Steve Klc

As an aside Steven--we talked about Herme's technique of poaching rhubarb in plastic in boiling water--from the first Herme/Dorie Greenspan book--not too long ago. It could be minimalist in the sense that you don't have this whole pot of infused poaching liquid left over when you're done--and who doesn't have a baggie lying around?

OK Bux--here's a relevant quote from the WSJ review or press release: "This, I thought, walking home in a cloud of ecstasy, is fusion food in the most profound sense. It's French cuisine but it's made by someone so completely imbued with Japanese culture that we get a true Hegelian synthesis of the two worlds. This is no mere mixing and matching of ingredients; it's a marriage of the esprit informing each cuisine, the aesthetics that underlie Japanese floral arrangements applied to French cooking in order to give birth to something unique." Hegelian? Me still thinks there's more here than a "scoop"--a pitch for a book deal perhaps?

mb--did you ever try dangling the chateaubriand from a string like a yo-yo or did you just write that off as quaint nostalgia?

Rudy--I have to tell you I go the other way on this. Instead of adding ingredients--I'd be alot happier to get a good to very good espresso more often--rather than something over-extracted, underextracted or crema-less. I'd rather have the sweet novelties--the cream, the chocolate, the infusions and syrups--in dessert. The simple pleasure of an espresso or machiatto is surprisingly hard to find after a meal.

Russ--thanks for the Pomaine--it's so direct and clear. Did you pull that passage from a particular volume--and should someone be given the credit for translating and conveying such ease and enthusiasm? (For eGullet members who may not already know this, Russ edits what many consider to be the overall best newspaper food section in the country--the LA Times--and is the author of "How to Read a French Fry.")

Too bad Smithi--thanks Yvonne, it appears not to be made available online even for a short time, unlike just about every other significant newspaper--the Times, the Post, the LA Times. Let's give WSJ a big eGullet boo. Just our luck--if WSJ did put some culinary content online, it would probably be those two "wine" writers.

Link anyone? Clickety Jinmyo?

(As an aside--Yvonne did you happen to see the hilarious Chef! episode where Gareth gets nabbed by the cheese police?)

do you have a picture of that stroll? how terribly touching.

Steve, my copy is on loan. Why don't you ask Nach if he'd mind if you copied it down longhand? And Steven--there is alot to this book. I am not understating things to say that it would keep Plotnicki, if not the rest of us, busy for a year. My "idiot's version" is that the differences which have developed between English and French cookery and culinary tastes are more subtle and difficult to pin down than many realize--and that French and English cooking are not entirely separate things. Mennell writes that "they have been in mutual contact and influenced each other over a very long period. Since they are not wholly independent, the differences and similarities between them can only be understood in developmental perspective." And he sets out to weave domestic, low and high end cooking in both countries together, essentially chronologically, and refers extensively to the printed record--he names names and the cookbooks of the times. From Middle Ages to Pre-French revolution--Mennell argues that there "emerged the main outlines of distinctive English and French cookery and attitudes towards food." Simplistically "French aesthetic" vs. "English nutritional and economic." Mennell continues "In discussing these national differences it is easy to overstate them, and to lose sight of the fact that then, as later, the same social forces were at work in both countries even if the timing was different. Timing is important though. It was important that French haute cuisine continued to develop in a specifically courtly context for a century and a half longer than in England. It was important too that the English women cooks, and perhaps the male tavern cooks, played a part in the development of a simplified and more socially homogeneous style of cookery" and that "the beginnings of the same process can certainly be seen in France...though the supremacy of courtly models remained unchallenged. That was to have important consequences for the development of French professional cuisine after the Revolution, which in turn had important consequences for English cuisine in the next century." There is some ethereal obtuse mumbo-jumbo of the sort you could just imagine the Gastronomica advisory board creaming over--if you like that sort of thing; however, it's also easy to read past the few bits of "I'm-an-academic-speaking-to-another-academic-tone"--and get to clear, concise take home writing that everyone can understand and argue over. The book is interdisciplinary and idiot-proof. I'll pull some passages out of the book if anyone is impatient, but 4 and 6--Mennell's best--could be read pretty quickly to get the gist. I want to avoid becoming the go-to source for quotes and am genuinely interested in others' reading of the text.

