[What is a restaurant trying to ‘say’ to us?]

German,Spanish: You will become one with your inner pig.

[I like curly parsley, do you?]

Flat parsley will finally triumph over curly parsley when the Butchers' Wholesalers near Smithfield Market start selling plastic flat parsley rather than plastic curly parsley.

The garnish that keeps on giving.

[Smokin' diary]

I hope you opened the magnum.

I enjoyed that in slow motion & was drinking along with the thread.

[Deep Fried Pie!]

Still what they lose in years they make up for in pleasure.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm deep fried pie.

[Does Italy lack culinary relevance?]

you have Rick Stein

Though I had a delicious meal at his restaurant a few years ago this had nothing to do with haute-cuisine.

In fact I would actively avoid an haute-cuisine place that specialised in fish - the ethos of such cooking seems precisely inimical to good seafood .

[Le Pigalle]

Akiko, if you have a luncheon opportunity my advice would be La Trouvaille (Newburgh Street off Carnaby St) in preference to Le Pigalle.

I found myself in the vicinity of Bond Street and having inspected the menu at Embassy and decided against noticed the dining room was empty. The Sugar club too. I was walking on for a pave au poivre at Le Pigalle when I wandered passed la Trouvaille.

I ate there well over a year ago with a friend who was cutting opposite at which time she said it was totally deserted. There was then a mini-tsunami of interest and it was full a couple of times & I assumed the worst. Apparently even one SteveP. dined there

However the lunch menu was £19-75 for starter, entree, cheese, dessert.

I was entertained on the one side by two gents who'd got through a bottle of red before ordering and on the other by two publishing types who were discussing the shock revelations of Brian Sewell's part in Anthony Blunt (I may have misheard).

Decent Black pudding on carrot and pear with a glass of Frontonnais.

Really good Onglet with sauce Choron (tomato Hollandaise?).

Frites - not as good as Pigalle but acceptable.

Cheese: St Nectaire - Bleu d'Auvergne - Muenster

with a little splidge of truffled honey for the blue.

This was decent. (well better than the cheese course at Pied-a-terre with two lumps of a bleu d'Auvergne alike)

Couple of glasses of liqouricey Corsican wine.

Clafoutis (bollocks, it was a tart) of pear w. calvados ice cream.

Coffee & cognac.

Very good. Snooze.

[Local Heroes: Favorite Neighborhood Eateries]

Mar i Terra is an excellent small chain of Tapas restaurants in London.

Locations are Air Street (near Picadilly), Gambia Street (the hinterland between London Bridge & Waterloo) and now in Blackheath SE3.

I tried the new one in Blackheath last night; good.

Brutally fresh octopus briefly marinated and dusted with salt and paprika, suckered me in with a glass of manzanilla.

The sensation of death on a plate led me to order tortilla (actually less heavily carb laden than some renditions).

Then what was described as 'rillettes of partridge and wild boar'.

One of the best dishes recently - 2 decent chunks of a terrine (mostly boar rillettes) shot through with chunks of partridge breast.

Served on a salad with a healthy quotient of marinated wild mushrooms.

Washed this down with a gamey rioja.

I was full by this time so concluded with a carajillo - and rather than an espresso which had been near a brandy bottle - this was a huge tumbler full of equal measures of coffee and brandy & a hunk of lemon zest.

Back over the heath for a game of chess in a pub.

[Dinner! 2002]

I think the main brands of Pastis may use artificial anise flavouring now & certainly very limited application of other botanicals.

For drinking I like Henri Baudouin.

[French Cookbooks]

I find it hard to determine what to look for:

Am I looking for

1. Recipes which will reproduce the peaks of 3* dining in my home.

2. Communication of an underlying aesthetic

3. An approach to domestic cooking which is informed by the techniques & innovation of haute-cuisine.

[Great British Roast Potato Cook Off]

Though not better than Death by crabs.

[Great British Roast Potato Cook Off]

Excatly. Simon how exactly do you WANT to die? Apart from painlessly and old ,that is.

Death by pork?

[Does Italy lack culinary relevance?]

Paella

Rice is for the tourists.

[Does Italy lack culinary relevance?]

Like Italy, Spain's national dish relies on starch which isn't conducive for haute cuisine, and their inability to be able to afford good quality meat and poultry, and their inability (because of lack of affordability) to serve them whole or in large slices.

Jamon?

[Roasted Potatos]

Showing the combination of golden-brown crunchy exterior and inner radiant fluffiness that only animal fat can truly bestow.

[Does Italy lack culinary relevance?]

I think it's the same in all countries where a culinary revolution took place. The U.S., U.K., Spain, etc. Burgeoning upper middle classes with lots of discretionary income to spend on what were historically luxury items.

So either

1. Food is not historically 'a luxury item' in Italy.

or

2. Italy has a much less significant UMC with lots of discretionary income than say, Spain.

Both of which one might question.

