Wilfrid

Good. Of course, it destroys diversity .

Simon, I need to investigate La Fromagerie. Kiku, it seems you can't get a real bagel in New York any more. Ask Bux or Suzanne F. Although I'll bet a dollar Nina knows somewhere in Brighton Beach or Yonkers where they still make them the old way .

Since I have publicly claimed to be ignorant about Italian food, I won't challenge you. I kind of assumed.

Kiku, we were posting at the same time. "One sees more mixed-race couples on the street of London than NY." My experience is just the opposite, but I have no way of telling which of us is right. I have the sense that New York is much more integrated.

Cleaner and safer than London, though. As far as dining goes, I would say that there's a better concentration of good dining options at each price level in New York up to the very top tier (I mean the Gordon Ramseys and the Daniel Bouluds). I'm interested in what Cabby and others have to say about that, because I am out of touch with the London side of that equation. A step down, one is comparing Cafe Boulud, Craft, Veritas, Babbo, arguably Blue Hill, March...and the list goes on...with a London contingent consisting of - what? Pied a Terre, the Lindsay House, La Trompette? I think New York wins hands down at that level, and at levels below. On specific ethnic cuisines, New York is far behind. Cantonese and the various Indian/Bengali/Pakistani cuisines are superior in London. I am not a good enough judge of Thai, and I am way out of touch on Japanese and sushi restaurants in London. On the other hand, New York has a number of ethnic cuisines which hardly exist in London - Latin American cuisines other than Mexican, for example; where's London's Patria? And by sheer volume and variety, New York must win on Italian, Mexican and Jewish food. Food shopping? Manhattan is more convenient than Central London, because more compact. I recognize Kiku's shopping problems. London has better markets. Cheese? I think London perhaps has the edge, but it's not as clearcut as Simon makes out. Where it that clear cut is game; not to mention pies. Someone else can talk more about vegetables and fruit.

More than one word is required. Access to certain unpasteurised cheeses is legal in London, but possible in New York. What other advantages does London have? Identify, for example, the London cheese shops which are plainly superior to Murray's or Artisanal . Paxton and Whitfield? Decent quality, but a fraction of the selection. Neal's Yard? Good on the British Isles, but other than that...

Setting the rest of Europe aside, that very much surprises me Cabby. I am guessing that you find the very top tier of London restaurants superior to the top tier in New York. But what about upscale dining generally? Care to expand? Kiku: I was responding to Soba saying the NY subway was overpriced. Can you enlighten me on what "rep cinema" is? You mean "repertory cinema" where old movies are scheduled?

We do not have an overpriced subway, Soba. Our $1.50 flate fare, including bus transfers, equals ninety of your British pennies. The lowest fare in London is one pound sixty, spiralling up to three pounds seventy if you want to travel right across town. Even after the increase, we'll be laughing.

Kiku, why don't you slap that last long post on the New York or London forum, because it would start a good debate? I agree with you about Indian restaurants and closing times, but not remotely about bagels, cheese, or separatism. Go on.

Tautologous, because you rule out every consideration other than the complexity a musicologist could analyse. And you always fall back on music because the argument is much less plausible in other art forms. I can show you poems of much greater complexity on a technical level than a short lyric by Blake or Shakespeare, but which are widely regarded as lesser achievements. Try any one of the first ten books of "A" by Louis Zukofsky. Similarly, you could find a lot of connoisseurs who think an essentially simple "zip" abstract by Barnett Newman is a much finer painting than the fussy, complicated modernisms of a Rauschenberg. If I was a musicologist, I could demonstrate that there are complex scores which work less successfully than relative simple ones. You are expressing a prejudice in favor of the intricate. When it comes to food, I am not persuaded that poulet a la financiere, complete with coxcombs, truffle-studded potatoes, chicken quennelles and langoustines in little pastry barges, is a better dish than poulet Henri IV or poulet jaune or even a simple roast chicken with some tarragon under its skin, just because it's obviously more complicated. (And I agree, all things being equal in terms of the quality of ingredients and skill of the chef.) What would be interesting (maybe on a different thread) would be to review what the differences between pot au feu and a traditional boiled dinner actually are. When Adam and I tried to do that with navarin d'agneau and Irish stew, you just wanted to change the subject.

