Jonathan Day

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.

What about the Ritz-Carlton chain? Their restaurants (which are often called something like "The Restaurant" or "The Dining Room") can deliver surprisingly fine food -- I think of the one in San Francisco, for example, or in Chicago. My impression is that this is a hotel chain that is obsessive about the quality of its restaurants -- a corporate "restaurateur". Is this an accurate reading? Are there other hotel chains that break away from the HR-driven, corporate mentality that Lizziee describes? What about the Hotel du Vin group in the UK?

JAZ, let me join the chorus. A lovely post. Bring on your book! I posted a related note on menu construction and execution, last year -- here.

Owing to an error on my part, Tony Finch's last post appears later than it should have ... it was originally just after my earlier post and just before the post by "loufood". I inadvertently deleted Tony's original post while cleaning up a duplicated post. Tony has kindly reposted it, but because of the way the system works, there is no way to restore the correct order. Apologies to all.

Not so. The French and Swiss governments do exactly this. Key "semaine du gout" (week of taste) into Google, and have a look at some of the sites that come up. There are national, cantonal (Swiss) and departmental (French) "taste weeks" every year, mostly in the fall. I have translated the set of objectives for "taste week" from one of the French sites (click here). Educating and training consumers (in good taste), especially young ones Developing the taste of the largest possible number of consumers, in every good category Producing and developing quality foods Offering information, creating transparency and developing knowledge within the general public about the origins of foods, their production and their quality Promoting eating behaviours that lead to a balanced lifestyle (un mode de vie équilibré) The activities in "taste week" are planned both for adults and children. Here is one example of a workshop recommended for children: You can help children learn to recognise and classify foods by their dominant flavour. For example, you could use the following foods:Acid: rhubarb, lemon, vinegar, green apple, gooseberries, pickles... Bitter: cucumbers, frisée salad, endive, grapefruit, gentian flower... Sweet: lump sugar, strawberries, cherries, brown sugar, ice cream, melon, cake ... Salty: bread, salt, Gruyère, Parma ham, Roquefort, sausage, salted butter... Present the foods you have chosen, as a tasting for the children. Let them see you preparing the tasting: cutting up foods and arranging them on plates. Before they taste, be sure to let them know the categories into which they will be classifying flavours. Other workshops are prescribed for adults. I realise that I have shifted the focus from "restaurants" to "taste", but developing sensitive and thoughtful taste is also part of "being well dined", a part that does not require large expenditure.

Ian, this is very close to the question which I hoped we might discuss in the thread. What "architectures" of tasting menu work well? Which don't? Here are a couple of personal views, mostly on what doesn't work. As I mentioned earlier, too many salty tastes, too early on, tend to interfere with enjoyment later in a meal. Soup is good to start with, but too much of it early in a meal becomes heavy, especially if the soup is hot. In serving multi-course menus at home, I love to start with a small (espresso-sized) cup of a cold soup, or occasionally two or three cups with soups of contrasting colours e.g. carrot and watercress. On the other hand I have never become tired of truffles in multiple courses of a meal, as long as they are sensitively prepared. Terres de Truffes, in Nice, incorporates truffles in every course, including dessert. The pace matters. Some years ago, at a restaurant in Boston (I do not recall the name), we had a multi-course tasting menu. The restaurant was full, the kitchen was overwhelmed, and the gaps between courses grew and grew. After four hours, we left with several courses yet to come. On the other hand, an overly fast pace is also problematic. I find it annoying when the same technique is used again and again in every course of a tasting menu. Last summer at Lou Cigalon in Valbonne (1 Michelin star), there were "foams" in each of something like seven courses, from amuse-gueules to desserts. For those who enjoy tasting menus: what elements distinguish the good ones from the bad ones? What makes a tasting menu tip into the "indescribable haziness" that Ian mentions?

That's where it's going, at least for now. The thread can always be brought back if members have more to add on Escoffier.

