robert brown

What put me off at Fresh was its trying to appeal to the Gotham Bar & Grill crowd and the Pearl's Oyster House and Mary's Fish Camp camp at the same time. Not that this is a major fault in and of itself, but it indicates the wishy-washy nature of the operation--from its lack of clear direction of the cuisine to the blandness of the interior and the matter-of-factness of the service (although we did have a very good waitress who had an excellent grasp of the food). Even so, they couldn't even make a passable version of fish and chips (deep fried and breaded haddock with French fries, which my termed "disgusting and inedible). However, her New England clam chowder was excellent. I liked the "Kobe" tuna (made that day with blue fin instead of yellow tail) and it was cooked the way our waitress alerted me it would be: medium. I have problems with Mary's Fish Camp in terms of having to wait for a table due to their "no reservations" policy. Yet, inspite of a more limited selection of dishes, the barebones decor and the lack of elbow room, I find myself going back there regularly, which is a lot more than I could say for Fresh.

Steven, I have a vague recollection of starting a post about how far we should go in trashing (more like being aggresive with) a restaurant on the site. You seem to go really far in this instance, which I can understand. This is really agregious behavior on Herbfarm's part). Have you ever felt this way before? Can you attempt to say what, in your opinion, other kinds of behavior it would take for a restaurant for you to feel the way you do about the Herbfarm? By the way, I think this was one of your best posts ever.

Nick, that was a marvelous report. Coming from a real pro, I am going to have to visit Fleur de Lys whenever I am next in SF. I'm a Type-B with Type-2, so I don't worry about it.

I think I made it clear from the start. "To have taste" means to be able to dismiss what it cheap, ugly, maladroite, and crass and to embrace what is refined, sophisticated, and meaningful. Rather than get into what taste is or is not, the question I asked is if having taste or being tasteful if one is a person who makes the food in a restaurant necessarily of significance or meaningless. I don't see where I limited it to works of art on display. If there is anything I need to clarify, it is that I am talking about restaurants that are chef-owned as opposed to investor, world-capital restaurants who hire David Rockwell types to design every aspect of the room and all the accoutrements. If I left anything else essential out of my original post, it was that I have experienced disconnects when walking into a restaurant that is run with poor taste. It makes me think that the owner-chef has no taste and maybe his or her food won't be of interest. I also wonder if it has a psychological impact on my expectations or enjoyment of the cuisine. Conversely, a chef who runs his restaurant in a tasteful way may raise expectatons as to the quality of the cuisine. Meanwhile, no one has responded to the other aspects of my original post;i.e. the most important attributes you think contributes the most to a person being a good chef.

How critical is taste for a chef trying to make interesting food? Not taste in the sensory sense, but taste in the ways in which one lives his or her daily life-- in other words what we call “good taste” Certainly good taste plays a crucial part in the non-culinary parts of a restaurant; the structure or building, the furniture, the decoration, and what is called in retailing the “table top”. When it comes to creativity in the kitchen, however, do you think that esthetic taste or design taste can play a role in making dishes that are harmonious, well balanced or ingenious? Conversely, do you think that some good chefs are what very loosely might be called “idiot savants” much in the way certain musically gifted people are: barely articulate but are able to assemble dishes in the same way that a great musician skillfully strings together phrases Feel free to expand the discussion to any facet or multi-facets that form the making of an accomplished chef. Perhaps you may want to argue that taste takes a back seat to native intelligence, God’s gifts (good hands, acute sense of taste, etc.) environment (many skilled chefs are the sons and daughters of chefs or restaurant owners) or starting to learn at a very young age as opposed to taking up the profession later in life. (I realize I switched gears in the middle. My professional interest in esthetic taste makes me curious to hear what my e-gullet acquaintances think about the role in plays in cooking. Don't feel you have to address it in your reply, however.)

Haji Baba is delicious. There's a restaurant serving food made from old recipes of the Topkapi Palace. I will try to get the name for you. I have the name of a good Iranian caviar dealer in the Spice Market. You pay about 1/3rd of the price of what you pay in France or NY. Are you coming straight home or going to a place you can serve it properly?