[Great British Roast Potato Cook Off]

What we're basically seeing is your continental approaches to the roasting game. Now nobody denies that those sides can saute some very attractive potatoes but for your roasting which is a very physical cooking environment you want a cooking medium that's fully committed.

Your olive oils and your goose fat, they may suit your foreign potato, but when it comes down to winning the roasting in the last 20 minutes on a wet field in Kent I think you'll find lard's your man.

Just because these foreign fats have got cooking awards and they get used in laboratory like "3 star" environments doesn't mean they've got the staying power and the guts for a heavy challenge with a king Edward.

So my tip's for Lard - it's got what it takes in the 6 yard box.

[Le Pigalle]

I had dinner on a Friday night with 2 friends 2 weeks ago.

It was still full - we'd booked & Francois was turning people away.

He is now assisted by 2 archetypal French waitresses - in fact I'm pretty sure it will soon be a Gaumont film set.

The frites were still good, but they were having supply issues not having the 2 starters we wanted. And the steaks were slightly smaller than I remember (but still a decent size). Venturing up the rather limited wine list they were selling the Crozes-Hermitage at less than twice retail.

I'd go midweek evening - Francois was bemoaning the fact that since Jay's article it was heaving - or a lunchtime - when a more relaxed service & less pressure on the kitchen will make it a more enjoyable experience.

[Great British Roast Potato Cook Off]

On its own I think olive oil has too low a smoking point, and as it decomposes into unpleasant carcinogenic things on burning there may be arguments for other fats.

Not that unpleasant carcinogens can't taste great, of course.

[Management style]

Thankyou for answering our questions.

We all appreciate that being chef of a michelin-starred restaurant is about ensuring a whole group of people work/cook/serve food well together.

There are also 'horror stories' of the ways in which discipline is maintained in high-level kitchens.

What is your particular style and how does this manifest itself in the atmosphere in the kitchen?

[Wine Literature for the Serious Student]

There is a dire short story by Dorothy Sayers

('The bibulous business of a matter of taste') which turns out to revolve around a competitive tasting.

This offers the possibility of a close approximation to scratch'n'sniff.

Reference works of course struggle to be read otherwise.

John Arlott's writing certainly encouraged me on the few occasions I played cricket over the age of 16 to do so equipped with a bottle of claret.

[Does Italy lack culinary relevance?]

Well Peter would observe it isn't real italian polenta.

Therefore it must be French (or possibly German) polenta that is turning up on those menus.

Though come to think of it one sees numerous non-coffee based products described as cappucino. Most confusing.

[How will we experience innovation in the future]

Do you think that the innovations of haute-cuisine chefs are most likely to be widely experienced through the attempts of ordinary cooks to imitate them or through industrial processes & thence through the supermarket?

For example the number of people who make their own ice cream is small, but the audience for savoury ice creams is probably large.

Does this represent a change in role for haute-cuisine chefs into something akin to haute-couturiers for fashion houses.

(i.e. run a loss-leading 3* restaurant and make money on your diffusion lines which pick up simplified versions of the high-end lines.)

[Does Italy lack culinary relevance?]

Then of course there is the argument about whether the Spanish chefs who make headlines these days are really offering new technique that is permanent or is it some varition of HC for the "connoisseriat?"

I think the answer to this question is yes and it is because of the increasingly large-scale processes underpinning people's food experiences.

The reason the Italian gastronomic aesthetic is in long-term decline is that it depends on access to very localised ingredients. Now that will continue to be possible for people who can pay through the nose but it will represent less and less the lives of most city-dwellers.

It is nothing to do with deliciousness.

By contrast the new-wave techniques though obviously h-c. in a la minute preparations in fancy restaurants will soon be available to produce food in industrial processes. These will be the techniques that will inform the food of generations to come.

However it is at a price. These techniques are unlikely to be 'home-cooking' and will typically feature mostly in industrialized food.

So as you bite into the food of the future you will taste your alienation, biting into the absence of a discernible root to your life and what feeds it.

[Does Italy lack culinary relevance?]

So a better way of asking the question is why does French cooking lack culinary relevance to modern gastronomy or haute-cuisine.

And the answer appears to be that though h-c. emerged in France it is now deracinated and lives in the world of the connoisseuriat, rather like opera, irrelevant to the lives of most people. And as such effectively moribund.

All we have to look forward to is the increasing specialisation and fragmentation of Plotto's Academy. Already we have the split into the Gagnairistas and the Anti-Ducasser's.

Later on I will move to Avignon & live in a barrel of ChN du Pape Roussanne.

[Does Italy lack culinary relevance?]

The Italic nature of the question was I think down to the number of people who thought the best food was in Italy, despite the relative lack of importance of haute-cuisine there.