Topic proposed by Robert Brown Not so long ago, only a tiny part of the populace paid much attention to where they or others dined. An interest in food was considered eccentric at best. One could become cultured and well-travelled without having any deep knowledge of the food or restaurants in the places one had visited. Today, however, restaurants -- experiences, opinions, comparisons -- are a prime discussion topic. We size people up according to where they have recently dined. We view someone with respect if she can tell us the place to dine in Madrid or Venice, or if he knows the best little pizza joint in Brooklyn. Society has always passed judgments about people being well-read, well-travelled or well-dressed. But it now has added, for better or worse, a concept we might call "being well-dined", referring both to international gastronomic travel and to deep familiarity with the restaurants in one's home town. Being well-dined could be part of being cultured, or it could be thought of in the same breath as being self-indulgent. Some questions we might discuss in this thread: Is demonstrating knowledge of and interest in restaurants and chefs an effective shortcut (as wine can be) to appearing sophisticated or cosmopolitan? Do most of the people cultivate an interest in food do so for this reason? Unlike interests that engage the intellect more than the body, does the need to sate one’s appetite lessen the legitimacy of becoming well-dined? If you consider yourself well-dined, do you feel at all guilty about the time and money it has cost you to achieve this status? Could the resources you have devoted to travelling to restaurants, purchasing books about food and restaurants (not to mention participating in eGullet) have been better spent in pursuit of high culture: reading great books, listening to recordings, going to museums, theatre, the opera or the symphony? Can we consider someone cultured who is ignorant of history, literature, architecture or the visual arts, but deeply knowledgeable about restaurants and gastronomy? Conversely, can one really understand New York, London, Paris or Milan without having some grasp of the culinary traditions and the top restaurants in these world cities? Is becoming well-dined an essential part of a person's cultural development? Generally speaking, then, is becoming well-dined a worthy goal if it is at the expense of missing out on more cerebral forms of enlightenment, or is the cost of becoming well-dined worthwhile in and of itself?

First, many thanks for participating in this Q&A. I live in London and therefore haven't dined at Blue Smoke (though after eGullet discussion it is on my list for a future visit to New York). But I have relatives in Lockhart, Texas and have been to several of their 'que restaurants e.g. Kreuz Market. The food is great but the service is primitive -- dishes delivered on brown paper, or in the places where there are plates, "cafeteria" rather than table service. Somehow this seems right for the kind of food on offer. It means that it's OK for adults and children to go to the restaurant in the most casual clothes and to eat in a messy, undignified sort of way. I can't imagine this going on at a fine restaurant in Manhattan. How do you reconcile the service and ambience you have created at Blue Smoke with the simple food? Was this a difficult match in designing the restaurant's fundamental concept?

Wilfrid, I agree (though I don't recognise many of the specific preparations in the second Escoffier menu): somehow these dishes sound both simple (after all, according to Elizabeth David one of E's maxims was "faites simple" -- roughly "keep it simple") and interesting. And yet here is Adam Gopnik, seeking to capture the essence of Escoffier’s ideas about cuisine: Has some of the complex simplicity (or simple complexity) of Escoffier's cooking has been lost in translation?

There is controversy on this board about Chez Panisse, and whether it still delivers an outstanding dining experience, especially in the main restaurant. Nonetheless most would say that it is important, as a restaurant. And I think it presents some challenge to FG's chef-driven vs. owner-driven distinction. On the one hand, Alice Waters has not been the restaurant's principal cook for many years (as she was in the early days), and (at least in her published work) defines herself as a "restauratrice" rather than a chef. CP has had a sequence of chefs, some professionally trained (Moullé, Bertolli, etc.) and others more "self-taught" (Tower). Yet Waters's imprint on the cuisine remains strong, not just in accoutrements, service, but also in the restaurant's fundamental culinary philosophy, menu design, sourcing strategies, etc. She is an owner, a restauratrice rather than a chef, but she exercises some of a chef's influence on what comes out of the kitchen. So is CP owner-driven or chef-driven?

Nick, a great question. If you are keen to discuss it, there is a new "role of the restaurateur" thread on Symposium. Ritz would be a great (historical) case in point.

We are clearly in the fact-free zone here and can only surmise just how radical Escoffier's innovations were. That said, what Escoffier did has all the signs of a discontinuous or "disruptive" innovation. It changed not only the production process but also the product, the customer offer, allowing more choice, on-the-spot creation of a service à la Russe menu, etc. It almost instantly became the standard for organising kitchen production, in a way that persists today. It even created the negative "lock-in" that Steve Klc's post refers to. Changes in industrial practice of this sort don't come quickly or easily. There is a lot of "stickiness" or inertia in most production systems, whether kitchens or factories. I suspect, by the way, that co-ordination rather than specialisation was at the heart of Escoffier's "big idea" -- the role of the expediter.

To correct an error in the earlier post: a menu for service à la française was divided into three parts, not two. Part 1: from soup to roasts, including hors d'oeuvres and entrées. Part 2: from roasts and cold second roasts to vegetables and sweet dishes Part 3: pastries, set pieces (both of these could be savoury), petits fours, sweets, ices, fruits. An example from Massialot's Le cuisinier royal et bourgeois (1691): First service. a piece of beef garnished with pies and sweetbreads; pigeon and capon soup with lettuce and asparagus tips; spit-roasted chicken and fillet steaks with lettuce on one side, hot rabbit pâté and goslings with asparagus tips on the other. Second service. roasts: two chickens, two hares, eight pigeons, with two salads and two sauces in separate dishes. Third service. A spit-roasted ham, cream tart, choux pastries; a ham loaf and skewered sweetbreads; a ragout of mushrooms and asparagus; fruit. The first two services, especially, were supposed to be roughly of the same length and number of dishes. Source: Larousse Gastronomique, chef Bertrand Simon's website (click here)

