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robert brown

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  1. I always felt that the Provencal location was unappealing. The terrace is too close to a well-trafficked road (pedestrians and cars/motorbikes) with an obstructed view and the exterior and interior are without warmth, charm, whatever. I've always hated the place since the chef there circa 2001 (despite his 16/20 Gault-Millau rating) used every trick in the book to rip us off (worse than at L'Astrance),and every chef who has been there since has run an unexciting, over-priced tourist restaurant. There is no such establishment as a good Italian restaurant in or around Nice, which is why I make the mild effort to go across the border to eat in a real one.
  2. Vedat is at Gastromondiale, his very own. It's Gastroville reincarnated, but better.
  3. John, what about the notion that if there is deflation and slackening demand, the price of raw materials will fall. Maybe even the Caspian Sea will become nicely restocked with Beluga and Osetra sturgeon eggs.
  4. I don't remember anyone other than Senderens pulling back when these guys were making it hand over fist, though I'm sure there were others I don't know about, my having other cultural matters to deal with. We're in an environment where some chefs like Adria, Bras, and Gagnaire will probably not miss a beat, but others who are probably dangling by their thumbs. If you have sons or daughters to take over such as do Haeberlin, Bras, Pierre Troisgros,etc. you can hang in there with less of a physical toll. As for the younger guys, they just open up less-demanding shoestring restaurants while us veteran diners have only our memories of culinary debauchery.
  5. The best way to order at Lorenzo's in Forte dei Marmi is to ask Lorenzo or the maitre d'hotel what fish he has fresh that day, or to ask about some fish that you like and is in its peak season. The odds are that he'll have it. Then ask what preparation he suggests--grilled, roasted, boiled, whatever. Add a dish or two from the menu such as the sampling of raw fish or a pasta of some kind (unless he proposes a pasta not on the menu). Fill it in with smaller portions of whatever sounds good or order another plate of the one or two kinds of raw fish you just ate and liked the most, and just order as you go along. Try that here at the Armani place and see what happens.
  6. Julien, I came across a story that Llorca walked out on his shareholders, but nothing abour a replacement or closing. I'm sceptical about the reasons these chefs give for closing or shrinking. Veyrat had one prior flirtation with bankruptcy, and given the Swiss economy, along with all the others, he must have had some rough sledding. Roellinger, I suspect, overexpanded. The supply of people's available cash isn't able to support the expensive foundations of these ambitious places. Say goodbye to full-throttled dining, same as civilization has to the great luxury liners.
  7. Julien, where did you hear about Lorca in Mougins, the home of lobster in Sauternes. The web site is still taking reservations.
  8. “Today’s restaurants in Paris and the French countryside have changed a great deal, with the most marked change occurring since 1950. Tourists in increasing numbers, and especially those who can make demands because of wealth or position, have corrupted restaurant traditions and created chaos throughout the entire restaurant business in Europe.” “But with very few exceptions, the average expensive New York restaurant is not as good as it was twenty or thirty years ago, because, for the most part, restaurateurs have lowered their standards; too many of their patrons are diners-out on expense accounts, who value a “chic” for its snob appeal, not for its cuisine. They no longer pride themselves on being purveyors of fine food and drink.” “The trouble with American gastronomy is that the tradition of regional eating has been ruined during this century. Everyone thinks he must have Maine lobster in Oregon and California asparagus in New York, and so it goes. What a job it is to find a restaurant—and they are rare—where the pleasures of regional food are still respected.” --“Delights and Prejudices,” 1964 With thanks to AHR for bringing this to my attention.
  9. robert brown

    Per Se

    Is that for one of Keller's pishy portions? I hold to the camp that says only eat white truffles in the zone of production where you can choose your truffle from many. The further away you go, the less you know in terms of age, freshness and provenance.
  10. robert brown

    Ledoyen

    Underrated and off the proverbial radar screen. Some may find the food "old fashion", but Ledoyen is one of the relatively few remaining restaurants that's good for that good old-fashion gastronomy. My two meals there have been a delight. I would just as soon have my next three-star meal there than anywhere else. Le Squer even told us he likes generous portions and food that's on the bone and the whole fish or fowl. The milieu and the ambiance are as classic as classic gets in Paris, and the cost is less than several other Paris restaurants in its category. My only complaint is some arrogance among the waiters.
