robert brown

Victor, thanks for jumpng in. Do you mean that someone was comparing Gaig's cuisine to that of the Reixach Sisters? I'm trying to reply with one arm tied behind my back, never having dined at Can Gaig. The point that I was trying to make was shortly after my visiting El Bulli and Can Fabes, Hispania was a most welcome change, being blown away with the experience of tasting relatively unadorned products that, unlike both Union Square and Daniel much of the time, taste the way Mother Nature intended them. If you are suggesting that one should go to Can Gaig instead of Hispania as a welcome contrast or antidote to two and three-star dining in the region, then I withdraw my enthusiastic suggestion of eating at Hispania, sparing the members the schlepp out there and back.

Bux is a friend always in need of a good meal. I have a vague recollection that the train station in Arenas del Mar is near the restaurant. I think both are just about on the beach. I should remember since I must have driven on every street and road in the town trying to find the restaurant. It is better to find out before you head out. Let me try this: Dining at Hispania is comparable to a no-star or one star restaurant you used to be able to go to in the French provences between meals at the "big name" places; restaurants from which you would walk out singing the praises of a thick, melt-in-the-mouth portion of calf's liver or jambon persille (two dishes I still remember from Burgundy). When your trip was finished, you would remember those dishes as vividly as the best ones from the three-star chefs and long for them with the same intensity.

It sounds like your brother should be the one named Pan.

What happened to Totonno's?

Matthew, you must be one of those computer whizzes. Thanks very much.

CyN, I'm glad your program is so ambitious that my recommendation to avoid Ca'LIsidre hardly causes a ripple. You should consider Restaurante Hispania if you can get to it. I didn't comment on Can Fabes (yet), but it just may be worth having one meal at each as opposed to two at Can Fabes. In a nutshell, we liked Can Fabes very much, but it wasn't transcendental like El Bulli, Troisgros in its heyday, Chapel, Guerard,etc. Rather it was highly-competent cuisine cooked in the French/International haute-cusine style with great regional produce. Hispania is at the other end: classic Catalan dishes with mouth-watering freshness and no stabs at pretense. If you are not bowled over at Can Fabes, that's what I would do: have one meal at each. Several of us like Ledoyen very much. The prices are fair for what you get both in terms of quality and portions, and as an old-timer, the style of cuisine should resonate with you as it did with me. I don't want to start talking France's restaurants on the Spain/Portugal board, so I will leave it at that for now.

CyN, we'll never know if I give you a bum piece of avoidance advice, which I suppose is better than being given a bum steer to a restaurant you find stinky. I appreciate the implicit faith, but I would hate to think I hit Ca L'Isidre on a bad night. It's tough to buck the consensus. We recently had a discuss on Symposium about dispensing restaurant advice, though I can't recall if it encompassed web-based advice to those yoou have never met. All I can say is, yes, I am a veteran eater along with you and if you think experience counts for a lot, then I hope I spared you the kind of experience I had there. All I can do is say that the four of us (all art dealers, so of course we have terrific taste!!!!), did not have a very festive evening nor a meal that was good all the way through. How long will you be in the Barcelona area and where do you plan to dine?

What I have admired most in this whole drama is the candor of Dominique Loiseau. I met her one time about ten years ago and she impressed me with both her looks and intelligence. I suspect, however, that what is most being left unspoken is that Loiseau realized he didn't have the place in the culinary fermament he quite wanted, which was not be just a three-star chef, but one of the ones on the food-lovers radar screen. Those would be Michel Bras, Mark Veyrat, Pierre Gagnaire and Alain Passard, among others. I think even Olivier Roellinger at two stars was getting more attention. There is a hint, in the remark that he didn't like the direction that food was going in, that Ferran Adria and his influence upset him as well. It is more complicated than that. Apparently he overreached to satisfy an insatiable ego when there are many three-star chefs who are happy to hold the hand that fate has dealt them.

Do you mind if I call you "42" for short? You made the restaurant sound very good. It seems more classical than most, which I like. It was nice to hear that the "chariot de desserts" is not yet extinct. I hope you will post more in the future. Thanks 42.