Let me couch what can be called the “potato argument” in these terms: The Adria skeptics are concerned for the future course of top-echelon cuisine because they see Adria leading the way into a Brave New World of dining. Whether rightfully so or not, they see the possibility that the next generation of the most gifted chefs will minimize, de-emphasize, or abandon altogether the cornerstones of what today’s experienced or well-traveled eater holds scared. These are the integrity of produce-- be it how it tastes, looks, feels in the mouth and to the touch ( I like to eat with my hands) and , as a related matter, the importance of the grower, breeder, farmer, and the purveyor; the perversion or abandonment of preparations that have stood the test of time; the loss, or near-loss, of geographic specificity resulting in an internationalization of cuisine and the loss of definition between country and city dining or ,say, American and French or French and Italian cuisine. Beyond this, there is the fear that this kind of cooking will be attempted by lesser chefs who may represent the phenomenon of tools and techniques falling into the wrong hands, thus perverting dining at lower levels. Of course there will always be bistro cooking and “internationale” Italian restaurants, but those of us who seek the highest expressions of culinary craft sometimes go beyond this level of cooking. Already I have experienced schizophrenic dining experiences in which Adria-type creations are mixed in with classic regional cooking. I always find this disquieting and discordant. This is typical in other creative endeavors when sudden change occurs after a lengthy period of quietude or lack of innovation. ( I just saw that Steve P. elucidated the same concept.)`The problem is that there are not very many places to go where one can dine at the very top level. It is that this category can become quickly infected and swayed by fashion that the Adria skeptics find worrisome, the few, for now, that there are.

If Adria is the Pied Piper of cuisine (and it is still too soon to know the answer), then it does not matter in the long run if he turned more chef's heads than Robuchon. I would like to know if Adria banged away at foams, etc. for ten years before all of a sudden the chefs started beating a path to his doors. In other words, as I have been saying and everyone has been ignoring, have there been macrocosmic changes in the world of restaurant cooking that suddenly made Adria such a focus of interest rather quickly and belatedly? To use the jazz analogy, is Adria similar to Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler ( "free jazz" artists of the 1970s) who had a wide following and then fell out of favor), eventually will the chefs of the 1950s-1980s be lionized and influential again just as the young Miles Davis and John Coltrane are today? I think that's sort of what the Adria sceptics believe (and this discussion may be the first ( at least on-going) discussion in that vein. I and perhaps a few others occupy a middle ground in which we express awe toward Adria but either question his longevity as an influential chef or somehow see his cooking as "not natural". To me he is still a chef's chef or a gastronomic tourist's chef even, who, like many other innovators, arose to fill an institutional vacuum. Right now I love his restaurant and what he does, but I cannot rule out that time will show that there will be only one of him just as there has only been one Thelonious Monk.

Steve Shaw, here is another (and I believe more legitimate and encompassing) way to discuss at least one aspect of your argument. The French have a nifty word for which we native English speakers do not have an equivalent. It is called “restauration” The closest synonyms we have are “care and feeding”, “hospitality” and “the restaurant business”, but nothing succinct or as appropriate as the French language has to mean the process of taking care of a person visiting a restaurant and looking after him or her in terms of feeding and serving. Irrespective of the potato argument, but not of discussing cuisine then and now, as long as one bandies about the names of Adria, Robuchon, Ducasse, Bocuse, Troisgros and Point, those of us who cut our gastronomic teeth on the food of many or all of the above do not necessarily think the food was better, or that what Adria is doing represents the ruination of cuisine. We believe that whether or not the “chefs of yore” cooked better than Adria, Trotter, Keller, Barbo, or Blumenthal, they understood and executed “restauration” better, and that's what made restaurant-going better 15-35 years ago than now. I realize I have been hammering away at this general theme for a few months on other forums and with other threads, and that it may be tangential to the potato argument. However, another way to look at it that brings the two areas closer together are the notions of “restauration”, which now exists as much for chefs cooking as if for other chefs versus traditional“restauration” of the diner looking to be, in a manner of speaking, caressed. Perhaps citing a concrete example best illustrates what I am striving to put forth: This past summer I was fortunate to visit a restaurant in France that was so “hot” that it was difficult for many people to book a table. It was a paragon of what I call the “new dining”. Its young chef’s cuisine was praised in many publications and guidebooks for its inventiveness and freshness. When I read the menu, I saw that all the food was already chosen for us by the restaurant, as was the wine, since our host thought it best to order the larger menu that included wine. To make a long evening short, my wife and I disliked the experience. The service was functional and without style; the dishes came so fast and there were so many (nine) that we now can only recall parts of two of them. The two wines the part owner chose for us were from a producer in the Minervois, which he poured out of our sight from magnums that looked (and tasted) as if one could buy them in a supermarket. You might say that the potentially interesting dinner we anticipated was spoiled by lack of “restauration”. What we ate was a meal that made me feel as if I was paying for the privilege of dining in the restaurant, or kissing the chef’s feet, as opposed to paying so that someone would take good and concerned care of me. This is the problem with almost all of the avant-garde chefs. (Ironically, this does not include El Bulli, which operates at full tilt as if it were the old days with 32 people in the kitchen and, I believe, more than 40 in the diing room). I do not believe you can separate the modern (or ultra-modern) chefs and cuisine from the notion of “restauration”. In fact, I am willing to bet that what we are seeing in more restaurant kitchens these days is a cuisine that has evolved as much from the need (or greed) to serve increasingly smaller portions of “restauration” than from expanding the ambit of innovative cooking.

