robert brown

Russ, I have had some similar dustups. It goes with the territory. Does your wife try to override your Garmin? There's still that frontier between the old days and total harmony.

It's tough to pull them apart, a characteristic of tourist city restaurants. I have a tough time finding any that stand alone, or almost alone. Consensus, in other words, is hard to come by. Therefore you should try to eat in the environs. I had a very nice meal at Arnulfo in Colle de Val d'Elsa. It's no secret in that it's a two-star Michelin restaurant. The same goes for La Tenda Rossa in San Casciano in Val de Pesa. These are expensive, but not as costly as a comparable restaurant in France. I haven't been to Enoteca Pinchiorri in years, but the gastronomes I know don't like it. Il Cibreo seems to be everyone's favorite. It's very good, but hardly world class. You'll find the cuisine much more adventurous in the two restaurants above.

Not since the appearance of the first Guide Michelin in 1900 has there been as useful a friend to the gastronomic traveler as one of these portable GPS devices. Mine is the Tom-Tom GO 910 which my wife bought shortly before we arrived in Nice. We had done all the prerequisite work of plugging it into a computer to download the latest maps and positions before giving it a test around Nice. The real test, however, came on a trip we made from Nice to Forte dei Marmi. We marveled how it found the shortest route from the autoroute exit to our hotel. The next day it amazed us even more by guiding us effortlessly from the Tangenziale exit Viale Certosa to our hotel in central Milan, avoiding the one-way streets, dead ends and, best of all, keeping my wife and me from bickering over mistakes that used to get us screamingly lost and made us late in this city most unforgiving to drivers. Only once did we mistakenly override the Tom-Tom with a wrong turn, but as soon as we did, it recalculated the route in two seconds. There’s no end to the bells and whistles embedded in Tom-Tom ( or“Tum-Tum” as we like to call it). Among the many are its constantly recalculating your time of arrival as your speed varies, you encounter construction delays or stop to fill the tank. Whenever you approach a radar or speed camera, the device makes a loud noise a few hundred kilometers before reaching it; and it seems to have almost every restaurant in it from fancy to snack and pizza restaurants. The other day I put the Tom-Tom to a major test by having it plan a route from my house to several restaurants in the “Osterie d’Italia” guide that are in little Italian villages. It had them all in its database. The little computer isn’t without some shortcomings. The maps are crude and hard to get any perspective on such that I would still travel with a fold-out map or road atlas. In places like Nice where I know the shortest or most unencumbered route, Tom-Tom didn’t always send me that way. From time to time he gets confused or changes directions on me. I’m still orienting myself, so perhaps some of the glitches may have to do with me. Regardless, it’s like being on-line. You can’t possibly imagine how you survived without it. I wouldn’t give it back for all the road maps in China. In the interest of starting a broad-based discussion, feel free to chime in about how you plan and navigate your eating trips, be it with a built-in GPS, mapping software, or good old-fashion paper maps, what is positive and/or negative about them and personal anecdotes

Is it okay to use some means of identification, be it a toque a tatoo, to make reference or single out a photograph? Actually when I see other pictures, Mason looks a lot like latin music pianist Larry Harlow 15-20 years ago. I also don't mind being associated with food writers and bloggers.

Tan, I wrote "cooks" because in these new-fangled shoestring restaurants (and even the odd one that isn't), dishes are either cooked very quickly or sit in plastic bags for several to many hours. It has all become a shortcut game where the chef creates a menu that preordains as much as possible what gets ordered and made, and everything is cut into little pieces that can be made quickly by relatively inexperienced and inadequately trained cooks. There's a restaurant I went to recently in a luxury hotel that had counter seats facing the "kitchen" so that you could watch everything and chat with the head chef and his two assistant. The kitchen was about the size of one on a train; as much a galley as a kitchen. Cooking involved some sautéing, grilling, and microwaving, but as far cooking in the sense of the great traditions, it was nowhere in sight. As I wrote recently in another forum, I told of the stagier at Charlie Trotter's who told me as a point of pride, "Just about everything here is cooked sous-vide; in fact, everything is cooked sous-vide." As my hosts had procured the table in the kitchen, I tried to watch the going-on as much as I could without being impolite, and I was struck by how antiseptic, quiet and odorless the kitchen was. Look, I'm not saying that these restaurants aren't worth a visit or are completely without merit. The chef in charge of the hotel restaurant had some good ideas and some of his dishes were quite enjoyable. It’s not as if the gene pool has stopped turning out people with an aptitude for chefdom. Also, I don’t mean to imply that restaurants inspired by classicism or tradition are seeing numbered days. What is worrisome is that it’s the chefs who get the buzz who distort what being a gastronome is about, and that sometime in the future we may really see that higher-end dining has achieved making complete pawns out of diners. It’s interesting that when you go to Per Se, you get some spiel from the maitre d’hotel about how eating the Thomas Keller way does away with “palate fatigue” when actually what it does with its parade of tiny portions is impart palate vertigo. We desire extended pleasure and excitement in such activities as sex, sporting contests, and well-written stories. So why not in dining? Any gastronome worthy of the distinction doesn’t like being dictated to by being told what to eat and having to put up with imposed mediocrity (which is unavoidable in these multi-course, tiny-portion meals). Yet the hallmark of the kinds of restaurants we are talking about here is to cheat the informed diner by not providing him anything beyond superficial inquiry, thereby making it futile for him to try to avoid pitfalls and engaging in the challenge of trying to get the most from the larder, limited as it may be.