Does anyone have the address of Balaguer's operation? His website is from outer space and I have yet to see his coordinates on it. Bux, thanks for your kind words on the thread I just started on Barcelona. I am working on a new hypothesis about the differences between Spain and France. I think you could be right about Barcelona vis a vis Paris

Chazzy, it's out of our hands and in Fat Guy's. It has been torture finishing it. Collaborative efforts seem to take twice as long.

In early April my wife and I spent a week in Roses and Barcelona and environs. Below is my seperate report. However, the text is soon to be included in a new, expanded, revised second edition of the "El Gullet Guide to Barcelona" which is our snowball-like experiment in on-line gastronomic travel info. There you will find addresses, phone numbers, etc. The El Bulli part, slaved over by me and Jonathan Day, will appear in The Daily Gullet right after Easter. Ca L'Isidre. An exception that may possibly prove the rule? One man’s meat another man’s poison? Ca L’Isidre, which we were much looking forward to in light of the above comments, left us disappointed. We were met with a frosty welcome. Isidre and his wife barely spoke to us. Our waiter proposed bad to mediocre wines, and other than the renown roasted baby goat that two of the four of us ordered, the rest of the food was either undercooked (a rack of lamb, which when further cooked was also delicious. We encountered the same situation at Can Fabes; the Spanish must like their lamb chops raw) or not impeccably fresh. (A complimentary plate of four unadorned “cigales” had been in the refrigerator too long and had lost their freshness). We don’t know if the perfunctory treatment was because we were bombing the shit out of Iraq or if some kind of weariness set in on the Isidriites. The décor was bland, the art of questionable taste, and a sense of the personnel going through the motions pervaded our visit. The clientele was old; they rushed through their meal (and this on a Saturday night) and we were about the first to arrive and the last to leave, early by Spanish standards. Maybe old Isidre was depressed, as the restaurant was less than full. Cal Pep. At first blush you may think you have walked into a Spanish luncheonette at night; brightly-lit at that. Everyone sits at the counter, although there is a restaurant-by-reservation behind. Somehow it seems like more fun to sit at the counter and ask the servers, who also put each order on your plate, what you want. They all seem to speak adequate English. In our particular case, our travel mates by coincidence appeared with a fellow German who is a long-time resident of Barcelona and we let him order for us. The ubiquitous "pa amb tomaquet" ( toast rubbed with fresh tomato and olive oil added);' tiny roasted green peppers, tiny clams found in the sand; sensational warm, thin slices of Serrano ham; and a terrific house-made sausage made with foie gras, served with qarbanzo beans ham were all delicious among the ten or so small dishes we had. We, like just about everyone else, had to wait an hour in the line that forms against the wall. This is a popular, revered classic worth waiting for, however. Restaurante Hispania. Arenys del Mar.That near-perfection in restaurant-going is not limited to the lairs of revered chefs and culinary prestidigitation is brought home at Ristorante Hispania: This in spite of going with the better half suffering from a bout of nausea. Even if I had dined alone, I would have clearly recognized the restaurant's greatness. While Hispania is a quite large family restaurant serving many middle-class clients, this 51-year-old establishment cares passionately about impeccably-fresh ingredients and the their careful preparation according strict tenets of Catalan cuisine. One test of a restaurant's integrity is the way it prepares complimentary dishes, humble as they may be. Hispania serves everyone two pieces of " pa amb tomaquet", but unlike the ones we received at other stops, this one was made on a thin, crispy flatbread, not the usual thick piece of toasted leaven bread. It put to shame all others we had. With dessert you receive a piece of the most moist and fresh sponge cake imaginable. A "humble" tomato salad we ordered, due to the exigencies of my wife's stomach, was sublime. The tomatoes from Almeria were sweet and delicious and strewn with slices of white, sweet spring onions and green chilies ( hot, but not the least bit painful). As her main course, my wife tried to eat a fish soup, but simply was unable to consume anything more. I had a few spoonfuls to compare with the shellfish soup I had as an appetizer (made with a species slightly resembling crab, but still a type of langoustine. I read that Catalunya has between 2000 and 3000 varieties of shellfish). Both were among the very greatest I have eaten, making me realize that of all the ones I have had on the Cote d'Azur, none were as good.The various "white" fish in my wife's order melted in my mouth from their freshness. As my main course I had the delicacy of black baby eels in garlic and olive oil. These were perfect, but at 50 euros I think I should have tried a dish that had more latitute of flavor. Although we were reduced to one dessert, I had a serving of mint sorbet that was thick and intense; a magnificent example. Service did not miss a beat and everyone who took care of us from the woman of the house to the busboys was endearing. To echo Bux's refrain, it took as as long to find the restaurant, once we penetrated the center of Arenas del Mar, as it took to get to that point from Barcelona. The key to finding it once you get off the toll road is to get on the National II ("dos"), direction Barcelona. You will come to a traffic circle which you turn off at the second right after a sign for the restaurant. If you turn at the first right, you will end up where Bux and I did: at the beach. The restaurant is on a narrow service road parallel to the NII. It's worth going around in "circles" twice to make certain you find the right turn-off. Now that I have invested the time in finding Hispania, I am going back every time I visit Barcelona. Casa Calvet. Casa Calvet is likely to be a restaurant difficult to forget, as Arthur Lubow implies. The dining room (once the offices of the owner's textile business) is one of the more sober Gaudi houses given its narrowness and zoning requirements of the neighborhood. Yet its tile walls and carved benches and partitions are arresting; a rare experience to have dined in such classic, genuine surroundings of a giant of early 20th-century design. The lunch we had was surprisingly good. My garbanzo bean soup with cod and whitebait was intensely-flavored as was squab in a Sherry reduction. My wife had one dish, a marvelous and fresh roasted hake in a watercress sauce. A fruit soup with ice cream and a chocolate cake with walnuts topped it off in a refreshing fashion. A wine from the Navarre from Izar de Nekeas (1995) was one of the more complex and enjoyable Spanish wines we have had in recent memory. Pla de la Garsa. . We selected this restaurant because it sounded as though my wife's stomach, now in a recovery phase, could handle it. The room and the general cadre did not strike us as exactly elegant. While the neighborhood is interesting-narrow streets in a very old part of town due east of La Rambla-the restaurant is not. Our waiter, one of a small staff of young people reminiscent of the struggling actor variety, confirmed our hunch that the place was in British guidebooks since we were surrounded by either holiday-goers or academic conventioneers. Here the prices are cheap, befitting the clientele, but only adequate food. I had a carpaccio of cod with pulverized olives and lamb sausage with "flageots": both edible, not much more. My wife had a vegetable cous-cous and beans with ham, both of which she could do without. We were out in under an hour. Mercat de la Boqueria. I have been to dozens of markets in France and Italy including some really good ones such as Joigny, Lyon, Cannes and Genoa. None of those has the scope and excitement of La Boqueria. I never saw so many varieties of seafood ( so fresh that they dare display the fish with the gills open) and hams, for example. The hall is immense and you feel overwhelmed at first. That it is open 12 hours a day, six days a week makes a vivid statement about Catalunians’ love of food, We had lunch at what looked like the most serious food counter, Bar Central. It had a good selection of seafood and various meat dishes. The food was tasty and what one would expect in a market that cuts across all class lines.

