Jonathan Day

Note that "Provence" is almost as ambiguous as "the South of France". Does it include the Côte d'Azur, for example? You can dine very well on the Côte d'Azur, but not by following the stars. There are no 3 star places in the region, now that Ducasse's place in Monaco has lost its third star. There are lots of two stars, e.g. Chibois in Grasse, or the Hostellerie Jérome in La Turbie, or Maximin in Vence. Some of these are very good indeed. I will some day go back to Le Moulin de Mougins, which fell from three stars to one and has now climbed back to two, but after one very poor and very expensive meal there, this place is low on my list. But in that region, I have found it far more interesting to dine at the smaller "treasures", many of which I've learnt about from eGullet: La Cave in Cannes, Loulou in Cros-de-Cagnes, le Bistrot de Mougins, La Petite Maison and Terres de Truffes in Nice. In Menton, there's Chibois's "modern bistro", Mirazur. And you can cross the border for some very good Franco-Italian eating at Balzi Rossi in Ventimiglia...if you find that cuisine relevant. You can go up into the hills of the arrière-pays and find some lovely places, e.g. the Auberge de la Madone in Peillon. Robert Brown, Steve Plotnicki and Bux have all posted long and useful writeups on the area in the France board. One of the pleasures of taking a house or flat in an area and making that your local base of operations for a week or so is that you can get to know the place reasonably well and begin to ferret out some of the more interesting places. Your total star count will be smaller, but there is a different (and I believe deeper) pleasure to be found this way.

I agree with Steve's comment here. Equally, I find it irritating that the reviewer didn't report on dessert, or on wines that would match the meal, on the pretext that her budget didn't allow it. If the Telegraph covers the cost of the dinners being reviewed, it should. Clearly a meal of this sort would be beyond the reach of most diners, but how can a review help people make an informed choice if the reviewer only dabbles with the dishes on offer? Even those on moderate incomes might choose to save for a long time and then enjoy a meal of a lifetime. This is what I did as a student: trips to New York for fine dining and the opera were few and far between, and each represented many hours of washing and chopping vegetables. But once there, I took great seats and ate very well indeed. It's the reviewer's business to report on prices and perhaps comment on the relationship between price and quality. After that, it's up to the customer to decide.

Ed, at a Shanghaiese restaurant in London (ECapital), I had "thousand layers". I believe it is made from pigs' ears, somehow arranged so that white and brown ears alternated, and then sliced vertically, so that the slices had a beautiful layered look, like slices of a miniature terrine. Is this a well-known dish in Shangahi cuisine? Do you know how it is prepared? Are the brown ears cooked in a different way to the white, e.g. braised in soya sauce? Do you know how the ears are made to hold together for slicing and presentation? Thanks again for your rich and insightful answers in this Q&A.

Ed, thank you for taking time to answer our questions. Could you say anything about how you judge the quality of a Chinese meal, either the menu or individual dishes? I realise that this may be difficult because of the variety of Chinese cooking traditions, but are there common features you look for? Are there particular dishes that are good tests of the skill of a restaurant? I ask this in part because I've just returned from Hong Kong. We had some extraordinary meals, all Cantonese. The fish and vegetables, in particular, were better in texture and flavour than most dishes I get in restaurants here. What would you look for?

Adam, I wish I knew. Once I'd researched these ovens, my wife bought one for me as a birthday present, so I never saw the price. I don't think they are particularly cheap, and you also have to pay to have the oven shipped. And you need a number of accessories, all of which add up, such as a very sturdy table to put it on. If you e-mail Cesol Tiles (see the website) they will come back to you with pricing. I have had mine for about 3 years, and the prices have no doubt changed since then. It doesn't seem to require any maintenance. The door should be closed and the oven covered when not in use (more accessories!), so that it stays dry. If you haven't used it in awhile, it's best to prepare a small fire in it, to drive moisture out of the terra cotta, before firing it in earnest. Otherwise moisture can turn to steam too quickly and crack the terra cotta. And, of course, before use the ashes from the previous cooking need to be cleaned out of it. However the oven gets so hot that there are usually few ashes left over. My original plan had been to build a real pizza/bread oven. As it has turned out, the beehive has been a nice substitute because it only takes about an hour and a few logs to fire. One bread oven I looked at in Italy required almost 10 hours!

