robert brown

Steven, are you implying that Morimoto restaurant can do just fine if Morimoto stops giving it his attention or is spending his time in New York? When I asked the woman who picked up the phone if Morimoto would be working at lunch tomorrow, she said, "He sticks to his own schedule." Maybe the queston to ask is, is Steven Starr (his restaurateur partner) another Drew Nieporent?

A sushi chef at Sushi Yasuda told me tonight that Morimoto was no longer showing up at the restaurant that bears his name, devoting his time instead to looking to open in NYC. Does anyone know anyting about this since I have a lunch reservation there tomorrow? What would be a good alternative regardless of price or cuisine? This is an emergency situation!!!!!

Bill, welcome to eGullet. It's great to hear from someone who has a house in Piemonte. It's where I would be if I weren't where I am in terms of a vacation home. I hope you will share your dining experiences in the region. I know it well, but still have several stones to unturn. I need more opinions on Flipot. Two posters were not enamored of their meals there recently. I think they will be sharing their experiences. But dining is often the luck of the draw. I had it on my list to go there this summer, indeed perhaps even next week (I am still in New York, but leaving for Nice in three days). Now you give me second thoughts since the other reports made me put it o the back-burner. Anyway, I look forward to your continuing posting and partaking of your opinions and descriptions

Professor Shesgreen sent me the following e-mail because, as he explains, problems he is experiencing with his server does not allow him to post directly into the Symposium forum. I am grateful that (without any prodding) he has taken the time to discuss some of the matters raised by participants in this thread. Dear Robert Brown: You can post some or all of this to Forum, which I cannot post to myself because of technical difficulties with our server this morning via remote--I'm away from home. Regarding the London correspondent who asks about the Wine Wheel: I looked fleetingly at that and noted that, for example, it featured "sweat." That word raises the same kind of problem I address in the essay: my sweat and yours are very different, in aroma or taste. Regarding the correspondent who alludes to aromas occurring in "well-made wine": a longer version of this piece glances at that issue, at least obliquely, by pointing out that most current wine criticism is only positive, seldom negative (and then timidly), as if no bad wines were made. Here are a few examples from the longer piece, which was edited to fit the Chronicle's space requirements: What wine writers shun are captious terms and words of disparagement. Wine "criticism" in the hands of men (wine writing and collecting are male preserves, my wife claims, and Forum's correspondents confirm that) from Saintsbury to Parker proceeds by acclaim, and that in the superlative degree. In Parker's Wine Advocate for 28 February 2002, the following adjectives appear on a single page: "superb," "spectacular," "blockbuster," "extraordinary," "exceptional," "fabulous," "huge," "immense," "enormous," "thrilling," "phenomenal," "superlative," "thrilling" "gorgeous," "amazingly accessible," "sumptuous," "immense," "perfect," and, not surprisingly, "intoxicating." This operatic language might be pardoned because it alludes to wines sampled at two special tastings, but such poetic license is the rule in the Wine Advocate. It surfaces in headlines like "Bordeaux's Hallelujah…2000 is the greatest vintage ever," an anti-historic banner underlining the extent to which wine reporting is crying and hawking, like literary criticism and art appreciation. His clientele, of course, are alumni of elite colleges were grade inflation is also the norm. With thanks Sean Shesgreen

Andrea, By sheer coincidence I have posted in Symposium a marvelous essay on present-day winespeak written by Professor Sean Shesgreen. I hope you will read it and tell us what you think of the article, Prof. Shesgreen's premises, and/or winespeak in general. I happen to own Frank Schoonmaker's "Encyclopedia of Wine", 3rd edition Revised, May 1968 in which he defines "rotten egg flavor" and writes " a fine Cote Rotie of a great year is a truly admirable wine, deep-colored, full-bodied, long-lived yet with great distinction and class; certain experts claim to detect in it the scent of violets and raspberries." Now what is wrong that? It describes the phenomena in question the way they are, what they are. The more bull an evaluator or taste throws out, the more the subject at hand becomes the taster and less the wine. There's an elegant simplicity in using a limited yet applicable universe of descriptions. In fact, I get a better notion of the quality and nature of a wine from a traditional description; something that is much better than being on the receiving end of a confusing string of irrelevancies.

I suspect the bouiliabaisse is better at Bacon. I qualify it because I have only recently had the "degustation" portion which has fewer fish. It was nonetheless delicious. Last summer my wife and I had a degustation portion of both it and the bourride. The terrine de foie gras was very good as well. Bacon isn't cheap, but not nightmareishly expensive (but this was before the drop in the dollar). I like it there. It's a classy place, although it is not a value for the money restaurant.

Menton, good point that I didn't think of. I wonder, however, if they might have changed their tune given the downturn. I also believe the Bastide serves lunch, and perhaps that is a more open opportunity. I forgot whether you are in Nice or Menton. Didn't you tell me you also live in New Jersey?