Gavin, I share your implicit scepticism. I find it very hard to distinguish phenomenologically between the experience I have when looking at a sunset, a landscape or a beautiful face from the experience I have when looking at a great painting. Those all seem to be aesthetic experiences. Now, I am convinced that sunsets, landscapes and pretty faces aren't works of art, but saying why is going to involve talking about artists, galleries and the art market rather than the quality of my experience. It may be that food isn't art just because it isn't sold by art dealers.

Steve, you know I agree with you that there are criteria by which one can evaluate the validity of judgments of taste; it's not a free-for-all. I still disagree with you on whether there is a necessary correlation between complexity and excellence. If you check out my recent post about Bill Grimes's menu exhibition, you'll see I mention Schockli's cooking at the Forum of the Twelve Caesars. I didn't copy out any of the dishes, but my goodness those entrees were complex, and one can make a reasonable guess they would have been prepared by a large battery of kitchen staff using a variety of classic techniques. These entrees were glazed and sauced and garnished to the point of death. Maybe they were great, who knows, but Jonathan's description of his veal kidney was a lot more appetizing. And you are using the unfair-musical-comparison trope again. Sure "Rite of Spring' is more complex than a nursery rhyme, but if you want to say it's better, my question is always "At what?" Better for singing to babies?

Shockingly cheap. Seems you could do three courses for under $25.

I think Chinese dining in London is far superior to New York, across the board. Indian dining even more so.

Dried cherries are now an important component in my sauce-making repertoire - for savory dishes like duck I mean.

Sadly, it is looking like I won't be eating any of this good stuff until some time in February. But I guess it will wait for me.

Thanks Chloe. I only wish I'd had time to eat in a number of churrascarias and make comparisons. Liked the hump, though.

Rhubarb. Figs. Prunes. Generally I prefer dried fruit to fresh fruit. It is more evolved.

Reading the responses to my post, I think some of my claims were interpreted as being a little more ambitious than they were. Of course gastronomic experience cannot be reduced to taste, smell and olfaction. I was reacting to the arguments I often see (on other threads as well as this one) that cooking cannot be art because it lacks many of the properties associated with other art forms. I wished modestly to point out that the processes through which we experience food and drink are so different from those through which we experience, say, theater and music, that cooking should not be disqualified as an aesthetic medium on such a basis. My comments about the possibility of "recording" and "re-playing" gastronomic experiences went to the same point. I entirely agree that the performing arts would not cease to be arts if we couldn't record them (just as they did not suddenly become arts when we developed that capability). All that I would infer from this argument is that the fact that - as it happens - we can't record and replay gastronomic experiences is irrelevant to whether cooking is an art form or not. (Interestingly, I was thinking about one of Michael Lewis's points this morning, reflecting on the enormous differences between the arts in terms of where we even locate the art work. I agree that a musical score is not a work of art. When we look at a painting, we are looking at the art work itself. In the case of music, we experience the art work when we hear the score played, not when we gaze at it. But is the case the same with a play? Are Shakespeare's "scripts" not art works, but merely instructions for creating art works? And when is a reproduction of a painting an art work? If the reproduction is indistinguishable from the original, does it not become an art work in its own right? Questions which are complicated by the ready reproducibility of lithographs, photographs, and so on. Of course, a key text here is Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", misguided though I think it is. A long-winded way of saying that, whether a dish can be an art work or not, I doubt that a recipe is.)

I have a couple of questions, the context of which is that I haven't visited Sydney in a few years. Generally, I'm familiar with Rockpool and I've got the message about Tetsuya. Where else is especially good right now? What do you think is the essential Sydney dining experience outside of the two I mentioned? More specifically, one thing I have enjoyed in previous visits is exploring cuisine which reflects unusual indigenous ingredients, not to mention unusual indigenous game. I know my quandong from my bunya nut, for example. An endearing little place called Riberries in Darlinghurst used to offer such a menu, as did the more touristy (but still, I thought, good) Wolfie's on the quay. Either of those places still around? Or is there anywhere better for that kind of eating? I did check the other Sydney threads on the forum here, of course. Thanks for any help, which will be rewarded by my thoughtful and penetrating reports, if I manage to make it there and back.