The French, I am fairly sure, would say that something produced at mass scale, not under the supervision of an artisan, is not artisanal. No matter how good it tastes. Conversely, it is perfectly possible for an artisanal product to be of inferior fitness-for-purpose to an industrial product. In food, especially, there is a general presumption that artisanal products are of higher quality (though they may be of higher price), just as there is a general presumption that small shops will sell higher quality products than supermarkets. And both assumptions are often (but not always) true. To call someone an "artisan" is generally a sign of praise. But the circular definition proposed in the quote wouldn't satisfy the French desire for logic and precision. Nor mine. We don't seem to be any closer to consensus on this, so I will make this my last posting on this particular issue.

Suvir, I have something that functions a bit like a tandoor. It's a Portuguese "beehive" oven, made of thick terra cotta. You heat it with wood, and when the wood has burnt to ash you can cook foods in the heat stored in the terra cotta. It's so named because it looks like a beehive. It gets very hot -- I would guess at least 400C. The first time I fired it I put in a whole chicken. The phone rang, a call from California. I didn't talk for long, perhaps 15 minutes. When I returned to the oven, the chicken was completely charred, not just the skin but about 1/2 cm of the flesh. But when we scraped the charred stuff away, the flesh underneath was perfectly cooked, tender and juicy. The company that makes them is called Cesol Tiles, and they have a website: (click here). They come in regular, large and professional sizes. The regular size, which I have (the large wouldn't fit through our garden gate) is very large and very heavy. It is a lot of fun to cook with, once you master the technique of firing it and regulating the heat. After you've done a roast or fish in the full heat of the oven, you can put in a dish of fruit to cook, gently, in the heat that remains, or a stew for the next day. It stays hot for a long time. You can also do pizza and breads, though these take a lot of technique.

But all you are describing is a standard of quality. If LMVH bought Boulangerie Poillane, and installed a master baker to manage a production line of bread making, and the mass produced product tasted as good as the bread did before they bought the place, no, it tasted better, would we be removing the artisanal designation? The test I would apply is: did the master baker personally supervise the process? If she/he sat in an office in another town and read quality reports, or occasionally watched parts of the process on a TV screen, then I would remove the "artisanal" designation. Without an artisan present, the product can't be called artisanal. Note that this implies some limit to the scale of the production line. Judgements about the taste -- other than those of the artisan -- are irrelevant to this particular issue. (note that I edited the quoted post to add a sentence and to correct my stupid misspelling of "descendant". Can only plead: too much beer at a large fish dinner here in Hong Kong...)

I could see how you could describe as "artisanal" an establishment such as Poîlane or Paul, where each shop has a maître boulanger who originally trained at another shop (a sort of bakery apostolic succession going back to the original Poîlane or Paul), as long as the maître personally supervises the process. This fits the Academy's definition and leaves room for small-scale industrialisation. But without the master baker in the shop, the product couldn't be described as artisanal, no matter how tasty. It is the master baker, whether the original artisan or his/her "descendant" who judges the quality of the product. That's where the objective subjectivity that Steve P. is looking for comes in.

Let me try to build on Toby's good example. On another thread I mentioned "L'Artisan du Chocolat", the London chocolate maker who now supplies many of the top-end restaurants (GR, Fat Duck, etc.) as well as Concorde. It was formerly named "L'Atelier du Chocolat" but changed its name for legal reasons...and, after all, an artisan works in an atelier. The partner who runs the business side is a former colleague of mine. Gerrard, the partner who makes the chocolates, wants to maintain personal control over every piece of chocolate that the company produces. It doesn't mean that he personally makes every one, and they are investing in equipment and adding staff, but he refuses to subcontract manufacturing, or to allow any of the things that Toby describes. To me, this is the operative definition of "artisanal": the artisan closely monitors the entire production process and personally intervenes where necessary to maintain a personal standard of quality. This implies some natural limit to scale of artisanal production, since one person is limited in what he/she can directly oversee. Gerrard has been clear from the beginning that his business will never run at larger scale than he can personally manage. There are other ways of maintaining quality and indeed a large industry devoted to TQM, mystery shoppers, etc., but this is industrial, not artisanal production. Artisanal production can use modern equipment, but it can't be run at huge global scale. In this sense, Poîlane was producing bread of the same quality (or better) than many artisanal bakers ... but through an industrialised process. Finally, there are tradeoffs between artisanal and industrial production. The former is not always better. Its quality can be inconsistent, especially if the artisan is indisposed, as witness the discussions here about restaurants whose chefs are "out of the kitchen".

