sleep becomes difficult -- a serious problem given that during the week we are out of bed around 6 am. Much earlier, and I end up snacking before going to bed: bad for sleep and for weight control. My wife is from Texas, and even after 12 years on this side of the water she prefers to eat at something like 6 pm or even 5:30. That's about the time we feed the children, and she and the nanny often eat with them. Meal timing is not independent of national work habits and restaurant opening times. In the UK, it is rare to be finished with meetings and calls before about 5:30 pm, and there are often meetings starting at 5 pm. So it is challenging to get home much earlier than 7 pm or 7:30 pm. Weekday dinner parties here are often "7:30 for 8:00" which means that dinner actually starts at something like 8:15. The better restaurants here don't start serving much before 7:00 or 7:30. Gordon Ramsay's early seating is at 6:45, but that is an exception. In France, I have had difficulty getting reservations starting before 8 pm, 7:30 at the earliest. This can be a problem when we are with the children. Italy goes even further in this direction. As Ellen points out, nightlife in Argentina doesn't really start until 9:30 or so. I have found it very easy to get good tables at some of Buenos Aires's most desirable restaurants, simply by booking for 8 pm, where a 9.30 reservation would be impossible. Only problem is that if you take Argentinians along, they finish dessert at a time that, for them, the night is still young. They then settle in for several hours of coffee, drinks and chat. Fun, but painful if you are jet-lagged.

Completely agree with this. However, holding other qualities equal (the social/ethical/moral development of the individuals concerned), would you not say that "being well dined" could be an important element in one's cultural development, similar to being exposed to great architecture, literature, paintings, sculpture, music, etc.? Note that "being well dined" could refer not only to the highly refined world of the 3 star restaurants but also to simpler and older dishes, the connections between sea and farm and table, and between the cycle of the year, driven both by the seasons and by religious observances, and the foods people eat.

On this I disagree. I love cocktail parties too, especially where there aren't hundreds of guests and the noise level stays reasonably low. We should start a thread about menus for stand-up dinners or cocktail parties; here the architectural principles are different than for a sit-down dinner. But over the years I've stopped serving complex "snacks" or "amuses" away from the table. Olives, perhaps, or a few breadsticks or salted nuts. Or tiny wild onions, lampascioni. Or giant caperberries. But no more than one of these things, and in meagre quantity. And more and more, nothing. First, a complex dish away from the table starts the meal perhaps an hour before people sit down. The appetite and palate are dulled. The initial dishes don't have the freshness and excitement that they would have. Later on, people are tired of eating. Second, the endless criteria do apply, because taste memories carry over. I remember serving, with drinks before dinner, plates of tiny marinated vegetables. And they were very good, but the guests subsequently left most of the salad I served, hours later, uneaten. Third, you need to think about dishes clashing with your pre-dinner drink. Fourth, unless you can do the away-from-the-table amuse well in advance, this adds a layer of complexity and preparation that you may want to avoid, not to mention extra dishes to deal with. And if it's a dish of any ambition, people won't be able to eat it without a plate and fork or spoon. Finally, at this stage of an evening, I find that people aren't really concentrating on their food -- snacks that are served with the champagne get gobbled down. One more example: I once did a watercress soup that came out beautifully green and flavourful. We served it away from the table, with drinks, in espresso cups. Down it went, without pause or comment. The point here is not to serve dishes in order to elicit comments from guests, but that they were more interested, at that point in the evening, in catching up on news and gossip rather than in tasting the soup that I had fretted over. It's different when children are around: they cannot manage their hungers as grown-ups can, and need something to eat at their accustomed times.