Wilfrid

Looking out for a report on the new upstairs restaurant at '21'. Mm, but they're probably not catering for a readership of compulsive-obsessives. That's where we come in.

Of course, Americans - the exemplary exception being La Nina - pronounce 'haute' wrong too.

I believe someone told me that she'd left, but I'm clearly fallible. ANyone have the latest issue handy?

What I didn't like about the article was a lack of evaluation. Having read it twice, I think I worked out that. among conventional burgers, the author was giving above average scores to The Old Town Bar, the Burger Joint (UWS) and the Lunchbox Tool Company (whoever they are). And maybe to JUdson Grill. I wish preferences had been more clearly stated. Does that look like a reasonable choice for best burgers in NYC? (Edit: I see Steven addressed that above). Have we done this on another thread?

Sara Moulton was, until recently, executive chef at Gourmet magazine. I think she knows exactly what she's doing, and rather more than some of the other 'chefs' on the network. Her TV personality is perhaps a little reticent.

You want to talk about Kim Basinger, start your own thread. This is London/NY travel. (I know, thirteen years.)

Hold in obloquy?

If you look down on those who do, surely yes. I don't mind eating food I've made and frozen myself, but eschewing manufactured frozen foods, if you can, seems sensible. Not to mention canned beans.

While I have better things to do than cross swords with Fat Bloke, I have had my eye on the word "travel" in the forum heading, and I thought we were pretty squarely in the region of travel and tourism here.

Or you could do lunch at Blue Hill, then head on over to JB with Dan and Michael.

Good, but the policy I am referring to has been in place for years. I never paid for BM, the Tate, the NG or anywhere like that, under Thatcher even.

Well, since it's a set meal, Tommy won't be able to screw up the order.

When Rodriguez left Patria, plans were announced for him to open a grand restaurant in a pre-Castro Cuban style. It even had a name, which doubtless included the word "Havana". I have asked occasionally here if anyone has heard anything. Maybe this is a new plan.

Learn to let go of your anger. Deep breath now.

Vegetable soup with the last bits of Sunday's guinea fowl lurking in it too.

As I said, none of the big museum/gallery institutions in London charge admission, although the Tate Modern has invested heavily in donation buckets . It would indeed be interesting to know if there's a legal reason for this rather than just a well entrenched policy.

Let's not get onto Ouest and Aix. Please.

I expect you know this already, but Jonathan Gold wrote a fairly detailed piece about the two places, including discussing the split, in Gourmet last year.

Well, I like to take my cosmpolitan in "literally" too. I find external application unsatisfying. $25 for three courses is very, very cheap. I am not entirely surprised it was also disappointing. Edit just to add that the place must surely expect a profit on bar sales, with the food essentially a giveaway.

One thing often remarked on around these parts is that restaurants which get off to a great launch, with exciting menus, and high standards, a year or so later seem to be a little out of steam, coasting on their reputations. Maybe the menu has got a little predictable, maybe business is steady and the pressure is off. Is this a phenomenon you recognize? Do you take specific, periodic steps to keep your restaurants in top gear?

That was a good read, Vanessa. I once resolved to make a different cocktail every evening (from a book, of course), but apart from the difficulty of fitting it in before (1) going to the pub time and (2) opening the wine for dinner time, I found that I was always short of ingredients. So I have ended up making the same half dozen or so cocktails repeatedly from the ingredients I have. But I am getting good at them Oh, Negroni, Sidecar, Manhattan, Cosmopolitan, Rob Roy, and a lemony one the name of which escapes me. I must do some cordial and liqueur shopping and try some of the DeGroff recipes. The book I have been using is Cocktail by Harrington and Moorhead, which fortunately got a tick from Dale DeGroff.

I did have an amusing few minutes earlier today reflecting on how stuffing a chicken with tuna, or indeed a tuna with chicken, would rise to Beckettian levels of pointlessness.

Oh, shoot. That was on the menu but for some reason didn't register with me. I should've had that. I am having a scatterbrained week. Also, I like rolling my 'r's.

I changed in my thirties, and I could even list the eating experiences which I associate with the change. It wasn't quite overnight, but I stopped thinking that dramatic new combinations of ingredients made eating exciting.

I think Nickn put his finger on something when he said the first Escoffier menu on the thread reminded him of down-home cooking. The dishes, as far as the menu is any guide, do appear to be relatively simple, consisting in most cases of a main ingredient with one accompaniment or garnish. I find the menu appealing, although it is sobering to note that Escoffier was working at reducing the number of courses. At the other extreme, we have examples of multi-course menus featuring individual dishes of what appear to be considerable complexity. The courses at Berasategui, posted by Cabby, sound dramatic but also intricate and very rich: pig's feet with cheese, foie gras with smoked eel, seafood jelly with an anise soup and a fennel sorbet; I don't doubt this could be well done and a wonderful meal, but in the wrong hands a menu of this kind might present an exhausting series of challenges to the palate (not to mention the stomach and liver). I sympathise with Bond Girl's comments about ADNY; the meal there is not only long but also rich, and it can become a test of stamina, albeit pleasurable, in the later stages. So we have, on the one hand, architecturally complex menus, and on the other hand architecturally complex dishes, and neither necessarily entails the other. I recently re-visited Bill Grimes' exhibition of old New York menus at the New York Public Library (unfortunately, without a notebook). Not only are some of the menus as long as you might expect, there is also an elaboration in the dishes which borders on the nauseating. Alfred Stockli, at The Forum of the Twelve Caesars, was offering as recently as the 1960s, multiple course menus in which fish, meat and fowl were stuffed and glazed and sauced and garnished, with dramatic combinations of fruits and liquors, beyond anything one could imagine would be enjoyable. But I bet a lot of skill and training was required to produce such dishes. We rightly praise sophisticated menus and technical virtuosity when we discuss restaurants on eGullet. But are there not limits? Do we say enough in praise of simplicity, restraint and self-discipline when it comes to conceiving both menus and dishes? A couple of asides about contemporary tasting menus. First, "tasting menu" can mean so many different things, from a series of courses improvised by the chef, to a "common denominator" selection of the most popular or least challenging courses on the menu. In some cases, a tasting menu is less expensive than the carte; so it's hard to generalize about them. Secondly, how refreshing it is to see the range of main ingredients and cooking techniques deployed by Escoffier. One of the tedious aspects of tasting menus, in modern New York at least, can be the presentation of a series of predictable pan-cooked proteins, distinguished only by attempts at novel garnishing. But I am repeating myself from elsewhere, so that will do.