I've mentioned this to Steve privately already, but I'd like to let everyone in on a great book pertinent to this thread--"All Manners of Food" by Stephen Mennell--it concerns "Eating and taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the present" and is much more relevant than the Drew Smith book. The Mennell was originally published in the UK in 1985 and later reprinted in paperback in the US. (Mennell's bibliography is deep, too.) After laying the groundwork for the similarity of Medieval cooking throughout Europe--Mennell writes well and knowingly, especially in Chapter 4--From Renaissance to Revolution: Court and Country Food; Chapter 5--France and England--Some possible explanations (for the rather different courses of development observed in the taste in food of the two countries) and the seminal Chapter 6--The Calling of Cooking: Chefs and their Publics since the Revolution. The more time I spend with this book, the more I realize how far-reaching it is. And if I could most respectfully disagree with Adam on one point--he wrote that "At the end of the 18th C. there wasn't much between France and Britain" meaning not that much difference in cooking techniques and ingredients or dining style, I suspect. From Mennell, and my reading of primary sources, many of which have been translated and published in folio version, there was already huge differences technically, culturally, professionally with respect to both fine dining and home cooking. (Sorry Adam.)

I got married in a restaurant, too, Liza--and my experience was fabulous...perhaps this has the makings of its own thread--are food knowledgeable people more likely to get married in a restaurant--so a chef can work in his space--rather than rent a space and have to deal with logistics and caterers offsite?

Jeff--I'd give serious weight to Steve's suggestion of Savoy if only because of the upstairs room. Private rooms--your own perfectly-sized piece of real estate for a period of time--can be wonderful. As mogsob said, there are lots of private rooms and spaces within restaurants that could accomodate your party. But please don't infer from Steve's post that Bayard's is pretentious--I'm not sure he meant to make a direct comparison of Savoy's informality with Bayards pretension. As mogsob hinted at, they're different restaurants. Bayards has more serious, refined cooking--by a more talented chef capable of achieving an elegance on the plate to match the more elegant surroundings. And Bayards has one incontrovertible plus--a talented pastry chef, Eric Bedoucha, who in my opinion is perhaps the best pastry chef working in NYC at the moment. (Another plus--when Eric was pastry chef at La Grenouille he often created special desserts for parties in their private room.) Bayards is a Grimes two-star--that I felt should have been a three. (Savoy got two on the relaxed Reichl bell curve a few years ago and I haven't been since.) I think another aspect Steve pointed to is important--that the same space could have a different feel on different days of the week and at different times of day.

Is anyone else slightly suspicious that Friedrich perhaps wanted to be the first out of the gate on Hiramatsu and overstepped a bit? A few years ago she did a piece in the Times about Barcelona dining--and the only Michelin-starred place she chose to dine at was Neichel. She said she "knew that Jean-Louis Neichel was from Alsace, which worried me, as I live in France and didn't want to eat French food in Barcelona. I'd read, however, that Neichel's classic French cooking had been transformed by the influence of Catalonia." Needless to say, she found it wanting: "there is no reason in the world why the Barcelonese shouldn't have a classic French restaurant. My only gripe is that it took me back to France before I was ready to leave Spain." How's that for insight? Too bad I had the sense she'd decided on the verdict before the case was tried. I have that same whiff of over-reach, of trying to get ahead of the story when I read things like "Hiramatsu produced the culinary event of the year with this spectacular new restaurant" or "easily the most important new restaurant to open in Paris in the new century." Thank you to those who have shared their Hiramatsu experiences here.

Who is Simon Morris, the chef not the artist, and does he have any relevance to "nouvelle Indian" in the UK? I've cooked from his book "Cardamom & Coriander" and wonder how significant a chef you feel he is?

Yes, Bux we now have 5 threads at least on 3 different boards that in one way or another touch on Gopnik and the decline of the significance of French cuisine--if we only could take all the posts that are really addressing the same theme and compile them, we'd be much better off. I actually repeated Robert Brown's observations from above on one of those other threads because I thought it was a good point--as he had weighed in on this in the past--only to find him making the point here. I had suggested Gopnik's one chapter--on cuisine--to be our starting point.

Should we consider this on two tracks--general and niche?

Thanks cabrales for reminding me of Steven's original question--to wit I'd answer "true" and it's a "good" thing. Anyone else agree?

