Jonathan Day

Julie Sahni wrote in a book called Moghul Microwave (or perhaps it was the other way around) that the best way to cook basmati rice was in the microwave. Her method was reprinted in Gourmet about a year ago. I don't have the recipe in front of me, but in essence you put rice and water in a glass bowl, cover the bowl, microwave it for something like 12 minutes, remove the cover, microwave for a couple of minutes. No soaking. I have done this a number of times and must say that it works beautifully. The rice grains are consistent and separate and the wonderful perfumes of the basmati are preserved. It's extremely easy to do. But then, my stovetop methods for basmati may be less than optimal, so perhaps this is a bad comparison. Have other members tried basmati in the microwave? Has anyone seen Sahni's book? I believe it is out of print.

I took a client to Petrus last night. No scope for tasting menus or £45000 wines in this environment! I would not be that eager to return. The food was adequate but did not match the price. Some good but ordinary amuses: chicken liver parfait, aubergines, parmesan crisps, etc., then a lobster consommé. The latter had something odd about it, and I was not that eager to finish it though I was hungry. I think it was a note of bitterness, and also a littering of truffle shards at the bottom of the cup. It didn't start things off that well. Very well put together ravioli of quail (special), then turbot with fennel and caviar sauce. Pleasant but not overwhelming 98 Ch Musigny. Bavarois of bitter oranges and kumquats with a dark chocolate overlay. OK, but not overwhelming. On the positive side, this place is terrific for a confidential discussion, because the tables are well spaced, the environment is hushed and the service is discreet. This was 80% of the reason I chose it. On the negative: the service could be just a bit more in line with the quiet and exclusive atmosphere they are seeking to create. For example, rolling a champagne trolley up to every table to offer an apéritif strikes me as aggressive and slightly gauche. They were polite about letting us stay at the table instead of hustling us to the "lounge" for coffee, which is good because the lounge is near the door and is not at all relaxed. Nonetheless, it was clear that they wanted to turn the table. What bothered me most, though was the food. First, they were too far liberal with the salt. Second, there were truffles or truffly notes in almost every dish: the paté, the consommé, the quail and the turbot. This is fine if you are having a truffle dinner, as at Terres de Truffes in Nice, but I felt that it robbed this dinner of contrast and balance. A similar sameness with the presentation technique (serving a plate and then saucing it from a silver pitcher): after several rounds, this became old and I had the impression of eating one "floating island" after another. Good mignardises, the highlight of which was chocs from L'Artisan du Chocolat. I can get these without paying £100 per person at Petrus. The good news was that my client enjoyed it, loved his best end of lamb, and we had a successful discussion. This place could be absolutely magnificent, though, and it wasn't on this occasion. In this morning's paper there is a story of a spat between Gordon Ramsay and the AA over Petrus. Apparently the food guide editor, Simon Wright, and his staff agreed that it merited 5 stars. Then AA managing director Roger Wood visited the restaurant, had a row over a table, and allegedly blocked the award. Ramsay is now seeking an injunction to block publication of the guide, and Wright has quit the AA on a point of principle after the intervention.

There are three strands in the story that I hope we can pick up at some point. What follows is almost entirely fact-free (both of saturated and of unsaturated facts), but I will go ahead and write it in the assertive mode, even though it is only supposition. One is the comparative development of intellectual elites in the different countries. My impression is that France started earlier and went further in classifying and systematising many aspects of life, including the domestic arts and sciences, than did other countries. Dictionaries were produced by individuals in England, but the French had the Academy. The second is the existence of stereotypes (positive and negative) from one country to another. My recollection is that in the 18th century the general American view was that France represented a highly cityfied and refined culture. To a largely agrarian and rural populace, this was a negative. Benjamin Franklin may have gone to Paris but most of his countrymen had no interest in doing so. Conversely, the French saw the English as "rosbifs" (roast beef eaters) i.e. ignorant and crude. The third is the transmission of the haute cuisine as opposed to the simpler rural cuisine or the intermediate cuisine bourgeiose. This would follow from a tendency to systematise, and also from a perception of the French as highly urban and refined -- essentially a conflation of Paris and France. It's hard for me to imagine the story without some element of each of these.

