Jonathan Day

Some newspapers report the weather, other the baseball scores. On New Year's Eve (or Saint-Sylvestre as it is known in France), Nice-Matin covers the food. Today's edition has several pages covering restaurant menus, recent purchasing habits concerning foie gras and smoked salmon, and comments from local chefs. I thought some members might enjoy a review of some menus offered by local restaurants this evening. This is a small sample of the dinners covered, and I have omitted details about music, dancers, etc. In Antibes, because of ongoing building works, "there is less choice when it comes to great restaurants". Les Vieux Murs, in the old village, offers a salad of Breton lobster, "panier croquant" (a pastry basket) with asparagus tips and sauce Maltaise, sea bass and scallops with oyster butter, a granité of mandarins, then venison with a velouté of truffles on roast potatoes, vegetables, goat cheese in puff pastry with basil oil and a winter salad, 'petit chalet' of chocolate, pistachio and vanilla. All this for EUR 125 per person, exclusive of drink. The menu at the newly opened La Jarre, on the ramparts, also costs EUR 125. Salad of Breton lobster again, this time served with a ratatouille of fresh scallops with truffles, green asparagus tips with balsamic vinegar, filet of John Dory, breaded and fried, with black olives, fine de claire oysters served gratinéed with champagne and an oyster cream with coriander. Then a granité of grapefruit and basil, heart of filet of Simmenthal beef "en chevreuil" (I think this means the beef is cooked as if it were venison) and grilled duck foie gras, bone marrow souffléd with polenta and cèpes, carrot fans with cumin, a plate of cheeses from Cannes's famed Céneri, canneloni with bitter chocolate, mousse of crème brulée with Bourbon vanilla, "sauce Juanja". Moving up the scale, in Nice, Alain Llorca at the Chantecler offers "a symphony for gourmands" starting with a cold jelly of seafood with fennel sorbet, then grilled scallops, chestnut agnolotti, Breton lobster, venison and a chocolate dessert. EUR 350 per person. In Mandelieu-La Napoule, L'Oasis offers a Russian dinner in honour of Peter the Great, founder of the village, including, amongst other dishes, borscht, "goloubzy" of troute and crayfish with "red caviar" (quotes in the article), coulibiac of pike, black tea sorbet, pain d'épice "Petrouchka". EUR 400, but this includes champagne and as much vodka as you want. In Cannes, the Villa des Lys at the Majestic offers a 10 course dinner for EUR 470. Restaurants in Menton, on the Italian border, "the city of lemons", have opted for an Italian theme, including a "Venetian" soirée at Jacques Chibois's Mirazur. Finally, for big spenders, there is Monaco. Here the festive dinners ranged from EUR 195 (which sometimes included wine and champagne, sometimes not) right up to Ducasse's Louis XV, where 'the menu is a closely guarded secret, but it is certain that the meal will reach the summit of the art.' Yours for EUR 650 per person, drinks not included. Interestingly the Monégasque restaurants were the only ones to indicate dress code: "tenue de soirée" (Ducasse), "tenue sombre" (Monte-Carlo Grand Hotel), etc. Chefs in the smaller towns commented that business had not been as good this year as last. But meanwhile, the champagne was flowing and the foie gras and Breton lobsters (lots of these this year) were on the table. For the avoidance of doubt, our St-Sylvestre dinner was quiet and at home, with the children: oysters, vioulets, "Christmas duck" (half-boned, brined and slow-cooked), roast cauliflower à la Jim Dixon/eGullet, roast potatoes and turnips, cheeses, chocolates. Bollinger 1988 and Domaine Tempier Bandol red, 1999. And an Armagnac from my wife's birth year. A very happy New Year to all.