Re: a wine tour piece in a glossy--Did you happen to read the Saveur section a year or two ago on the Anderson Valley? I thought that was wonderful, timely and relevant. (Naturally it is not on the new Saveur website.)

OK--right off the top of my head, since I've yet to go through the whole thing, I wondered about the choice of Sonoma for a wine jaunt. Do locals really make the effort to go there? It had a much more touristy feel of late, that center town seems more Disney-like, the Creamery was never good, and Charlie Palmer is there now? Personally, Napa has much better food and I'd go to the Anderson Valley anyway to get away from the crowds. Better wine, too. Talk about the best tasting room hospitality--Navarro. Now that's a valid reason to leave SF. I didn't like seeing quick, dumbed-down Zuni Cafe recipes on 146--the wording is vague enough to mislead a reader into thinking Judy Rodgers adapted her recipes herself, while I suspect it was a "Zanne Stewart." Here's a novel idea--instead of making excuses, present recipes side by side when you screw with them--the way Judy does it and the way a food editor adapts it to fit an easy form. Then the reader can make both and compare. Also, I came away disturbed--perhaps disturbed is too strong a word--how about suspicious of the Patrick Kuh "Hidden Charms" piece on artichokes. I am a huge fan of Patrick's book, "The Last Days of Haute Cuisine," but this piece--charming as it is in the increasingly popular Amanda Hesser personal diary style-- reads like it was pulled from a file somewhere--and disconnected from the recipes and photography. Are the "cooks' notes" his? Not from that apostrophe. The recipes are credited to a "Shelley Wiseman." I'd rather know how Patrick would prepare artichokes and how he would write up a recipe. It is vague enough to lead me to believe he didn't have anything to do with them. (Though the deep-fried baby artichokes look so good I'd readily claim them as my own. I wonder where that idea was ripped off from?) I was drawn to one line of Caroline Bates review of Jojo--a place I have not been to yet--that the pastry chef "is so gifted I hope she writes a dessert book someday." Well, no, we already have enough Alice Waters/West coast style pastry chefs (he used that term loosely) with books. I loved the Emerging Markets piece by Bruce Cost perhaps best of all, very strong and interesting, lots of little literate turns and insider tips. There's good and bad jumbled in the 100, for every gem like Graffeo coffee properly noted (the coffee I still drink since I discovered it in San Rafael about 15 years ago) there's an egregious inclusion--like the "inventive chocolatier Joseph Schmidt," who is inventive only in his ability to produce alot of tasteless, garish, sweet dreck. Delfina gets a throwaway sentence. Wonder why? Citizen Cake gets a sandwich mention, has their time come and gone? Any thoughts? More later.

I'd be curious to know how their slant differed from what your slant might have been in certain areas Margaret--apart from the 100 great things list--if you care to share. That's the food media critic in me coming out--I have an idea what I think as a frequent visitor to SF--but not from the perspective of a local.

cabrales--steve k here, not steve p. For me, whether the curry powder was sprinkled in the sauce and simmered or sprinkled on as an accent in that specific dish--which you have nicely explicated elsewhere--really doesn't matter to the way I see the issue. I'd feel the same way about Hoffman's quote and I would still line up against Steve Plotnicki on this issue regardless. It doesn't matter to me whether Pacaud had any Indian frame of reference at all nor even if he had advanced a version of a traditional French sauce with curry. I do appreciate your addressing this point however. I do think the last line sums up my feeling exactly--that at the highest level, chefs regardless of nationality do what they think works best according to their palate--even if that means they break, bend, ignore or create their own rules.

Katherine--I'm not sure what you mean by pompous? Discussing the history and context of food--high and low--is certainly not pompous. On this narrow issue I do think Steve is wrong--but certainly not pompous, nor is Steve the voice of all eGullet. I'd sincerely like to know why you feel our bent is pompous? Compared to what--Bon Apetit? the Zagat guide? a discussion of road food? Is there no room for sane, literate, philosophical or reflective discussion? Is there no room to be wrong or to disagree?

Cabrales--great research--and to your last point--I'd offer that L'Orangerie is clearly not the only high-end French restaurants in the US to copy--or emulate--what has appeared in Thuries magazine. What's sad about L'Orangerie is that while its French savory dishes are modernized--and up on Michelin-starred trends--the desserts are stuck in the ice age, with chocolate souffles and apple tarts. And once argan oil got written up in the Times, it's no surprise to see it on trend-spotting menus. What I'd like to know is if anyone else made an "ice" out of an argan oil and carrot emulsion like Gagnaire did. Now that would be trend-spotting!