  11. John, I can't criticize you on your post. You raise the matter, intentionally or not, of the integrity of a chef or, in the case of L'Astrance, chef and front-of-the-house partner, I don't universally condemn no-choice-or limited-choice restaurants. In fact, during the two days after we visited l'Astrance, we had two meals in Honfleur at Sa Qua Na with Vedat Milor, who I think heard about it from the Julian referred to above (Tort or Torte) or their friend Lydia in London. The chef is a disciple of Michel Bras who ran Bras' restaurant kitchen in Hokaido. Although we exhausted his current repetoire in two days by taking the small menu one day and the large the next, I found our meals there (enjoying the smaller meal more) extremely interesting and worthwhile, made more so by the chef's attractive, well-bred, sophisticated wife. There was no flim-flammery as I described in my previous posts here, but rather an all-out effort to be accomodating. Unfortunately the number of restaurants that offer a blow-out visit is decreasing rapidly, probably still existing more in Spain and Switzerland than in France. Still, I raise the point that restaurants that display their hand and offer relatively numerous options are more transparent than ones like L'Astrance or the French Laundry. To put it another way, slowly but inexorably the clients for fine dining have evolved from exercising autonomy and experience into becoming supplicants.
  12. That's just precisely the heart of my contention: I don't want to spend my money in a low-cost or budget-conscious operation. I don't think you know or recognize that great gastronomy is built on the concept that chefs exist for those they feed; that one goes to the best restaurants and pays the most money to indulge oneself, not to be putty in the hands of chef-restaurateurs or to be manipulated by them. This deep, wide, drastic and no-brainer paradigm shift between restaurants owners and their customers has ruined, if not destroyed, gastronomic connoisseurship. All these gimmicks such as no-choice (or almost no-choice) meals and wine pairings are meant to fleece people. Keller and the partners of L'Astrance know how to play this to the hilt, which is why I will never go to any of their restaurants again. It's why I prefer eating in Italy more than any other country. There they know what culinary altruism is and how to impart a notion of "joie de vivre" for the time and money spent in their restaurants. I like the guy at Per Se who said that eating Keller's way avoids palate fatigue. Great dishes, even gargantuan ones (whole birds, whole fish), never wear out their welcome. It's these little morsel plates that create instead palate vertigo, inability to recall most of them and having waiters in your face throughout the entire meal.
  13. There is no menu, which accounts for much of what's wrong with the place. They love it when you order wine pairings. Then they can mix cheap wines with better ones. It's the same conception with the food; they had the audacity to serve us a dish of chorizo among several other cost-effective courses. Look, the endearing idea behind a bottle of wine is that it changes character with each dish you eat. Red Burgundy goes with more dishes than any other type of wine I know of, so I always order one at these autocratic restaurants. And why would you let someone tell you what to drink? Sure, it's an opportunity to taste several wines which is worth something. But you can do that better and cheaper at home with a group of friends.
  14. Even though I am, among my many serious, well-traveled gastronomic friends, a minority of one, it's hard for me to see why none of them can recognize that L'Astrance is about the most abusive, manipulative restaurant one can find. How the Guide Michelin can give three stars to a restaurant at which there is no autonomy for a client is beyond comprehension. A fixed menu is bad enough, but not to tell anyone what one is going to have is a license to cheat. The man Christophe preys on people who offer no resistance and are frightened to complain. He stole wine from us, sequestering it away in the bar in front and giving it back only if we told him we had some left; removed one of my dessert plates before I touched it, and when I called him on it, he said it was all a joke; and when we told our waiter who was taking our order (as little as there is of one) that we were anticipating one of Barbot's renown veal dishes. we received instead duck, and when we asked Christophe why, his answer was an unapologetic "next time". All this happened to my wife and me a few months ago during the same meal. While the bill was half of what we paid the day before at L'Ambroisie, I would nonetheless return again and again to what is a great restaurant in the tradition of great French gastronomy. We gave L'Astrance a second chance after three years, and I'm not enough of an idiot to ever let there be a "next time".
  15. Did anyone catch "Les Escapades de Petitrenaud", the engaging weekly program on France's TV5 in which he gave some attention to the bistrot on the outskirts of Paris named "Le Petit Vanves"? My wife and I were taken by it and are wondering if anyone out there has any first-hand impressions and opinions.
  16. I care because putting something over on people is a sign of lack of integrity, and itegrity is a quality that's become increasingly less in gastronomy as time goes by. As I said above, wait and see what happens to this place as time goes by.