A very pleasant lunch today at Le Pigalle with four of us at table: escargots, warm goat's cheese, fish soup, cassoulet, souris d'agneau (lamb shanks), coq au vin. A decent bottle of house merlot. Fish soup didn't hit the heights of Loulou (few places do) but had a good stock served with a mild but nicely rounded rouille; coq au vin very good: flavourful, meaty chicken, neither over- or under-cooked with a rich stock and delicious mushrooms. Served with noodles, in honour of the ongoing pasta thread. Cassoulet as wonderful as before, with fat, flavour-filled beans. This is "sweet" cooking: not in the sense of sugary, but rich, warm, deep flavours. This is a chef who isn't trying to shock or challenge his customers, just to bring them back, for a few hours, to a simpler and slower world. One of our guests, who had never eaten in Europe before, was overwhelmed at the flavour of the cassoulet. The food at this place all goes down very easily. And for minuscule prices, for central London. That's the good news. The bad news is that we were the only customers for the whole lunch service. If this continues, Le Pigalle can't last long. Come on, eGulleteers. Let's not let this place go under!

Actually, it is evidence of exactly the opposite. The best chefs are using ravioli techniques as simple means toward what Heston Blumenthal calls "flavour encapsulation": the pasta keeps the bits of duck, or fish, or whatever, together, so that their flavours are concentrated and explode in the mouth rather than being dissipated in a soup or sauce. Nonetheless the eGullet world awaits your antipasta thread with breathless anticipation. Bring it on!

I learned to fry Chinese foods on a commercial wok burner with very high output. But as Kikujiro notes, very few home stoves (even the quasi-professional models) have anything like the high heat that you would use on these stoves. Right now, I am using an "Aga" cooker, which on the "high" flat-top puts out roughly 15kbtu/hour using a heat storage system. For "wok" cooking I use a very heavy, flat-bottomed Wohl pan, virtually a dutch oven, with high rounded sides, allowing it to get very, very hot before the food goes in. This is the closest I have ever come to the heat intensity of a commercial wok burner. Of course it does have the problem, as Ed says, that it doesn't cool down quickly. So on the "low" flat-top, I keep a high-sided sauté pan, and transfer the cooked food into that. Not ideal, but a practical adaptation given the idiosyncrasies of the Aga.

I am not sure whom the "you" repeated throughout Steve Klc's note is supposed to refer to. I am going to take it as generic rather than personal. Nor do I see how comments about "dinosaurs" or "the amusing language of this thread" particularly move the conversation forward. Nonetheless I will clarify my own point of view. I am neither defending Alice Waters nor attacking any other chef. Nor am I trying to establish or defend a "camp" or promote one cuisine over another. I enjoy eating and cooking both simple and more elaborated dishes, traditional and modern, Gordon Ramsay and the River Café and the Fat Duck. (Yes, yes, I know that there is controversy regarding the latter, but please take Blumenthal as a proxy for Adria, since I have yet to dine at El Bulli). I did ask a question about culinary history: is the Waters/River Café/'cuisine selon le marché" idea really new, or not? And I do think that there is a point where excess elaboration can leave things tasting "other than what they are", which seems to me to be the point of the exercise. I remember a chaud-froid de canard montmorency (this is a duck, roasted and then reformed with liver and foie gras, coated with a chaud-froid sauce which is in turn made from brown sauce, chilled, decorated with almond-stuffed cherries) served at a festive dinner in a Paris hotel. Perhaps because the sauce and the filling weren't well balanced, the flavour of the duck itself vanished under a range of cloying/salty tastes. At a lower level of pretension, I end up being served, at business dinners, quite a lot of dishes that would have tasted far better if the hotel chefs who prepared them had focused less on saucing and garnishing and more on the main ingredient itself. And, for the avoidance of doubt, I don't determine my enjoyment of a dish by how it looks, or how big it is, or how I think it was prepared ... but by how it tastes.

This may be true in New York. It may be true in Paris. It is not true here. It is not true in the other parts of France I know well. It was certainly not true for Chez Panisse when I lived in California: they sourced at least some of their ingredients from their own gardens.