When we've reserved at JKL, and occasionally on a walk-in basis I have been directed to upper floors even when the ground floor has many vacant tables. There is a small, creaky lift, so that folks who cannot climb stairs can still be sent to higher floors. The allocation algorithm is mysterious; I have to admit I haven't worried about it very much. All the food seems to come from the same kitchen, in the basement.

All the food I've had at JKL has been of high quality. In particular, their fish and vegetables are very fresh and well prepared -- for me, this is an important test of a Chinese kitchen. Service is efficient and, in a Chinese way, friendly. A friend from Singapore, now in London, first recommended JKL to me. He is a wine connoisseur and more than a bit demanding about his food. He tells me that each of the floors of JKL is separately owned, but that they share a kitchen and menu. He claims that a family feud led to the break-up of the restaurant, but that the operation was sufficiently successful that they opted for this unusual arrangement. I have no idea whether this is true. But the food is very good, and the menu is extensive, e.g. more than the usual number of varieties of abalone.

Some 10 years ago I did a study of small business credit risk for a UK bank. If I recall correctly the businesses with the highest rate either of failures or of so-called "hard overdrafts" were hairdressers, independent (non chain) restaurants and taxi drivers. Comparing an investor-owned restaurant with an chef/owner model is tricky, because the chef/owner has strong incentives to keep the place running, even if it means that she/he works at ridiculously low hourly wage rates. In other words, the opportunity cost of the chef/owner's time is not correctly estimated. A detached investor would expect to pay a market rate for the chef, but also to earn some reasonable return on investment. An employed chef would expect to earn a market rate for her/his time. To be sure, there are other businesses where this goes on -- high-tech startups funded by venture capital, for example. An economist friend of mine believes that the big returns earned by VCs, even after the tech bust, are largely due to their ability to get people to "work for love". The difference is that most VC-funded startups have some probability, however low, of later achieving a very high growth rate, one that amply rewards the capitalist's investment. It's hard to see how this holds for a restaurant that begins as an independent, unless the chef/owner's explicit model is to create a chain like Pizza Express. I can see that a chef (one in thousands) might achieve high personal earnings as she/he becomes famous, takes on TV adverts, etc., but I wonder whether outside investors are likely ever to realise much of a return. I don't have much data on how UK restaurants are financed, and it would be interesting to see comparables for the US and for France. If the work I did many years ago still holds, bank debt is not a good way to finance an independent restaurant. Another problem, by the way, with all of the troubled sectors (restaurants, hairdressers, etc.) was that their owners were generally inexperienced in business and had weak skills in areas such as pricing, customer relationships, or managing through a downturn, however skilled they were at cookery or hair care. Nor, for the most part, did they have time to learn these critical skills.

McCawley's book has explanations for some of these poetic names -- e.g. "ants crawling up a tree". The best explanation of a Chinese dish I have been given by a waiter (not at ECapital) was "little birds, burnt in the fire". This turned out to be roast quails, and they were very good.

Jon, my impression was that there were fewer specialities on the main menu. But since most of the main menu dishes were sized and priced beyond what I wanted to eat or spend, I have to admit that I didn't analyse it as carefully as I might have. I initially asked a waitress whether dimsam was available, remembering vaguely that the smaller lunch menu had many dishes that fell into this category: dumplings, buns of various sorts, small dishes of noodles. "No," she said, "we don't do that". She later admitted that this sort of thing did appear on the lunch menu. Don't the Shanghaiese do dimsam? If I return, by the way, I will bring along a copy of James D. McCawley's wonderful Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters, still in print and available from amazon.com. He gives a simple stroke-counting algorithm for indexing characters, then a comprehensive dictionary of foods. It works reasonably well for decoding Chinese-only menus.

