MaxH

Here's a small but very well supported note on naming, from my independent research of this topic. A wide panorama of first-reference sources on absinthe and associated subjects (including medicinal plants, biochemistry, drinks and spirits, food) spanning the last century (Conrad's standard 1988 absinthe book included), all call A. absinthium by its main English name, "wormwood" (with secondary names such as "ajenjo" and "absinthium")). That also is the standard I've seen in general absinthe references for 35 years, other than occasional archaic or foreign quotations with "grand wormwood." Yet for some reason, the Wormwood Society's FAQ page and (recently) Wikipedia's absinthe page -- which share authorship, I understand -- cite A. absinthium first as Grand(e) Wormwood. (Others by now may have innocently copied those recent online sources.) Against the volume of far more distinguished authoritative writing on the subject, that choice appears one of personal preference, even eccentric. I've no quibble with private or hobby-enclave use of any favorite jargon. But newcomers would surely prefer to know, instead, the standard practice across all the past US literature. (Eric, contact me privately if you want more information, I have far more on this than most people would ever want to hear about.)

Please note that USFDA's herbal thujone restriction singles out wormwood. That may be a residue of 19th-century French absinthe-ills myths, where thujone was widely and inaccurately scapegoated. Ironically, absinthe's lack of familiarity (therefore lack of demystification) sustained those myths after the ban, as does some recent online "tutorial" writing on absinthe. What that writing doesn't say is how far science caught up with absinthe soon after the ban, demystifying it, obsoleting the myths. After the ban, "many" other herbs were found to contain thujone including common ancient cooking herbs (sage, tarragon). Thujone became seen in standard scientific writing as just another herb principle, toxic in gross overdose like all others. The other thujone-bearing herbs remain unrestricted by USFDA and carry its highest possible safety classification. You get the same thujone dosage in a pinch of sage as in a serving of even thujone-rich absinthe. Pork sausages, Italian stews, pasta sauces and turkey stuffings do not have lurid illness mythologies.

[Emphasis mine]Not disputing St. George's contribution (and I've noted their public statements to be refreshingly matter-of-fact and demystifying, compared to some or most other new manufacturers; St. George is a widely respected, established artisanal distiller, not specializing in absinthe -- their distinctive single malt is well appreciated too). But I keep raising this point, even upthread, and haven't yet seen anyone address it searchingly: Is the assertion above actually true, other than outside the bottle? What exactly changed, if anything, besides the TTB labeling rule? It now permits the "A word" on US labels. But USFDA's wormwood restrictions long allowed products made with wormwood but negligible thujone content. Absinthe-like liquor has sold legally in US for years, claiming such content.