Julia’s assertion, in essence, was that bad ingredients could be covered up by good technique. Not that good ingredients wouldn’t improve the product, but that they weren’t essential to good cooking. I think that relatively few people – including Julia – would defend this view today. To Steve Plotnicki’s point, did Ferran Adria really say that quality of ingredients is unimportant? It would be interesting to see the citation. The question I posed was whether or not starting from the immediately available ingredients and then deciding the techniques that will maximise their flavour was relatively modern (less than 100 years old) in French culinary thinking. The opposite approach would be that in planning or choosing a meal, you could start from decisions about the dishes you wanted rather than with a trip through the market. Restaurant menus might well be seasonal, but could be fixed for a long time. You would not find a daily varying menu, decided after the chef’s early morning trek to market. Is cuisine selon le marché a new invention? (I assume, of course, that before the advent of trucking and refrigeration, all cooking was more seasonal than it is today. I am not talking about obtaining strawberries from Israel or peppers from Holland in mid-winter, but about choosing the menu based on specific ingredients that were superb on that day. Whether in restaurants or at home, people would presumably not eat asparagus in the depths of winter. The issue is whether, at the height of the asparagus season, a chef would feature asparagus because it was especially beautiful that day.) Note this is an historical question more than a logical one. A second question is whether the application of more and more technique, however skilful, to fine ingredients can ultimately be detrimental to their flavour or aesthetics. And here, again, we need a criterion. If the purpose is to create exciting new flavours, then more technique can be better. If it is to bring out the flavours of the ingredients themselves, then I would assert that too much technique – saucing, puréeing, reshaping, otherwise transforming – can get in the way. This is certainly the case in some of the elaborated, multi-layered recipes of the grande cuisine. Which is not to say that ‘Italian is better than French’ (a meaningless statement in whichever direction you put it) but that too much treatment can get in the way of the flavours of foods themselves. There is a technique to knowing how much technique to apply.

Of course one need not dominate the other. And of course the product of good technique will improve when good ingredients are used. But there is a school that says that ingredients are not that important, as long as you know the right techniques with which to doctor them. Julia Child promulgated this view, and it earned her the Hesses’ wrath in The Taste of America. To Julia's credit she was writing for Americans in 1961, when good ingredients were scarce. In her energetic way, she wanted to convince everyone to get into the kitchen and try cooking French. But, back then at least, she was very clear that technique dominated. From the foreword to volume 1 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking: The first substantive chapter concerns kitchen equipment. There is then a brief section on ingredients, noting that except for possibly foie gras and truffles, all the foods called for were available in the average American grocery store. American salted butter and French butter were deemed interchangeable in cooking. Wisconsin “Swiss” could be substituted for Gruyère and Emmenthal, Philadelphia cream cheese for Petit Suisse. If you can’t find shallots, mince onions and then drop them in boiling water. And so on. Another example from Julia’s expositions of soupe au pistou and fish soups: My point is not to attack Julia Child, to whom many of us owe a debt of gratitude. And my guess is that in her later work, Julia emphasised fresh and good ingredients more than she did in 1961. But a lot of cookery technique is about transforming or disguising bad ingredients, through sauces and other treatments. When I first learned to cook, the things I was most interested in finding were kitchen tools and cookbooks. My gastronomic trips to New York took me straight to Bridge Kitchenware, not to the farmers’ markets (if they existed back then). Something new seemed to happen in the US, roughly 20 years later. Alice Waters may not have been the only proponent of the school that said, “start with great ingredients and then decide what to do with them,” but she had a lot of influence. I certainly recall a shift from starting with a recipe to planning the meal based on what seemed good in the markets on the day. A first cooking trip to Paris in the early 1980s pushed me further in this direction. An extreme position in this direction turns up in the River Café cookbooks : for certain dishes and sauces, the salt must be Maldon sea salt, the vegetables and fish exquisitely fresh. Sourcing (Chez Panisse’s ‘forager’, for example) becomes as important as kitchen technique, and Alice Waters gets reproached by a chef from another restaurant, “that’s not cooking, it’s shopping.” Precisely, say the ingredientologists. It would be interesting to understand just how modern this ingredient-focused view is in Europe, and in particular in France. The aphorism I have used as a signature (roughly, “great cooking happens when the ingredients taste like themselves”) is from Curnonsky (Maurice Edmond Sailland) who lived from 1872 to 1956, and who had a lot to do with the “discovery” of provincial restaurants and cookery. Edouard de Pomiane (1875-1964) followed in this school, and influenced Elizabeth David with his emphasis on simpler treatments of excellent ingredients – e.g. his recipe for tomates à la crème. And David, of course, had a deep influence on Alice Waters. My guess is that these days we would be surprised if a chef or food writer wrote as Julia Child did above. The Waters/River Café/David perspective is the more common. But which goes back further?

