Gavin Jones

As in music, or indeed physical attraction for example.

Eyes closed, mouth open.

And the sub-saharan colonies? Even the Paris-Dakar - also the name of a restaurant. One of my principal reactions is to sort an unfamiliar cuisine into familiar bits and unfamiliar bits. It is then a somewhat painstaking job to slowly re-assemble those parts into a version of the unity that is a culture-in-cooking.

Does the food you offer in St. John now reflect in anyway your experiences of food growing up? If so in what way?

The high-end restaurant also suffers the fact that basically 'Sketch' is an expensive nightclub, currently filled with 'celebrities', but likely to be replaced with the inhabitants of Essex, shortly. This setting for a restaurant is curious but not tempting. Edit: What a horribly snobby tone.

Is that Plotnicki's Indian cousin?

Me too.

A shock to realise I had never talked to Tony sober, an infelicity I swiftly rectified. Pig's cheek ham was excellent - very spicy cure. Squirrel tasted like a rabbit with a personality. The trail on toast was a good deal gamier - close to the woodcock level - which I like in a small creature. Ginger cake & ginger ice cream was good - very treacly parkin in effect. I have never eaten an eccles cake as I have seen the terrible effects of addiction in others. Tony's starter of squid/fennel/aioli was outstanding - close to a chinese combination of textures. The side order of steak & kidney pie had, as pointed out, a rather watery filling - reflecting the absence of significant quantities of starch. It would be a good restaurant to frequent if you felt that carbs led to death.

One might also argue for some sort of parity between domestic dining and restaurant dining in Italy, leading to the lamentable failure of Italy to be French.

The menu includes smoked sprats, and squirrel.

And even of recent times. The Roux brothers had careers as private chefs before opening the restaurants that have probably been most influential for haute-cuisine in the UK.

Almost certainly, if only to see how well the pig is suckling.

I am increasingly tempted by the prospect of a drink & a dead thing this evening.

One of the idiosyncracies of St. John is the all French wine-list. Is there a reason for this?

Fergus, thankyou for joining us. Do you ever feel constrained by the justified success of your restaurant's very individual style? For example have you had the urge to rename it St. Jean, banish the marrowbones and instead serve up 6 escargots, followed by a poulet au gratin - or somesuch. Or more seriously are there dishes you would feel inhibited about offering due to their apparent poor fit with the rest of the menu. (For example 18thC English pasta dishes).

The wet-fish stall at Chamberlain's lasted a matter of months. The one that's been at Leadenhall market for ages is good though, and still going.

Steve, I appreciate that your comments are directed at the high-end - however I am inclined to think it would be rash to predict the behaviour of a small self-defining class. (Hence the repeated analogies with art etc - it's the mid-19thC what are connoisseurs going to look at in 50 years? Who are the connoisseurs?). I had thought that the lump of protein, sauced was a universalising piece of cooking which you had demonstrated that, but for the aberrant (such as Chinese & Thais), formed the foundation of anything such an elite would eat. However to demonstrate this it is simply circular to insist that the population upon which you test the hypothesis is selected from that soi-disant elite. (I thought I'd offered you an easy set up, actually, since it's a fairly safe bet that the number of 'elite' (= french ) restaurants in China and India would very likely increase over the next 20 years or so).

Well as this is now in empirical terms we have an experiment. Will the population of the Indian sub-continent and China (I think we're up to what, 1.75bn people or so?) switch their preferred eating to lumps of protein with less spicing? Considering the rapidity of social change in these places we can run this for 20? years. Then we'll know. End of thread. Actually I think that the highly evolved restaurant dining characteristic of a few big cities is essentially an aberration. This is because the systematic risks associated with such agglomerations of population will overwhelm the capacity of the social infrastructure to absorb such risks and a less intensively developed civil structure than the archetypical late 19thC city (Paris, NY, London, Berlin, Shanghai, Calcutta) will emerge. We will all end up eating Italian, Chinese, Indian rather than French. The pleasure of dining on Escoffier's dead residues has surely a limited span.

As a Scottish Chef suggests this practice almost certainly contravenes 1. Fire regulations 2. General Health and Safety legislation 3. Any insurance contract The first two carry fairly heavy duty legislation which I would guess imply shutting your place of work immediately until procedures are in place to prevent this.

Why is restaurant cooking - a by-its-nature industrialised process self-evidently better than home-cooking. Oh, damn, that's why British cooking is crap.

Excellent article. I've always been bemused by the conventional 'gourmet' disdain of the microwave in the kitchen. It's an energy source, with some different characteristics to some of the others in your kitchen, why not explore it. I hope to market some low-level radioactive rods for domestic cooking purposes soon. The microwave performs, as previously noted, very well on cooking gloopy liquids. Fish, also, I have heard, is responsive to those tender waves.

This is one such strong assertion. It appears to rest on a notion of universal progress which is difficult to assent to - for me, anyway. (I will avoid repeating myself from ages ago on the trustworthiness of the judgement of connoisseurs, Duveen & BB spring repeatedly to mind).

The above Postponed until Julian Maclaren-Ross is able to deliver a manuscript.

Next Wednesday, the 26th March, Wilfrid & I and anyone else who's thirsty will be exploring the literary history of Fitzrovia. Starting in the Wheatsheaf at 7pm or so, everybody welcome. I will put up a specific drink-related thread for this now.

Just because it's simple doesn't mean it's not delicious. Just because it's simple doesn't mean it's not possible to screw it up worse than my first marriage. And I've never been married. England used to rejoice in varieties of 'cooked cream' puddings. Blancmange was a favourite. Too much gelatin, too much sugar, too little cream and insufficiently contrasted sauce. A perfect vanilla panna cotta with an espresso tipped over is a fantastic end to a meal. But simplicity brings its own travails - it is readily mass-produced in a disastrous format, and it is easily over-embellished. Sitting in a front room having the perfect panna cotta it is too easy to close ones eyes and imagine the death-knell of 'creativity' being applied. Creativity is adjudged post facto, not the mystery season-all which turns perfection into a passion-fruit & saffron nausea of taste possibilities which history has had the good sense to never ask for.