Cabrales, I agree wholeheartedly with this, as far as it goes. Most of us have "special foods" or "comfort foods", things we particularly like to eat. I happen to have a special love for salty, fishy things: bottarga, dried tuna, anchovies. I could make a dinner out of anchovy-stuffed olives, especially if they were of high quality. Children have strong convictions about their preferences. I've posted elsewhere about my daughter's love for pasta alla ketchup. HOWEVER, this world of solitary comfort foods presumes a solitary diner. There comes a point for some of us where we want to expand our horizons and learn from others' experiences. That's where culinary traditions come in, and classification systems and food writers. Perhaps the best way of all is to master the tradition and then to come back to the foods you really enjoy -- which you can then place into the bigger context of the tradition. I know a lot of adults who feel they should like this or that dish -- after all, it's very "gourmet" and perhaps Jamie or Delia or Nigella has recommended it on television. Often they try the things they feel they "should" like. Often these things are served in pretentious but poor quality restaurants. Then the grown-ups feel guilty that they aren't entranced by these "gourmet" dishes. They are worse off than if they had stuck with their comfort dishes. I would never say to someone: "You should like this" or "you would like it if your palate were as developed as mine." But I might say "you could try this and see if you don't learn to enjoy it." Or, with apologies to Dr Seuss: Do you dream of the best sauce to serve with red mullet? Do you spend every waking hour reading eGullet? Do you search every town for that one special place? Do you squabble on food 'till you're blue in the face? These things are all fun, and these things are all good. If you aren't doing all of these things, then you should. (The last line is something of a P-ism but it wouldn't have rhymed otherwise.)

We could also ask the 3 questions relative to Plotnickiism: do you understand it? Do you appreciate it? Do you enjoy it?

This same theme (subjectivity/objectivity, well done steak, mint jelly on roast lamb, etc.) has appeared in several threads. So I won't go on about these themes or whether dish has standing to sue the diner (in the European Court of Gastronomic Rights, of course). However for further information see Bistecca #120821 v Diner #23234993 (Queen's Bench, 2002, page 2309...) I will say that more than a few waiters could learn something about how to persuade a customer to learn new eating habits. At a dinner at Tante Claire a few years ago, a colleague asked that her rack of lamb be cooked well done. "The chef does not agree to do this, madam," said the waiter, in a haughty tone. "Why not?" asked my colleague. "Because he will not associate himself or the restaurant with an inferior dish," said the waiter, even more icily. There followed a squabble, as my colleague and the waiter each became more positional about the issue. Finally he stomped off to the kitchen. They torched the lamb. It looked like leather. My colleague ate it with gusto. She, by the way, is British, highly educated, and deeply sophisticated in music and theatre. Well of course the waiter was "right" in a certain sense. But how much better it might have been if he had taken a more diplomatic tone, or suggested a different dish (mutton!!) or even offered to have it cooked medium well, or suggest that the customer try it the chef's way and offered a refund or a replacement dish if she didn't care for it. Perhaps she would have expanded her horizons. It doesn't bother me that others want their meat cooked well done. I don't feel responsible for their palates or their enjoyment. I can offer a better way, but why insist on it? I would also observe that it seems difficult in many restaurants, especially where French cooks are involved, to get anything between "very rare" and "burnt". A point usually goes too close to the former, bien cuit to the latter. It personally doesn't bother me, because I tend to order things saignant or even bleu. But it causes problems for friends and guests.

FG, I obviously wasn't clear in my communication. I was talking about variance, not about progression. The youngest child has very "adult" tastes. The two older children have less "developed" tastes. I am confident that all three will develop more refined and confident palates over time, but it's striking that one of the three seems to have got there long before his older siblings.

I am constantly surprised by how variable childrens' tastes are, even at a young age. In general, they have a strong preference for sweet tastes and a general intolerance of bitter overtones -- hence the frequently-observed dislike of many vegetables, which often have bitter notes. Is this nature or nurture, or a combination of both? My youngest (now 7) somehow has many of "my" tastes: he likes dark, bitter chocolate where his siblings stick to sweet milk chocolates. He likes meat cooked very rare, which the other two don't. Like his siblings, he loves to eat duck but prefers it it without sweet sauces. He doesn't like ketchup. And he likes complex cheeses and is prepared to try them, including Epoisses. Alas, he still doesn't like to eat green vegetables.