That may be it. It was an elaborate, lavish book. In fact I seem to recall it was a couple of years old, already. I'm kicking myself for not checking out the shop. I hope I can in a few months. If anyone is in Barcelona soon, would you please report on it?

This past December I saw at Librairie Gourmand in Paris a cookbook he did. I am sorry I didn't try to find his shop in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago. Does anyone know the book?

My recent excursion from Nice to Barcelona and the Costa Brava was extraordinary in the variety of dining I indulged in. From the unique and extraordinary El Bulli -- really as perfect a restaurant as one could hope to find -- to little places serving simple Catalan food such as Cal Pep in Barcelona or the somewhat more elaborate Restaurante Hispania in Arenas del Mar), the experience got me to thinking about what I call "dining in extremis". "In extremis"as I am using it is a small distortion of the dictionary meaning, but I like the resonance of it. For purposes of our discussion, it means dining at one extreme or the other; i.e. at one end, indulging in the world-renowned abilities of a chef or, at the other end, revellng in the freshness and simplicity of the food, with the hypothesis that the extremes generally offer more than the middle. What I find difficult about dining in the United States, and what some have told me about the United Kingdom, is that most restaurants fall between these extremes. Of course each country has a few world-class chefs, as well as a few times of the year and places where you can find impeccably fresh products, simply prepared. But most restaurants offer neither perfect ingredients, cooked with a minimum of adornment, nor pinnacles of technique or sobriety. How often are you satisfied by restaurants "in the middle"? When you travel do you limit your choices either to restaurants with renowned chefs or those that offer simple, perfect foods -- usually coming from the immediate region of the restaurant? Do you agree with my hypotheses that dining "in extremis" offers the most consistent rewards?

