Orik

Gnomes aside, tonight was Japanese night, started off with a scallop carpaccio with yuzu juice, japanese seven spices and shiso leaves. Then risotto with rock shrimps followed by panko crusted miso marinated foie gras with eggplant ginger marmalade. Then we had some seared tuna with japanese mushrooms (enoki, shitake and matsutake) and summer desserts from Minamoto Kitchoan. Last time we cooked...shamefully it was memorial day...went to the French Butcher and got some duck rillettes, which we had with toasted batch bread, german mustard and pickles from the pickle people (I believe they're based somewhere in west hempstead, we found them in one of manhattan's generic street fairs). As a main course, we had a couple of rib eye steaks, served in a pita bread left over from the day before, with tahini. (that's the Israeli way - steak in pita - not ON pita, as you may often see meat served here, but IN pita, it's supposed to have a pocket you know) Day before that we had some friends over for an Israeli style brunch, made shakshouka as the main course, with hummus, baba ganoush, shrimp falafel and a couple of other sides.

That some wine experts are prejudiced, others may be plain old frauds. Suits have a very visual side to them, wine less so. You'll hardly hear anyone claiming (proudly) they paid 񙇈 for a bottle because of its nice ruby color or the pattern on the label. Hence the blindfold parallel is broken. But with wine prices the way they are, the fair comparison would be confusing white italian truffles with button mushrooms. When you "trick" many "experts" in a statistically significant manner, it proves their expertise is, on average, suspect. Your odds of doing it by chance are one in 3.6 million. If you identified 5 of them, your odds are still one in 120. That you did it goes a long way towards demonstrating your vodka identification skills (I hope you didn't have to drink absolut, even a bet is not worth the agony)

I've actually witnessed a similar event. The tasters were not professionals, but they had the pretense that comes along with a 贄,000 cellar. Blindfolded, they could distinguish semi sweet white from dry red, but that's about as far as it went.

http://www.google.com/search?....+&hl=en

I'm not sure if the lunch menu at Gagnaire is identical to the dinner menu, but if so, I would strongly recommend an astonishingly good dish (actually served as 3 dishes in a row) of wild hare (lievre). We made the mistake of dining at savoy a couple of days following Gagnaire and while I can't complain about any single detail of our meal there, it seemed uninspired and predictable (for the price).

Tan Dinh is a very nice vietnamese restaurant, but coming from the US, you'll be underwhlemed by the price/value ratio. For a meal consisting of two appetizers (examplary shrimp spring rolls and duck rice-violis) and a good main dish of beef fillet slices in five spice sauce, we paid 600FF (including a half bottle of some cheap young red Bordeaux). Normally I would agree that you should focus on French food in Paris, but we arrived there after a week of force feeding on foie gras and it was late, really. Note that Tan Dinh has two floors - the top one being a reasonably elegant dining room where you're expected to spend much more on wine than on your food, while the lower floor looks and feels like your neighborhood chinese take away joint (the wine list is more limited to match the atmosphere). If you come without a reservation you'll be seated downstairs.

One perculiar addition to David's message on the Paris Fermier show was a farmer that presented an amazing range of products made of Nutria (from soup and pate to dolls and key chains). It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that this creature tastes half way between pork and carp, but I couldn't help wondering what kind of response such a stall would get on this side of the atlantic... more on this, restaurants in the Perigord, Paris and Tel Aviv (which is not in France :)) in following messages...

A pointer for Paris fermier and Marche du Chocolat: http://www.ccip.fr/foire/uk/efoir020.htm#258

The burger at Molly's ranges between very good and completely dried out. Asking for it to be prepared medium-rare does not help as this appears to be an intrinsic property of whoever is cooking that day (statistically, Fridays tended to be drier). What I really like about Molly's is the combination of well poured Guinness (or a couple) with the burger - a combination that makes you very laid back for the rest of the day :)

My nickname is Orik and I have never hard boiled an egg. I hope the group will still accept me :)