How social change affects various fields of endeavor can often be gleaned from the way that people write and talk about them. Shifts in the vocabulary and jargon within a field are one of the key barometers of such change. With wine drinking and evaluation, we see this at work to an extreme. As one interested both in wine and in the ways people speak and write, my heart stood still when I encountered Sean Shesgreen's essay "Wet Dogs and Gushing Oranges: Winespeak for a New Millenium" that he had written for The Chronicle of Higher Education. I immediately thought that this essay, which I found more enlightening and better written than just about anything I had read in the gastronomic literature, deserved to be made available to eGullet members. Professor Shesgreen has graciously granted his permission to reproduce his essay for us to read and discuss. I believe that he lays out a convincing case of the causes for the evolution over the past four decades of how and why the way people describe the properties of wine. He has identified the cultural reasons for it and has deftly described the genres or categories of the adjectives people use and the comparisons they make. Do you find Professor Shesgreen's thesis compelling, if not convincing? You may also want to use his essay as a point of departure for your thoughts about the accuracy, honesty, and appropriateness of the new "winespeak" (perhaps versus the old or traditional) as it is used in the wine media as well as by certain wine drinkers. Sean Shesgreen is Distinguished Research Professor of English at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. He is the author of numerous articles and five books, most recently Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (Rutgers University Press, 2002). Wet Dogs and Gushing Oranges: Winespeak for a New Millennium By SEAN SHESGREEN As a habitual wine drinker and a former wine columnist, I regularly slog through articles and books filled with the fanciful, extravagant, mystifying babble used by writers whose prose is deeply disconnected from the beverage they pretend to describe. One such writer, ransacking nature for imagery to promote a French wine, paints a regional Burgundy as "a good mountain stream that could one day become a long, peaceful river." The celebrated Robert Parker, turning to the city for similes and metaphors, describes a 2000 Bordeaux as "a towering skyscraper in the mouth without being heavy or disjoined." Other writers regard wines as if they were mental patients with psychopathologies: Spain's Ribera del Duero from Bodegas Reyes has been called "more brooding than cheerful." A small dose of such criticism is enough to make the common reader rejoice when he or she hears a plain-speaking Englishman pronounce his beverage "a jolly good wine." As these examples suggest, contemporary literary-oenological styles of writing are diverse. However, that diversity is superficial; in fact, the language that the majority of American wine writers use falls into three categories. Two of those were popular in the middle and late part of the 20th century, when they were eclipsed (but not entirely obscured) by a third style of rhetoric, which has become more and more popular. Until recently, Americans have described what they drink using just two languages, both abstract and neither, oddly enough, linked directly to wine: the language of social class and the language of gender. Of the two, the language of class has been the more pervasive. In the 1964 edition of Frank Schoonmaker's Encyclopedia of Wine, for example, Portugal's best red wine is characterized as "full-bodied, extremely fruity, [but] somewhat lacking in breed." By contrast, French Sauternes from Château Coutet is praised for "great distinction and breed." Frontignan's muscat, another sweet, French white wine, has "considerable distinction and real class." (Schoonmaker's Encyclopedia grew out of a series of wine columns in The New Yorker, published around the time of the repeal of prohibition in 1933; until recently, and through several editions, it has been the American oenophile's bible.) Although less ubiquitous, the vocabulary of gender has a more venerable legacy than the language of class; it goes back at least as far as the Victorian literary critic George Saintsbury, who, according to Schoonmaker, described a red Hermitage from France as "the manliest wine" he had ever drunk. Like the language of class, the language of gender bestows praise and blame, but in more nuanced shades. The red wines of Morey-Saint-Denis and Chambolle-Musigny are distinguished from each other thus: Morey's wines are "big, hard, assertive -- the reverse in every way of the Chambolles," which are "delicate and feminine, with beguiling grace and a captivating, warming bouquet," according to the early editions of Alexis Lichine's Encyclopedia of Wines and Spirits in the 1950s. For Lichine, who viewed the reds of Gevrey as "robust, assertive and strictly masculine" and the whites of Meursault as "soft, round, and feminine," the dichotomies of sex and gender were fundamental to any understanding of wine. A chateau owner whom Newsweek dubbed the pope of oenophiles (according to the book jacket of Lichine's book), Lichine was emphatic about that contrast when he wrote of French wine. About the time of Frank Schoonmaker's death in 1976, descriptions of wine in America began to shift from the language of class and gender to the language of fruits and vegetables. A recent Wines & Spirits account of a 1998 Argiolas Costera called it "a garden of southern Italian flavors, from sun-baked black plums and fresh, fuzzy figs to almonds, fennel, and cherries. Crisp, lemon-like acidity provides the freshness of a sea breeze." Such passages suggest that, like cookbooks, wine guides are modern forms of the pastoral, a literary genre inventing idealized, imaginary, and nonsensical images of country life for the amusement of city dwellers. This new pastoral language has been widely adopted in the United States, and has also spread to France and the United Kingdom, where the English translation of The Hachette Wine Guide: The French Wine Bible declares that a La Clarière Laithwaite offers aromas "of almond, cocoa, marsh flowers, irises and undergrowth." The same lexicon pervades the wine columns in The New York Times, which recently described a glass of Madeira as "a big, full, brash wine [which] raced for each corner of our palates, gushing oranges, golden raisins, brandied cherries, licorice, mint, and maple sugar." Gushing indeed. Such descriptions focus on produce with a romantic, idyllic, and halcyon aura. Banished are parsnips, onions, carrots, potatoes, and other roots with lowly ties. Wine writing recoils from vegetables that make gas or blight the breath, like beans and garlic. Naturally, it shuns brussels sprouts, broccoli, and other vegetables forced upon us as children. It favors picturesque foods like asparagus; green, yellow, or red bell peppers; lemons; oranges; and apples. And it goes for fruits over nuts and vegetables, especially fruits that are high in sugar. It is particularly fond of cherries, Asian pears, peaches, melons, plums, figs, tangerines, lychees, and pineapples. While it also shows a preference for exotic foods like papaya, quince, guava, passion fruit, and mango, its all-time favorite is the berry: strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, boysenberries, mulberries, gooseberries, cranberries, blueberries, and bilberries. Although fruit lies at its core, the new nomenclature radiates out in other directions, chiefly culinary. The Wine Enthusiast's tasting notes for a bottle of Hidden Cellars finds that its 1997 zinfandel displays "an appealing mix of nut, cocoa, anise, oak, and black fruit on the palate. Opens with paprika and cinnamon, plus cocoa aromas; closes with a definitive vanilla-anise-oak tang." Along with an assortment of herbs, spices, and baking ingredients, wine