An interesting thread. We could distinguish the ability to discriminate trace elements, not only in taste but also in smell (which is inextricably linked to taste). This is clearly similar to good pitch in music; it was said that Pierre Boulez could hear an oboe that was just slightly off pitch in the midst of a loud passage in a "big" piece (e.g. Berlioz at his more expansive). This can be learned, to some extent. I have a good but not great ear for pitch, but it took me awhile to get to the point that I could hear "beats" and do a half decent job of setting a temperament in tuning a piano or harpsichord. I still can't do this all that well; my point is that it's not purely a matter of talent. Taste discrimination can be trained as well. Didn't Malawry describe a training session in her chef school aimed at developing taste discrimination? Then there's "taste memory" -- the ability to remember and classify tastes and smells. The great wine palates have this. For me, tastes almost immediately morph into a strong visual image. For whatever reason this doesn't work as well for wine -- I can see a bottle but I can't always "read" the label! There are also skills in combining tastes in effective ways: partnering food and wine, combining flavours, and the like. Again, a lot of this can be learned. Culinary Artistry (Dornenburg and Page) has a long and useful analysis of "what goes with what". They don't say much about "balance" in combinations. They do have a useful discussion of balance and contrast in a menu, as a whole. And there is the tradition -- knowledge of other cooks, an understanding of how today's tastes have developed, knowledge about restaurants, all the things that Cabrales listed in her analysis of what it took to be a good restaurant critic, and more. Some of this can come through reading, but most has to come through experience. I continue to believe that this should include some experience of cookery, not just eating, though clearly this is neither necessary nor sufficient to master the tradition. There are other "palate skills" as well, I am sure. Talent helps but training can go a long way. FG, I agree with you that all this is more relevant to the cook / restaurateur than to the diner. The diner needs to experience the meal, whether in home or restaurant, as a whole. I would even go so far as to say that the host has really succeeded if it's a bit challenging for the diner to dissect exactly why the experience was so effective. This was the freight of my post (July 23) in the "Assessing Restaurants" thread. To put it another way, one way to know that magic is present is that you can't figure out exactly what the sorcerer did. However, I thought we were speaking here of a diner who not only experiences a good or bad meal, but is also capable of talking and writing about it, so that she can help others find and appreciate similar experiences. Here it seems to me that there is something of a shift back the synthetic (the diner's role) to the analytic (the host's).

Larousse Gastronomique (Prosper Montagné, 1938) talks about mutton (mouton) for some 14 pages. It is clear that mutton was eaten at least as frequently as lamb. There are recipes for every part: cutlets, saddle, head, tongue. The lamb (agneau) section is shorter. Many of the recipes overlap. A lamb is defined as a sheep less than 1 year old. After a year, or after the first (front) teeth appear, it is an "antenais". After the molars appear, it is a "belier" or a "brebis". Suckling lamb (agneau de lait) has not been weaned. After weaning, it is an agneau ordinaire or agneau de pré salé. Evidently the latter term is both generic and specific, because there is also an entry under agneau de pré salé specifynig that this is a young sheep raised on a salt meadow. The reader is directed to the "mutton" section for recipes! The more recent edition (Robert Courtine, 1984; I have the English translation of this one) defines mutton as a castrated and fattened male sheep more than a year old. Rams have too much flavour of wool grease and ewes tend to be fat. Milk lamb (agnelet): 30-40 days old, 8-10 kg Agneau blanc or laiton: 70-150 days, 20-25 kg Broutant or agneau gris: weaned, 6-9 months. "Many gourmets prefer this to agneau blanc". Lamb is "increasingly replacing mutton, which having a stronger flavour is hardly ever in demand." Alan Davidson cites Mrs Beeton to the effect that mutton was the most frequently used meat in England at the time she was writing. Interesting both that the French terms have changed and that mutton has fallen so far out of favour.