I am not surprised that an impasse has been reached with respect to finding a definition of art. I have never seen convincing criteria which can reliably distinguish art works from other "objects", and the more I see what is exhibited in galleries, the less I expect such criteria ever to emerge. A good history and discussion of the question, in lay terms, can be found in Cynthia Freeland's recent book. Criticizing the notions of art already advanced on this thread is probably fruitless, but I am willing to do so if anyone wants me to. Just to address the original quote from Korsmeyer, I am merely surprised that anyone today would advance the ability to express emotion (or to "move us") as the defining characteristic of art. More constructively, I can suggest some ways in which we go wrong when we attempt to consider what aesthetic appeal food and drink might have. I agree with Nick Gatti's earlier comment that we are too hasty to take other art forms as our model. The fundamental point is that food (or cooking) and drink appeal primarily to the three senses of taste, smell and olfaction. Sure, one can see, touch and even hear food too, but that's secondary. No other art form I can think of makes its primary appeal to those senses. It is a reasonable premise, therefore, that there may be no strong analogy between the kind of aesthetic appeal food and drink have, and the kinds of aesthetic appeal to be found in music, painting, performance art, and so on. Secondly, we experience taste and olfaction (smell is a bit different) by putting the food and drink inside our bodies. It's a special fact about food and drink that we then have to either swallow it or spit it out - again, no clear analogies with paintings or symphonies! Wine connoisseurs do, of course, spit. Although I haven't tried it much, I suspect that tasting and spitting when it comes to food would inhibit enjoyment of textures and after-tastes. But the fact that food and drink pass through our bodies tells us about the physiological disposition of our organs of taste and olfaction, and not really much else. Similarly, the fact that we require refreshment in order to live is an important and interesting fact, but since any aesthetic appeal of food and drink is likely to be epiphenomenal to its nutritious value, I don't know why that fact alone would lead one to disqualify food and drink from aesthetic consideration. Finally, it has been observed that food and drink are "ephemeral", in the sense that there are problems preserving them or exhibiting them in museums. Well, I don't know how true that is of wine, but I suppose when a vintage has been drunk that's an end of it. Again, this seems to me to be no more than an interesting contingent observation. We have been able to record performance art - including sound synchronized with pictures, anyway - for less than a century (I am thinking the Vitaphone was demonstrated in the mid-twenties). Imagine a counterfactual situation in which the gramophone (and its descendants) had not been invented, but a machine for recording and replaying the taste and smell of a dish had. That doesn't seem to me to be inherently absurd. One could then borrow copies of Escoffier's best dinners from the local food library. Would food then be art, but musical performances not? I don't have a strong view on whether food and drink are art, and I am sceptical that any such thing as a "hierachy" of arts has been demonstrated anyway. But these are examples of the kinds of questions that need to be addressed.

Good advice here. I should go and compare with 10 year olds with the 17 year olds somewhere. The whisky bar at the Athenaeum suggests itself. Of course, I'm on the wrong side of the ocean right now.

Last time I ate there, several years ago, the food was competently prepared but terribly dull. Roast chicken and mashed potatoes, sort of thing. Would it be possible to sketch what was on the tasting menu?

Gomorrah.

I have ordered frogs in New York's Chinatown more than once - the specific dish which springs to mind was Kung Bao frog at a Malaysian-Chinese restaurant which I think is at the west end of Bayard Street. I can check if anyone's interested - it's a place with a lot of cheerfuo mock-tropical decor in the big windows. The frogs were a little bony, but palatable. I have seen big barrels of live frogs many times, but I confess I not fearless when it comes to the idea of purchasing and murdering them. As the immortal Withnail said of the chicken, "How are we going to make it die?"