Robert, here is information you may be looking for, specifically for southern part of the Bay Area. It has surfaced in past discussions here but landscape changed with the closing several months ago of another true French neighborhood café, Brigitte’s in Santa Clara. In passing I should credit also the Left Bank chain, which offers something along these lines, though has shown limitations. Several meals of different sizes at each of following locations produced consistent high results at the San Mateo site in the young instant-village complex there (northern analog of SJ's Santana Row). Good results at the older, Menlo Park location; spectacularly and relentlessly inconsistent results at the Santana Row (SJ) location which however has a beautiful setting with outdoor dining in good weather, arbor with outdoor chess area adjacent. 6-8 meals that location. For a business dinner where we brought in wines, server brought glasses to the table and it fell to me to point out that they were covered with dust and greasy fingerprints. Large meeting and dinner for a well-known international food-wine group, with European dignitaries, was a comedy of service errors. But random visits for a glass of wine, onion soup, delicious apple tart have been fine. Strange tension between the menu cards, pointedly in French, and the servers, who have sometimes not been able to pronounce much of it. (Why not either train them, or translate the menus to the more practical, local, language, English???) And then a highly respected Bay Area chef stopped there, ordered the offered sauce Béarnaise, received a Hollandaise, remarked at the difference, and had server argue to him that it was actually a Béarnaise. (Malaise!) That leaves the Petit Bistro (Mountain View near Palo Alto, 1405 West El Camino Real, 650 964 3321, dinners appx 5:30-10PM). French cookbooks (in English or French) actually are on some tables, for diners who want to read. Below are some things I wrote recently for another wine-group dinner. If you'd like to consider a new option, food entirely compatible with our wines but more casual, as well as inexpensive, our region has a (very) few genuine brasseries of the type so good and common in France. I'm thinking of something above the authenticity level of Left Bank, although of the four or so of that chain's sites I've tried multiple times each, the best and most consistent experiences were at the San Mateo site (recently I learned why, SM is something of a flagship site, I'll explain later if interested). But also a very real, independent French-owned brasserie, now in second generation of its French-born owners, is in MV not far from the Palo Alto border -- the Petit Bistro. I know the owners well. French is spoken. It's a neighborhood favorite; courses e.g. coq-au-vin, sweetbreads "poulette" style, and the best and most subtly herbed steamed mussels I've had in California. All pointedly more folksy, "cuisine bourgeoise" rather than new-international or even Guide Culinaire, but very genuine and European in food sensibility. Small open dining room seats about 40. During tonight's visit [to inquire about group dinner], having eaten no lunch, I got an early à-la-carte dinner of the day's soup (spinach-leek), flat crisp sole with lemon and capers (basically a small meal, with its garnishes), vinaigrette salad with crudités, onion soup gratinée (which I like), and a warm tarte Tatin with coffee. That totaled $54 pre-tip not counting two expensive delicious glasses Alsatian Riesling [which proprietor, Jean-Michel, opened when I asked for something interesting], and it's the sort of cuisine-bourgeoise the Bistro is known for. Apropos, below is location of review a few years ago by an experienced sometimes food-writer friend; the place doesn't change much. Incidentally the bistro was packed this Tues night, walk-ins waiting. (Some tables spoke French.) I was told it's busy most nights now, I'd guess less so in the new year. http://www.flavornotes.com/revpetitbistro.html Viennese cooking, a particular study of mine (couple shelves of books, picked up there; writeup 9 years ago on Amazon for Wechsberg's Blue Trout and Black Truffles), I haven't seen, to speak of, in this area but would like to know of any. There've been a couple of decent German restaurants, can't report recently, Germania in downtown SJ, and especially Hardy's Bavaria in downtown Sunnyvale near train station which has featured some light, natural dishes-- wild mushrooms, multi-cheese Spätzle -- polar opposites of the Harry's-Hofbrau steam-table roasts under IR lamps that shape some inaccurate US impressions of German cuisine. But the esteemed owner, Hardy Steiner, former travel agent, sold it a couple of years back and old regulars complained about the service afterwards. For any further info or regional suggestions, please PM me.

Haven't seen the book, but I looked at some of the article. It showed current cooks and their projected last meals. I don't know if the book also goes into some extremely famous actual last meals. A couple of examples from France, with context, below. I wonder how many current chefs will be so well remembered 200 years after their time? The Brillat-Savarins came of heroic stock and all died at the dinner-table, fork in hand. Brillat's great-aunt, for example, died at the age of 93 while sipping a glass of old Virieu, while Pierrette, his sister, two months before her hundredth birthday, uttered (at table) the following last words which are forever enshrined in the memory of good Frenchmen: Vite, she cried, apportez-moi le dessert -- je sens que je vais passer! -- Lawrence Durrell, preface; 1962 English translation of Marcel Rouff, The Passionate Epicure (Itself a classic of 20th-c. food fiction and highy recommended.) Food writer and theater critic A. B. L. Grimod de la Reynière died during a midnight feast, Christmas eve 1837. Leaving a recipe for an "unparalleled roast:" an olive stuffed with capers and anchovies, into a garden warbler, and on up to a pullet, a duck, a turkey, and beyond -- 17 birds in all, the recipe also an allegorical critique of some acting talent. Today in North America the recipe survives, simplified (minus 14 birds, olive, capers, anchovies, and allegory) as a "turducken."

That by itself is a profound point, worth emphasis and not to be undervalued IMO. I remember (to give only one example) the publicity several (20?) years ago when it became known that synthetic "Vitamin E," though duplicating the natural molecule exactly, lacked the biological efficacy of the mixture of related materials (congeners) occurring in natural sources. That case, which is not unusual, is maybe even trivial compared to the complexities of scent and flavor chemistry. Another case that I've mentioned before in print: "Residual sugar" in wines does not accurately predict perceived sweetness; even if we separate out the fact that sweetness itself is hard to taste objectively in context of other flavor factors, wines and other fruit products also entail cornucopiae of organic molecules some of which (the sweet "sugar alcohols" or polyols) are not sugars at all, but are so sweet to the taste that they underlie the entire sugarless gum and candy industry. Touché. When I was in university, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) was honored for its new medical benefits. That it had to be renamed "MRI" for image reasons teaches the importance of style vs. substance. The method itself did not change. And I had an influential food guru who eschewed microwave ovens (which rely, essentially, on radio waves), not because of their cooking properties but because of "radiation" ...