FG is right: Escoffier certainly didn't invent service à la russe. Prince Alexander Borisovitch Kourakine, the tsar's ambassador to Paris in the Second Empire, introduced this style of service at the Russian embassy, from whence it spread to Parisian high society. The idea was to move away from the formality of service à la française (see tasting menus thread for more on this) to a mode where dishes arrived hot at table. The guests were divided into groups of 8, 10 or 12; each was served by a maître d'hôtel who was told, in advance, which guest to serve first. The overriding imperative was to serve dishes hot and fresh. The cook and author Urbain Dubois (1818-1901) popularised this style of service in middle-class homes, following his service in Russia under Prince Orloff. What we don't know is the extent to which this service appeared in restaurants, where guests arrived at different times and ordered different menus. That, I would guess, is where Escoffier's innovation may have taken place. I would hesitate to trivialise Escoffier's "industrialising" of restaurant and hotel kitchens. Although there were many innovations in kitchen design and management (e.g. those of Alexis Soyer, 1810-1858, at the Reform Club in London), Escoffier's changes seem like a major step forward, a discontinuity. And this is usually how industrial innovations take place. Toyota's "just-in-time" system seems incredibly simple once you see it in action, and you start to wonder why another firm failed to come up with the idea. Similarly for Dell's approach to computer manufacture, with its zero or negative working capital. Yet (1) nobody did it that way before; (2) almost nobody else does it that way today.

I have not been impressed by the restaurants in the Conrad itself (or the J W Marriott, which is also in Pacific Place). But there is at least one good restaurant in the shopping mall below the two hotels -- we had some delicious roast fowl there (pigeon, duck, etc.) -- in the event that you want to eat without going outdoors. There is also a dimsam restaurant in the same area, the menu looked good but I have not tried it. Both the Conrad and the J W Marriott offer in-room broadband connections, so you can bring a laptop and stay fully tuned in to eGullet...

First, many thanks for participating in this Q&A. In many hotels I have stayed in, the concierges have not appeared to have much direct or personal experience of the restaurants or shops they recommend. I am curious about how a skilled concierge learns what to recommend. Could you describe how you and your colleagues have gone about learning the characteristics of different Paris restaurants? How much is personal "research", how much is word of mouth from other concierges, how much feedback from guests? Do you dine out often? Does your hotel cover the costs of your dining out when this is done to learn more about new restaurants or reach a point of view on what to recommend? If you do dine out for this purpose, how do you go about selecting which restaurants to examine?

Cabrales, in light of your experience (and perhaps considering the Escoffier quote above) are there design or "architectural" elements in a multi-course tasting menu that make it more or less satisfying for you? I find, for example, that too many salty tastes in the first part of a tasting menu get in the way of my enjoyment later on. This is difficult, because the classic openers in many cuisines are salty: olives, nuts, anchovies. In composing a menu, how can you awaken and energise the palate without stimulating it to the point of exhaustion before the meal is over?

Digging around a bit, I found a series of extracts from Escoffier's Livre des Menus (1922) in which he discusses the architecture of menus. It seemed so relevant to this debate (as well as to NickN's Escoffier thread) that I took the time to translate it. Escoffier was pushing for shorter and lighter menus, in keeping with a trend he had identified toward lighter eating. He then goes on to describe the development of the "lighter" menu. It seems clear that Escoffier was as concerned about the architecture of menus in 1922 as we are today.

My understanding (though this is based on very superficial research, and I hope other members will correct mistakes here) is that Escoffier pioneered two important innovations. The first was so-called service à la Russe, Russian style, in which dishes arrived in sequence, rather than being placed on the table all at once. In this way, the dishes arrived hot and freshly cooked, rather than sitting on a buffet table either getting cold or being held over heat while sauces turned to glue. This required a novel "industrialisation" of the hotel kitchen, rather as Toyota created so-called "lean" or "just-in-time" manufacturing and hence enabled customers a far wider range of choices in car colours and options. In this sense he could be said to have "invented" the tasting menu, though it was more the invention of a service style. The second was enabling customers to order à la carte. And this, I believe, did not just mean that you could order a starter, a main and a dessert from a carte-- that had been possible for many years, and there are examples of such cartes, predating Mr E by many years, in the Escoffier museum in Villeneuve-Loubet. It meant that the restaurant patron could order a full, multi-course, Escoffier-sized meal by choosing from a list of options, "composing" the menu on the spot. In this sense, the restaurant customer was better off than the wealthy patron who could order her chef to provide a multi-course menu, because this had to be done in advance of shopping, i.e. no later than the morning of the dinner. Again, the industrialisation of the hotel kitchen must have been critical. Note that this second Escoffier innovation is, for the most part and for most people, no longer available in today's restaurants. You can order a set tasting menu, you can ask the chef to compose a tasting menu for you (though this often reduces to the set menu with variations). But for the most part you can't walk into a restaurant and ask for a sequence of 15 or so dishes, even if they are on the carte. Further research would be valuable here. For example, would Escoffier's customers have been required to order the same menu for the entire table? My guess is that they would not have been. If this is right, then once again today's restaurants offer less flexibility.