The guy with the tatooed arm bent over whatever it is he is prepping personifies what "cooking" has turned into.

Nobody has commented on the most significant three-star award of all: that to L'Astrance as the first three-star shoestring restaurant. That in itself should be enought to tell you that the solidity and exactitude that used to be part and parcel of Michelin's highest rating has been totally demolished. It wasn't really all that long ago that truly great restaurants--those where pleasing the gastronome was the way of life, not dictating to him by tying his hands-made up the constellation of three stars: Chapel, Troisgros, Guerard, Robuchon pre 1996, Peyrot, Verget, Oustau de Baumaniere,etc. Michelin should be awarding fewer three stars as a way to make some of these chefs think twice instead of encouraging them to take shortcuts and put greed above gastronomy.

Osterie Locanda d'Italia: A Traveller's Guide is the English version of Osterie d'Italia. It faithfully and completely follows the Italian edition. In naming the dishes in each restaurant, it gives some in Italian and some in English. However, there is a 45 page glossary of dishes arranged alphabetically by the Italian name. Therefore I bought both editions so that I would be able to recognize on the restaurant menu the dishes given in English in the guide's listings. What the English version has that the Italian doesn't are descriptions of many inexpensive bed and breakfasts, small hotels and Agritourismos, many of which charge under 100 euros for a double room. I like my creature comforts, but for the hearty or budget traveler, the guide makes many of these establishments sound enticing. In Milan I also bought the 2007 editions of Gambero Rosso, Veronelli and Guida de L'Espresso. Using them in concert works the best since each has restaurants that the others don't. If I were to recommend just one of the three, right now it would be the Veronelli. It's the most comprehensive and concentrates on listing many dishes at each restaurant. Regardless, the Osteria guide stands by itself in discovering inexpensive, often hidden local restaurants such that it and one of the three others are what you need to cover the gamut of Italian dining. Its glory is that it documents the density of regionalcentric, tradition-bound family restaurants in Italy, a characteristic that to my way of thinking helps establish Italy as the most gastronomically rich and fascinating country in the Western world.

The reinvigorated La Reserve by the water in Nice (between Coco Beach and the port--the eastern sector) that Jouni the Finn is taking over opens this Tuesday evening. I'll be there the next day and will chime in. For four days of dining, based on part-time living here for eight years, I would certainly give La Reserve a go, hoping that the bugs are out; Hostelerie Jerome for sober, quasi-classic dishes with high-quality ingredients. A visit to Mirazur in Menton last week was pleasant, but the food was mixed. The choice is limited and we found the first courses overly-complex. However, the milk-fed baby lamb served in slices and a thigh and breast of chicken were excellent. It's a restaurant to keep an eye on, and the recent modernist building and the big coast view toward Monaco should make going there worthwhile. Thanks for the mention of Tastavere. My maid's brother owns it. It's a good casual place. La Reserve in Beaulieu lost its chef back to Robuchon for his Monaco operation. Don't go to either. Dining on the terrace at the Hotel Metropole is great; unfortunately the food is of the overpriced hotel variety. Same for the Palais Materlinck, although our last lunch last summer showed improvement. As for L'Oasis in La Napoule, I've heard so many bad reports that I don't want to try it. In Villefranche itself, I've never had a really good meal. Same for St.-Jean, although Le Skipper is one of the two or three okay spots at the harbor. If you want to hold on to some of your funds, we find La Petite Maison and Lou Pistou (a barebones mom and pop next door to La Merenda and a fair deal for the money) to be good examples of Nicoise cooking. When exactly will you be there. Or are you already?

