Wilfrid

Hopefully we'll be able to tell from the picture. But you never know.

Yes, I quite like Pimms. Doesn't need to be smothered with fruit and veg, though.

Note that if you created the image yourself, Liza, you are free to post it here.

Pimms in the garden behind the Pavilion. By the pint. (Note, I don't suggest doner kebabs are appropriate to Lord's, I just think it's odd that that was the first place I ever saw one. Had to try it, of course.)

I am losing it more and more. I know I had a conversation with a woman last week who turned out to be a fan of Siberia. I just can't remember who it was I was talking to. If anyone looking in remembers having that conversation with me, please let me know. hic

Cricket, seriously, is very much a pie game. Pork pies, sausage rolls, mustard, pickled onions. Oddly, it was at Lord's that I ate my first doner kebab - many years ago. I had never seen one before. Chilled cans of Foster's or swan if it's a hot day. Otherwise, pints of bitter. Thank you.

Spooky. I was re-reading the chapter on Julian last night, my second hand copy having shown up in the mail. Lovely piece of writing. I had forgotten the extent to which I have clearly modelled by sartorial tastes on MacLaren-Ross's example, although I don't have the balls to wander around New York with my silver-headed cane (yes, I do have one). As for La Scala, there's a map of MacLaren-Ross's Fitzrovia inside the covers of his Memories of the Forties. In case you don't have that at your finger tips, I'll make a note to look it up. It identifies the location of La Scala and other haunts. You do realise the "Beerhouse" is still there, but now called something else. It's built over a little passage way in the street which runs north from Rathbone Place parallel to, but west of, Charlotte Street. At the top of that road is the Duke of York(?) - the hangout of the polo-necked types Julian called "the slithy toves". Come to think of it, how about a Fitzrovia pub crawl next week. I might be available.

Sez Elvis.

The Holland Bar went upmarket a year or so ago, when they took the old Bud beermats off the wall and did a bit of repainting. It's now only quite disgusting rather than utterly disgusting. But here's something interesting. I picked up this new guide to NYC dive bars yesterday. It's by Wendy Mitchell, and her comments on the bars I know are pretty accurate. She must have been to Smith's on a quiet evening, though. She makes it sound friendly. She rates Mars Bar as the most appalling dive in Manhattan, which I think is a fair judgment, and describes the Wakamba as frightening, which isn't far wrong either.

People with young babies might be well advised to make preparations, especially if you're relying on milk formula. Pharmacies and supermarkets can run out of that in a day or two. Otherwise, I agree that it's hard to imagine a situation so serious that drought and starvation are prospects. In addition, I find it hard to see why such a situation is more likely to occur during conflict with Iraq than at some other time.

I seem to recall Bourdain mentioning hanger steaks on the menu at Les Halles, but I don't recall having eaten one there. Lissome asked about the steaks at Les Halles. I ate a steak at the downtown location which was unspeakably poor. From memory, the various times I've dined at the Park Ave South location, I've tended to eat trotters, blood sausage, choucroute and the like, rather than steak, and I think that's the way to go at Les Halles. It may have been a different story when they had Arnaud Carre working there as a specialist butcher. Steven Shaw mentioned the double cut strip at the Strip House. I really enjoyed that, whereas I'd found their regular strip steak really disappointing. Why so much difference? The quantity of fat? The aging?

Most of us drink wine with appropriate restaurant meals, I suppose, and will continue to do so. One is conscious, however, of serious downsides. One is the elevated cost - in the United States at least - and there may not be much we can do about that because of restaurant economics. Another drawback, of which I'm increasingly conscious, is that few restaurants offer more than a handful of wines with any significant bottle age. Indeed, even quite expensive bottles of Bordeaux, Burgundy and Rhone wines, which appear on lists, seem far too young to drink. Could you comment on how much we should worry about the second problem, please; and to what extent is it mitigated by drinking "New World" wines, which often seem to be made for younger drinking? P.S. "Quench" was a good show - let's see more of you on TV.

Ah, I'm right again. Yes, Stone, we know what Steve's doing and we've explored in some depth how and why he's doing it, and I think everyone understands why the conclusions of his analyses are usually inevitable. The Tabla(not the Bread Bar)/Diwan comparison is a good example of a pointless comparison. I can't comment on Diwan, but if I wanted a conventional Indian meal, Tabla would be a waste of my time. Tabla is not a good Indian restaurant in that sense. It does, however, have other virtues, and it's possible to eat well there, especially if you don't expect an Indian meal. To suggest it indicates the future for Indian cuisine is a proffer of the deepest implausibility. And without wishing to offend, I think the discussion here is somewhat thwarted by the fact - and if I'm wrong, I apologize - that many of the participants do have a limited experience of eating in good, conventional Indian restaurants.

Comparing Tabla with an Indian restaurant and comparing the Bread Bar at Tabla with an Indian restaurant should be kept separate. We started out with the a meal at the Bread Bar being compared with a meal at Diwan, which made some sense to me. Tabla proper is a long way from an Indian restaurant. (I'm not planning to defer to anyone on that.)