Topic proposed by Jonathan Day NickN has started an interesting thread on Escoffier, who composed many long, complex menus. This thread is only incidentally about Escoffier; rather, it is about the length and complexity of menus. In 1908, "the chef of kings" prepared a special tasting menu at the London Ritz for twelve guests, among them the future King George V. Daniel Rogov’s internet page (http://www.stratsplace.com/rogov) presents the menu, along with valuable commentary and context. Note that it was served as a procession of courses, not a banquet where a diner might choose some four of the fifteen courses offered: Melon halves filled with Beluga caviar Clear turtle soup Cold velouté of chicken soup Roast chicken stuffed with wild rice and truffles Welsh lamb with fresh peas. Lemon-ginger sorbet Trout filled with fresh herbs and grilled Duckling breasts in port wine aspic Quails with grapes Sorbet of pink grapefruit Artichoke hearts in mustard sauce Lettuce salad with a mint and honey vinaigrette Peaches poached in vanilla sauce Petits fours Selection of fruits Impressive, and no doubt fit for a future king. But many of us would consider such a menu overly complex, difficult to eat, and, simply, too much food. Apart from a once-in-a-lifetime challenge (rather like the restaurant in Amarillo, Texas where anyone who can consume a 6 pound steak in 1 hour gets it for free), Escoffier’s menu doesn’t sound like a satisfying way to eat. How much less satisfying would a menu of this length be if it were designed by a lesser chef? As Robert and I were discussing this thread, he mentioned Ferran Adria's 25 course tasting menu at El Bulli, which didn't collapse under its own weight. And, he pointed out, we don't know the portion sizes Escoffier served, though I would guess they were larger than the spoonsful and tiny tastes on offer at many restaurants today. At what point does a multi-course menu tip from bounty into clutter and excess complexity? Here, by the way, is another Escoffier menu, with my translation and explication. More knowledgeable members may be able to correct errors and help fill in details, e.g. Salade Isabelle, which I do not have. Again, note its length and complexity. 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. Were these the classic Chinese birds' nests, or some sort of pastry or potato construction made to look like 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 (or does "rosée" refer to the degree of doneness?) 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 Grandes Liqueurs Fine-Champagne 1830 Source: "Menu de Noël", from the Escoffier site at the Académie de Dijon: click here

And don't forget Le Pigalle. First you get to walk your children through Soho's sex shop district. Then you get to "take in" the detritus of the Berwick Street market. But the place is clean, Francois is a hoot, and the food is inexpensive and very good. The best dishes are the long-simmered ones: either those Francois tells you about or those found on the last page of the menu: cassoulet, coq au vin, souris d'agneau. Highly recommended.

I agree with Matt's and FG's prescription, and this is what we tend to do at home. We buy an inexpensive but tasty extra virgin oil from Spéracédes, in 5 litre tins, and use it for almost everything except cooking at high temperatures -- for which we use a neutral vegetable oil, e.g. sunflower. I am consistently surprised, though, when travelling in Italy, to find home cooks and cooks in small restaurants frying all sorts of things in extra virgin olive oil -- including deep frying. Perhaps this is because this is the oil most readily available to them. I see this in France as well. The Spéracédes mill, for example, sells no grade other than extra virgin.

Switch the sign of this idea from positive to negative. Lots of people will (pre)judge the enjoyment of something by learning where it comes from on the beast (e.g. kidneys, brains, tripe), or the fact that it is a vegetable (cardoons, salsify) that they have not seen before, or being able "to see what it was before it went into the kitchen", e.g. a roast pigeon served with head still on. Crosnes (a tuberous vegetable) look a bit like fat grubs before they are cooked, and even after unless they are puréed. They can still be tasty. My guess is that some of this disgust is based on the actual smelling and tasting experience, e.g. people who have an aversion to the taste of liver. The majority, I would assert, is based on mental associations that have nothing to do with sensory experience. I sometimes call it "eating with the mind instead of the mouth", by which I mean letting preconceptions about how, e.g., duck tongues will taste rather than tasting them and judging by that. Children are, of course, very prone to this.