Jinmyo, I don't know the Chinese name. It was printed in Chinese, but that didn't help! I will try to remember to ask next I'm there. Also not exactly sure how it was prepared. My guess as to the preparation method: ears from fairly young pigs, since they were relatively thin and not very cartilaginous they were either boiled or very thoroughly steamed, then flattened half of the ears were somehow cooked (braised?) in a mixture containing soya sauce, rendering them brown, the other half were left white the brown and white ears were alternatively stacked the whole thing was pressed under a heavy weight then it was cooked again (steamed?) then cooled and perhaps pressed again then sliced, so that you saw the alternating brown and white colours and served cold, lightly brushed with sesame oil, and spicy mustard dipping sauce But this is just a guess! The first time I had this, by the way, the colours were more marked. They were more muted in this one.

Haute cuisine fans please note: the restaurant I am discussing is Chinese, not Chavot’s much-debated French restaurant. If that's the one you are interested in, leave now. Formerly known as "Capital", this place attracted some attention about a year ago, for serving Shanghaiese dishes so authentic as to sound bizarre even to adventuresome eaters. Perhaps under pressure from Chavot’s operation, the restaurant has now renamed itself ECapital. Or perhaps they thought that prefixing an ‘E’ to the name would turn it into a New Economy success story, like eGullet. As mentioned in another posting John Whiting and I had lunch there last summer and enjoyed “thousand layers” (pigs’ ears, pressed together and then sliced vertically through the stack, the resulting slices resembling a beautifully layered terrine in miniature), and crispy chilli eels. Both dishes were delicious: the “thousand layers” resembled a brawn, with overtones of sesame and a bit of spicy mustard; the eels had a lovely sweetness that matched the chilli very well. I was in the area today and returned for a very quick lunch, solo. Unfortunately the place seems to have slipped somewhat, though it was still interesting. Back in the summer, a separate lunch menu was offered, proposing interesting dishes in smaller portions. It was printed both in Chinese and in English. Now the lunch menu is only printed in Chinese. The main menu offers some, but not all of the interesting Shanghai dishes (the ‘thousand layers’, sea cucumbers, cubed belly pork, etc.) but in largish portions with prices around £12.00. The focus of the main menu is on more commonly ordered pan-Chinese and Cantonese dishes. The place was almost empty today, so I asked the waitress to work through the Chinese menu with me, line by line. I had the ‘thousand layers’, once again; scallion pancakes; and a dish of cold noodles with chicken and cucumbers. A German family took the table next to mine, took out a massive German-English dictionary and tried to puzzle their way through the English menu. I felt some sympathy for them, even more linguistically challenged than I in this place. All of the dishes were good, but none matched the level I had found last summer. The flavours in the ‘thousand layers’ were less bright and pronounced; the cold noodles tasty but underseasoned. The best dish, in some ways, was the scallion pancakes, which looked more like a small doughnut, with the insides of the ‘ring’ filled with scallions. It was one of the best dishes of this sort I have tasted. Because I had ordered from the lunch menu, I left with a bill of just over £15, including service charge and tea. Ordering from the main menu would have raised this to something like £30. I asked two staff members why the lunch menu was no longer translated; neither had a clue. I hope this place turns around. It was one of the more interesting restaurants in Chinatown and the cooking had an enjoyable energy and brightness. It doesn’t bother me when special Chinese dishes are announced, only in Chinese, on wall signs, but I was annoyed by the idea of an entire menu printed only in Chinese (and offering different portion sizes and prices).

Here is now Giancarlo Caldesi showed me how to make egg pasta, at his restaurant (Caldesi, 15-17 Marylebone Lane W1, 020 7935 9226) in London. Pasta flour ('tipo 00', 'doppio zero') Eggs (he imports these from Italy; the yolks are almost red and give the pasta a wonderful colour) Water A pinch of salt Proportions: 500g flour, 4 eggs, perhaps 10-15 ml water. These are approximate. Make a 'well' with the flour. Add eggs to the 'well'. Use a fork to start incorporating the eggs into the flour; then add a splash of water; incorporate more and more of the flour; knead vigorously. The dough will eventually stop taking on more flour, at which point you know you've gone far enough. A skilled maker will end up with almost no leftover flour or dough bits on the board, because the proportions will be right and the kneading done effectively. The dough bits can't be kneaded back into pasta but they can be boiled up and eaten as a snack... Wrap the dough in plastic and let it rest for 30 minutes before rolling. He uses an electric roller, a huge and expensive machine. It turns very quickly -- the flattened dough flies out of the machine -- and apparently this speed is important for the quality of the pasta. He tends to cut the sheets with a knife rather than the cutting setting of the machine. The rollers of the machine looked like hard rubber rather than the metal you find on home pasta machines. Where dried pasta has to be watched carefully because it will overcook, egg pasta can be cooked almost indefinitely without losing its texture. He demonstrated this by leaving some in the boiling water bath near the stove; 30 minutes later it was still fine. The pasta Giancarlo produces is delicious: a firm but smooth texture, a brilliant colour (because of the eggs, I guess) and a flavour that is almost nutty rather than the bland flavour you get with most pasta.