Romeo Salta's?

Anybody out there who can answer the above?

On the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, there is a ceremony called Tashlich. - Jews traditionally go to the ocean or a stream or river to pray and throw bread crumbs into the water. Symbolically, the fish devour their sins. - Occasionally, people ask what kind of bread crumbs should be thrown. Here are suggestions for breads which may be most appropriate for specific sins and misbehaviors. ~~~~~ For ordinary sins.....................White Bread - For complex sins.....................Multigrain - For twisted sins.......................Pretzels - For sins of indecision...............Waffles - For sins committed in haste.....Matzoh - For sins of chutzpah................Fresh Bread - For substance abuse...............Stoned Wheat - For use of heavy drugs.............Poppy Seed - For petty larceny.....................Stollen - For committing auto theft.........Caraway - For timidity/cowardice..............Milk Toast - For tasteless sins....................Rice Cakes - For ill-temperedness................Sourdough - For silliness, eccentricity.........Nut Bread - For not giving full value .............Shortbread - For unnecessary chances........Hero Bread - For war-mongering...................Kaiser Rolls - For jingoism, chauvinism..........Yankee Doodles - For excessive irony..................Rye Bread - For erotic sins.........................French Bread - For particularly dark sins ..........Pumpernickel - For dressing immodestly..........Tarts - For lechery and promiscuity........Hot Buns - For promiscuity with gentiles.......Hot Cross Buns - For racist attitudes .......................Crackers - For causing injury to others.........Tortes - For sophisticated racism..............Ritz Crackers - For being holier than thou...........Bagels - For abrasiveness..........................Grits - For dropping in without notice.....Popovers - For overeating.............................Stuffing - For impetuosity............................Quick Bread - For indecent photography ...........Cheesecake - For raising your voice too often... Challah - For pride and egotism..................Puff Pastry - For sycophancy, brown-nosing .....Brownies - For being overly smothering.......Angel Food Cake - For laziness.................................Any long loaf - For trashing the environment ......Dumplings - - For telling bad jokes/puns........Corn Bread

Bux, put Esilda to work.

Bux, nobody on this site takes things like this seriously. Robert, they allow all creeds and colors. (Enough people associated with the site can get us a group table). Make sure we eat at Rafa's in Roses for simple, heavenly grilled seafood of the highest magnitude of freshness.

Who wants to be in charge of organizing it for next year?

When did Rosengarten write this?

Part of this discussion is as if 30 to 35 years ago food writers discussed “Saumon a L’Oseille” and “Soupe de Truffes VGE” in terms of do they taste better than salmon or an Auvergnat soup of yore, or, are they a legitimate approach to how food is cooked compared to what came before, and so forth. However, what turned out to be the major impact of the “Nouvelle Cuisine” chefs were a host of both micro-gastronomic and broader cultural issues such as the way they cooked vegetables; how they presented food on a plate; how, as Steve P. mentioned, they lightened dishes; the ways in which it was possible to play about with tradition; stress the critical importance of using the best ingredients; and turning serious eating from a highly-elitist preoccupation into something more accessible to the upper-middle class. The important questions, therefore, to ask today are: Will Adria have a positive or deleterious effect on the gastronomic culture, and did he arise in a vacuum or as a response (whether he knew it or not) to the changing socio-economic dynamics of high gastronomy during the past several years? Ultimately Adria and the Adria approach may live or die on the matters most of us have been discussing such as does he make food taste delicious, will enough people want to eat “that kind of food” often enough; does it provide the same or comparable satisfaction compared to great meals we are accustomed to; or is what Adria does to food creating significant change in the course of how mankind has heretofore made food? On the other hand, will his role will ultimately be seen as a short-term answer to the institutional culinary situation of today; i.e. that this role ends up being nothing, or not much more, than coming to the rescue of the thousands of mediocre chefs in the service of the dining- out boom by showing them how to “wow” their clientele with foams, and gels, and sprays and powders; that the way he makes and presents food is more cost-effective; and that his techniques short-circuit the use of the best ingredients. (That the Observer critic went with Adria to the market to buy a vacuum-packed ham is interesting in this regard, as well as Steve Klc’s mentioning some months ago Adria’s cooking with a can of corn). In other words instead of being compared to Marcel Duchamp, Salvadore Dali, and Jacques Derrida, among others, culinary history may see him as a merry prankster who ran a restaurant and atelier that were part industrialized food laboratory, part perfume manufacturer, part supermarket and part drug store and led gullible, impressionable chefs down a dead-end road?