I'm one of those, as you know, Steve, and I wouldn't have it on my top ten or twenty list either. The entire concept of CP is derivative of Mediterranean cooking and isn't as good as I've had in dozens of casual places in Italy. Good for Alice Waters for having raised the level of awareness about ingredients in some circles in the US. Good for her for having done it in a demographically felicitous location. She deserves her success. Not a great restaurant. Three quick thoughts here. I am also "one of those", preferring simple to elaborated cooking. But I firmly believe that it is much, much more difficult to create transcendent dining experiences in the "simple food" or Chez Panisse model. There are far fewer outs or options for the day when the right ingredient doesn't arrive, or the line cook is feeling lazy, or a waiter is off form. A top French restaurant can barrage the diner with course after course, doctor weak flavours with complex sauces, disguise poor-tasting fruit in the "fondant covered pyramid sprinkled with raspberry dust served with a gelee, a foam, and a panna cotta" that Karen describes. It is more of a high wire act: either it succeeds brilliantly, or it fails miserably. There are few points in between. And the more experienced a diner is (both at eating and at cooking) the harder it is for a no-choice, simple cooking restaurant to consistently create "wow". A second point is that the thread illustrates the difficulty of "best" as an operative category for restaurants. Best for what? For me, and I suspect for many of us, Chez Panisse was a wonderful door into a new kind of dining and a deeper appreciation of food. The Grand Vefour was another. Discovering eGullet some 7 months ago was another. For who I was, at the time, and more importantly for the personal development I needed, Chez Panisse was undoubtedly "best". I was smitten with the woman who had taken me to dine at CP; the room was quietly welcoming; and the food was overwhelmingly good. I can still remember the crunch of a perfectly fried squash blossom that our waiter quietly offered as an amuse (or, as he put it, "an appeteaser"). I had my first Chassagne Montrachet with that dinner. So I do think that "best" (whether we are talking about restaurants or French vs Italian cuisine) needs to be qualified. This isn't an invitation to relativism, but to clarity of language. Finally, I am with FG in rejecting political orientation as a qualifier for a restaurant. Some diners may choose to go to a restaurant because they are anti-fur, pro organic, emphasise local produce, etc. but this shouldn't excuse poor cooking or shoddy service. I hope that Alice Waters would agree with this.

I believe this, though I find it amazing. The oven he has built is huge, and looks both heavier and better insulated than any I have seen. Thanks, Nickn, for passing on this interesting website. A production pizza oven needs (1) fiercer heat even than a bread oven, i.e. around 400 C; (2) an open door, so that you can constantly put new pizzas into the oven and remove the finsihed ones. This can happen very frequently i.e. once per minute. You can bake acceptable pizza at lower temperatures -- this is what most of us do at home, after all -- but you can't keep the door closed in a restaurant setting. Hence the need to re-fire the oven during service.

Pizza Metro in Battersea Rise is very nice, and for us it's very local, so I have to join in the chorus of recommendation. The food is good, the welcome warm, and they have from time to time let our children make a mini-pizza and cook it in the wood oven. We feel lucky to live so near such a pleasant neighbourhood restaurant. However we have had times when Pizza Metro has fallen apart on service, getting orders confused and serving one diner at a table perhaps 15 minutes before the others. Usually this happens when the restaurant is very busy and every table is full, or they are short-staffed for some reason. On one of these occasions some of the staff started to behave in an ugly manner, shouting at customers. We continue to go to Pizza Metro. However, they are starting to experience competition; when we moved to the area the only other option in the road was a Domino's. Now there are two other places right in the neighbourhood, including one (Strada) with woodburning oven, decent product and a somewhat more "modern" menu than Pizza Metro.