narratives include everything found in today's kitchen: raw materials like honey, olives, bacon, meat, and coffee; processed foods like tapenade, marzipan, and chocolate; quasi-edibles like violets, tea roses, dried leaves, beeswax, and green tobacco; inedibles like oyster shells, camphor, and stones; imponderables like "orange-scented peach," "precious, very roasted wood," and the titillating "corrupt cherry." Then there's this account of Standing Stone Pinot Noir, in which "intense aromas of caramel-cola, black cherries, and wet dog give way to a medium-weight, silky palate that offers dark chocolate and cherry flavors." Other bizarre references include new saddle leather, pencil lead, seaweed, ash, smoke, Band-Aids, iodine, beef blood, and creosote. Who among us distinguishes beef blood from, say, pig's or chicken's? And is it really possible for one wine to smell of multiple, antagonistic aromas like "coffee, violets, prunes, smoke, toast, and game"? Questions probing the accuracy of this new lingo lead to broader ones about why it has won such widespread acceptance, defining the way Americans perceive -- or imagine -- the 565 million gallons of wine they spend $19-billion on yearly. One answer lies in an obscure but initially influential book published the year Frank Schoonmaker died. In 1976, Maynard A. Amerine (an oenologist) and Edward B. Roessler (a mathematician) wrote Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation to establish a scientific vocabulary of organoleptic terms -- expressions aiding in the sensory evaluation of wine. To that end, the two professors offer a glossary amounting to an index of forbidden wine-tasting words, though they do not give it that undemocratic title. In a preface to their glossary, these two professors from the University of California at Davis's department of viticulture and oenology do admonish: "It is not our intent to condemn the following terms (although some of them deserve it) for your wine vocabulary, but merely to warn you to use them with caution, if at all." From the realm of class, Amerine and Roessler purge "coarse," "common," "breed," "elegant," "heavy," "noble," "ordinary," and "well-bred," reserving special scorn for "finesse." From the sphere of gender, they outlaw "big," "masculine," "robust," "sturdy," "feminine," "fragrant," "lithe," "perfumed," and "delicate." But Amerine and Roessler's book did not, by itself, banish the vocabularies of class and gender. And though the book's science (impressive algebraic formulas adorn the volume) played a role in discrediting Schoonmaker's and others' aging terminologies, it did not establish the pastoral paradigm replacing them. The death of the old language and the birth of the new followed a cultural shift in late-20th-century America that has not drawn the comment it deserves. In the United States (as in England), France and Italy have long stood as models of contrasting cultural and social styles. France represents urbanity, cynicism, artfulness, formality, protocol, high theory, elitism, snobbery, and propriety. Italy stands for naturalness, informality, accessibility, practicality, spontaneity, optimism, intuitiveness, and family feeling. Those contrasts are apparent in movies, literary philosophy, couture, cuisine, wine, and, most recently, education. (Italian styles of child care, emphasizing creativity and spontaneity, are being studied not just by Americans, but by the French themselves, who now view their own system as overregimented.) In the middle of the 20th century, when the specter of Italy's fascist past still lingered, Americans looked to France for cultural models. French was the language of diplomacy; the adjective "French" was synonymous with the "best" in wines and restaurants everywhere; movies by Truffaut and Godard defined the avant-garde in cinema. But when Reagan's "morning in America" political optimism and Clinton's prosperity ushered in a period of serenity in the 1980s and '90s, an increasingly self-confident population sought styles of living that embodied informality and familial ease. That casualness drew Americans to Italy. Italian movies like Cinema Paradiso, The Postman, and Life Is Beautiful eclipsed French films in popularity; Bella Tuscany displaced A Year in Provence, the latter enduring through so many sequels only because it celebrated the Italian part of France. Marcella Hazan trumped Julia Child; and impenetrable French menus spawning tiny portions of food drowning in egg-butter-cream sauces yielded to Italy's cornucopia cuisines, prepared in olive oil, now elevated to a medical wonder. Following the triumph of its cuisines, Italy's Barberas, Pinot Grigios, and Chianti Classicos began to challenge their French rivals. Viewed as more accessible and less costly than astronomically priced French wines, they brought with them the pastoral associations and language of the Italian campagna. Where these bucolic connections and vocabularies had been embraced by oenophiles like Parker, the zest for all things Italian nourished and sustained them, bestowing on such pastoral allusions the naturalness and validity they needed to take root and flourish. Today, as a result, it is impossible to mass market any wine on American television using French imagery. Political fashion has helped discredit gender referents, so that to praise a Rhone as "manly" or to speak of "the fragile yet resolute charm of feminine wines" is to sound comically old-fashioned. And economic pressure to market a worldwide glut of wine (overproduction runs at 25 percent annually) has made invidious allusions to social standing, high or low, seem snooty. Meanwhile, creating Italian-sounding brands like Mondavi, Gallo, Martini, and Sebastiani, or depicting large, noisy families gathering around Mediterranean feasts has become the preferred way to pitch wines, regardless of their true nationality. Finally, casting wine, in words or images, as so many heads by the Milan painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (who fabricated allegories of the seasons out of pears, peaches, cherries, and nuts) gives it the appearance of a health food. Here at last is a natural medicine that keeps the doctor away, but promises to gratify the flesh, not mortify it. Composed of nature's bounty drawn from the four seasons, wines enjoy irresistible appeal to aging boomers obsessed with their physical well-being. Reinvented as those fruits and vegetables touted by physicians and governments as the best defense against cancer -- not to mention heart disease, dementia, and hip fractures -- wine metamorphoses into one of the most powerful prophylactics in our pharmacological arsenal, along with olive oil and green tea. Clearly, unlike literary critics and art historians, wine critics have failed to invent a dialect of their own to describe precisely what they do. Wine writers are loosely organized into two adversarial camps, researchers and marketers. The first, located in winery labs or universities, is committed to pruning oenoleptic diction back to a limited number of exact, scientific terms, but that camp is too obscure to achieve its goals. The second camp, operating in glossy magazines, prestigious daily papers, and $50-a-year newsletters, is committed to the hard sell, by expanding the language of wine through imagination and expressiveness. Devoted to the "poetry" of the grape, these wine "rappers" resemble nomads who wander from one landscape to another, gleaning their next crop of terms to mythologize their next vintage. As their search leads them farther and farther afield, it yields literary harvests that are increasingly fantastic and improbable. If current writing is the barometer of the next oenological wave, chronicles of wines as "hedonistic," "pretty and caressing," "ravishing," "pillowy," "seductive," and "overendowed" point to the erotic, affirming the view that, in the kaleidoscope of Americans' fixations, gastronomy has eclipsed sex.