Not to sound like a snob, but I have some of the 1989 Hommage a Jacques Perrin, including a magnum. Has anyone opened one of these yet, and when might you?

Another way to look at it is if there isn't great Italian food in France because the produce is coming from Rungis (which is hardly true for the Italian restaurants in Nice and elsewhere in France), how is it that places like Rochat and Pont de Brent in Switzerland; and Tantris in Germany make highly credible, if not highly praised, French cuisine? They're not getting the lion's share of their produce from Paris. Don't eat Italian in any of those parts.

Has anyone noticed that once you cross the border from Italy into France, Switzerland, Germany or Austria that you can no longer get real-taasting Italian food? I haven't tried Italian food in Austria or near the German-Italian border part of Germany. However, I have been to the two"best" Italian restgaurants in Nice-L'Allegro and Auberge de Theo" and the food tastes (and the restaurants smell) just like I get in New York. I have also eaten in the Ticino, but have never had a seemingly authentic Italian meal, although it has been a long time since I was last there. Am I mislead by somehow being psychologically affected by stepping across the Italian-Something border? Is it possible that great Italian cooking is so regionalized that once you leave the area for obtaining the proper ingredients it deteriorates into a vulgarized version of "internationale" Italian food? What do you think?

If you arrive much after 5:15, you may have to wait a long time for a seat or table. I haven't been back in several months because there was a woman there controlling the line who was as disagreeable as they come. (Everyone else there is very nice, however).She wouldn't let a couple in for the first seating because the husband was looking for parking and arrived two seconds after the woman decided to let people in ahead of them, even though she could have done otherwise. As for us, we also couldn't enter for the first seating because we were three people. The couple behind us got seated and we had to wait an hour for the first couple to finish. To their credit, they will take your cell phone number and call you when they are about ready to seat you. I haven't given up for good on Mary's. We like the food there and will put up from time to time with the lack of comfort and hurriedness of the visit.

Does lunch count? Then I would have lunch with the FT. (That's an inside joke for us readers of Saturdays' Financial Times).

http://www.gastronomie.com/afp/gastronomie...30.ia3jq1d5.asp Pierre Gagnaire is making some unspecified investment in 82-year-old Jean Ducloux, owner-chef of Restaurant Greuze in the Burgundy town of Tournus. Questions one might ask are how authentic will the food remain, if it hasn't already lost some of its authenticity; and what will happen to the restaurant after Ducloux "disappears", as the French like to say. Being an optimist at heart, I would like to think that this is an opening salvo in what could be a new concern for preservationist efforts in historic gastronomy.

I have one entire bookshelf in France devoted entirely to Italian wine, food and restaurant guidebooks that include among the previously unmentioned restaurant ones Il Veronelli, Accademia Italiana della Cucina and two Critica & Guida Golosa (one for Piemonte and one for Lombardia). I believe that Italy publishes quite many more guidebooks than France (and, especially given all the Slow Food publications) books about products and produce.) I find that I buy some of these books primarily for the sake of having then, although the Veronelli and Gambero Rosso have useful maps keyed to restaurant locations. If you can read one Romance language well and have a decent Italian food vocabulary, you can find out what you might want to order (if you have a choice) and arrive at some kind of fairly reliable consensus. The problems are that they give the highest ratings to the same group of “luxe” restaurants and that none of the books seem to have a point of view such as the Gault-Millau in its glory years. They cover so many restaurants that they have many reviewers contributing such that one never knows anything about them or how they might be instructed to evaluate each establishment. One pretty much has to “work” with any given guidebook and see which one comes closest to your taste. Guida de l’Espresso has been the one I have used the longest (I think I started with it when it came out in about 1980. I find it as reliable as any, though kin the tricky region of 13-16/20, I often find them at odds with my evaluations. I agree with everyone about the Guida Michelin. I don’t think it is “accurate” beyond the law of averages and overrates fussy food while failing to reward fully interesting-prepared regional food. Interestingly, no one has mentioned using Faith Heller Willinger’s “Eating in Italy”. The entries are relatively few, but adequate for anyone making an exploratory trip or limited duration. I have a love-hate relationship with the book, but always take it in the car. When I post my two-night trip to Piemonte that I made a week ago, I will write more about it. But what do people think of this work?