I scanned this thread, but despite all the discussion of vermouth composition I didn't spot the point that might be very interesting or timely right now. It's widely understood that vermouth traditionally is herb-flavored wine. There are many modern versions, but does everyone know the original herb that gave this product its name? Vermouth is the anglicized form of the German Wermut (pronounced similarly), German for the wormwood plant. (As in Artemisia absinthium, source of the name of a distilled spirit using it that's lately returning to fashionability.) That history was publicized in one of the major modern US absinthe-liquor writings prior to 10 years ago, although I don't see it emphasized in the recent online absinthe-hobbyist FAQs. I'll add from my own reading that the modern reference-size German-English dictionary I use renders the English "vermouth" back into German as equivalent to "wormwood wine." FYI.

Thanks Pielle. I am not a chemist, though have some university chemistry training; more to the point, I run into many technical issues in current events. It's amazing to compare the notions among people who resist foods with "chemicals" in them to the very chemicals in those same persons, expressed in the same language. Fearsome names: Acetylcholinesterase! Adenosine Triphosphate! I wonder how such anxieties would react, if confronted with their own "ingredients lists" so to speak. A bit like people who'll only stay on a hotel's 13th floor if it's renamed the 14th. The importance of names!

That's very kind, though some who know me would beg to disagree ... But I haven't seen that particular book. I mentioned specifically the case of Saint-Ange's Livre de Cuisine (Paris: Librarie Larousse, 1927) which I wouldn't characterize as sexy by the way, though sometimes quirky and opinionated, like many unique cookbooks; and have noticed that the rule applied to other cookbooks widely considered standard, though I can't claim it applies to every title, not having read them all. I've found the rule true, broadly, for general cookbooks in various European languages -- notably German where I've done some research and extended translations (without being fluent) and where, though the grammatical style was distinct in my experience from both the conversational tongue and from typical format of English recipe narratives, still the vocabulary has been narrow in several representative books. (Mercifully: since even though described by my scholarly friends as an offshoot Germanic language, English gets remarkably few of its food nouns from that source compared to others.)

Incidentally Daniel (and I fully support the gist of your last posting) -- Daniel (before some truffle-oil manufacturer jumps on that assertion), you mean I believe dimethyl ketone (DMK), more modernly 2-propanone. Acetone is one of many alcohol-related light organic species that occur naturally in things like fruit, wine, and spirits. I would not suggest focusing on it but on the larger point that's superbly supported: a few chemicals do not a scent or flavor make. 35 years ago in high school (having fortuitously a former research food chemist teaching organic chemistry) I synthesized the main chemical species of grape and pineapple flavorings in a lab exercises, but they lacked nuance. Also, this is a good opportunity to remind everyone that words like "poison" and "toxic" are badly and distractingly meaningless (sometimes a reason why they're used) without quantitative and context information. (As in the new flush of writing on absinthe liquors, fashionably characterizing the common plant principle thujone as "toxic" without adding that its lethal dose matches caffeine's which occurs in far higher concentrations in coffee or tea than does thujone in even a thujone-rich absinthe, in which also the alcohol is around 100 times more toxic anyway by the same measure. As an extreme example, even water is toxic if taken in too great a quantity and has actually killed people, including Andy Warhol.)

Per Fat Guy, Daniel Patterson's May-16 major exposé article (New York Times food section and syndicated throughout the US -- I hope you all saw it) did not formally demonstrate all commercial truffles oils as fake but more or less asserted that, to little industry denial. (I also wonder about the suggestion early in this thread that the retail price of products is tied somehow more to manufacturing cost than to what the market is willing to pay.) FYI, in online truffle discussions a commentator (who separately advertises and advocates cheap domestic truffle species) commented to me about Patterson's conclusions, "While synthetic, [truffle oils] are not unnatural." That is along the Orwellian lines of euphemistic replies Patterson quoted from manufacturers of the oil. This whole situation is, moreover, only part of a wider truffle hustle underway for a few years now, bizarre to people like me who've dealt even casually with truffles in cooking for many years and are astounded by minor cheap nearly flavorless species brazenly sold (and bought) as "black truffles" (fraudulent vis-à-vis normal understanding of that term as T. melanosporum with centuries of history in cooking writing). This and related practices are now warping the understanding of truffles among the public encountering them for the first time. -- "Most commercial truffle oils are concocted by mixing olive oil with one or more compounds like 2,4-dithiapentane ... their one-dimensional flavor is also changing common understanding of how a truffle should taste. ... [some chefs] are surprised to hear that truffle oil does not actually come from real truffles." -- Daniel Patterson