That's because it is far easier to secure consensus on (1) whether the ball did in fact clear the endline outside the goalposts; (2) whether the accepted rules state that that it must cross inside the posts. Only the first, by analogy, holds in the case of the mint jelly on the gigot. (That one was not a 7 hour lamb, by the way -- it was a boneless roast. About an hour, if I recall, in a very hot oven). Nobody would argue that my guest had asked for mint jelly. All sorts of people would argue about whether the jelly would make the lamb worse or better. But why don't we just agree that you hold to some theory of objectivity where I think that a theory of intersubjectivity or socially constructed consensus is more powerful. Our theories diverge. Why don't we let it stop there? The second issue you raise is new and more interesting to me. I would look at this from the perspective of the restaurateur and then from the perspective of the diner. I have some experience of the former but a lot more of the latter, so I hope that members who have been "inside" more than I will contribute here. From the restaurateur's perspective I believe that success is about creating an environment where the different elements complement (reinforce) one another: location, technique, selection of ingredients, service (not just table service but the whole approach to the customer, starting from their first phone call), clientele, menu design, interior decor and the like. As with any powerful business strategy, you can't separate one strand of it and say "this makes the restaurant tick." If you could, it would be too easy for a competitor to imitate. ("Complement" has a precise meaning here. A and B are complements if having more of A increases the returns to having more of B. The cross-partial derivatives are all positive.) For an example outside of the restaurant biz, look at Southwest Airlines. It flies from regional airports rather than busy "hub" airports; this keeps its prices down and enables fast turnarounds. Its pricing structure is simple and inexpensive. It doesn't allow baggage interlining. It doesn't serve food. It has one kind of aircraft. Each of these things reinforces all of the others. Competitors have tried to imitate Southwest, generally unsuccessfully, because they typically picked on one element of its system and tried to build around that. Only airlines like Easyjet over here, which took almost the entire Southwest model (including the colour of the planes!) were able to do anything like it. (I didn't invent this notion of complementing strategies, though I wish I had. It started with Paul Milgrom and John Roberts of Stanford, and Michael Porter popularised it in a brilliant article in the Harvard Business Review a few years ago, called "What is Strategy?") Look at Chez Panisse. It is not perfect, but everything in its system "fits": the no-choice menu, the focus on fine ingredients, the small size and largely unchanging philosophy. They are able to attract good candidates from culinary schools and other restaurants. It is a self-reinforcing system, one that is hard for anyone else to imitate. I think Keller has done something similar with the French Laundry, and Roux with the Waterside Inn. Vergé had a good thing going for a long time with the Moulin de Mougins, until the village ran the Cannes-Grasses through road next to the property, cutting it off from the old part of town and destroying a lot of its peacefulness and country ambience. Suddenly a huge element of the system was knocked out of kilter. Down it went. I hope that something similar isn't happening to the Waterside Inn as Roux slips into retirement. By the way, I don't know any great restaurateur who ever said, "I am going to design a restaurant to serve people at the $100 price point", and then worked backward from there. It's a lousy way to design any business, let alone one that is all about creating a powerful and distinctive experience. And that brings me to the diner's perspective. Here I think it's about the quality of the total experience: not just technique but also ingredients, recipes, decor, service. (And, by the way, I believe it takes a lot more than money to get consistently perfect ingredients. You have to find them. You may have to grow them. But let that pass.) Great technique with bad ingredients doesn't get you very far. Perfect ingredients with poor technique -- e.g. an overcooked fish, no matter how wonderful it was before it went into the pan -- obviously don't work. For me, even perfect ingredients and superb technique don't work if the quality of the welcome or the room is bad. I want to see balance and contrast in the menu, and a degree of creativity and thoughtfulness in the preparations. And I want to feel that I am not being held to ransom or asked to pay silly prices. I don't believe restaurants should give away their services, but I do think that price and total quality should ultimately line up: the French speak of the rapport qualité-prix. I scribbled the above hastily, so it may not hold together as I would have hoped, especially the second section, and there are a lot of parenthetical asides. I'll look back later and edit if I have time.

Welcome to Blighty, Saffy...the land where everything costs more. Your comment about the 70m sheep brings the following incident to mind. We have a friend, Martin, who is a PR in the City but in his spare time is a "gentleman farmer". He has a small plot in the country where they raise ornamental chickens (about 20 of them last I visited), 2 or 3 ducks and a few sheep. Farmhouse, Aga, all the stuff. A few years ago Martin visited New Zealand. In the immigration queue he was asked "have you been on a sheep farm recently?" Martin is an honest guy and answered "I live on a sheep farm", whereupon he was whisked into an interrogation room. "Now then, sir," said the immigration agent, brandishing a pencil, "how many sheep do you have on your farm?" "Three," said Martin. The agent wrote "3,000" on the form (or perhaps it was "300,000" -- I don't remember). "No," said Martin: "three." This time the agent wrote "300" (or perhaps it was "3,000") "No, no, no," Martin said: "I told you, three sheep." "You mean three, as in one-two-three?" asked the agent. "That's right," said Martin. "Name them," said the agent. And Martin did. "Get out of here," said the agent, collapsing in laughter. "Right now." Here ends this evening's mutton story.