Steve, what do you mean? They're all right here.

This discussion may well be the first in which there is a hint of a backlash to Adria and Adria-inspired cooking, or at least a questioning (mostly from Steve P.) about the ultimate impact of it on international gastronomy. I, at least, have never read anything that extols him as being anything less than a genius. I think, however, that if anything changes this, or that he ultimately ends up as an idiosyncratic chef with no ultimate impact, it will be this concept of playing at food—in introducing the phenomenon of snack food or junk food and space-age or science fiction food into serious dining at the expense of diminishing the primacy of impeccable ingredients. This is not to say that he is not making food, or creating approaches and techniques that may forever change the face of cuisine. Yet, I think Steve P. raises some interesting points that he may sharpen or revise after visiting El Bulli. One that does not require a visit is his observation that it seems no one says the food is delicious. In my case, there were some delicious dishes, but Adria’s meals are such that “delicious” plays second fiddle to “amazing” and to their novelty and uniqueness. But take for example the liquid chicken dish I had. On one hand, it was delicious and captured the essence of the meat of a chicken; on the other, it lacked the textures and the contrasts that eating a “Poulet de Bresse” meat and skin together have. The novelty of eating Adria’s dish may be worth repeating in a couple of years, but day in and day out, I would rather eat a chicken made by a French three-star chef. I think the questions we have to ask that Adria’s work has raised, are: Have we hit a dead end in innovation in “traditional” cuisine? Does Adria’s approach suit the parsimony that has overtaken serious cooking and restaurant dining? (I am curious to know when El Bulli began offering strictly “degustation” menus and when chefs started coming there in meaningful numbers since Adria took over the kitchen in, I believe, 1984). Does Adria’s pre-eminence partially result from the decline of great chefdom in France? Are we entering an era of “programmed” cuisine, both in cooking and presentation in the "degustation" format, in which spontaneity and freedom are given up for elaborate “a priori” conception?

Nicely done Fat Guy. I am even willing to discount your being the son of an esteemed literary scholar. I am not comfortable with "Deconstructivism" being applied to Adria either. That is why I suggested the word "displacement" which I think describes the phenomenon of rearranging the pre-existing structure of a song or reshaping the subject matter of a painting, with the most vivid example I have ever come across being the Marian McPartland NPR interview with Bill Evans during which he demonstrates how he displaces the melody in "All of You". The big question, however, is (and it should be a thread of it own) do many fewer people care these days about Adria and the repercussions on the best eating than had he arrived on the scene 15-20 years ago. And finally FG, maybe you were conceived after one of the first "Nouvelle Cuisine" dinners.

Steve Klc, do you find the interest in Adria (I have always been meaning to include both brothers because I detected Albert’s hand all throughout my meal at El Bulli) has continued to increase, leveled off, or diminished recently? I ask because there was this big flurry of articles two years ago (Adria PR or copycat journalism?) and I haven’t seen much since. Marcus, thanks for jumping in. It is nice to have an additional voice making cogent statements. I think you caught the essence of the present situation surrounding the cooking avant-garde. ( I think “displacement” is as good a word to use as “deconstructive”). By the way, I always wanted to try Vanel (Wasn’t it Les Freres Vanel?) and Chez Guerin, which Monsieur Jamin mentioned to me a few times.. How were they? Steve P. and I are worried about the possibility (somewhat small, I think, but hardly discountable) that the way we enjoy eating at serious restaurants will be eroded away with this kind of cooking in which spontaneity is lost for a cuisine that is carefully plotted out ahead of time; is less reliant on markets (the food kind); and by which, in essence, something that you don’t want to stop eating is “taken away from you” because of small portions. I am also starting to see a form of culinary corruption (even in Italy of all places) where I have had a few meals in regional restaurants where “Adria things” appear on my plate. This does not mean I am backtracking from the very enthusiastic reaction I had to my one meal at El Bulli. Rather, to reiterate, I think that key to enjoying it to the maximum is to have it at Adria’s restaurant in 25 or so courses: the “El Bulli ride” as Bux aptly named it. However, I am willing to admit that it is early in this new manifestation of cuisine and that it is unknowable how it will fit in several years from now with the way we eat.