I agree, if in fact US prohibition of them had poor basis then restricting access to these products is absurd. (I'm still not sure about the "none" factor owing to the question I cited about previous drinks possibly differing just in name.) A perennial factor in the US liquor market. For possible historical interest, 20 years ago with less but still subtantial drinks discussion on the Internet, there were pleas to avoid posting "undergraduate nauseating cocktails of the month" and even earlier, hints of same thing surfaced pro-actively in formation of the original drinks forum, 26 years ago: Newsgroups: net.wines Date: Sat Feb 27 15:37:47 1982 Net.wines lives! Subject matter for this group includes all topics covering alcoholic beverages, including wine, beer, hard liquor, wine making, beer making, and, if you prefer this group to net.cooks, recipes using alcohol. ... During the poll, I did receive a request that new recipes for obscure cocktails be limited ... Happy drinking. Charles Wetherell

Interesting! (So someone is after all actually doing it; a few pages ago in this thread, it was only a theory.) Let's hope this does not spawn a rash of food poisonings from anaerobic pathogens (e.g. -- it's not the organisms but rather their byproducts that cause the trouble in this case -- foodborne Botulism intoxication mortality rate runs about 40% traditionally, and we haven't recently had one of those nasty cases like the canned Vichysoisse episode of the 1970s -- the autoclave didn't work, and failed to steam the sealed cans hot enough -- which taught everyone a generation ago) to remind us all that the cutting edge can be sharp.

Greetings Salsa72, welcome to eG and its long absinthe thread (with much information and discussion, though spread over time). Some of us have been following and posting about the subject for a while. In a 1988 absinthe thread on the Internet's general drinks forum, one frustrated absinthe seeker pursued an image of danger and mystery. I commiserated. "However, Ouzo, Pernod, etc. are plenty toxic in their own right; don't overlook this. Just pretend they are illegal and stylish, and there you are." There you are -- image and reality. Grossman, in his US drinks reference book (4th edition 1964), who'd handled absinthe professionally in various countries, and writing with a hint of exasperation, dismissed the "aura of mystery." "It is not because of the wormwood that [absinthe] is dangerous but rather ... alcoholic strength." That was my 1988 point too, and it is the core of the modern absinthe story. In the 1800s, some absinthes were much more dangerous, but ironically not because they were absinthes. Dangers were misunderstood and the wormwood herb scapegoated. The reality surfaced after the ban, yet the aura remained, assured by forbidden status and the drink's rarity. Unfortunately, the standard of available public demystifying information has IMO not improved and maybe even retreated in the last five years, as a new crop of self-appointed experts, some commercially interested, demonstrably nurture elements of the mystique (even while purporting to remove it) in comments, FAQs and books that add little not available 10 years ago, and omit to clearly lay out long-public upshots like the following. -- Low thujone content by analysis is found in some classically made absinthes for reasons discussed upthread, but this was also a selling point a century or so ago. -- Low thujone content doesn't appear to matter much healthwise anyway as described below. It is chiefly a regulatory quirk possibly due to the same residues of 19th-century stigma and misinformation mentioned above. -- Not long after the early-1900s ban, science caught up to absinthe, demystified it, and came to see thujone as just another herb principle, consumed anyway in common herbs classed as completely healthy by USFDA, and toxic in gross overdoses, much as caffeine is and at the same dose level.* At around 1% thujone, for instance, common cooking sage (S. officinalis) gives you as much in a pinch of leaves as you'd get from a serving of thujone-rich absinthe. By animal lethal dosage measure there's as much "toxin" of that kind in one cup of coffee as one bottle of thujone-rich absinthe, and a bottle of any absinthe contains around a lethal human dose of alcohol. (Why don't today's "FAQ" files begin with such perspective?) -- The chief US "legalization" recently was relaxation of labeling laws to permit (still with restrictions) the "A" word. Otherwise the new products already met longtime USFDA food regs permitting wormwood-related products if thujone-free. In fact, some absinthe substitutes (Versinthe was retail in US since 2000) claim to use the same herb family and be thujone-free, they just don't say "absinthe." I don't know their exact differences from the new products and am curious to learn, accurately. -- I've tried the new St.-George product as have others. Interesting like many herbal liquors, and real absinthes I've tried over the last 25 years, but there are many interesting herbal liquors, they are niche tastes or cooking ingredients (where absinthe excels -- shellfish steamed or cooked with it and other flavorings can be exquisite -- after all, these liquors are basically spice tinctures). I wonder what will happen when experience and availability banish the gee-whiz factor. And if that consideration encourages some people to preserve the mystique? *Caffeine, and equilibrium mixture of natural thujone isomers, both list standard rodent LD50 levels of 135 mg/kg and this information was in public libraries before most absinthe hobbyists were born. Data on sage from materia medica handbook by chief of that section at the US Department of Agriculture.