Giorgio Morandi was Bolognese. I assume the name is a homage to him. I look forward to trying it, but it sounds like another hodge-podge Italian restaurant to me.

Does anyone recall one of the more memorable food critic remarks which goes that at the birth of New York Magazine Clay Felker said, "Let's just give the restaurant job to Gael."? In the context of this thread, it conjures up hypocracy if Chodorow considers Gael Green's praise legitimate and Bruni's not. I think Bruni is rounding into shape and is starting to gain a valid perspective on New York dining. He's also a very good writer, and his essay on kissing the chef's napkin ring was the best and most relevant one on New York dining in years. After what must have been several years of dining on real food in Italy, I think he knows what's good and what isn't. Look, entry to food reviewing is easy. You can become a notable restaurant "critic" in no time flat relative to being a critic in just about any other worthwhile field. Restaurant reviewing is a creation of the journalism. Restaurants were around for a nearly couple of centuries before reviewing them reached a few hundred words. Chodorow's restaurants are hardly about gastronomy, and if he wants to be a shadow critic (no doubt praising the restaurants of investor types he likes and dumping on those who successes irk him), be my guest. Let's see how his reviewing measures up against the Sultan of Bruni's.

High-end restaurants here in New York do serve dishes a la carte, but not, in a growing number of instances, without being backed into a corner of having to order a minimum of three courses for a set price and any supplements. This is just another way of slowly tightening the noose. It's a practice that runs counter to what is one of the most admirable and generous ones you often sees in good European restaurants, which is welcoming diners who wish to breeze in and out of a restaurant to have one or two courses. I see all kinds of classy French and Italians do it, and while it is permissable still in some resturants here, I bet it doesn't make the restaurateurs very happy unless, of course, you make the restaurant your second kitchen. Look, you can take a snapshot of the current dining scene and still find notable examples as Fat Guy does. What concerns me, however, is how gastronomy is trending, and it's certainly not doing so in favor of the serious, experienced and informed restaurant-goer.