It seems as if we are having the classic kind of debate that occurs when someone in a creative endeavor gives it a quantum leap forward; one of those big pushes that happens two or three times in a century. Adria will either end up being a Pablo Picasso or Charlie Parker of the ovens, or else a flash in the pan. As my favorite TV financial reporter Ed Hart used to intone, “We will know in the fullness of time.” In the interim, however, based on a minute sample of Steve Klc and the fact that to be admitted to the semi-private club known as El Bulli you need to have some connection to the profession of chef, might it be possible that we now have a cuisine that accommodates chefs to the detriment of gourmands? In the course of the past decade, we have seen the growing phenomenon known as diner passivity. With each passing year, we see increasingly more the chef dictating to the client what to eat and the more recent practice of what to drink. This does not happen in the majority of restaurants since I think if you started serving a dozen or more classic Italian, French, or Chinese dishes in two-bite portions, you would be closing the doors in rather short order. To be successful as a passive diner chef, you need to have a “creative”, “personal”, “avant-garde” or however you want to call it cuisine. Adria’s achievements are the ultimate manifestation of this. (I do not mean to imply that this is what drives his cooking; it just so happens to have arisen at a time to fit the restaurant economics of the day). It is hard for me to imagine that most of the chefs who come back from El Bulli or his laboratory in Barcelona and then incorporate some variation of an Adria dish in their offerings do not appreciate the economic benefits of it. I do not think that Steve P. and I have an ax to grind with the cuisine of Adria, his disciplines, or the odd appearance of his inspiration per se. It is, as well, not so much that this cuisine will win over converts from the traditional chefs and cuisine; it is more that it will cannibalize or blunt the kind of cooking(as Steve marvelously described it) the kind that makes you rub your stomach. What I bemoan is the lack of Romanticism that I find characterizes this new cooking. I would hate to see become passé the image of a cook going to market or taking in impeccable ingredients and doing something marvelous, delicious and even spontaneously novel with them. In fact, when I dined at El Bulli I became so engrossed with a kind of culinary sleight of hand that I indeed found novel and even amazing, that I lost sight of the role of raw ingredients in my meal. In fact, when I reviewed my descriptions of the dishes, the use of short-lived ingredients was somewhat limited. When Steve Klc described Jose Andres’ version or interpretation of clam chowder, it sounds as if it is a dish that evokes “clam chowderness” rather than being clam chowder: that the goal is to engage in culinary witchcraft to invoke a seafood dish without using seafood. (During my dinner at El Bulli, I could not avoid thinking about the titled of the Oliver Sachs book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”; the disassociation between object and name; and how Adria enjoyed making a dish from ingredients that tasted like a dish that it actually was not. Not that he was the first to do it, but rather it was taking the concept of vegetarian steak and doing something very much more sophisticated and even witty. I wonder if the French lads working in semiotics have gotten their hands on this kind of cooking.) Ultimately I think and hope that the meal I had in Madrid at La Broche, whose chef, Sergio Arolo worked for Adria for eight years, is the model for the future of this kind of cooking. My lunch was a four-course meal with superior products (veal and tuna steak in this case) accented or accompanied with delicious foams (bacon and egg as an appetizer and carrot as part of a dessert). His Adria inspirations were disciplined and held in check. (Chef Sergio almost apologized for not having the 20 or so courses I would have if I were at El Bulli.) My meal was marvelous even though it only hinted at the amazing barrage I would face three months later “ Chez Adria”. I hope Arolo’ s approach turns out to be the way since that would be ideal. Steve Klc, thank you so much for your positive reaction to my post. I have the opinion that because America does not have the history and traditions of the Old World in terms of a “high” cuisine, this creates both a positive and negative situation for dining in our country. Because we do not have it, its lack actually encourages and makes more viable the kind of experimenting and even plagiarism of techniques and dishes from other countries, adding a variety and richness to American cuisine few, if any, other countries have. On the other hand, I do not think this is helping us develop a distinctive cuisine any time soon, though eventually we may if it is not to late in the development of civilization for such a phenomenon. Although the tide may be turning in the ratio of native to foreign-born, consider how many of the best and most successful chefs in America are French, Spanish, and Germanic. The Morimoto Iron Chef episode I mentioned took place on December 25, 1998. You can read the details on the unofficial Iron Chef site. I have to admit that my opinion that the Chapel chef should have won was influenced by stopping two or three times a week in the late 1980s or early 1990s to my neighborhood Japanese restaurant where Morimoto was the sushi chef. He always made special dishes for us (sushi and otherwise), but it was clear that he culinary skills were limited. I realize I haven’t touched all of your points and those of Lix, Jaypee, Steve P. and Bux, but let’s see how this marvelous discussion continues.