Exactly. I have Saulnier, the English translation, it's a tiny book (by cookbook standards), more a dictionary or quick-reference guide rather than recipe book. That English translation is extremely available in a modern facsimile printing (hardcover) on amazon.com, currently about $13 new or $7 used, or your favorite online book dealer, as ISBN 0812051084 . French ed. is also available. I don't use it much -- more a novelty item, interesting though. Classic French reference cookbooks, more influential and packed with practical information, which I've consulted often and used directly for 30 years, and all of them mentioned repeatedly on this site, are the Guide Culinaire (Escoffier); the encyclopedic Larousse Gastronomique in various editions, the widely available 1961 Crown English translation being the most famous in the US and good even for wicked pleasure reading, see past postings here; and Mme. de Saint-Ange's Livre de Cuisine, comparable in size and content to the others, I don't know if it's in English too, but that doesn't fundamentally matter because it's a cookbook, cookbooks by nature use small everyday vocabularies repeatedly. I believe anyone who can read English well and consult a dictionary when necessary has access to most of the content of a book like Saint-Ange even if they've never learned French. (Which is technically never true anyway: French was a major donor tongue for English after AD 1066 and accounts for some fraction of current English vocabulary.)

That can't be the price of domestic truffles -- but it sounds low for European (i.e. classic or standard) truffles. Unless there's huge demand for the Oregon species, or a lot more US people have recently been induced to confuse them with European types. I last saw Oregon Whites for instance at $2 per truffle, at an ounce or a bit less, one or two winters ago on the lower peninsula, in good condition and pleasant, but admittedly the vendor was having trouble selling them. Now the main information: Chief source of fresh prime wild mushrooms for everybody on the SF peninsula and south bay (if not the whole Bay Area), wholesale, but also sells online and by appointment, is also the most enthusiastic (and maybe the tallest) too, The King of Mushrooms. I've met the guy, he is a mycophile gone big-time. I haven't gotten truffles from him, but he'd certainly know and likely be a main source of any local varieties (which, beware, are apt to be nothing like the famous "black" and "white" truffles of Europe, the kind ermintrude refers to -- and Escoffier and Colette and A J Liebling and Waverly Root and Brillat-Savarin and Marcel Rouff and Paula Wolfert and Marcella Hazan and ... -- but very few species are). He may have import sources however, and would certainly know where they are if anyone would in Northern California. (20 years ago I could tell you precisely where to get or order the best European truffles in the East Bay -- same places Chez Panisse got them -- but that information is out of date.) If you can link up with this source, you will have far better selection than any retailer I've heard of, and one less level of handling and markup.

Yes (the independent NYT article covered the same news, although St.-George is local to the Chronicle). Finz's article in the Chronicle is well written and researched. The level of background and the absence of myths (old or new) distinguishes it somewhat from the norm for popular articles on absinthe in recent years.

Don't recall offhand if I've tried this one or not, but I concur with others here: although you will probably get some pleasure from it, you should do so with clear awareness that you're opening now a wine that is made to be opened a few years from now, and some of what you taste may reflect that. (Notes not at hand, but I did taste a few dozen related 2004 red Burgs and don't recall it being an early-maturing vintage. 2000 for example was such a vintage and for that reason, among recent years, it is the one that people in Burgundy itself have been drinking.) Anne Gros is a superb artisanal producer with some first-rank vineyard property. (I was at her firm, tasting in barrel, when the 2004 grapes were being picked.)