Bruni's articles and this ensuing discussion are enough to shake me out of my posting lethargy. I hate to state it, but it's the veteran diners such as Robyn who are part of the constantly diminishing universe of those who dined well before the onset of the apparently unending Post-Gastronomic era we have been in for the past decade. Those of you who are younger than 30-something or are Johnny-Come-Lately's to upper-echelon dining can never experience what dining was like when the paradigm was chefs who aimed to make an honest living in the service of gastronomy as opposed to those who create overpriced-dining empires and enterprises at gastronomy's expense. By doing so, they rob their clients of dining autonomy while creating generations of culinary know-nothings. Ironically, as Bruni writes, it is mostly the top-tier chefs who are debasing any remaining gastronomic currency. For several ardent gastronomes I know, dining out in what the media hypsters call "The Dining Capital of the World" is an exercise in permanent frustration. Almost never is overwhelming satisfaction or a semblance of value for money met with in restaurants in which one pays over $100 a person. Take away the non-culinary trappings and atmospherics and one is just as likely (or even more likely) to find gustatory satisfaction at the “cheap eats-simple cooking” establishments that “The New Yorker” and, on occasion, Bruni himself devote full coverage to. Take away the expensive, big-name restaurants that put you in a dining straitjacket; offer you nearly no interesting bottles of wine for less than the cost of the meal; dispense with, for all practical purposes, the need for a knife; never offering whole fish or fowl and using mundane truffles or third-rate caviar to jack up prices; and you’re forced to go off and running to the few remaining real delicatessens, the ethnic “discovery” in the outer boroughs, or a formal Japanese or Indian restaurant. Notice now that “original” dishes in these chefs’ restaurants almost never have a name; they are identified by the compilation of their seeming multitude of random ingredients. Other than catchy names such as “Hot Potato, Cold Potato” or “Oysters & Pearls”, we no longer see contemporary equivalents of “Vol au Vent”, “Gateau St. Honore” or “Beef Wellington” (names that live on and evoke or describe a classic preparation) for the simple reasons that there are almost no classic dishes, but rather those that fade almost immediately from memory because no chef wants to be caught dead making a dish that someone has made before. Robyn hits the target by referring to labor-saving that today’s menu formats provide to kitchens. Add to this the shortcutting that is increasingly endemic to these restaurants that turn out many little portions of dishes their chefs choose for you, and you see most vividly why “haute cuisine” has gone the way of the great Transatlantic steamships and grand hotels. About four weeks ago, I dined at the kitchen table of what most consider to be the most famous restaurant in the Midwest. Even though this restaurant didn’t have “Laboratory” or “Laboratorio” in its name, I realized however wittingly unintentional it may be that this squeaky-clean and odorless kitchen (and the one I visited two nights later at an avant-garde restaurant in the same city), had more in common with a hematology lab or a semiconductor clean room than with the traditional kitchens I see in France or described in “Kitchen Confidential”. Between what was “prepped” and finished off, there didn’t seem to be anything completely fried, roasted, boiled or broiled from scratch and completely made a la minute, and the chefs seemed more like assembly-line workers than cooks. After the meal service was over, I went over to an Asian stagier who was pouring for future use some blood-colored liquid in a plastic bag before encasing it with a sealing machine. After explaining what he was doing, he was actually proud to tell me, “We cook a lot of vegetables, fish and meat sous-vide. In fact, we cook everything that way.” These and many other of the culinary phenomena du jour are best explained by what happens when one of mankind’s special endeavors takes on added prominence in daily life. With this particular one, dilution occurs in the form of ill-equipped and underachieving restaurateurs and chefs; a strain on foodstuffs that brings inferior, tired, pseudo-glamorous and often travel-fatigued examples to the table; and a new subject area for the mass media that glorifies the mediocre by filling space, and turning cooking and dining into entertainment. Unlike La Nouvelle Cuisine Francaise and even fusion cooking, which are considered connecting links in the evolution of gastronomy, what we have today is a detour derived from and fueled by the exploitation of the upsurge in disposable income. As a practical matter, it puts a premium on each person taking smart eating and dining into his or her own hands, a task made easier by one positive aspect of the food boom, which is the availability of useful information on the Internet and in serious books and articles. For me, the most revealing and damning part of Bruni’s article was the brief but telling “wisdom” of Thomas Keller. First, he and every aspiring gastronome should realize that tasting menus are the scourge of serious dining for the concise and simple reason that when you have a small taste of a dish that you like, there isn’t enough, and when you encounter a mediocre dish that the chef has foisted on you, it debases the meal. Keller also should realize that food, unlike an exhibition at the Met or a visit to the theater, isn’t spiritual; and experiencing a notable restaurant and its chef requires many visits over many years (or at least it used to). I’m sure that Frank Bruni’s essay speaks for many ardent diners who have been waiting for an influential food writer to have the courage to criticize exactly the manifestations he addresses. I’m not willing to bet his piece will change anything substantially. But if it makes diners think twice and consider from time to time symbolically putting their middle finger through the napkin ring, there will at least be some progress that will benefit us consumers for a change.

Bux lived to eat and loved to dine, especially on the trips he took two or times a year, almost always to France and Spain. Before he left, I would grill him on where exactly he was going and why, and looked forward to his return when he would regale me with his reportage and opinions before he would post them on eGullet. We were of the same generation and even started out at the same age dining in France, although I believe he began to take it more seriously than I did in those days. That gave us even more to talk about. While we and our wives shared several meals in New York, I never had the chance to meet him abroad, although we once talked about it. What fun it would have been. Do yourself a favor, though. Read the precious words he left behind before setting out on a trip of your own.

Yes, Virginia you can get hosed at Etxebarri. I and some of its partisans did this past November. Somehow the people in the kitchen messed up every fish dish, especially in light of much better preparations of turbot and hake cheeks (pil-pil) at Elkano and Ibai respectively. As almost always, we were put at a disadvantage by having the six of us receiving a 10-course no-choice tasting menu. The most partisan fellow in our group laid the blame on the owner's bad back, the arrival the next day of a "Lo Mejor de la Gastronomia" crowd that had booked the restaurant, and one or two other excuses. Great restaurants, however, never screw up 70% of its offering. Nonetheless, I recognize that "stuff happens" and I plan to return for a pow-wow to try to hone in on generous portions of the best products of the day.

This really is a case of "If you've eaten in one, you've eaten in all ". Robuchon has managed to standardize his dishes such that the first week his Monaco restaurant opened, the same dishes and even the same fellows I saw in Atelier Robuchon in Paris were there. And everything tasted exactly the same in Monaco as in Paris. This in more of the internationalizing of food, so I guess Monaco is an appropraite spot for this restaurant. If you want to delve into the heart and soul of the cuisine of the region, the restaurants I mention below are better and cheaper. I'm sure Robuchon is making 5-10 times more money than he did when he had the three-star restaurant in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s, which is why the food there was 5 to 10 times better than what he's now serving in these amoeba-like establishments.