Lesley, unfortunately both La Petite Maison and Terres de Truffes (other posters -- please note the correct if idiosyncratic spelling) are closed on Sunday. Terres de Truffes is listed in Gault Millau but not Michelin; La Petite Maison in neither. Both are well worth visiting on a future trip. If you are out wandering, Fenocchio (place Rosetti) has about 999 flavours of very good ice cream, including interesting herbal mixtures like thyme, tomato/basil, rosemary...

Amen to that. Cooking when you have time, space and clarity of purpose is one thing. Cooking that is sandwiched between carpools, phone calls, work, children falling down stairs and other domestic interruptions is something else entirely, perhaps better done in the mind.

It's Bruno Clément, not Oger, and the name of the restaurant is 'Terres de Truffes' (truffleland!). It's a small place. Every course, dessert included, is festooned with truffles. That's the main feature -- the cooking is good, but not extraordinary. La Petite Maison is very good indeed. Bruno's place is on rue St François de Paule, the same road as La Petite Maison, near the flower market. If you go to Cannes (20-30 minute drive from Nice, or you could take the train) try La Cave (see related thread in the French board). Not Adria cuisine, not by a long shot, but friendly and very good. In Grasse, worth trying two-star Chibois. But this is a longer (40 minute) drive from Nice. La Merenda is getting some good local comment, after a period when people tended to dismiss it, but I have not tried it. This place has no telephone, so you have to walk in before the meal and book. This may be inappropriate for a short visit! Also it doesn't take credit cards. Have others eaten there in the last year?

I have had one meal at LTC, and it was dreadful. But this was 5 years ago, it was a large group discussing business, and the group did everything it could to make life hard for the restaurant -- some people showed up very late, people changed their orders, demanded off-menu things, etc. But the attitude and demeanour of the waitstaff were worrying. When one diner asked for lamb cooked well, the waiter replied, “the chef prefers to cook it rare”, and walked away. The cookery was poor, too -- I remember an over-floured sauce and thick, fatty skin on a duck. I had refrained from earlier comment, since I had assumed at the time that this was not a setting in which the restaurant would do its best! However I have not been back.