I don't think the firebox versus the fuel-in-oven will make much of a difference in the heating characteristics, as such. Equally, you can get very high temperatures with electricity, which is generally cheaper and certainly cleaner and lower maintenance. I'm not sure whose standards would decree that flavour transfer is undesirable for pizza. To believe this, you would have to believe that pizza "cuit au feu de bois" is simply a romantic idea, something that affects ambience rather than flavour. That's possible, but it seems unlikely to me. Isn't there a Neapolitan pizza society that publishes standards for pizza quality, perhaps even on the web? It would be interesting to see what they have to say about this. On whether the smoke comes from the wood or from burnt flour, all I can say is that the electric pizza oven I have in France (which easily goes up to 500 degrees C, in practice we tend to do pizzas at around 400 C) turns out a delicious product, but it doesn't have the same character as the best pizza from wood ovens, including some that I have used -- hence eliminating the possible confounding variable of the cook. You certainly get an element of smoke and wood flavours when wood-fired ovens are used to cook meats. Next I am in France I will try to find out what kind of wood the pizza restaurants tend to use. You would certainly want to avoid resinous softwoods (pines, etc). But even well-cured white oak will leave some flavour elements. I have never seen a coal-burning pizza oven in Europe. But then, there are thousands of pizza ovens in Europe that I haven't seen, so this doesn't tell us very much.

As far as I can see from the photo, this is a coal oven. In which case you would want the fuel in a firebox, since the flavour imparted from direct exposure to coal smoke and ash would not be good at all. FG, I have eaten and cooked a lot of pizza in wood-fired ovens and electric pizza ovens and I can assure you that there is a definite flavour transfer where wood is used. The exact character depends, of course, on the type of wood being burnt. The dough that goes into the oven is very tender, and it quickly picks up flavour, even though it cooks in a few minutes. In home bread and pizza ovens (rare but not unknown in Italy; even rarer in southern France) it seems more common to fire the oven -- this can take many hours -- remove the embers and then cook pizza and bread from the retained heat. Resins and smoke elements remain in the oven, and the character of the bread or pizza does change. A large home oven, properly heated, can cook many loaves or pizze. As the oven cools, it can then be used to cook meats, stews, etc. My small "beehive" oven can do a fair job on, say, 2-3 pizze before it loses the scorching heat needed for a great product. But it only takes an hour to heat up. As you indicate, this declining heat would not work for a restaurant. So restaurants with a wood burning oven continue to add wood during service. Most restaurant ovens are slightly wider than home ovens, so that there is room for the burning logs and embers to be thrust to the side, making room for the pizza in the centre of the oven. In any case, the same retained heat is in action, radiating from the floor, roof and sides as Nickn indicates. Wood burning pizza ovens have suddenly become popular in restaurants here, even though there are strict environmental laws about burning wood in home fireplaces in London. I assume that the restaurants have some sort of scrubber on the flue. What are the environmental laws regarding wood burning ovens in New York?

Please let me know the date of the event -- I do get to New York now and then. In any event, happy to send an offering from London. I am a complete amateur when it comes to baking, though I love to do it. Perhaps we can persuade Jinmyo to send some bread from the frozen north.

Not always. It's never as soft and creamy as fresh ricotta, but I have seen it with the texture more like, say, a good roquefort. I've also seen it hard, like a parmesan. As with many goat cheeses, it depends on how long the ricotta has been aged and how much moisture has come out of it.

I have no idea where to get good ricotta in New York. But could the success of the Lupa dish have something to do with the way the ricotta was prepared? I have seen recipes where the ricotta is "drained" before use -- it is placed in a fine sieve, and some of the whey allowed to drip out over a period of a few hours. This changes the texture considerably. I believe that "ricotta salata" is prepared this way: the ricotta is lightly salted, pressed, and aged. In fact, is it possible that the ricotta served at Lupa was ricotta salata? I have seen this cheese, and cheeses like it, served with honey in Sardinia and Sicily, as a dessert.

I have a "coarse" or "medium" microplane. I have used it for everything from parmesan (which it turns into feathery curls rather than chips) to horseradish. I microplaned carrots into a puree to add to a soffrito for rice, turning the rice a brilliant orange and giving it a lovely flaour. I've microplaned chocolate for finishing cakes. I've microplaned truffles. It is a wonderful gadget with a thousand uses. And cheap, to boot, for what it is.

Yes, and as Tony notes they eat pasta (perhaps before their pie, but they definitely eat pasta). Weren't you going to give us an essay on "The Problem With Pasta"? Or has this been adequately covered in the Italian Culinary Irrelevance thread?