"I am using the concept of relevence in order to probe whether French cooking technique and creativity are still having the same impact on chefs, cooking styles, cooking techniques and any other important aspect of fine dining outside of France. What I'm really looking for are chefs outside of France who are copying what todays roster of 3 star French chefs are doing." This very concise and to the point Steve P. I get what you mean and do agree that the landscape has changed and that the French are no longer clearly dominant culinarily speaking. That isn't necessarily the same thing as saying they still should be--or that they aren't as relevant--but we don't want to get too bogged down, too diverted. It's undeniable the situation is different now than in 1985; it is less clear, however, if you only consider what has happened since 1995, which is why I raised that point. Your point about language--and French stubborness in maintaining their language--is very well taken. With globalization, new media, print media taking off--there are hardly any secrets anymore within the kitchen--and certainly less mystique. And to other chefs--we see this French rigidity to form--this sense of superioirty--that things are supposed to be done a certain way, that flavors are supposed to be combined in a certain way, look a certain way--the French way. To me, this point is inarguable. It is an old way of thinking that even French chefs working within France will tell you. But, let's not forget that in the ensuing years since 1985--alot of French chefs came to the US to make their mark and make a name for themselves. They brought French culinary dominance here. In the late 80's you had some of best young chefs in France coming here--when Jacques Torres arrived he was considered the best pastry chef in all of Europe. But he was French, and worked French, and gradually adapted. Also, let's not discount Robert Brown's point, expressed on other threads, that the worsening depression and economic conditions in France may have mitigated a lessening of their culinary dominance--which really doesn't have anything to do with the technique itself. Since 1985 culinary schools have opened in the US, too, by French-trained chefs teaching French methods. It became easier not to have to go to France anymore--you could go to school or work under talented French chefs here. (Granted, certain food writers still feel that there is value in getting a housewife-style culinary degree from a foreign French-sounding cooking school.) Of course, the most over-riding factor may be that the American media has allowed chefs to bypass the traditional route of working in France with Michelin-starred chefs--and that is no longer necessary for fame. Fame now has many suitors in the American media. How much this has dimmed the leading lights of France I am not sure. Also, while the French had this elitist/protectionist/insular attitude--so too did an anti-French attitude develop since 1985. How much this backlash has to do with nationalism--versus culinary techniques--is debatable. Clearly Steve, you're trying to go beyond even this sober assessment--you're getting to whether the French are still ahead of the curve or has the curve gotten ahead of them and eroded their influence among chefs in the know? To this I will answer as a pastry chef--I think a fairly savvy, knowing one. There is no doubt that the global fine dining pastry curve--albeit an elite, technical one--has passed by the French and is now being surfed by the Adria brothers and bent to their will. However, in the flavor curve, also at least as influential since 1995 have been the French--especially two French pastry chefs working in France--Herme and Conticini. Their books have been very "influential" among working pastry chefs all over the world at the elite end (it is silly to divert discussion of this from the high end.) All have been published since 1995--again, why I mention the date--and all are leading edge flavor-wise. I'd add another title--Au coeur des Saveurs--by Frederic Bau, too, publishd in 1998. All of these French books have been published in Spanish, Italian, English and have been terribly influential--at the high end. Especially in NYC--much more so than Adria, which is only recently influential. On another thread in Canada, Lesley Chesterman relayed a comment from a visiting Parisian pastry chef who said the biggest trend in Paris now is desserts served up in glassware. And who started all that? Conticini years ago, though now that he has been "recognized" by Thuries magazine within all of France and his creations in wineglasses et al--some of that innovation, freedom to explore and stretch has already filtered out to others. And flavorwise--Conticini is operating on a plane above even the Adrias when it comes to dessert; it will be years before his true influence will be felt with force, a force I suspect will be a gale wind. So there have been those in France fighting against the rigidity of form and flavor and the evidence is that those bonds are breaking again--perhaps to be constrained for the last time. So, I wonder how much of this supposed decline is a media-created perception--a lack of awareness--rather than an accurate assessment of what chefs are actually doing? I think this gets to one of Gopnik's themes--that of being Francophobic versus Franco-ignorant.