Wilfrid

It might be an ethical transgression for to omit it if the only reason for doing so was Shopsin's attitude. But hardly a serious one, unless the guide book undertook to be "a complete guide to New York restaurants", or "a complete guide to new York restaurants owned by grouchy eccentrics". Hey, how about a NY eGullet dinner at Kenny's joint?

Well, thank you very much, Tommy. I am glad that someone on this site has a modicum of respect for me. Actually, I have to apologize for inadvertently skipping earlier posts. Steve P.: Yes, of course, journalists agree not to publish things for all kinds of reasons, good and bad. The last thing I was suggesting was that a journalist is always obliged to print thre information he or she has, least of all in this case. Of course, Shaw's entitled to omit Shopsin. What I was arguing with was Suzanne's view (if I got it right) which was that Shopsin was entitled to expect his veto to be effective, and that it was shameful (an assault, even) to ignore it.

Eveyone, I take it, is familiar with the magazine Time Out, whether in its London, New York or Paris edition. Guide books, of course, existed long before Time Out ever did - ask Baedeker - but Time Out was a pioneering version of what we have come to know as "what's on" or "listings" magazines. Time Out, of course, has many spin-offs - listings for restaurants, shops, services, etc, in various cities. And it has many competitors. When Time Out lists things, it often (but not always) includes a brief evaluative note, or even a full review. You'll find guides, listings and reviews all over the web now, of course, and I expect many of you have used sites like City Search to find places to eat or shop, or entertainment events. I have worked on a number of magazines which had what's on guides (or listings) as part of their life blood, as well as reviews and features. I have contributed to guide books which were spin-offs, although I've never edited one. This is all part of being a journalist. Journalism can include news reporting, it can include the collation and presentation of factual information, it can include interviewing, reviewing and writing features. Often its a mix of several of these categories. Time Out includes all those things. I don't know the details of Steven's guide book, but I assume it's not utterly different in nature to the kinds of things I've discussed here; and if he 's writing or editing it, he's doing so as a journalist. I can imagine certain, rare cases, where someone might ask a journalist not to write about something for serious personal reasons. But, as a general proposition, the idea that people get some kind of veto over whether journalists write about them or their lives or their businesses is one which is absolutely novel to me, and how it's taken up four pages here is astounding. Just read Steve P.'s post: of course an editor can choose what stories to run with, and there are many factors, inclouding the disingenuous, which come into play. What beggars belief is that the idea that the subject of the story should get a veto.

Are you serious, Steven? What else would it be?

Yeah, I'm beginning to think the kernel of it is that they invented the restaurant. If Syria had invented the restaurant, maybe Syrian chefs would have been all over the map, and who knows?

If Shopsin just hung up, I don't know what the thread is about. I am assuming "I don't want to be in the guide book" is more or less what he said. I can see no reason Steven should give such a comment a second thought. Reality check: Does everyone agree that what Steven is doing is journalism? WHat's all this about hitting on people?

I have discovered what a successful self-promoter Soyer was. As mentioned earlier, someone selling a quarter of a million copies of a cookbook in England in the 1850s qualifies as a bit of a superstar. However, Soyer worked very little in France, and the consensus seems to be that his cuisine was certainly not purely in the French tradition. Whether this counts as "dumbing down" I don't know - depends what he cooked. But this is why it's important that it wasn't just Soyer, but Ude, Francatelli, and clearly others too. There are some Soyer recipes in Willan's 'Great Chefs' book, but only a few. However, there is a huge volume on gastronomy by Soyer in the New York Society Library, which I shall try to to take a look at.

Okay. I am a journalist working on a story about a local politician. I hear he made some offensive remarks at a private dinner. I call him and tell him what I heard and ask whether it's true. He then says, "I don't want you to write about that." Excuse me? That's not in the rules of the game. Why can't we stick to a simple and precise analogy like that? The language about assaults and slander is utterly inapplicable.