Possibly. The object of this exercise is to get some idea of what eating Italian in New York is about; what it means to the city's culinary culture; why it's been so important here. The fact that I can make a long list like this of Italian places I haven't been to implies precisely that it's a whole part of the New York culinary scene I've long avoided. If I was just trying to identify restaurants I thought I'd enjoy, I wouldn't be making an Italian list. Still, I'm trying to sample the best of what there is. I'll ponder your suggestions and build them in. Michael; thanks for the suggestion. I have, in fact, been to San Pietro, so I probably won't include it in the current list. I remember enjoying suckling pig, stuffed with pine kernels and other stuff (sorry it was a while ago) - slightly too peppery, but not a bad dish.

What fun. I was trying to remember which bits I wrote. I love El Portalon, but that doesn't look like one of my reports. Wish I was there now.

Steve, you don't seem to understand how the rating system works . There is no Indian restaurant in New York shooting for four stars; there has been, therefore, no failure to achieve four stars. There is a whole sociology to why restaurants shooting for four stars almost always present themselves as French. Your other comments simply support the facts I've already explained. Tamarind, Shaan and Diwan all have two stars. The first two of those restaurants are at least as expensive as many of the French and other restaurants in their categories. Diwan I don't know about. Dawat, at one star, is more expensive than many two star restaurants. This completely demolishes your theory about people not being willing to pay the same for Indian as for French and other cuisines. All I do is compare like with like, and it becomes clear that you're wrong. So we can scrub that one, then, can we?

And then there's the use of spice in a choucroute to consider.

Even setting peppercorns aside, spicing is not restricted to cuisines which developed in hot climates. The food of Eastern Europe and Russia uses spices. German food makes some use of spices, as does Scandinavian. I don't know much about the indigenous foods of the northern part of North America. But spicing doesn't seem to be a hot climate thing. Most cuisines feature spices. The historical development which, to an extent, drives this discussion, is that French, British and Italian cuisines, all of which once used a lot of spice, largely stopped doing so.* Why? (Oh, I'm sure I've read books about this, but it's Friday afternoon - somebody spoon feed me). * Edit: Hard though it is to believe, even I'm talking nonsense now. If anyone runs their eye over a list of spcies, as I was just doing, you'll realize how widely used spices are in all those cuisines, even today.

Steve, you'd be on stronger ground if some of the things you were saying were true. But maybe you're just not saying them clearly. The market, just sticking with the United States, puts French restaurants some way down the list of dining-out choices. That's the market considered as a whole. Indian restaurants haven't been tried and rejected - they just haven't had much presence across the country as a whole. In New York, my research suggests that people will pay about as much for an Indian meal as for a comparable American or French meal. You want to compare what someone would pay for Tamarind with what they'd pay for Daniel - obviously an unfair comparison. You may want to amend your claim to assert that the extremely small market segment which eats out at New York four star restaurants would not pay the same money for Indian food. If we had a four star Indian restaurant, we'd find out. The closest test is probably Tabla, which I agree is a Westernized form of Indian cuisine. People pay for that like they pay for Union Square Cafe, and the place is packed. Whether or not it is packed with people from the sub-continent tells us nothing about their preferences, unless people from the sub-continent have stopped eating traditional Indian food - which seems unlikely.

He must've copied it out of somewhere.

I like Sparks. I've expressed my view here before: I really can't tell much difference between several of the standard old guard places, which seem to serve beef of similar quality, similarly aged. I choose according to convenience. I'd be interested to hear how wrong I am (as usual). I was buttressed in the belief that I can actually tell a good steak from a bad one by a recent experience outside New York, where I ate cornfed dry-aged (22-28 days) local steak from a supplier owned by (or affiliated with) the restaurant. I found a superior tenderness and flavor I've not come across in Manhattan for a long time.

It's a year's project. At least.

Should we start a separate thread about comparative dining costs of cuisines? Anyway, let me bore you with some facts. I took Dawat as an example, as its a Indian restaurant with some pretensions to smartness (I don't like it much) and it's menu is on line. An ungarnished entree averages $23. Assume either rice or a bread (you'd probably split one of each with someone): $33. Share one vegetable side dish, as is common practice: $40.50. Compare with two fairly smart non-Indian restaurants nearby. Dawat is more expensive than Della Femina (unless maybe if you get the prime rib) and it's about the same as a garnished entree at Beacon. You could knock it down under Beacon if you didn't have a vegetable. Okay, carry on.

I understand what you mean, but these "facts" don't support your argument, because they're not true. Compare the price of dinner at La Petite Auberge with dinner at Tamarind. I think you'll find Tamarind a little more expensive. It's a better restaurant. Compare Sushisay with with Tamarind. About the same? Not much in it. You can't compare the cost of French, Japanese and Indian dining in the way you do without specifying that you are comparing very expensive French and Japanese restaurants with relatively cheap Indian restaurants which - holy smoke - cost about the same to dine at as relatively cheap French restaurants. What you should be asking is why there aren't any very expensive Indian restaurants in New York yet (although a lot of people wouldn't find Tabla cheap by any means. If it's Indian). Are there expensive Indian restaurants in India, Singapore or Malaysia? Or Canada? I ask 'cos I dunno.