Which side of the family did you get it from? Seriously, Pirate, the ris de veau Denis seems a lot like ris de veau grandmere. My book describes it as "Braised in Madeira, studded with truffles and scralet tongue and heightened with butter". Later I'll run through the canard sauvage Denis which was sensational. Are you in the food business or a dedicated amateur?

The Gantie started an English addendum to the guide last year that is somewhat abridged, but is pretty faithful to the full French text. It can give you some bum steers, but also lead you to some interesting places you might otherwise overlook. It seems to me that he doesn't dine anonymously or pay for his meals. However, it is the most detailed and complete, thus making it indispensable.

Pirate, I recall that Denis absented himself from the Michelin. In fact, the Raubady book shows an 18/20 from Michelin in either the 1975 or 1976 Guide (the book was published in 1976) and states that he is not in the Michelin or Guide Bottin. My wife and I had the ris de veau Denis which we thought was sensational. Of course we were wet behind the ears in terms of that level of dining, although I ate well as a kid in visits to New York and decently in Europe before then. I don't remember the dish, which I had at least twice, being overwhelmed by salt, though the "langue ecarlat" (tongue turned scarlet from soaking in brine) used in making the dish may have been the cause. Chapel's "souffle de barbue" was more like a normal souffle but ethereal and gossamer, as I recall, served with a sauce of vermouth. Keep dueling, Pirate.

Pirate, please excuse the oversight. I didn't go to Chez Garin, but I remember Monsieur Jamin talkng about it. When did he close in Paris? How about La Camelia in Bougival, outside of Paris? I was there in 1977 with the guy who introduced us to Chez Denis. The chef, Jean Delavayne was a genuine cult figure of modern dining at the time. Jacques Maniere was a clt guy I missed. He had Doudin-Bouffant, but left for Valence before I could get there. I will post some info. on Chez Denis from the above-mentioned book. Meanwhile I am dying to know what happened to Claude Mornay? Oh yes, did anyone ever have both the trout souffle of Garin and the "souffle de barbue" of Alain Chapel? It would be interesting to know how similar they were.

Cy, so much for my being the only member to have dined at Chez Denis. It was the place that was my initiation into the glories of dining in France from which, as they say, I never looked back. It was in May of 1974, perhaps six months before Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey had the famous Channel 13 auction meal offered by American Express. I got to dine there two more times. I also wondered what happened to the chef and his brother, Claude et Michel Mornay, who I think took over the restaurant from Denis, who, I also think, stayed on nonetheless until he lost his life in a car accident in Spain. I have a text about the restaurant, part of Nicolas de Rabaudy's book, "Guide des Meilleurs Restaurants de France".

NYCdrew, As for Aix proper, I only know the local two-star, Clos de la Violette. Based on our one meal (two people), it was obvious to me that the chef is competent, but not really inspired. I have dined in enough of these places to know that he will never get any better. I would avoid it unless you were in the area for some days and wanted a festive outing as the locale is very pleasant. Call it a lukewarm endorsement. The problem is that the area is not a good one for restaurants. Ducasse's place in Moustiers is a pleasant stop for a room and dinner. The meals offer essentially no choice, but solidly one star. No fireworks here, but tasty. If you go to the great antiquing town, L'Isle sur-la-Sorgue (Saturday and Sunday), the one-star Le Prevote is picturesque (a stream runs behind a glass wall in the dining room) and the food is honest and well-prepared. The prix-fixe lunch menu is very nice. Several of us have commented more than once on our favorite places between Menton and Cannes. Check the search feature. What comes up a lot in positive terms are L'Hostellerie Jerome in La Turbie; Mirazur in Menton; Terre des Truffes and La Petite Maison in Nice; Loulou in Cros de Cagne; Villa des Lys and La Cave in Cannes. I also like La Terrasses at the Hotel Juana in Juan-les-Pins for a blow-out kind of meal. Tetou in Golfe-Juan for bouilliabaisse is a big favorite, but I also like Bacon on the Cap d'Antbes for its bouilliabaisse and bourride, but also really fresh grilled local fish.

Gosh, I thought you were talking to me. Where are you thinking of trying?

April 2-7.

The article comes across to me as what we have seen many times before, which is the provincial-minded "homer" food writer dumping on the French and the Paris dining situation. Steve caught the essence of the article's and its author's shortcomings to which I can only add that if her paper didn't want to cough up the dough to eat in the better places, she shouldn't have wasted its money to write such a self-serving, egocentric, unrigorous piece to begin with.

Rachel, I compiled this for a trip I am soon to take. I'm sorry for any ambiguity or confusion. I will add to it when I return and put my experiences in italics or bold,as you suggest.

Lizziee, I couldn't have done it without you. Thank you so much. I really think the restaurant, if not general travel, advice we find on the site is the as pure and informed as one can get. Do you really think that the typical freelance food and travel writer has the open-mindedness and experience that people such as you, Bux, Wilfrid, and Victor have? I probably could have had a couple of leisurely meals in the time I invested compiling this. I look forward to going and adding my impressions.