  17. Even if you’re a believer in parallel universes, don’t look for any confirmation of it at Benoit. It’s clearly a fake, as a student of design would notice instantly by the cheap, clumsy Hans Wegner knock-off dining chairs and the maladroit attempts to recreate Sem’s caricatures (Sem being the original decorateur and graphics man of Maxim’s) in the cornices above. If you have been to the original Benoit, I doubt you’ll feel transported. But whether or not you have, you’ll be in for the same quasi-French feeling rhat you get at Balthazar or, for those who remember from 1982, the brief, ill-fated transplant of La Coupole in the space that is now Artisinal. Rather than starting a restaurant from scratch with a new identity, Ducasse wisely hit the ground running with a known quantity of sorts already experienced by thousands of Americans who have dined at the real Benoit for decades. Ducasse is not an idiot even if he has sold his culinary soul. I am certain that this is one reason why the ersatz Benoit will be around a lot longer than the New York La Coupole or, for that matter, Ardour. Once you get past the flim-flammery that also consists of menus without French (and their paucity of enlightenment such that you can’t know without asking if a dish is warm or cold, a fish wild or farmed or with or without the bones for example), and the international roots of a team of waiters who vary wildly in knowledge and experience yet, to a man, (no women serving here that I recall) friendly and efficient, Benoit acquits itself quite nicely and is a welcome addition to New York dining, midtown especially, that may be showing signs economically and culinarily of having its fill of misguided Johnny-Come-Lately chef-shoestring restaurateurs, keying in instead to the sober use of whatever meticulous produce is in New York’s larder. Without going into a time-consuming and tortuous recitivo of the seven dishes three of us ate, I’ll make it suffice to say that two were disappointing; one better than okay; and three up to Parisian bistro standards, with the French fries meeting a mixed reception. The tongue dish I had been looking forward to turned out to be a visually masterful charcuterized terrine invoking thoughts of a slice of 20-layer cake with thin, alternating strips of tongue and lard with a tasteless mustard powder stuck in-between. The fat overwhelmed everything. Classic French onion soup was as good as you’ll find (If you want to know what an insipid one is like, try it at the Café de Paris in Monaco). As indicated in other reports, the chicken is likely the first choice. Before carving, the waiter brings it to the table in its iron pot with its chervil (?) leaves. I couldn’t resist asking him if it was our chicken or a show chicken. He assured me it was the former. I have to say that it was nice to have dark meat in a restaurant for a change and that it may have been the besr chicken I have had in America. My wife’s cassoulet was generous both in the amount and the various pieces of meat that were in it. It seemed to lack some intensity and flavor compared to cassoulet I have had in Southwest France, but certainly superior to others I have had in New York. Having learned to make a soufflé at the Cordon Bleu in Paris, my wife is a stickler for getting the classic variety. She won’t accept the name as applied to one of these molten center creations. Our waiter assured her that the chocolate one was classic, which he based on the fact that it was made in a traditional soufflé dish. It turns out it wasn’t. Rather it seemed to be built on a layer of chocolate cake and wasn’t the light and airy kind you get after 45 minutes of baking. Clearly little or nothing at Benoit is made a la minute or from scratch upon order. Even the chickens, the waiter told us, are cooked ten at a time and finished upon the demand. So what else is new? As for the three flavors of ice cream offered, the vanilla bean was the weakest as it was too sugary and not intense;, but the caramel and chocolate were as good as ice cream gets in this town. Its pure taste is almost always encountered in France, and rarely in these parts. There’s no question I’ll be back soon. The repertoire is captivating and makes you want to try everything. I suspect that getting a reservation won’t be easy. I’ll hand it to Ducasse this time. After ADNY and Mix, Benoit is his first truly honest Manhattan restaurant. Get there before it gets worse.
  18. I'm having my dinner there tonight, and I'm feeling lucky that Benoit doesn't have its liquor license yet. My guess is that the food will be more than adequate in terms of quality, but I'll miss the pots of herring and potatoes and mousse au chocolat they left on the tables of Benoit in its heyday (which, according to a really gourmand French friend of mine who used to live nearby, has taken a tumble). We all know there's a certain amount of smoke and mirrors here on W. 55th St., rather like the Japanese who recreate Dutch villages, the pseudo-Art Deco caviar restaurant I once visited, and the indoor ski trails they build. On the other hand, I can't remember the last time I had calves tongue with mustard sauce (shades of the old Madison Ave. Deli's tongue with sweet and sour sauce?) which I'll pounce on tonight. Of course it much depends on where the products are from. The Bronx markets aren't Rungis, but maybe Ducasse gets around it somehow. The big question for me will be how does Benoit, NY stack up against my neighborhood Cafe d'Alsace, which is slipping in my estimation as I see now how everything is made ahead of time. Alas, is it also another Balthazar or one step beyond? Ask again in six months to a year from now.
