robert brown

Just a note to say that I will be in the area in a few weeks and could try Can Fabes again. I liked it on my first visit 15 months ago. The above makes me nervous and I suspect we will pass on it. Jordi's candor is rare in a collegial situation and I admire him for it. There are too many chefs out there afraid to speak their true feelings about other restaurants and chefs. Sumac and her husband are dining matesl and when they don't like a meal, I take it to heart.

Arpege is not at all stuffy, but it is one of the more expensive three stars. Something like 330 euros for the chef's tasting menu. However, we enjoyed our a la carte meal the most, which was also less money. (You also get quite a few extra plates as well) It's a great place, but no price limit and 200/300 euros is a contradiction in terms.

Well-put, John. I believe that the heart of the matter is that with the near-universal cheapening of the restaurant, the sophomore jinx has to be more prevelant. Cutting back breeds inconsistency.

What about the reverse? I was quite underwhelmed the first time I visited Fredy Girardet, ca. 1983. Every meal after that (about six or seven) was divine. Much had to do with ordering his renown foie gras chaud, which I later came to appreciate. But I just last week had the phenomenon under dsiscussion at what was, after my first visit, my favorite restaurant in Piemonte, Il Centro. This time it simply fell off the charts because, I sensed, there was something that had changed of a fundamental nature; i.e. with the couple involved. It was strange. I'll go into detail on the Italy board in the report of my otherwise remarkable dining trip. The truly great always hold up.

Patrick, first I would forget La Reserve. The chef has moved to Robuchon's new place in the Hotel Hermitage in Monaco. July 27 is opening day. We have been in Nice for two weeks now and find the produce uneven so far. The place to go is Ventimiglia to the covered market for the best fish and produce. It may take you longer to get there than you wish. Have you polked around the Liberation market at the end of Avenue Jean-Medcin in Nice? I'm trying to find the time to write up some visits. I am finding lots of pleasant surprises so far, but really none east of Nice, although if you want good tajin and cous-cous, the folks at Darkhoum in Menton moved their operation to Beaulieu almost opposite La Reserve. It's now Le Petit Darkhoum. We went last night and had good tajins. PM me.

Paul, thanks for bringing this to our attention. I have the original edition and find the between-the-wars part fascinating, both text and photographs. I'm glad you can get all of that and more once again.

John, one of my old-time Parisian gastronomic pals, an eccentric (but not wildly so) chap named Alain Weill told me a couple of months ago as we were lamenting the various gastronomic losses, that Allard remains unchanged. For some inexplicable reason I never have set foot in it. Let us know how you find it. Bon appetit.

lxt, it's essays like this that make eGullet unique. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to write it. I'm an admirer of Alain Passard, so it was nice for me to read about dishes I have never had and, with luck, encounter them in the near future. What happens next on your trip?

ilcapriccio, thanks for your insight. I'll let you know how it goes if I decide to keep the reservation.

During eight days in July, my wife and I are taking another eating excursion in Northern Italy. We have Piemonte down fairly well, but want to add Combal, Renzo, and Borgo Antico to the list of places visited. Then we drive to Bergamo for a dinner at the two star da Vittorio; then the Mantova area for La Bersagliare, Aquila Negri,and L'Ambasciata. Finally, around Parma for Hosteria da Ivan, Villa Maria Luiga, and another address or two for which we are open to suggestions. Any comments you can make we will greatly appreciate.

Doing so would diminish the remaining four star places in the minds of all those people who need stars as crutches. That's what happened when Gault-Millau decided to separate some of the 19s when they gave others of the them 19-1/2. Maybe we should call it "star dilution" which is a result of inflation.

Wasn't it Shun Lee Dynasty that had four stars at one time?

If deciding to give a couple of restaurants five stars isn’t star inflation, then what is? My guess as to what this star teasing business of the last two weeks is tied to is this “b.s.” pronouncement you read all the time that “New York is the restaurant capital of the world”. The people at the Times food section figure that with the “Restaurant Collection” in the AOL-Time Warner Building and so many restaurants opening up in the meat packing district and other parts of town, we need to up the number of top-rated restaurants or, as they are starting to say, restaurants that for all intents and purposes are four-star restaurants even if they are awarded four question marks and three stars. I’ll go along with the dictum that New York is the ersatz restaurant capital of the world.