As preparation for my three-day visit to Barcelona, I eschewed the usual guide books and relied on the Spain & Portugal thread of eGullet to get a handle on dining in this "hot" culinary city. Relying on the posts of Lizziee, Victor de la Serna, Bux, and Wilfredo, I moved their collective wisdom into MS. Word and cut and pasted my way to the creation of a concise but concentrated document I can fold and put in my pocket. I can tell that their collective wisdom, along with a bit of excerpting of confirmatory magazine suggestions, will just about guarantee that I will be availing myself of the best possible recommendations. I hope that other members will try this approach with other cities. Perhaps someone can adapt the idea into a permanent, readily-available feature. Please pardon my not attributing the various commentaries to their authors. You can always find their original posts in the Forum. My primary motivation was to demonstrate how the gastronomic traveler can customize the wisdom on the site for his or her own purposes. Please excuse the lack of formatting that got lost from copying the document from Word to here. BARCELONA . (Victor de la Serna).2002, the list (not going into the restaurant-rich suburbs and nearby coastal areas) would include Neichel, Àbac, Gaig, Jean-Luc Figueras, Racò d'en Freixa, OT, Peixerot . Bar Pinotxo - real Catalan food such as shredded salt cod salad and white beans with baby squid. Counter service. Breakfast/lunch. Inexpensive. Ca L'Isidre Les Flors 12, phone (34) 93 241 11 39- Bux and I have both mentioned this. Colman Andrews says," Our vote for the best restaurant in Barcelona."The owner is Isidre Girones. We got there around 1:45 and the place was empty. By 3:00 every table was filled, no tourists, mostly affluent businessmen. Our waiter, Joseph, spoke perfect English and with his help we orchestrated a perfect lunch. We started with tiny whitebait deep fried. Every time they fry up a batch, they use fresh oil. Next an incredible gazpacho with clams and shrimp with a slight dollop of oil floating on the top. Next quickly sauteed squid in olive oil that were so tender they melted in your mouth. Then their specialty - roast baby goat with small onions and white wine. The owner's daughter, Naria, is the pastry chef. She did a wonderful dessert - in an egg shell she placed sabayon which represented egg yolk I commented on Ca L'Isidre in another thread, but will briefly comment here. This is a real find. We got there around 1:45 and the place was empty. By 3:00 every table was filled, no tourists, mostly affluent businessmen. Our waiter, Joseph, spoke perfect English and with his help we orchestrated a perfect lunch. We started with tiny whitebait deep fried - every time they fry up a batch, they use fresh oil. Next a gazpacho with clams and shrimp - the gazpacho was pureed with a little oil floating on the top. Next quickly sauteed squid in olive oil that were so tender they melted in your mouth. Finally, their speciality - roast baby goat with small onions and white wine. Cabrales, they do a humorous "egg" dish for dessert. Naria, the daughter does the pastry. In an egg shell, she placed sabayon which represented the yolk, white chocolate was the white of the egg and underneath it all, liquid dark chocolate. Cal Pep, Plaça de les Olles 8 (00 34 93 310 7961). Get there early for a seat at the bar, and prepare for some of the finest seafood in the city. The squid is as tender as you'll find, the tallarines (wedge clams) are divine, and if Pep lets on that the day's prawns are good, you'd be a fool to demur at the price. A lively crowd at a brightly lit counter. Specializes in seafood: razor clams, sea snails, fried baby inkfish. Dinner, moderate. He suggests that you visit the La Boqueria Market at Rambla de Sant Josep 101 which is open Monday through Saturday from approximately 8 AM to 8 PM. Can Majo. Almirall Alxada, 23. 93-221-54-55 - Seafood based rice dishes such as black rice made with inkfish. Dinner, moderate. Closer to funky--I recall having to shell shrimp that were cooked in olive oil, tomatoes and onions to eat a dish recommended by the waiter at Can Majo. It was food well worth getting into tomato sauce up to your elbows to eat. Excellent very fresh shrimp. Good rice dishes here. I'd recommend some simple seafood a la plancha perhaps and then a grand rice and seafood dish. This restaurant is on a corner of the Barcelonetta area and across the street from the beach. It's a great lunch spot. In fact one of the best one two culinary punches I've ever had is lunch here the day after a meal at El Bulli. Restaurant Hispania in Arenys del Mar. It is, I suppose, the quintessential Catalan restaurant. We had lunch there and the restaurant was full of locals--couples and many businessmen, but more white collar workers enjoying a collegial lunch than what appeared to be business lunches. The menu is too large for a stranger to easily figure out what to order and the owner/hostess was quick to help us. No tourists here and it helps to speak Spanish, but I have a menu from last year and can get you a copy some way. Be very careful of the turnoff from the road here. Make too tight a turn at a point that's poorly marked and you will be on the wrong side of the road and the railroad tracks on a dirt road that leads to abandoned factories and a nude beach. To add to my frustration the beach was all male when we tried to find Hispanya. Jean Luc Figueras. Santa Teresa, 10. 93-415-28-77. Liked very much. The cuisine is very contemporary and the decor stark. We found the service exceptional. Our waiter, Mikial, had worked at Guy Savoy. The sommelier is a young woman, Helene, who selected wonderful, inexpensive Catalonian wines. It is difficult to describe the food. There are separate flavors on the plate that need to be mixed as you eat it. It is not the 20 ingredient syndrome of some American chefs, but the chef focuses on a number of ingredients and wants the mixing at the moment. We had the tasting menu - 2 amuse were served beforehand. Memorable dishes were: Rare ducks chunks, iced tomato with shrimp, gazpacho soup with apple puree, snails with a red pepper mousse and baby pork with peach honey and hot goat cheese. Two factors diminished my appreciation for our dinner. I came down with a head cold that affected my appreciation of food and particularly of finesse in flavor. We requested that each dish be split into half orders so two savory courses became four, but they followed so quickly that we never had time to reflect on a course. As I recall the next course was in the hands of the waiter at our side as the last course was being cleared from our table. The restaurant seemed eager and ready to accommodate our request with the recommendation that we change one of our courses as it would be hard to plate as a half order. We had two of the specials listed in Michelin. The canelones de cigalas, without a binder for the seafood, tomatoes and black olives, seemed more like a summer roll than either an Italian or Provencal pasta and more applealing intellectually than delicious. It was unadorned except by a sauce that was mostly on the side. My wife thought it was buerre blanc, I wasn't at all sure. The Tarta fina de butifarra del perol a layer of rustic (blood, guts, hoof and head as far I would guess) sausage meat on phyllo disk with with sliced ratte potatoes and black truffles was less intellectual, but impressed us very favorably. The simplicity went with the simplicity of the decor, and the earthyness contrasted with the elgance, both in good ways. We were tired, I was not in the best of shape. We enjoyed two fish dishes, but they made less of an impression on us. The service was quite good, if too efficient. It was a meal not quite up to the starred meals we had in the provinces and not quite as relaxed as the less formal meals I've had in Barcelona, but it deserved its star and I need to return to better evaluate it. Lizzee's been there and recommends it. I'd guess it's a short taxi ride from the train station, but then again there are several stations and some of the metros stations seem to serve the main train lines as well on separate tracks. Sants is the only train station I've used, but you can also get the train I took at the plaça de Catalunya. Food is reasonably priced in Barcelona, hotels are expensive and taxis are inexpensive . Bar del Pi, in the square outside the Sant Pi church, for a couple of heart