Sweeping up some other interesting bits: Oraklet, do you have a cite for your comparison of French and British prosperity? - it doesn't accord with my understanding. And, by the way, the restaurant wasn't a result of the revolution - it pre-existed it, and the austerity years after 1789, if anything, slowed its development. Adam - I love fruit pudding for breakfast.

Lizziee, I was too was struck by the penetration of French chefs into London clubs and hotels in the mid-nineteenth century. I knew of Soyer, at the Reform, but I hadn't realized how widespread the invasion was. Francatelli, although an Englishman, trained with Careme and wrote cookbooks featuring, essentially, French cuisine. He seems to have been a key figure, working as a chef for Queen Victoria, at Crockford's (like Ude), at the Reform (like Soyer) and at the St James's Park Hotel. While there, he apparently designed menus for a number of other hotels in the district. Mennell regards his work, 'The Modern Cook', as essentially a distillation of Careme-style cuisine. Just in case any non-British readers passing through are mystified by these clubs - places like the Reform, the Garrick, the Carlton, and so on, are private member's clubs, many of which still exist today. In the eighteenth century, their clientele would have been exclusively male, but would have included wealthy and influential members from all walks of society - the aristocracy, actors, journalists, judges, bishops. They provided dinners and accommodations (and sometimes gambling) in grand surroundings. Anyone cooking at these clubs - in those days - would have been cooking for society's opinion-makers. The presence of French cuisine in such settings would have helped it become accepted by a wider society. I had overlooked this, because in the twentieth century such clubs had a reputation for the dreariest of British cuisine. You are way ahead of me with Curnonsky (no "h"). I am interested in finding out the extent to which he championed rural cuisine grand-mere/du terroir against the haute cuisine of Escoffier, et al. It's important to recognize that French cuisine itself is not a homogeneous whole.

"Bimibap" may be word of the day. Keeping up with the fashions, I did some more very low temperature cooking. Salmon fillet, marinaded in crushed frsh peaches (smothered in the pulp and juice). I dropped about a tablespoon of water in a shall skillet and stirred in a tea spoon of honey, so the skillet just had a honey-flavoured slick to it - barely any standing liquid. Lowest possible temperature. I think it only took about five minutes each side for the salmon to colour, while remaining rare in the middle. Crunchy kosher salt. It ate like butter. A sharpish cucumber salad to cut the richness (and some leftover potato salad with sour cream to fill the corners). Fat Bastard Chardonnay (a simple, chubby white from the Pays d'Oc).

I'm constantly amazed at the things a bunch of intelligent people can disagree about. The correct analogy is with reviewing - or just listing - other public services or entertainments or arts (put restaurants in whichever category you please). Permission is absolutely not required. Never has been. End of story. And the really droll thing is that those who disagree are happy to chat about Shopsin's, right here on a web-site which possibly - I don't know - gets more views than whatever guidebook we're discussing.

It's the humility that's so moving, isn't it? (Although, dammit, I agree with him this time.)

I'm definitely on the other side of the fence, having worked as a journalist. If I had heard from an author or a musician that they didn't want me to review their book or record, I am afraid I would have just laughed and carried on. Absolutely never happened, of course. I think someone saying that a show is not yet ready, and asking critics to wait, is slightly different than someone asking not to be reviewed at all. Writing reviews is, in addition to a job, a service to the reader, not to the restaurateur, author, or whomever. Seems to me to be even more the case with guides. Paparazzi - again, a tendentious example. Do I think a news photographer is entitled to take pictures of a news event in a public place, without seeking permission. Of course, just as a news reporter is entitled to report a story without asking permission.

I'm puzzled, Suzanne. Reviewing seems to be more on point. Should a restaurant - or a play, or a band, or a TV show - be entitled to say to a journalist "Don't review me"?

The "dessert" type puddings evolved from those, I assume. After all, the traditional ones are usually a fairly savory dough or sponge, made with lard, but stuffed with bits of fruit, or drenched in some kind of syrup or custard.