That leg of mutton (I do not remember the weight, but it was small to medium-sized) cost me £9.90. My guess is that a leg of spring lamb that size would have cost at least £15 and probably more like £20. "Mutton ... the sheep that's cheap!"

As reported earlier (click here) I bought a leg of mutton -- not lamb -- at Borough Market. The raw meat was a dark red and had a gamy, almost spicy odor: not at all "off", but richer than the usual lamb. It went into a slow oven for 7 hours, with garlic, onions, a splash of red wine and a few bay leaves. I took the fat off the liquid after 4 hours. The result was delicious: tender and moist, with much deeper flavours than I've had using true lamb. I'm now motivated to try things like mutton civets and stews. This is the sort of dish that could partner a very big wine. It's hard to find mutton even in France, though my butcher there can order it. The butcher I usually use in London laughed when I asked about mutton -- he did not remember it as a desirable meat. Do other members cook with mutton? Would a fancy restaurateur be laughed out of court if mutton turned up on the menu? Only hassle is that the oven temperature was clearly a bit too high for this dish -- and this was in the plate-warming oven of an Aga, which measures about 82 C. Next time I will prop the door open or somehow contrive to get the temperature down to 60C. I think that would produce an even more tender 7 hour mutton.

I continue to wonder about the role of regulation and certification in improving the general quality of restaurant cuisine in a country. France appears to have a more active "industry" (Michelin, Gault Millau, Gantié, Bouche-à-Oreille, Meilleur Ouvrier de France, etc.) for rating restaurants and chefs than does the UK or US. Is this true? And if so, does it make a difference? Cabrales (or any other member): are you more inclined to choose a restaurant based on awards that its chef has won? In the US, does the "CMC" (certified master chef) award have an effect in attracting custom?

Cabrales, on some issues we're probably in closer agreement than it may seem. My point about non-touristic areas was that multiple-round games are then possible. I can get to know a restaurant, and I can make contact with locals who know it. They can get to know me as I make repeated visits. Each of us has fewer incentives to act opportunistically. (Can a restaurant patron behave opportunistically? I think so: she could demand special favours or make false promises of future business. Or make reservations which she fails to honour.) This is why I always prefer to limit my travels to a single area -- to go to one place for a week, ideally more than one, and get to know the restaurants well, in part by speaking with local residents. Isn't the newer work on information asymmetries, especially the Akerlof/Spence/Stiglitz contributions, all about extending the simple models to allow for signalling (information exchange) even in cases of single rounds? Perhaps the question is then (1) how a restaurateur could signal his positive intent; (2) how a diner who was not obviously a restaurant critic or a celebrity could signal her interest in and knowledge of good food so as to get the restaurateur to put its best foot forward. The latter question is very interesting, from a practical standpoint. In Ruhlman's account of the French Laundry, dining alone was enough to get a table treated as "VIP" ... I wonder whether this is still true? Other signalling methods could include speaking the local language, ordering an interesting or rare wine, etc. The Michelin guide says: "Your recommendation will be self-evident if you walk into a hotel with the guide in hand." I have sometimes succeeded in engaging a waiter or the chef in discussion about the quality of a dish I have just tasted. This can backfire, though! Of course if there are completely disparate objective functions then the game is over: the only thing I can do is to randomly visit restaurants until I hit on some that I like, and then return to those. Fortunately I believe there is sufficient congruence in objective functions that -- without having to believe in some sort of Platonic hierarchy of cuisine -- we can compare each other's tastes and exchange information. You don't like Taillevent or Gagnaire. But I can go back and read your thoughtful posts and understand why you reached that point of view, and try to decide whether I would experience them in the same way. This is why I strugggle with criticism that simply says "I liked this dish and I didn't like that one." It doesn't help me make up my mind. Much more useful is an analysis on the lines of "If you liked Arpège, you will like L'Ambroisie."