Roz, Thanks so much for posting the review. How do you get in advance? Maybe I will post something after my dinner.

I have a table at Fresh ("We serve fish with attitude") on Duane Street for dinner tonight (8/31). Has anyone who has been there offer any advice, recommendations, or anti-recommendations?

Steve Shaw, I’ll give your question a shot. In an “Iron Chef” type of situation, as opposed to a restaurant one, the judges may think that an Adria or Gagnaire ran circles around a “chef of yore”, whatever your definition of “yore” is. (Given the ages of the older posters, I will assume you mean as far back as the first wave of the “Nouvelle Cuisine” chefs, i.e. 1968). Most of the “Iron Chef” jury members would likely be carried away with the novelty, construction, or ersatz or exotic ingredients as opposed to the disciplined classicism of the designated chef of yore. (I did watch the program in which Morimoto received more votes from the judges than the Japanese man who is the head chef of Restaurant Alain Chapel in Kobe. I think it was easy to see that the Chapel-trained chef had immensely more skill and technique than Morimoto. Yet, the judges --or maybe the producers-- felt that novelty should triumph over classicism, or that Morimoto needed to stay on the program given his more effervescent personality) It is that kind of phenomena that is the closest I can get in any comparison). Your question is an intriguing one, though how meaningful it is is questionable in the everyday life of a gourmand. My experience with the two chefs you mentioned is a lot less than with individual chefs of times past—limited to one recent visit to Adria and two to Gagnaire in 1987 and 1989 when he was still in St. Etienne. (Just to let you know how much certain departed chefs are regarded in the culinary avant-garde, Julio Solter who is part owner of El Bulli and who promoted Adria from an assistant chef to head chef told me he, like others including myself, could not talk about Chapel without breaking down. That Gagnaire also adored Chapel was apparent when we all were together for a lunch in Mionnay in 1989, a year before Chapel died). I share the opinion of many who feel that Adria is the most interesting and influential chef since Paul Bocuse and maybe even Fernand Point while Gagnaire is the most dazzling “off the cuff” chef I have ever encountered. Nevertheless, El Bulli, as much as I hope to return to next and every year, is not the restaurant I would necessarily want to dine in on a regular basis. It is also not clear to me how well Adria’s approach to cooking travels beyond his restaurant. In other words, a lot of the bang comes from being there and experiencing the whole ensemble. My second Gagnaire meal, for which he did a surprise multi-course menu years before it became fashionable, left no lasting impact. A day or two after, I could not recall much of anything, if anything at all, that I had eaten. I think what renders moot the discussion of superiority of any of today’s avant-garde chefs, or running circles around those of earlier generations, is the concept or approach that is at the forefront of every kind of art, craft, or design endeavor: lessening the possibilities. What, in my opinion, made the cooking and the restaurants of the “Nouvelle Cuisine” chefs so satisfying and fulfilling was how they reinterpreted classic French cuisine and remained true to French ingredients even when what they made bore little resemblance to the classic. (Who is to know if certain chefs thought about, and then rejected or discarded, dishes close to what Gagnaire and other “crazy” chefs as they used to be known, thought up on the spot because they lacked some ring of “truth”)? To the inexperienced or uninitiated, the razzle-dazzle that often comes with breaking the mold, expanding the possibilities, or creating something can seem exciting when to the experienced gastronome it seems frivolous or undisciplined. I believe that a major difference between the two classes Steve Shaw brings up is that the “chefs of yore” created dishes that became classics while Gagnaire and Adria (especially Adria) are creating new approaches or techniques that greatly interest young chefs. It is clear to me as well that today’s chefs are more risk taking than the chefs of previous generations, a luxury afforded by the many-course meal that allows much more room for error. Besides an avant-garde in the sphere of designing and preparing food, there is complicating the matter, a new modality of dining (at least as practiced by Adria, Gagnaire, Keller, Barbot, and others) of pre-determined and small, multi-course servings. Therefore, not only do we have to decide if today’s new generation of chefs is cooking even better, but if they are also feeding us in a way that is commensurate with the excitement they have also created.