And though you didn't emphasize it, if anyone was wondering what happened to Blake Gray (until recently at the San Francisco Chronicle, writing about wine) --

As the product was more or less invented (and remained popular informally) in and near Switzerland, your perspective is much appreciated, Chef.A key phrase is "up to" a certain quantity of thujone per liter. Thujone was stigmatized or scapegoated before the widespread absinthe ban, and negligible thujone content became an advertising claim at that time. I haven't looked at the linked references yet, but modern analyses of old and reproduction absinthes support the claim that they need not contain significant thujone. It also has long been known that they could be made with significant thujone content depending on distillation details, because the distillates alcohol and thujone have similar boiling points around 80 degrees Celsius. (In either case the pre-distillation infusate can have considerable thujone, from the quantities of wormwood that go into it.) Some of this information is in recent popular sources. Less well emphasized recently but also long public is that 100mg of natural thujone (as in a liter of "high-thujone" absinthe, above) is the same tiny fraction of a human-lethal dose as the caffeine content in a cup of mild coffee (because caffeine and thujone have the same lethal human dose level). This suggests that rational concern over thujone present in a serving of high-thujone absinthe should imply much stronger concern over a cup of coffee.

As host/moderators during the few years I've read it, they stimulated discussion and more or less made the eGullet wine forum. They will certainly be missed! Good luck -- Max

Morey-St-Denis -- a low-key Burgundy village making rich spicy Pinots Noirs, such as these recently opened: 1997 Roumier Morey-St.-Denis "Clos de la Bussière" (Premier Cru, Monopole), with duck confit and hoisin-cranberry sauce, steamed bun, cucumber and scallions. Solid and even young with long mineraled flavor. Great with the confit. 1997 Domaine Bertagna Clos St.-Denis (Grand Cru) with the end of a pan-seared salmon course, and cheeses. A developed, earthy, truffly nose. Rich, long flavors of dark berries and spice. (When this wine was tasted young, seven or so years ago, some fellow tasters derided the oak but what was woody or over-toasted young has become complex spice, well integrated.) Musigny -- a better-known vineyard, 25 acres, small total production. The wine made by Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé was in US restaurants at moderate price last decade. In contrast the 2005, now with fad status and other factors, sells for many hundreds of dollars. Likewise Mommesin Clos de Tart recently rose fourfold in price. (Moral: Buy excellent wines before they become fashionable.)

Some very thoughtful comments here the last couple of days. So far, I've not seen mentioned an issue that's implicit in many such discussions. Jon Carroll (now columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle) remarked a quarter-century ago, after tenure as a magazine editor, his professional estimation (after innumerable unsolicited applications) that everyone alive considers themselves qualified as a restaurant critic (Carroll's Law). Yet presumably, readers have other criteria. That's a built-in difference of values, much as voters prefer candidates for reasons other than how much they want the job. (The contrast isn't limited to restaurant criticism of course; many potential popular, even scholarly, authors dwell on publication's benefit to themselves, not their readers.) Yet readers outnumber writers (I hope).* It'd be interesting to see more views on this subject from people reading, and not writing, restaurant commentary. -- *There are known exceptions among academically-oriented scholarly journals.

Yes, for what it's worth. (I've known the restaurant for many years, through all its chefs.) Chris Kostow took over the kitchen a couple of years ago (from Campton Place in SF), brought a newly international, edgy style, and earned first one, then two Michelin stars. (The latter based reportedly on eight inspection dinners.) If anyone's only experience there was pre-Kostow, forget your impressions and visit again. When knowledgeable complaints (public or private)* have come to my ear during the Kostow years they've tended to concern service, not the kitchen (Bauer's too, in my quick reading). Some notably stable, loyal senior front staff (for more than 15 years) moved on, a few years back, and there's been turnover since then if I remember. I think the new attention will be a spur toward fixing anything that needs work. I've dined there more than most people, starting before the eponymous chef TJ died. (First posted dining notes on the Internet in 1991.) Had many good experiences. It's also a place that resonates with diners interested in food -- diners who are interested, ask questions, appreciate. Many people find they can establish a good rapport. Usual smart-diner tips apply, of course, to maximize this or any other high-end restaurant experience, like don't go there at the busiest time of week (say, Saturday 8PM), even if this takes work. *I omit the wild cheap shots that you can find about this, and every other, high-end restaurant. One very audible diner at another table, soon after Kostow joined the business, seemed impossible to please. "This isn't French," she kept saying. "I know real French." No doubt she hurried home to break the news to the world, online, that TJ departs from the Guide Culinaire. Actually (a) the Michelin classes TJ, appropriately, as "Contemporary," and (b) you do in fact see some of the dishes and techniques in contemporary France (such as sous-vide). France also departs now from the Guide Culinaire.

I look forward to seeing the Los Angeles Michelin. I'm from the Bay Area and only in LA occasionally, but food-sophisticated Bay Area friends who spend time eating there (and know locals who know where to go) come back very impressed. ("With which places," my So-Cal friends always demand to know. Hey, I'm just repeating what I hear.)