This is an example of what economists grandly call "information asymmetries"; less grandly, "the lemon problem", referring not to the fruit but to the sale of a bad used car. Suppose that I am selling you a car. I know that something is seriously wrong with it, but I also know that this won't be obvious on your inspection. The sale will occur once and you and I will never trade again, so I have strong incentives to conceal this information from you. (This is, of course, happening in the bizarre conceptual world of economics, where we assume that everyone is always as rapacious and opportunistic as they believe they can get away with. It's the world where you can never find a $1 bill on the street because someone else has spotted it first and picked it up. So mentally enter this world and continue...) Equally, the buyer could have information advantages over the seller: I could buy life insurance, knowing that I have a terminal disease of which the insurance company was unaware. Big information asymmetries are bad for both sellers and buyers. A seller who provides high quality products will be damaged, because buyers will be wary of paying too much for products that they suspect will be bad. Hence sellers of cheap, low quality products would crowd out the sellers of high quality products. If insurance companies could not ask for medical information, we could not buy insurance. Nobody would sell it. Information problems are difficult because there is often no easy way to create enough "discipline" to overcome them. Even the very liquid capital markets haven't done this with complete effectiveness: CEOs and boards know a lot more than their shareholders about the real profitability of their firms, and we are seeing the outcomes in recent market instabilities. We should not expect to be able to avoid information problems. They will always be with us. But there are mechanisms for getting around them. These include: Guarantees. I could guarantee your car for some number of months. Reputation. If I have a car shop, it may be less in my interest to cheat you, since you and others may want to trade with me again. If I am a larger car shop or a chain, this may signal to you that I have the financial strength to withstand a lawsuit. Reputational investments. Some reckon that the total cost of a Harvard MBA, counting missed employment income, is something like $400,000. One reason people pay these sums is to set up a signal of their commitment and their investment in their own skill and productivity -- which could otherwise be hard for potential employers to assess before hiring them. And there is regulation. Where buyers either have little choice or are unable to gain enough information to exercise their choices effectively, regulators step in. Examples here include a state restricting one's ability to practice medicine, or the onerous controls that apply to the sale of life insurance and savings products in the UK. Expensive restaurants in touristic areas are good examples of information asymmetries. Restaurant guides are one way around these, although guides themselves are of uneven quality. Having a high profile chef is one way of signalling investment in quality, though again the diner on a given day has little way of knowing whether the chef is semi-retired, absent from the restaurant that day, "cashing in" on a previously earned reputation. In any event few restaurants nowadays seem to live long enough for them to build durable reputations. Let's not forget that regulation might just have a role here. The French and Italian systems are more controlled than the UK or US systems, both in state or quasi-state organisations providing "star" ratings for restaurants and hotels, and in stricter controls on how you are allowed to describe products (the appellation controllée system). The Michelin system may be an important counteracting force to information problems. Note that this does not apply quite as much at the very heights of the top end: a Keller or a Ducasse has a strong incentive to maintain a high level of quality, though equally he may have an incentive to focus this on people who can provide signals of his reputation -- VIPs and restaurant critics! Note also that I may have a stronger incentive to investigate, in advance, a meal where I am going to spend a lot of money. The bigger problem is in the range where many of us look for good restaurants: in areas where we do not ordinarily live (and therefore cannot overcome information problems by being "insiders") and in the middle market. I am certainly not calling for state control of restaurants! But if you went indefinitely down the road described in the last quote then the theory would predict severe trouble for the high quality middle market restaurants and practitioners of what, on another thread, people called "old dining". For many of us that would be a bad thing. It would be interesting to speculate on things that could be done to "certify" middle market restaurants that had been given general approval in eGullet. Could we allow a restaurant to display a poll result, for example, in its front window? For more on information asymmetries, see (2001 Nobel prize announcement) and (1996 Nobel prize announcement)

Is it difficult to be a good food writer if you yourself don't have any practical experience of cooking? Clearly it isn't necessary to be a professional cook to be a food writer, and there are excellent food writers who apparently never cook. I, at least, appreciate and understand fine restaurant food a lot more because I've spent a fair bit of time in the kitchen. I know how difficult it is to do simple things properly -- e.g. getting a piece of fish cooked exactly right and still nicely warm when it is placed in front of the diner. And I know that some things that look very tricky (stacks and squeeze bottled swirls of sauce and the like) are anything but. I would think that being a non-cooking food writer would be like being a music critic without ever touching an instrument or learning to read music. Not impossible, but difficult. Should "practical cooking experience" be added to Cabrales's daunting list of qualifications?