Many articles, including the restaurant reviews, in the Dining section serve two purposes: One is to be about what they purport to be; the second is to play the role of booster of gastronomy or food in New York. This, I believe, explains what accounts for what looks like to me as impending star inflation. There have been two consecutive restaurant reviews that tease us with the notion of awarding four stars to types of restaurants that never have received four stars. But for some tables instead of a only a sushi bar at Masa, and The Black Crowes (maybe he was thinking he was served Mason Black Crows) that disturbed the Sultan’s visit to Babbo, we would have two more New York Times four star restaurants (a 40% increase). If you want to take the Masa review literally, then we have 5-1/2 four-star restaurants, which would include that Japanese restaurant that Bruni thinks should be in the top echelon one of these days. As I have written here before, allocating stars is an attempt to say everything about a restaurant without saying anything. I also think that restaurants are intrinsically unsuitable vehicles for the kind of rhetoric the Times and other print outlets apply to them. Taking all of the above together, it boils down to, in my opinion, that you should take these reviews, especially this allocation of stars business, with one large grain of “sel de mer”.

Pan, the misspelling was intentional, given the name of the work in question. Mongo, I'm glad there are people around who still remember. It was a toss-up over which name to use. Just so as not to be totally off-topic, I'll be back with a few words about the review itself.

I have a 1976 NYT Manual of Stile and Usage. It states: gantlet is a flogging ordeal; gauntlet is a glove. Further down the page it states: gauntlet is a glove; gantlet is a flogging ordeal. ( I'm sorry, but I have never learned how to use the formatting buttons). I haven't read Bruni's review yet, but how long will it take before foodies refer to him as "the Sultan of Bruni"? I didn't read, therefore, what he said about the music, but an informal study indicates that the most popular recording heard in better level restaurants in New York today is the Miles Davis-Gil Evans album "Miles Ahead". I am not the Louella Parsons of eGullet. Fat Guy is. But I did hear that several people turned down the NYT restaurant reviewer job. We need more-sophisticated content analysis on the site.

I can't imagine better pizza than Grimaldi's. I hadn't been for several months until tonight. The pizza (and calzone) tasted better than ever. My real reason for posting, however, is to point out the water taxi we just missed that would have dropped us off near home at East 90th Street. I can't think of a better, more enjoyable way to go there and back now that it's summer time. I think the web site is nywatertaxi.com. The boat landing is about a 90 second walk to the restaurant. Consider also that there is no subway stop very close by and the expensive cab ride from the UES or UWS.

For what it's worth, I'll share two conversations with one great chef and one great chef de cuisine of a great chef. Pierre Gagnaire told me 15 years ago that if he was away from his kitchen for more than a couple of days, the cuisine suffered. Guy Gateau, whom we recently had in for a roundtable, said that when Alain Chapel went off to cook somewhere, the chefs he left behind had mixed feelings. They liked the freedom of the boss not being around, but after a few days they began to miss his presence and the reassurance it gave. I put forth the dictum in the old Symposium that restaurants only get worse. I think the main reason is because the bigger chefs get, the less attetion they pay to their original restaurant. I don't think the music analogy or comparison holds for a gifted soloist, but maybe for a symphony. If Leonard Bernstein couldn't show up to conduct Mahler's 9th, maybe the performance would have lacked if it were led by, say, Erich Leinsdorf. It's hard to know as it depends on the quality of the guys in the kitchen and the type of food they cook. Back when Gagnaire was really wailing before he moved to Paris, you never would have had a special experiences if he wasn't around. I had a bad meal at the French Laundry because Keller was off watching the 2002 World Series in Anaheim. To me it was an indication that his guys in the kitchen were maybe watching the game as well. However, at Per Se last Sunday afternoon Keller was taking time off, but he was in town since someone told me he would be in the kitchen for dinner. I think the meal would have been comparable were he there when I was. Now let's take Ducasse. It's a fluke if he's around when you are. I wouldn't even count on his being there. Yet he seems to have his various brigades cooking the way he wants them to. On the other hand, I would be wary of eating at Blue Hill if both Mike and Dan were absent, though this is just a guess that the cuisine would suffer. So a lot depends on the conceptions, how well the chef de cuisine knows and delgates them, and how good a delegator and teacher the chef-restaurateur himself is.