I had missed this thread and can only plead lingering debilitation from the Chez Bruce lunch on Friday. And I am generally reluctant to post on the New York board, since I know very little about this important restaurant scene. Nonetheless here are two comments. First, and probably obvious, the form and substance of innovation can be wildly different. I recently posted (click here) a review of a London restaurant, Thyme, that had been enthusiastically praised when it opened a year ago. Its menu is filled with foams, raviolis and stacks of this and that. We kicked off with a beetroot-jelly-and-horseradish-foam that, I am sure, was supposed to be reminiscent of El Bulli or the Fat Duck or some such place. Thyme delivers food in the ‘tapas’ or ‘Club Gascon’ form that Steve praises. But there was absolutely no ‘wow’ factor present. Second, on innovation and economics. For the most part, large and established companies struggle to develop and commercialise major innovations. This is a sweeping statement, and of course exceptions exist, but I think the facts largely bear it out. General Electric deliberately avoids ‘high velocity’ businesses, ones where products change quickly or where innovation rather than disciplined execution is the key to success. Xerox developed many important innovations – the personal computer, the mouse, the graphical/windowed user interface, the local area network – only to see them rubbished by ‘the toner heads’, as the scientists at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center referred to executives in the mother company, and taken up by other firms. Similar stories could be told about IBM, Microsoft, and so on. The most intuitive explanation of this phenomenon has been given by Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, in The Innovator’s Dilemma. He argues that the largest and most successful companies will concentrate on the needs of their largest and most important customers. Hence they will focus on improving the same product, even to the point where it is ‘better’ than anything even their most demanding customers will want. An example here would be Microsoft Excel, the spreadsheet software. In its latest incarnation, this has so many bells, whistles and add-ins that it’s hard to imagine even the geekiest analyst wanting to use them all. Perhaps in the restaurant world a similar example would be one of those Ducasse restaurants where you are given a choice of elaborate pens with which to sign the bill. Yes, you can add in new features and new options, but you aren’t really improving or changing the core product very much. Christensen contrasts this with what he calls ‘disruptive technologies’. These are innovations that, when they first emerge, look to be beneath the notice of a given company’s demanding customers. Example here would be the early ink-jet printers, which were slow, expensive (per page printed), and, by contrast to the more expensive laser printers, highly unreliable. What the laser printer manufacturers didn’t spot was that ink-jet technology brought printing within the reach of a new group of customers. Disruptive technologies start out below what a large firm’s customers will accept, but rapidly improve in quality until they start to displace the older technologies or products. For example, there are some very interesting products and services emerging in economically deprived environments like India … but we in London and New York don’t even see them – yet. A related problem, and one I won’t go into at the same length, is that all firms find it hard to ‘play two games at once’, because elements of a firm’s systems tend to reinforce one another. Note that this is a good thing! It is what gives a successful company or restaurant its particular character, and it makes successful firms hard to copy. But it also locks them into patterns that are hard to break. The big cities (Paris, London, New York) must be problematic for ‘radical innovation’ in catering because the base cost of operating a fine restaurant must be enormous, and the owners therefore have little choice but to stick with the tried and true, the dishes that their regular customers demand. As I understand it, The French Laundry started out on an economic shoestring. I would guess that they found it easier to innovate in the Napa Valley, where the ‘staying alive’ cost was lower than in New York. If you agree with what I’ve suggested above, we would expect Keller’s New York restaurant to do little that is truly new.

Tony, at one level I agree with you. I suppose my personal sensitivity to these things has been somewhat eroded after 12 years in the UK, with a fairly steady level of silly assumptions about Americans; clubs within major companies whose charter reads "No women, no Americans"; TV shows with the title "Americans: Rich, Fat, Dumb" (this was presented by Jonathan Ross); and, at a personal level, questions such as "when are you going back?" and the like. This despite living in a primarily British neighbourhood, owning property here, raising children in the British school system, working with British companies, and so on. My (British) English is at least as good as my French, and my accent, which remains largely American, no more different from the native than with French. Yet the roots of discrimination are deep and strong. We lived in a racially mixed neighbourhood in the US, in a semi-detached (duplex) house with a black family on the other side of a shared wall. They were good friends, and there were many shared meals and drinks on the porch. I thought I knew something about discrimination back then. I did not. It took becoming a member of a "minority" to understand something about this. Don't get me wrong: I love the UK and my British friends and colleagues. This place has been good to us, though on days like today (firefighters' strike, tubes not working well) I could wish that London's infrastructure worked better. Nor do I think that there is a direct connection between this behaviour and the horrors of Naziism. But cultural discrimination is real, and I don't believe we will see the back of it for a long time, either in the UK or on the continent. And of course it appears in America as well, though often with the opposite polarity: many Americans think that anyone with a British accent is witty, highly educated, sophisticated. Rather than condemning the French or the British or any nationality, I think we would do better to try to find "bridges" that enable people of different cultures to meet as individuals rather than abstract representatives of races or nationalities. In our case, for example, the children have been a lifeline. Perhaps a shared interest in food and wine could have the same effect.

You don't need to speak with native fluency to have this experience. I speak French pretty well, though not at native level -- probably one notch below that. I can speak, read and write fairly easily, but would miserably fail one of Bernard Pivot's dictées mostly because I am not up-to-date with modern idiom. And I speak with a heavy accent, which many native speakers assume is either Canadian or Belgian. But the French love their language and tend to welcome those who use it, even with a strange accent and mistakes. I've seen them warmly welcome people who speak at a very elementary level, as long as they try. That's what counts.