My perception is that this is changing in Britain, though perhaps not fast enough. The chattering classes now chatter as much about food as about house prices. It's hard to think of a homeowner in Clapham who isn't installing a new kitchen. Shiny 6-burner Britannia stoves (useless tin fiddles, but I guess it's the thought that counts) are everywhere. We just completed the 8th anniversary of our neighbourhood "progressive dinner" with over 70 people dining. There was some phenomenal food served. So my sense is that Fay Maschler and Jan Moir are just a bit behind the middle-class curve in their reactions. It would be interesting to understand the audience that the Telegraph, for example, is targeting.

I think it's a fair assumption that the readers of most UK dailies won't eat at the Library at Sketch on a regular basis. Nor would they take a holiday in Sydney or Tokyo on a regular basis. But these are things that they might do at least once in a lifetime. My French friends (and these range from the fairly poor to some captains of industry) don't rush to Astrance or Arpège every night, nor do they structure their holidays so as to guzzle as many 3-star meals per kilometre travelled as possible. But they do, now and then, go for a special meal at a special restaurant. It's not impossible to save one's pennies for something like this. I agree that a bite-by-bite replay of a meal at the Library (as exemplified in some reviews on these forums) would be ridiculous. We, the food-obsessed, get great vicarious enjoyment from these reviews, but ordinary newspaper readers would not. Nonetheless, couldn't a review focused on the food and covering some spectrum of courses be done without arousing envy. Isn't part of the function of a review to strech the readers a bit, to invite them to try new things? Or, if it doesn't stand up, to be able to say to them, "if you are saving up for an incredible meal at Sketch, don't bother".

I agree that the core issues is not the hotness of the food -- except in the gastronomic case, below. But I think the desire of the absent person (or the one waiting to be served) would change a great deal, depending on context. In the solitary cases (grab-and-go, snacks around the telly, etc.) the person who was waiting wouldn't really care what happened, so you might as well tuck in. In the more communal cases (old-style family dinner, religious meal, etc.) my guess is that the person who was waiting would prefer that the rest waited for her/him; at these events the goal is not to have a wonderful gastronomic experience, but to share food with friends, something that's hard to do if you haven't got any food. This is even more true if the meal begins with a prayer or candle-lighting or other ceremony. There are variants on business dinners. If I were the one waiting, I would encourage others to begin eating, but wouldn't be surprised if they refused. The most common behaviour I've seen is that people simply ignore the food, as if it hadn't arrived, until everyone has been served. At a gastronomic dinner, the absent person would certainly want the other diners to begin eating immediately.