There are a number of themes in this thread and in Steve's comment. First, it's clear that some people have wider experiences of food and spend more time reflecting on and integrating those experiences than others. So there is more to this pursuit than individual taste. There is mastery, both in the preparation of and appreciation of food. That mastery can take a long time to achieve. I have been "seriously" cooking and eating for around 30 years. Yet the more I learn about food and cookery the more I realise I have yet to learn. That's one reason it is so interesting. Yet there are individual tastes, and there is a fine line between differences in taste and differences in knowledge. Some very experienced and discriminating diners use a bit more salt than I do. My wife likes roast meats or steaks fairly well cooked, where I prefer most of them very rare. Some people have an intense dislike for offal. My 9 year old daughter believes that the ultimate sauce for pasta is Heinz ketchup. Somewhere between the salt and the ketchup we cross a line, but it's hard to see exactly where it is. Tastes can be educated. A good food writer should be able to challenge her readers to stretch their tastes, to try new things, to appreciate differences that they may have missed. To pay more attention to something that can be perfectly mundane. A reviewer should be a guide not just a critic. This takes both the knowledge and experience (and taste memory) to interpret what's going on in restaurants, and the communication skill to bring it to life for readers. There are different kinds of readers, of course. I expect more from a review in a specialist food magazine than from one in a popular paper. I will have a different conversation with someone who is not all that interested in food and wine than with someone who is. The reviewer as guide / educator brings up an issue of pedagogy. In my experience it is very difficult to bring people along by pointing out their ignorance or by telling them that they are "wrong". Food, music, literature: almost everything is assumed to be completely relative these days. Whatever the merits of your case, it is easier to progress by persuading and cajoling than by standing on principle. Years ago I prepared a leg of lamb for a luncheon party. It was incredible lamb: I had carefully selected it, boned it, trimmed off every shred of fell and fat and sinew, and covered it with fresh garlic and herbs. It was roasted perfectly: crusty on the outside, rare on the inside. I can still taste that lamb as I write this. As I served it, one of the guests asked, "Could I have some mint jelly?" Back then, I snapped "No, of course not," insulting my guest, irritating my wife and casting a pall over an otherwise pleasant event. Today I wouldn't do that; I would apologise -- though I wouldn't offer mint jelly, even if we had it -- and encourage him to try the lamb as it was. Some people are afraid of different taste experiences. A relative of mine believes that the best Italian food in the world is served at The Olive Garden, a restaurant chain. She is terrified of some of the dishes I've offered: risotto, pasta with garlic and winter greens, roast rabbit. Especially the latter. (Incidentally, I believe that one taste experience that is relatively underdeveloped in the broad public is "bitter". I'll bet one reason that many people like the gummy sauces at The Olive Garden is that they are very sweet. John and Karen Hess pointed out this tendency toward oversweetening many years ago in The Taste of America. Some of the most interesting tastes -- truffles, for example -- have bitter overtones. But it takes awhile for most people to get to enjoy them). If you don't believe that empathy trumps emphasis in educating palates, try raising children. I challenge you to convince a 6 year old that those mushrooms you've just served aren't "yucky". I remember a French couple living in London who adopted a simple approach: they offered their children adult food and nothing else. If they didn't like it, they went hungry. And because the parents were terrified of their children being culturally assimilated, they prepared very French meals: tripe, brains, cabbage soup, the works. Their 4 children looked like starving refugees and were perpetually cadging sweets and snacks from neighbours. This "my way or the highway" approach is not one I could adopt with my children, however strong my views on food. I shudder to see my daughter pouring ketchup on her pasta, but I'm not going to forbid it -- though I do take her to restaurants in Italy where ketchup isn't served. Over time she will learn new tastes and perhaps even get interested in food and cooking. This brings me back to the food writer or restaurant reviewer. Not only does he need an extensive knowledge of food -- both theoretical (history, schools of cooking, science, etc.) and practical (many different restaurants) -- but, unless he is writing for an extremely specialised journal, he also requires the ability to build a bridge to the majority of diners, to tempt a few people out of The Olive Garden and into a more interesting dining room.

It's been almost 7 years since I stayed on Monkey Island, but I wasn't impressed. Not "horrid and dirty" but dark, a bit foreboding and not very cheerful. The Monkey Island I recall wouldn't have been a good match for a celebratory meal at the Waterside Inn...or even a reflective one.

Can't disagree with any of this. At some level the focus on differences becomes silly -- is the cookery of the eastern arrière-pays so different to that of haute Provence that we have to treat them as completely separate? How about Mentonnais vs Ligurian? Having said this, I think that the differences are worth focusing on and celebrating. I find the conversation about the best of specific regions and (micro)traditions richer and more interesting than generalised comparisons about one culinary tradition vs another. For simple verification of this statement, tell any deconstructionist you meet that his fly is open. He will probably look.