  19. Gavin, like you, I haven't been to Michel Bras in a decade (11 years, almost) and from what I hear from those who have been more recently than we have, you may well be relatively disappointed. (But let's hope maybe not). I consider myself fortunate to have visited Bras between 1987 and 1997 when he mostly had a restaurant and middling hotel in the town. Not only was it half the price of the restaurants of many of the other great chefs. but he offered a deep and ever-changing menu of audacious dishes. When you were at your table his wife or a waiter would bring you a book about herbs and plants so you could read about the many that he used at any given time. In fact four of us took him in our friend's car so he could get some herbs, not at some farm or from some other kind of purveyor. Instead he told my friend to stop the car, after which he would get out with a pair of scissors and cut some herbs at the side of the road. I also recall that he offered a small menu of classic Auvergnat dishes for about $15. so that the locals could afford to dine there. At our last visit to the restaurnt in town, he put drawings on the wall of what he was hoping would be a new hotel-restaurant designed by a modernist architect from Bordeaux. I thought to myself that surely this is a pipe dream, probably wishing that he wouldn't go upscale, but rather remain at the relatively simple location. We liked the new locale, however, and the cuisine remained in its ambitious way. Now I can feel that like so many of the three-star restaurants, Michel Bras is quite big business, turning out their 'Menu du Terroir" or whatever it's called to as many people as they can. And by the way, his sister-in-law told me "Here, people pronounce all the letters". Thus, it's Michel BraSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.
  20. Not to avail yourself of seafood on the Tuscan coast would be a big oversight. Fish is to me the cornerstone of gastronomy, what separates the poseurs from those who cook and purvey with heart and sole. All of which brings me back to my man Lorenzo in Forte dei Marmi. Search the site and read what I have written more than once about it. But even seafood trattori/osteri of a humble nature can be memorable, and for addresses, you must buy "Osteri d'Italia", the Slow Food people's guide to inexpensive restaurants of local tradition. Don't travel without a copy. As for inland Tuscany, it may be good for certain cooking products and some good restaurants, but unless you splurge in a few places outside of Florence (Tenda Rossa, Arnolfo), the repetitive restaurant food can get tiresome rather quickly if you don't do your gastronomic research. I second the establishments in Piemonte that Peter mentions. Castello di Villa above Isola d'Asti is our favorite hotel. If you want to splurge, ask for rooms 1 or 2. Renzo/Antica Corona Reale has always been the class of the field for us in Piemonte, but I've never tried it outside of truffle time, and a couple of disappointments have seeped in from vmilor and one or two others. Enoteca in Canale is moving up rather quickly. We like this one a lot.
  21. Hey Maureen, I just discovered you joined the society. I gave the folks at Gambero Rosso in Bagno di Romagna a copy of your English-Italian food terms book. They want crazy!!!! I found another copy for myself. It's indispensable.
  22. Peter, now that I have read again your inquiry, I gather that you want a place to recover from your flight from the US? Am I rigfht about that? Villa Crespi is not on the lake whereas the San Rocca in Orta San Giulio is. That hotel has a nice setting on the water, but with just adequate accomodations (Don't stay in the Villa they recently took over). From there it's a short drive to either Villa Crespi or Sorriso. In general I have to say that gastronomy around the lakes district is generally my least favorite in Northern Italy, so good luck. (If it were me, I would simply stay in Milan and dine in one of my favorite restaurants, but I can also appreciate the peace and quiet and relaxation of what you are planning.) Where in Liguria are you going?
  23. The dinner four of us had at the Villa Crespi two years ago ranked among the most disappointing and therefore making, to my mind, the restaurant one of the most overrated in Italy. My hunch is that Sole is the best bet in the vicinity of the airport. The Villa Cresp is best enjoyed as a minor tourist attraction as the rooms there are not much better than okay. For a lunch or dinner you may want to consider Caffe Groppi in Trecate. The owner-chef is young, up and comng and inventive. I enjoyed my dinner there 18 months ago even though I'm a traditionalist who puts impeccable producer as my #1 priority, which is not to say that Caffe Groppi doesn't have it. First determine, however, if it's a bit out of reach in terms of time and distance.
  24. Cracco is probably of most interest to chefs. I was more impressed with my second meal there a few weeks ago than I was with the one a couple of years ago. If sea urchin is still at its peak time of year, the kidneys served with it would be a remarkable choice. I loved it. Sea urchin also is part of his flagship spaghetti with coffee and sea urchin that we ordered both times, although it wasn't as memorable this time. It's cooking at a very high level and a good 40-50% less costly than comparable restaurants in Paris. As an aside, the best veal chop Milanese I ever had is at Trattoria del Nuovo Macello, a restaurant I adore. The chop comes in a brittle, oily bread casing that shatters when you cut into it. The risotto Milanese is perfection as well. It's a delight to be there as everyone is amazingly friendly. I'll keep going there every time I'm in Milan. Call ahead and ask if the veal will be available. They have a web site.
  25. I came across your inquiry on the way to posting about the remarkable hole-in-the-wall Colombian restaurant La Fogata in Pittsfield. Keep it in mind in case you leave before I post the details. To my mind it's the best in the Berkshires, no doubt about it.
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