starters. I breakfasted on montaditos, little slices of baguette with various toppings: smoked salmon and quail's egg, catalan (a pale, soft slicing sausage), ham and anchovy. El Xampanyet Montcada, 22. is indeed in the guides, but is worth singling out. Get there at opening time if you can (around 6.30/7) not just to drink the local artisanal cider (which is okay) or cava (which is distressingly sweet) but to eat the delicious little open sandwiches which are spread out on the bar (catalan sausage; tuna and pimento; anchovy; tortilla; etc) or order canned seafood tapas. I am not joking - they have every kind of wonderful little sea thing canned in oil, from sardines and anchovies to baby squid and cockles Set Portes A landmark restaurant, it is now heavily used by tourists (but still by locals too). It is scattered with memorabilia and promotional gimmicks, but I have always found the food to be fine. The paellas are famous, but I also recommend their simple meat dishes - roast, kid and roast rabbit especially. . Alkima. Carrer Indústria, 79; 207-61-15. "Fried egg" appetizer, with cauliflower cream, unsweetened egg-yolk ice cream, and sevruga caviar; terrine of guinea fowl with pistachio-and-green-apple "guacamole" and trumpet-of-death mushrooms; squid with creamed rice and squid ink. $95; tasting menu, $30. • Cata 181. Carrer València, 181; 323-68-18. Pig's trotters with figs, walnuts, and honey ice cream; three squares of rare tuna, each topped with a different mustard; sugared cruixents of cheese and tomato. $25; tasting menu, $20. Comerc 24. Carrer Comerç,24; 319-21-02 Asparagus with mayonnaise foam; sardines marinated in balsamic vinegar or fried in Parmesan cheese; onions tempura with a soy-foam dip. $40; "festival menu" of tapas, $40. . (In the case of this particular restaurant, this is the only restaurant in Barcelona that Adria recommends unconditionally. The chef is Carles Abellán, 38, a veteran of El Bulli.) • • Hisop. Passatge Marimon, 9; 241-32-33. Purée of green melon topped with spicy mâche; pigeon with sweet purées and arrays of different salts and peppers; chocolate madeleine soaked in rose syrup, with strawberry-pepper ice cream. $80; tasting menu, $35. • Espai Sucre. Carrer Princesa. 53; 268-16-30. Smoky tea cream made from Lapsang souchong, with yogurt, a black sesame wafer, grapes, a coffee-and-chocolate cake, and chocolate ice cream. Seatings at 9 and 11:30 p.m. Five-course menu, $30; simpler three-course menu, $20; savory dishes, $9-$11. • OT. Carrer Torres, 25; 284-77-52. Peanut "vichyssoise" with quail eggs, cabbage, and carrot; a deconstructed suquet (a fish, potato, and tomato stew); pigeon with shiitake mushrooms, baby corn, and popcorn. Prix fixe, $40. • Santa Maria. Carrer Comerç, 17.; 315-12-27.International standards such as sushi, falafel or tuna mojama (thinly sliced, dried and cured) are competently rendered as designer tapas, but the desserts get really interesting. Tiburon shark with carrots and okra in a red-pepper sauce; botifarra (pork sausage) with white beans and cèpe mushrooms; parfait of coffee foam, mango cream, and white chocolate; rice pudding with cinnamon ice cream. Tiburon shark with carrots and okra in a red-pepper sauce; botifarra (pork sausage) with white beans and cèpe mushrooms; parfait of coffee foam, mango cream, and white chocolate; rice pudding with cinnamon ice cream. $30; tasting menu. Cata 181, Carrer Valencia, 181 ( 93 323 6818) €. A wine lovers' paradise with a superb list of wines available in 25cl decanters and dinky saucer-fulls of food to go with them. The list includes little hamburgers with tiny cones of chips, salted liver specially treated with liqueur and sugar with strawberry sauce, and miniature parcels of cheese and tomato; but all are overshadowed by soft, treacly pigs' trotters with figs, walnuts and honey ice-cream Catalan Cafe de l'Academia, Carrer Lledo,1 ( 93 319 8253) €€. With cosy, shaded tables outside on a tranquil medieval square, this might be the best place in the city for modern Catalan dishes. Try cold anchovy lasagne with chargrilled peppers; roast guinea fowl with a tiny tarte tatin, or the rossejat - Catalunya's answer to risotto. It's excellent and cheap so book. Casa Calvet, Carrer Casp, 48 ( 93 412 4012) €€€. Gaudi's dazzling modernista interior with swirling woodwork and graceful stained glass is the showcase for pea soup with chunks of squid, succulent pigeon with Szechuan pepper and roast fennel, and tasty lamb 'meatballs' with creamy risotto. Puddings are supreme - especially the crunchy pine nut tart with foamed crema Catalana - and the wine list encyclopaedic. Can Solé, Carrer Sant Carles, 4 (93 221 5012) €€€. Five metres off the main tourist drag; a small step for the customer but a giant leap for paella: dark and delicious with the rice crisped up around the edges, and spiked with the juiciest seafood imaginable. The scumbled, sea-blue walls of Can Solé heave with awards, photographs and mementoes of past habitués. Can Gaig, Passeig Maragall, 402 (93 429 1017) €€€€. From the huevo trufado - a soft egg yolk sitting in a warm, soft meringue and speckled with black truffle, or turbot served with its own 'crackling' and a nest of cuttlefish noodles, through to a shotglass holding layers of tangy lemon syrup, crema Catalana mousse, caramel ice-cream and topped with burnt sugar, every dish is as surprising and perfectly composed as the last. The Can Gaig is a trek from the city centre but the the excellent food makes it worth every minute of the journey. I have no tasting notes. It is traditional cuisine with good service. It has been in the Gaig family for 4 generations, but other than remembering that the room was elegant and the dining was relaxed, I have no recollection of what I actually ate. Els Pescadors, Plaça Prim. 1 (93 225 2018) €€€. The best of modern and traditional Barcelona, with an emphasis on fresh fish. A tuile basket of baby broad beans comes dressed with chocolate vinaigrette; cod is baked with honey and served with twirls of membrillo (quince jelly). Puddings are also wonderful, with lemon and ginger ice-cream on a bed of mango carpaccio or a fruit lasagne with warm chocolate sauce. Tapas Euskal Extea, Placeta Montcada, 1-3 (93 310 2185). Pintxos are the Basque way of doing tapas: they are colourful morsels speared with a cocktail stick - and they are never better than here. For the full regional experience, wash them down with txacoli, a lightly sparkling white wine. Keep the sticks - they'll be tallied up at the end when you pay. Quimet i Quimet, Carrer Poeta Cabanyes, 25 (93 442 3142). A handkerchief-sized neighbourhood bar with a great little selection of tapas and walls lined with bottles of wine and cava, some of it exceptional. Prepare to stand, possibly on the pavement. El Portalón, Carrer Banys Nous, 20 (93 302 1187). Every day the crowds surge up this narrow street seeking the authentic and splendid, yet still they manage to miss this fiercely old-school bodega, with its gruff waiters, terracotta pitchers of wines and interior barely changed since its time as a medieval stable. It's an old-style bar, deep in the Barri Gotic. In addition to cheap, rough wine straight from the barrel, they serve tasty, authentic tapas: snails, deep-fried artichoke hearts, blood sausage, cuttlefish, as well as all the usual suspects. They also serve the Catalunyan version of paella, known as fideu, with vermicelli replacing the rice. Llesqueries. (Not dissimilar to tapas, but where you get slices of tomato bread and cheese and ham.) Pla de la Garsa, Carrer Assaonadors, 13 (93 315 2413). An elegant sixteenth-century space with marble-topped tables and a wrought-iron spiral staircase leading up to another secluded dining room. As well as the pa amb tomàquet, the ptés, the wonderful charcuterie and meticulously sourced selection of unpasteurised cheeses, there is also a handful of dishes based on medieval recipes. La Tinaja, Carrer Espartería, 9 (93 310 2250). The old crocks hanging like swallows' nests from the beams, the collection of farm implements and the lofty stone arches create a rustic atmosphere in which to sample standard llesqueria fare, washed down with a good value bottle of wine. Finish off with their fine tarta de Santiago; almond cake onto which you pour a glass of moscatell. La Vinateria del Call, Carrer Sant Domènec del Call, 9 (93 302 6092). This narrow llesqueria, furnished with dark wood and dusty bottles, has something of the Dickensian tavern about it, but once inside there's an eclectic music selection from flamenco to raî , and lively multilingual staff. The wine list and range of hams and cheeses are outstanding; try the cecina de ciervo - thin slices of cured venison. Va de Vi, Carrer Banys Vells, 16. 