Martin et al.: My sensing that the large majority of restaurants eventually decline instead of improve did not occur all that long ago. In fact it really hit home four or five months ago when, in a short period of time, I went to three of my preferred New York restaurants and walked out of all of them with the sense that they had lost something since my last visits. One, Ouest, I have to admit was a second visit that fell far short of the first; yet the other two, Babbo and Jewel Bako, struck me as having problems deeper than inconsistency. Jewel Bako lost its head sushi chef, so perhaps it will recover since its owner, Jack Lamb, is more than a restaurateur in sheep’s clothing. My long-time diner’s instincts told me, however, that Babbo had undergone a fundamental change in pursuit of a quicker buck; a primary cause of restaurant deterioration. I do hope that in the way I wrote the topic starter that I welcomed reasons for and examples of why restaurants can get better. In chef-owned restaurants I think the chances are better of enco0unter restaurants on the upswing, especially when the chef is still young, energetic and on a learning curve. I imagine this is the situation with some restaurants I have been to in Piemonte. I have to believe, however that the current macroeconomic situation, the hiring of the better chefs by const-conscious restaurateurs and hotels mitigates against that.

Fergus, is the Ken Brozen Annual Memorial Dinner still taking place? To get really serious, he told me before he left us in 1989 that Alain Chapel was a hero of yours, if not your favorite chef. Would you tell us why and if he instilled any inspiration that influences you? (As to who is Ken Brozen, he was a design gadabout and a friend of mine and Fergus' parents.)

In a PM to me, Bill Klapp expanded on his knowledge of La Carmagnole. He asked me if I could post it. Here it is, along with his thoughts on another Piemonte restaurant, La Contea in the Barbaresco town of Nieve and Centro in Prioca, a bit west of Alba. Robert: My first post on eGullet was Carmagnole! See "Torino-any recs?" on the Italy board. The place is one of a kind. It has a series of small dining rooms, some of which border on the tacky (i.e., the stereo sitting out on a bookcase in your dining room), but the goal, fully achieved in my view, is to make you feel as though you are in the proprietor's home and he's serving you whatever he's having that night. Which, by the way, is more or less what happens! Set menu, including wines, and not a clunker among the courses or wines on my last trip. He first brings you into an anteroom for an aperitif (he had that night the Nino Franco Prosecco Rustico, which could claim to be the best cheap wine on earth) and a few light "finger" antipasti. Then you are taken to your dining room and treated to liberal measures of his wit, food philosophy and wine and food pairings. A number of local winemakers make special bottlings just for him. I can't recall what those were that night, but just to make up a reasonable example, it was like a Moscato d' Asti privately bottled for him by someone the stature of Bruno Giacosa! By all means try it! The only mystery to me is why it received (and has kept) a Michelin star. The food is, to my mind, better than one-star, but the dining rooms and service are all homey and comfort and no pretense and the experience is all about the love of food and wine. On to Centro-again, one of my local favorites. Pretty restaurant, great food, great service, attractive wine list. Probably should have received more attention than it has. However, I would be remiss if I did not throw in Antine in Barbaresco, which, against long odds, was granted a star after only two years in business. The chef and his girlfriend, Andrea and Elisabetta, are good friends. If I were forced to sign up for a meal plan at only one local restaurant, this would be it. Andrea is one of a handful of brilliant young chefs on the rise in the Piemonte who show originality without artifice or pretense, but at the same time, great respect for the best Piemontese culinary traditions. (Others include the chef at Flipot in Torre Pellice, who just earned his second star, and the chef at All' Enoteca in Canale, who also earned a star after only two years. Boy, do I ever look forward to retirement!) Re: La Contea, a triumph of self-promotion by the owner, and capable of brilliance, but inconsistent and equally capable of mediocrity.