It is an explicit theme of defenders of British cuisine that French produce - the meat in particular, and above all the beef - was poor in quality, and so needed to be disguised by technique. Mennell can't find a basis for this belief in fact, and I have no idea whether it was truth or prejudice. The belief is the basis, of course, for Hogarth's famous picture, which depicts a joint of English beef being envied by the fat French monk and scrawny French solider. Look right here.

Any chance of an anti-trust suit on that basis?

When I instigated this thread, I did consider posting it on the New York board, as the issues are clearly very different from city to city and country to country. Sticking to New York, I do wonder if Bux is overlooking something. I agree with just about everything he says, including his theme that restaurants can do whatever they like, as can tailor's, as can retailers in general. But the message I get from this thread - and from BYO discussions in general - is that a lot of us are not particularly satisfied with what we get for our money from restaurant wine lists. That's why it's different from food, clothes, or whatever. In a good restaurant, I can rarely find the kind of wine I like to drink for under $100, and when I pay over $100 I am still often disappointed. Now, I sometimes have a lousy meal too, but there's no consistent pattern of disappointment with the food. I would like better wine for less money, and BYO seems to offer that.

Knock me down with a feather.

You're right, Adam. I have numerous citations to eighteenth and nineteenth century authors expressing disgust at fashionable food in general, and French food in particular. Tobias Smollet's discussion of metropolitan eating habits in Humphrey Clinker, contrasted with the healthy simplicity of the country, is exemplary.

Of course, of course. In many restaurants the tasting menus are no more expensive than a three course meal a la carte (sometimes less)*, and ordering foie gras - even if you do it every time - is not going to put the BYO'er out ahead of regular wine drinkers in terms of spending. I can see how they might to it in truffle season, but not otherwise. *Same price at ADNY, Fleur de Sel, cheaper at San Domenico and March, and at Blue Hill it looks like there's only about five to ten dollars difference. So many restaurants offer prix fixe, anyway, that this almost doesn't matter.

Sorry, Steven, I honestly can't find it. Is it that people don't have to order dessert, but aren't therefore entitled to bring their own?

Thanks again, Lizziee. More good information. Let me introduce a concept developed by Mennell, which is partly responsive to Steve's questions, and partly just interesting. Mennell speaks of the "decapitation" of English cuisine by the French. Prior to the arrival of restaurants in the nineteenth century, british public eating places had fallen into one of the following broad categories: cookshops, taverns, chophouses and coffee houses. Cookshops, if the expression is unfamiliar, were just places with big ovens, turning out food primarily roasts - from which people could purchase cuts. Each of these types of eating place catered for different clientele, but they tended to offer communal tables, few comforts, and little or no choice of food. The French restaurant offered comparative privacy, comparative luxury, and menus. At home with the aristocracy and the gentry, with the exception of a very small, travelled minority, who relished continental cuisine, the table was set with home-grown produce: simple roasts of meat, fowl and game; boiled meats; home-grown vegetables and dairy products from the local herd. The peasantry ate a more modest version of the same cuisine. English cookbooks, up to and including Mrs Beeton, primarily offered cooking instructions for this type of food. What Mennell means by the decapitation of English cooking is that the swift triumph of French chefs and restaurants in the first half of the nineteenth century seems to have inhibited the development of any luxury/upscale/"refined" version of the traditional English table. Society led the way, and the middle class swiftly followed, in adopting the French restaurant as the model for public dining, and the cuisine of the French chef as the model for fashionable entertaining. Mennell finds, even in middle class Victorian homes, that where families attempted to put on culinary displays, they did so by introduing French touches to their service. Two points. "Decapitation" is not the right word, because no "head" ever grew in the first place. Also, it's not clear which way the arrow of causation points: did English cuisine fail to develop a luxury extension because the French had the market sown up, or did the French triumph so decisively because there was no English competition. Either way, something to cogitate over.

I still can't see why the BYO-er is more worthy of disapprobation than the non-drinker.