93 319 2900). With its sixteenth-century arches, candles and heavy drapery, Va de Vi is a fabulous place to try wines by the glass. Along with hams and ptés, the real speciality is cheese, with more than 50 varieties from Spain and further a field. La Dama was horrible - old-fashioned, tired food, indifferent service. They rushed us through our tasting menu in an hour. Botafumerio Gran de Gracia, 81. 93-218 42 30- This is suppose to be one of the best seafood restaurant in Barcelona. It is a huge room so the atmosphere is one of "rush". We had the large cold seafood plate - it was piled high with cold spider crab, crab legs, langoustines, oysters, clams. The fish was incredible fresh - just caught. But this is more a place for a quick, light lunch than fine dining. I ordered an appetizer of angulas, tiny, whole baby eels, served over a salad of frisee lettuce and the delicate local judias - small fava beans. The nest of eels looked like julienned celeriac, or maybe cold spaghetti. On close inspection, they had tiny little faces. My first few mouthfuls made me think - ah, texture food. The flavor was slow in coming, but it did arrive - sweet, very mild, nothing like the strong flavour of full-size eels. Not an explosive dish, but I liked it. Next, a boned pig's foot stuffed with foie gras and a diverting mixture of wild mushrooms, topped with some big slices of black truffle, in its own, sticky, truffle-specked juice. No accompanying vegetables or extraneous garnish, and I didn't expect any. Rich, satisfying, and you could have put up wallpaper with the gravy.The cheeses were a slight disappointment. I had spotted a trayful, with little plastic flags, as soon as I'd walked in. Surprisingly, it turned out to be a selection of well-kept boutique French cheeses, some of which were new to me, and I wondered why he did not serve regional cheeses from La Boqueria market. No fireworks, but a subtle, serious, grown-up restaurant. Three courses with the wine, around $95 (obviously cheaper for two people sharing the wine) - and this was with luxury ingredients at a high end restaurant. Next thing I knew, I was enjoying a couple of glasses of cognac (Magno) in a new-looking bar full of people younger and arguably sexier than myself. Simple but stylish bars are everywhere around the old city: this one was just a bare room on the ground floor of a nineteenth century building. A big, steel bar. A few nice artworks on the wall. A dj playing pleasant and relatively quiet music. And beautiful people. The night moved on to Bar Pastis, an absinthe-ridden dive on a side street which was once patrolled by transvestite hookers who looked like they'd retired from the WWF. . One thing I've noticed in Barcelona over the last three or four years are new food stores/delicatessens which make the regional produce of Catalonia easily accessible. No longer do you have to know which bodega serves a particularly tasty sausage - you can go to stores which serve a whole range, along with cheeses and local wines. I pause now to kick myself, because I have lost the cards I picked up. Anyway, there is a huge craft shop on C. dels Escudellers, on the block after the old Los Caracoles restaurant as you head towards Las Ramblas. Hard to miss it, as the ground floor is a vast repository of regional Spanish ceramics - pots, tiles and so on. Look down through the windows in the floor, and you will see an equally vast cellar where they are aging hams, slicing all kinds of cold cuts and cheeses, and serving local wines by the glass or bottle. I took lunch on my second day at a newer charcuterie called Xaloc, only six months old, where a library of aging hams covers one wall. I watched the staff climbing ladders and dipping long prongs into the hams to check the aroma, and thus presumably their progress. You can order meats or cheeses individually, or eat a selection (and, of course, buy them to take away). I ate the assortment of Catalonian sausage, a big plate of hard salamis, soft slicing sausages, and sweet cooked hams; about $9 with a glass of cold beer. Xaloc is on one of the upmarket shopping streets in the upper part of the Barri Gotic, near the old Sant Pi church - C. de la Palla, 17. El Ateneu Gastronomic (http://www.ateneu.com/). Placa de Sant Miguel 2, bis. 93-302-1198. I have been eating here since shortly after it opened, seven or eight years ago. It is a labor of love. The restaurant is quite Spartan; bare floor, hard chairs (take a sweater in winter), but with tablecloths and uniformed staff. The menu used to be a lovely affair of deckled parchment, but is now plainer and plastic covered (it's in Catalan, Castilian and English).The menu is divided into plates para picar - essentially for picking at and sharing - cold and hot appetizers, and so on. I mention this because the prices are such that you would be crazy not to order a sharing plate followed by an appetizer and entree. You can pick at selections of sausage and cheese, or big slices of toasted country bread with various toppings. I chose a mixed foie gras plate. The ample portions of local foie gras came in two styles: the usual mi cuit, but with a firm, interesting texture and deep flavor which suggested home-made rather than mass produced; or a terrine with dashes of prunes and other dried fruit, soaked in a good sweet wine. The latter nearly made me cry. My appetizer was a rustic sort of dish I've ordered before: the sweet local fava beans, cooked to tenderness, then quickly sauteed with chunks of terrific dried ham, lightly dressed with olive oil and sprinkled with fresh mint. And it's a big plateful. I usually eat a meat dish next, with a red from the local producer Raimat, but mindful of my earlier history lesson, I ate the Alchemist's salt cod. Ungarnished, as is customary, the fish needed more vigorous flavoring; the mild crust of spices didn't really kick it out of blandness. It was topped with some bitter olives, which did add some drama. I drank a rose, Mas Comtal Rosat de Penedes, 2000 (I drink a lot of rose in Barcelona, where it is taken quite seriously, and is not a "pink confection").For dessert, slices of fresh goat's cheese with a sweet tomato marmalade. I chose a mysterious dessert wine called "Hydromiel", which turned out to be a kind of honey eau-de-vie with some frightening sediment which eventually settled. I recommend the moscatels. The check? Embarrassing. Four courses, drinks, tip: about forty bucks. If I'd eaten meat, I would have drunk a more expensive wine, but it would really be hard to push the price much higher here. I was about to get an early night, but my walk back to the hotel took me past El Ateneu again. I stopped to read the menu. Then, as if possessed by higher powers, I found myself seated in the wine bar section, saying to myself "Only an entree." I ordered their tartaro de caballo, one of my favorite dishes. Yes, horse tartare, dark and rich. This one was a little under seasoned, but I corrected that myself. I thought a dessert in order after all. Something was described as "Plum Cake" on the Catalan and Castilian, as well as the English, menus. When it arrived, there was no sign of plums. It was a light, lemony sponge with a few caraway seeds. "Flummery?" I asked myself, in the grips of another Nero Wolfe flashback. Then I realized with a shiver that, if I queried the dish, I would be told that the kitchen had run out of plum cake and had substituted authentic clouty dumpling flown in that morning from Scotland. For once, I decided to shut up and eat it, and the accompanying scoop of fresh yoghurt and home-made bitter orange marmalade were fine. . Mercat de la Boqueria just off La Rambla is the best known market. Breakfast the next morning inside Barcelona's central food market, La Boqueria. There are about half a dozen full scale tapa bars dotted around the market floor, and most of them have had something of a refurb since I was last here. Artichoke tortilla and a glass of rose. Morning drinking is encouraged; the two old guys next to me were polishing off a bottle of cava for breakfast. We happened to chance upon another that seemed bigger if not better, I believe it was the one on Mallorca and Cassanova