. The return of Thomas Keller to New York (remember Rakel's?) brings back into focus what to me is the most salient aspect of gastronomic change and what drives Per Se even more than the specificity of its dishes: the menu-dégustation, aka "the tasting menu." Per Se has been with us just a matter of weeks or months, depending from when you count, but its manner of dining has been around for more than 25 years. For the sake of clarity, the menu-dégustation distinguishes itself from other predetermined menus, primarily those that are made up of three or four full-portions that the chef chooses; and a menu of half-portions that would offer four to six courses (a menu type that Per Se also offers). The tasting menu, however, is characterized by its putting forth typically eight to ten small or very small portions, but as many as 30. It is this class of menu that many serious gastronomes of the past 20 or more years find hard to stomach. One culinary deep- thinker who was on the case 25 years ago was the Lyon-area chef-restaurateur Alain Chapel. Right off the bat in the essay section of his revered cookbook La Cuisine, C'est Beaucoup Plus que des Recettes ("Cooking is much more than some recipes"), he succinctly and methodically tells us what tasting menus do to the goals of enlightened, serious eating. Chapel describes the tasting menu as "a long declension of disassembled dishes in a capricious order ". He states that it is its variety that is supposed to make an impression, and because one nibbles, the tasting menu harks back to the 17th-century service à la francaise by inviting the client to indulge his taste buds in an astonishing gymnastic exercise in which superficial and elusive dishes with ever-changing tastes give us but a glimpse before they disappear. Chapel continues to question the validity of a major function of the tasting menu. "For the client dazzled by the spectacle of all these tastes, it becomes a situation of knowing such and such a restaurant from A to Z, (as one would wish to know all the books of a writer by simply reading the blurbs), by briefly spewing forth the specialties." and, "It exhausts all the possibilities of a restaurant in one go, which is the fantasy the tasting menu addresses itself to." Brevity, condensing and creating a digest are operative terms, Chapel writes. Above all, the adjective "short" is the most critical of all. "Short cooking, short sauces, etc." Chapel then discusses how the tasting menu makes timing difficult to manage, and, because of having to serve so many dishes, creates service at breakneck speed. Chapel adds that it is hard enough to compose a meal and choose the appropriate wine with two or three dishes. A tasting menu with its contortion of tastes and multiplicity of sauces makes a rapid and cumulative assault, and, paraphrasing from the sign that you see at French railway crossings, "One dish can hide another". He then illustrates the importance of his serving clients in a separate area an aperitif and certain "amuse-gueules" that they can eat with their hands in order to have a sensual contact with the meal about to come, or to put them at ease in a place they have never visited before. Whether it's a refined dish or something relatively straight-forward ("Une petite fricassée de boudin …from a just-slaughtered pig"), Chapel's aim was to serve dishes of significance in every way. Implicit in Chapel's essay is what I find to be a significant flaw of the tasting menu: By its nature it precludes major ways of cooking and rich areas of cuisine. It can best be summed up as one not being served a whole or entire principal product such as a chicken, rabbit, duck, lobster or fish. The chances of ever seeing meat, fowl or fish on a bone in a high-profile modern restaurant are also small. A retort might be to go to a steakhouse or a fish restaurant, but the fact is that the opportunities to have full-blown dishes from the hands of top chefs are steadily diminishing. Although my curiosity takes me on rare occasions to tasting- menu-only restaurants, a second reason I am wary of them is that the chance of having a sensational meal from beginning to end is zero to none. This is not to claim that one can't have several memorable dishes in a dégustation. The problem is that when you do, the portion is never large enough even when it is the kind of dish that wouldn't lend itself to full portions. To put it another way, tasting menus never provide the opportunity to meaningfully give the ultimate accolade to a dish, which is "I can't get enough of this." Ultimately, however, I leave the restaurant unable to grasp and retain my meal and missing the sense of satisfaction, fulfillment and well-being that a well-chosen and artfully-executed three or four course meal provides. Having said that, as they say, Per Se is nonetheless a prime example of why New York is no doubt revered by a plurality of whoever visits it as the most exciting city in the world. I can't imagine any other that would or could provide the backing, infrastructure or venue for the East Coast outpost of what many consider one of the very best restaurants there is. Holding culinary considerations aside for the moment, I was seduced by the friendliness of the staff, which was a contrast to that of the French Laundry; the "luxe" of the setting; and the pace of the service. That we were also in the company of two fellow veteran and inveterate gastronomic travelers and their erudite and informed chef son with a great palate besides, made for the most memorable luxury meal in a long time. I will leave the dish-by-dish diner's report to others (some of whom have already given illuminating reportage). Nonetheless, once the extra-culinary euphoric glow had faded, my wife and I found ourselves in Monday morning reassessment, more sober and better able to put some esthetic distance between us and our food. Not surprisingly, having tasted not just the nine courses of the Chef's Tasting Menu, but also extra dishes on top of the alternate preparations we received with most courses, there were wide variations in quality. As with tasting menus of this magnitude, the kitchen did its high-wire act with results ranging from poor to brilliant. By this time, Keller and others have proved to me that fish and shellfish shouldn't be cut up and served in little portions. Our "Crispy Skin Black Bass" tasted only of the crispy skin while "Sweet Butter Poached Nova Scotia Lobster Cooked "Sous-Vide" was tasting mostly of butter. The preceding foie gras dishes showed why it's best to stick to eating it in France. I've never had good American foie gras and Keller's were, in the case of the warm preparation, bloody and sinewy for which I needed a knife to cut the threads, while the Torchon was bland. Elysian Fields Farm lamb with a persil mousse and toasted faro was a bit unyielding and well below the quality of the animal one finds from Sisteron, the Limousin or Cuneo. The same held true in terms of quality for the Snake River Farms Calotte du Boeuf Grillé. What I liked to call "the dishes Thomas Keller has been living off of all these years", which I now rescind since we had other very good dishes here (unlike our visit to the French Laundry 20 months ago) were fine as always. The salmon tartare and crème fraiche cones and the oysters and pearls are Keller's ticket to the Chefs' Hall of Fame, great dishes that they are. Add to this the "Rillette of Hallow Farms Young Rabbit" with poached kumquats, spinach and a spiced pistachio crumble as well. The dish transported me back to the glory days of provincial dining in France. Keller also scored big in everyone's book with a "gnocci" of Pecorino cheese that was without a doubt the best "fromage cuisine" I ever had. The dessert part of the meal had Keller's "Napa Valley Verjus Sorbet served with a Vanilla Breton" that was another highlight. As we stood at the threshold of the kitchen looking at some of its 6000 square feet and forty workers, I thought how easy it would be for Keller to remove the deadwood from his repertoire and then offer his very best dishes à la carte and in full-portions, not in the small scale that lacks the succulence and inherent textural and taste variety found in all kinds of whole products. But that's not how he got to where he is, and probably would not have otherwise. I believe that people think that even in gastronomy, unrestrained variety is the spice of life and a meal is inferior if it lacks a certain rat-a-tat-tat, razzle-dazzle. I nonetheless left Per Se on Cloud Nine (before descending into the bowels of the Whole Earth store below) with our out-of-town friends, not being sure as to what put me up there most---the company and conversation; the Helen Turley, François Jobard and Domaine Dujac wines; the ambiance; or the meal itself. I suspect it was in just that order of magnitude. --------------------