Isn't this the way through the interminable arguments about French vs Chinese, objective vs subjective and the like? The realities we are seeking in restaurant reviews (I was going to say "and Supreme Court debates, but let that pass) are socially constructed. They are neither objective ["belonging not to the consciousness or to the perceiving or thinking subject but to what is presented to this or to the non-ego, external to the mind, real"] nor subjective ["giving prominence to or depending on personal idiosyncrasy or individual point of view"]. There are old and well established traditions of French cuisine, based not on the periodic table of the elements but on thousands of dinners, held over many decades, and many discussions of those dinners. Those traditions give us criteria against which I can evaluate the work of Keller or Vrinat or Senderens. And those traditions change over time; the great dishes we seek today are not those Catherine de Medici enjoyed, nor what Escoffier prepared. But they change slowly enough that we can notice and evaluate the changes, and judge whether an innovator like Passard has made a significant contribution. We can have a reasoned debate, or at least we can try. I can tell you my criteria for a judgement and you can decide whether you accept them. I assume that a restaurant reviewer is working in this tradition, unless she or he announces otherwise. Didn't this happen some years ago, when Gault and Millau decided that "nouvelle was best"? But at least we knew what they were looking for. Within the broad tradition, a reviewer should follow generally accepted critieria. Someone who hates the taste of crème fraîche should not denounce a restaurant that uses it in the right place, in the right way. Or if the critic does so, she/he ought to explain that this is a result of a personal idiosyncrasy. Of course the rhetoric of restaurant reviews breaks this rule from time to time, and most reviewers lapse into descriptions of their personal experiences, often as a way of making a point: "delicious", "yummy", "disgusting", "horrid", etc. In the reviews I find most helpful, though, these statements are in the minority. We wouldn't get much out of a review that went something like this: "First we had a lobster consommé. Mmmm! Then we had pigeon breasts in red wine sauce. Yummy! But then they served pig's trotters à l'alsacienne. Yuck!". My philosophy is too rusty to get the right term for this. I think it is "intersubjectivity" and that the relevant philosophers are people like Husserl and perhaps Gadamer, but I may be wrong here. This is why attempts to rank radically different cuisines (French, Italian, German, Chinese, etc.) are nonsensical. There is no meta-tradition in which you can evaluate the differring cuisines. Each needs to be taken on its own merits, on its own criteria. (Unless, of course, you believe that All Roads Lead Through France, but let's let that one pass too). Definitions above are from the Concise Oxford.

This is what I find so appealing about dining at a chef's table. It's not a substitute for dining in the restaurant, it's a complement. The atmosphere in a working kitchen, even in a fairly humble restaurant, is completely different to that in a dining room. In my experience it is pleasurable and educational to experience both. After spending time in the kitchen at Caldesi it was great to take a colleague to dinner there. I knew how dishes we were eating had been made; I knew what the cooks were worried about in getting them right. My "unthinkable thought" for a restaurant like Ducasse or Ramsay would be (1) to dine in the dining room; (2) to spend time in the kitchen, ideally on a shortish stage but perhaps at a chef's table; (3) to dine again in the dining room ... all experiences reasonably close together. But then I like to cook as much as I like to eat wonderful food. For a pure (non-cook) eater I suppose the other benefit of a chef's table is that you would most likely be sent interesting dishes "just to taste" that might or might reach your table in the dining room.

In the past, at least, Chez B have been very flexible about accomodating preferences. I have taken guests there who "forgot" to mention that they were strict vegetarians until we arrived. The restaurant handled this without missing a beat; I think they prepared a vegetarian risotto of some sort. That stuffed macaroni gratin with the coq au vin sounded a bit odd to me too. If it's still on the menu on my next visit I will ask about it.

Apparently service staff have suffered from the switch to the Euro. The old 10 franc piece was often used as "pourboire" e.g. when retrieving a car from the car park or rewarding some small service. The piece that corresponds to it in size, 1 Euro, was only 6.55957 francs. I have heard a number of complaints from delivery people, car park attendants and the like that they are being cheated. As related in an earlier post, I had a car park attendant at Tétou contemptuously hand back a 1 Euro piece I had given him.