It's a race between Joel Robuchon and Wylie Dufresne.

Bux, the inevitable rejiggering. Now it's get a car at the Barcelona airport; drive to Roses for two nights; drive to Barcelona with a stop for a lunch at Can Fabes; and stay three nights in Barcelona, taking our two lunches at Hispania and Ca' Isidre. I imagine with the late dining hour, one's stomach can rally in time for a full dinner. What do you like, then, in terms of restaurants for dinner and simply grazing and drinking? Anyone else chiming in, I will much appreciate.

Bux, you have been a great help. I'll take your advice and hit Gerona for dinner the first night. The next two nights we are in Roses to return to Rafa's (talking about basic, imeccable seafood a la plancha) and Adria. The problem then becomes fitting in Can Fabes and Hispania in one day of eating starting out from Roses. (We would spend that night near the airport and get the morning flight back to NYC the next day). How would you do it?

Lizziee, thanks for the link. It's a woman chef who gives the impression (based only on a few pictures) of a fussy, somewhat contrived approach. But I could be wrong. Right now I am thinking in terms of a restaurant serving down-home Catalan cuisine to contrast with Adria and Can Fabes. Does anyone know of a real funky, friendly regional-cuisine place between Barcelona and Figueras?

I am trying to put together my itinerary for short visit to the Costa Brava next month. I haven't found a lot on the site about the restaurant Sant Pau, a two-star Michelin establishment on the coast not far north of Barcelona. Has anyone been who cares to share some first-hand wisdom?