As fate would have it, I had lunch yesterday at Per Se with Sumac, her husband Bob, and their son Todd among others. Todd is the evening sous-chef-in- waiting at Cru. We talked quite a bit about the restaurant. It is ambitious-sounding with a 35,000 bottle wine cellar. The soft opening is scheduled to begin on July 1 and will last a week. There will be a 9-course tasting menu. I can't say much more other than Todd is precocious and knowledgeable. He enhanced the understanding of our meal immensely. His parents are tremendous gastronomic travelers. Todd and his girlfriend joined them on a recent trip to el Bulli, Can Fabes, Louis XV and other spots in Provence and Spain. I'm looking forward to dining at Cru, needless to say.

The intrepid, indefatigable, globetrotting gastronomes Sumac and Bobmac scored a table for six for Sunday lunch. We'll be joinig them and their son the chef and his girlfriend. If there is significant resemblance to my meal at the French Laundry, I already have the main theme for my a posteriori post.

Craig, I'm weak on Northeastern France, but if you love art and architecture, the Loire Valley is great. The major chateaux are not to be missed and the countryside is beautiful as are Tours, Angers, and other towns. I'm sure, however, that there are some Champagne district fans who would advise you otherwise.

Windy, welcome aboard. Have a great time and keep us posted.

What's wrong with seeking 1,00 anytime soon, unless you live your life in euros?

For a good selection of recent wine I always go to Frachia & Brachiola (or something close to that) which is a left turn into a little street as if you were going to the beginning of Vittorio Emanulle starting from the market end of town. (There's a yellow and black sign at the turn-off). On the right before you make the turn is a food shop and cantina called Gola. In the basement is a good sdelection of the best Barolo/Barabaresco producers, sometimes with recent acquisitions of older bottles. The owner is an experienced shipper of wines to Americans. I've checked out a few other places, but I always go back to these two. I guess the best is to check them all out and then pick and choose if you have the time.