For as long as I’ve known it intimately, which is close to ten years, the Nice and Cote d’Azur restaurant scene has always been mixed. This past May and June, however, gave me better than usual returns as I set my foot in all range of restaurants. In brief, here are my reactions to several I visited: Aux Rendez-Vous des Amis. In pastoral surroundings just a few kilometers north from the built-up part of Nice, this highly-popular restaurant may provide the most rewarding visit for the holders of stressed-out dollars. Inside, the Rendez-Vous is much like a bar-café, while in season, the charm-laden terrace is a joy. Here you can chose an entrée, main course and dessert from all the offerings for 22 euros. Artichoke terrine, fricassee of chicken and pork ribs were highlights of the meal we had with another couple. We were spared one of those “one server serves all” experiences with the result that service was efficient and friendly from our two waiters. This restaurant is all you would want and expect for an inexpensive one. It’s very popular with the locals, and therefore requires an advance reservation. La Petite Alsace. French friends berated me for liking a restaurant on the Cote d’Azur the serves choucroute, but to judge La Petite Alsace on that basis is to miss the point. Because it’s a duck out of water (though why should it be in a city full of ethnic restaurants?), it gets overlooked and often is nearly empty. Yet anyone who wants succulent, classic cuisine that will remind you of how bistro food used to taste, this is where to go. The choice of dishes is large and includes non-Alsatian classics such as escalope de veau a la crème, herring and potato salad, and veal Cordon Bleu. On my last visit, I ordered for the first time Tourte de la Vallee du Munster, which is sautéed pieces of pork and a cream sauce inside a dome-shaped puff pastry that is surrounded by the cheese and egg mixture one finds in a cheese soufflé. It may be the best dish owner-chef Philippe Humbert turns out. If available, avail yourself of Humbert’s Gateau du Fromage Blanc, one of the best desserts in town and lighter than the dense versions we are used to in New York. With wife Chantal, one of the most adorable women on the Nice dining scene, serving you, the Petite Alsace is worth sacrificing one cuisine Nicoise lunch or dinner. Lou Pistou. While La Merenda two doors down turns away the hungry twice a day, day in, day out, Lou Pistou nearly always has one of its half-dozen or so tables available. Our gourmand Nicoise friends consider the cuisine of La Merenda a bit too refined to qualify as real Nice cuisine while considering that of Lou Pistou the genuine, home-like article. True, while the dishes at La Merenda put out by former Michelin two-star chef Dominic Le Stanc are “better made”, Lou Pistou’s are equally satisfying, besides which you get to sit in real dining chairs as opposed to on a stool. Lou Pistou’s plat du jour is almost always a winner as are the ratatouille, the pesto soup, and possibly the best petits farcis in Nice. The husband cooks, the wife serves and the price is right. L’Univers (Christian Plumail). For eight years we heeded the advice of some friends who said what a bad restaurant L’Univers is. It took our first visit on a night we were looking for something different to discover for ourselves that they were right. How it ever received, let alone maintains, its Guide Michelin star is beyond us, even though it is one of the few upscale-looking restaurants in Nice. The night we were there, there was a French couple, the Rauch family of four, and another American couple. I wish we had been seated closer to our compatriots, especially the couple, the husband of which was one of those Americans who assumes some generic foreign accent while talking to the serving staff so as not to be mistaken for “one of those”. Of course everyone in the room knew what country he was from. I only was able to make out his precise words one time, which was when he ordered a dessert and referred to one of the ingredients as “pistachi”. He and his wife along with Mrs. Rauch and her two girls asked some questions, all of which concerned the salad situation—what kind could they order, what dressing did it come with, and so forth. As for us, our tart of crab, a shaped confit of lamb, and lamb rib chops and saddle were badly made and, in the case of the last dish, overcooked. Our dinner was joyless (except for trying to eavesdrop on Governor Pistachi) expensive and emblematic of what plagues many restaurants just below the top echelon: hoodwinking the uninformed diner with dishes that look good on the plate, lack interesting conception and making use of inferior products and culinary shortcuts. Ambitious restaurants, new ones of which are virtually non-existent in Nice, are soon to be manifested in at least one instance by the owners of Restaurant Jouni, a small restaurant near the old port. This band box affair owned by Finnish chef Jouni Tormanen and his partner Giuseppe Serena is closing in early fall and reopening in the circa 1925 beach club restaurant La Reserve just beyond the port in the direction of Cap Ferrat. Before closing as a sad affair with a restaurant serving frozen fish, La Reserve will have a large dining room upstairs and a bar serving more informal food downstairs. We always make it a point to visit Jouni, and after a couple of disappointing meals in the past two years, the ones we had last month and this February were on the money. The locals we know are looking forward with optimism, as are we. Jouni should no longer be hamstrung by his tiny kitchen, highly-limited menu and the general restraints on a CV that includes stops at el Bulli, Ducasse in Monaco and one or two restaurants in Italy.