Sorry to join this conversation so late in the game. But I did want to plead for a sense of context and for the prevalence of reasonableness rather than rationality here. I agree with FG that the official etiquette codes generally prescribe starting to eat hot foods. But doesn’t the code to be applied also depend on the setting and the purpose of the meal? Let’s try some contextual examples: At one extreme you have the grab-and-go meal, where the main purpose is to satisfy hunger. In essence this is a solitary meal for each participant, it just happens to be eaten at the same place and at (roughly) the same time. This happens at breakfast, for many families, where people are rushed and are leaving on different schedules for work, school, etc.. It would be unthinkable to wait for others to arrive before beginning to eat, because it is not really a meal taken in common. In country house breakfasts people will take food from the buffet and start to eat it, ignoring what others at the table are doing. And they will feel free to leave the table, e.g. to get more food or to fetch a newspaper. A related setting would be an informal party (e.g. pizza or snacks eaten while watching a football match on television); again, in some sense a solitary meal rather than a communal one. The context changes with family meals, though unfortunately these are increasingly morphing into solitary, grab-and-go meals, as families dine while watching television, reading, and other private pursuits. Here the social function outweighs either the nutritional or the gastronomic. In religious households the meal might well begin with a prayer. Thoughtful cooks will prepare dishes that can easily be held until everyone is ready to dine; this is not a place for à la minute dishes that must be consumed as soon as cooked. The same applies at a restaurant, with a family dining together. In most settings, people would wait for others to arrive or be served before eating. A related meal would be a religious meal, such as a Passover seder or a commemoration of a communion or marriage, or the quasi-religious Thanksgiving dinners in the US. To the extent that these are sit-down meals, I would think that the social/religious role would be more important than the gastronomic, and that people would wait for others to be served before eating. Then there is the business meal, where the primary purpose is to discuss business affairs, with the meal and wines serving more as a lubricant to conversation than as the centrepiece. To me, it is at least in part a matter of contextually appropriate behaviour (what is reasonable rather than what is prescribed) to avoid extensive discussions of the food or cooking in these meals. At times this is challenging: I have often taken clients to restaurants like L’Oranger, Bobendum or Pétrus in London, and it is tempting to focus on the food. But, unless one’s dining companions are deeply interested in cooking, it would feel strange to discuss the food, or carefully inhale the aromas of a dish before tasting it, or other things that would be appropriate at a meal focused more on gastronomy. Here the decision as to whether to eat before others are served depends somewhat on hierarchy. But in general the safe action would be to wait. And that brings me to the setting in which, I am presuming, the original question was posed: the gastronomic meal, where it is presumed that most participants, if not of eGullet levels of fanaticism, are there primarily to test the mettle of the chef (and their own perceptiveness). Here, the focus is on the food, and here it seems reasonable and contextually appropriate to taste hot dishes as close to the condition in which they are served as possible. I can see the formal etiquette codes applying here. Paradoxically, this kind of meal can approach the solitariness of the grab-and-go, depending on participants' behaviours. For more on rationality vs reasonableness and on the situatedness (contextuality) of practices, see Stephen Toulmin’s excellent Return to Reason (Harvard University Press, 2001).

Transport by taxi from Mougins into Cannes (and back) is very easy. It just requires a call to a taxi company, and there are many. And drivers who will take you from Mougins to Cannes, then return for you when you give them a call on the cellphone. Ditto for Mougins --> Grasse, for trips to Chibois. On my return I will post the co-ordinates of a very good local taxi guy. There are also frequent buses that run from Cannes rail station up into Mougins and then onward to Grasse.

I might consider Menton for a first visit to the area. There are some lovely sea views and the old section is wonderfully mysterious, with small, twisting passages. Menton itself is not a great restaurant town (though Mirazur is very good) but you would be in close striking distance to La Turbie, Monaco, and Eze, all of which have good places. To the east, you have Italy. To the west, Nice and Cannes/Grasse. To the north, the arrière-pays hill towns (Peille, Peillon, etc.). It will give you a sharp sense of the French/Italian flavour of the region. The other option is to go to the west, choosing a town like Mougins. Personal disclosure: we have a house there and know the immediate area well. Nonetheless, the eating in and around Mougins is very good. In between, you have towns like Vence and St Paul. A small gem in this area is the Mas du Haut Malvan (www.hautmalvan.com). The landlord also owns the Galerie Guy Pieters, one of the very top places in St Paul, and the Mas is furnished with exquisite modern taste. All of the 3 apartments have kitchens; the largest of the 3 has a separate and well equipped kitchen as well as a separate living/dining room. In any case I would stay in a smaller area, not Cannes or Nice. More relaxing and less hassle with noise and traffic.

I am far from an expert on Argentina, and am not a great eater of steaks. But I have visited Buenos Aires several times in the last year. In general the steaks there are good, but I have had better in Tuscany, primarily in small village places rather than in the large towns. Argentinian beef, at its best, has a lot of flavour but is not very tender. For me the magic of a great bistecca is that you don't have to trade off flavour for texture. And the flavour profile of Argentinian steaks is somehow different: a bit more acid, perhaps, and more (pleasantly) bitter notes, than you find elsewhere. Your friends in Buenos Aires will take or direct you to good places, but if you have free time I would highly recommend a newish place called "Sucre", in Bajo Belgrano (address Sucre 676, phone 4782-9082). A stunning room, with a fireplace at one end and an open kitchen at the other, with special tables overlooking the kitchen where you can watch your dishes being prepared. Magnificent wine/cigar "cellar", built into a giant column in the centre of the room. Cuisine is simple but precise, and the ingredients are good. I had foie gras and "cochinillo" (baby pig, cooked on a spit) ... both were delicious.