Craft has been in existence for a few years. I'm not saying that all restaurants get worse within a year. Sometimes it takes longer, but almost inevitably they do as greed replaces initial integrity, good intentions and setting high standards. I can think of some chefs, however, who seem to stick to their knitting, but they all have been around a long time. I may not be an admirer of their cuisine or restaurant, but I admire them for doing what chef-restaurateurs should be doing.

Craft, one of what I felt to be among the handful of good ambitious NY restaurants, batted 1.000 tonight. Seven out of seven "hot" dishes arrived luke warm. It appears that this quasi-institution of New York dining buttreses my dictum that restaurants only get worse. Good execution and conception were evident here and there, but if you want a good illustration of how deadly it is for a chef, whose profession by nature is to lord over his restaurant on a day-to-day basis, to then run around the country doing empire building, leaving inferior underlings to do the twice-daily task of catering, go eat at Craft, or just about any high-end restaurant in America for that matter.

My wife's daughter needs to know the best bakery in Los Angeles for croissants. I will appreciate any opinions or suggestions

The difference Robert is that those dishes were probably identified as homages. The issue isn't so much that the dishes are copies, but that they appear to be claimed as originals in a context in which most people are not likely to aware that they are not. ← Doc, I haven't been following the thread, so maybe I didn't make the point in the right context; the point being that these copycat chefs ought to be honest and gracious enough to say that they liked a colleague's work so much that they want to share it with those who might otherwise not have the opportunity to taste it. The problem is, however, that most chefs today don't have the confidence or the graciousness to do it.

What's the big deal? I remember going to Michel Guerard in the late 1970s and being able to order dishes that were homages to his colleagues; i.e. Les Freres Troisgros' salmon in sorrel or Paulo Bocuse' truffle soup, the latter of which was better than the original and which I ordered several times after. Every one is so bitchy and egocentric these days to the extent that they don't want to come out and say that this is my rendition of a dish I had at wherever. Todays' food is so ephemeral that there are almost no classic dishes that will stand the test of time. As far as I'm concerned, bring on the salmon in sorrel.

We had a bad stay at Hotel San Rocco, our third time there. We made the mistake of staying in the old villa right next door that the hotel must have recently bought. It was overpriced and under-decorated (or badly decorated). It is, however, on the lake and probably a bit forboding in March. You also could hit a convention or conference crowd. It's better in season when there's life and foliage in what is a charming town and a pretty lake overlooked by foreign tourists.

Battaglino in Bra is good, basic and fun. Vedat Milor, I, and our spouses enjoyed it a lot. Now it's not in the same class as da Renzo, now my #1 in the area, but if you're looking for a restaurant along the same lines as Il Bologna, it's a good one to visit. I can't compare it to Bocandivino since I haven't dined there yet. Cambal.Zero left Vedat cold, but us warm (along with Bill Klapp who had the call-in-advance tasting dinner). It's a different feel altogether than the restaurants in the Cunea, Asti, Alba provinces. Going there and to Flipot is what you do if you want to eat at the restaurants that define the region in terms of ratings and notoriety. I'll take Renzo over both of them for the time being.

Peter, I have been to both as diner and sleeper; the Villa Crespi recently (as a diner only this time) and Sole several times, but not in five years or so. Villa Crespi is creepy in a way, a Middle Eastern folie with rooms a bit dark and small as I recall. Sole's rooms are more modern. I liked the food at Villa Crespi, although the choice was limited. Sole is closer to the airport. Villa Crespi is not on the lake and I believe Sole isn't either. I don't see this as one being heads and shoulders above the other. Just to confuse you more, we stayed last time (November, 2005) at the Villa Malpensa, which we didn't like at all, but is a few hundred yards from the Malpensa Terminal so we could dine at Caffe Groppi, a bastion of the gourmands who like their food up to date, which is about 45 minutes from Malpensa. We had an interesting meal that I just didn't have the chance to report on. vmilor dined there a couple of days before we did and I think wrote it up on Gastroville.