balex
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Posts posted by balex
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People who have saved for a special night out aren't going to be happy about seeing a toddler seated next to them. It's going to detract from their evening, because enough parents have been inconsiderate enough to bring ill-behaved children to fancy restaurants.
They might not be happy about seeing a black man being seated next to them. Or a group of American tourists. So what? I am not interested in people's prejudices -- the important thing is how individuals behave. I don't see why well-behaved children should not be allowed into fancy restaurants just because some children are badly behaved, any more than we should ban all Americans from Arpege just because someone ordered a Coke there once.
Ok, I'm exaggerating a bit, but you get the drift
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Other diners have likely reserved a lot of money for a special night out, and they don't want to hear your kid screaming, even for a second. They don't need the stress of WORRYING that your kid might start behaving badly and ruin their special night. It isn't fair to them.
This is ridiculous -- the idea that I shouldn't bring my well-behaved children to a restaurant because other customers might be worried that they might misbehave. Bad behaviour is inappropriate whether from adults or children -- we all agree. Beyond that I don't see why there should be special rules for children -- I have had more meals disrupted by noisy drunk businessman bragging about themselves than by children. I think restaurants should feel free to throw out disruptive customers whether they are adults or children.
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Sometimes these tips do work but not for the declared reason. E.g. an Italian frying tip is when frying stuff, to first fry a bit of bread in the oil until it is brown -- this allegedly takes away the greasy taste from the oil. Now this does work -- because by frying the bread until brown you ensure that the oil is really hot, so the food doesn't taste greasy, not because the bread soaks up some element of the oil.
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Last night
in Wine
10cl bottles is because production of Eszencia is measured in litres and I think retails for ove £60 here in the UK. I think that this one had 1% alcohol but to be honest i found the writing on the bottle too small to read! {EDIT: didn't read your message properly but now that I have my brain has closed down and don't quite get what you are asking
}This is on the edge of what wine is. Apparently some eisweins don't ferment at all in some years -- that for me means it just isn't wine -- it's fruit juice.
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What is veal parm?
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Furthermore, as I am sure you would agree, a three or four star rating is generally more an indication that a restaurant meets a certain predetermined set of criteria, not necessarily that it is a better restaurant or serves better food -- it's just higher up on a certain arbitrarily-defined ladder. To my mind, there aren't very many Italian restauranteurs in America who are all that interested in playing the four star game. I have no doubt that Mario Batali could open a four star restaurant in NYC if he really put his mind to it. I just don't think he's particularly interested in making the changes in his cooking and service he would have to make in oirder to earn such a star (he has, by the way, said a number of times that he thinks the Michelin Guide is screwing up restaurants in Italy and causing them to offer food that isn't really very Italian).
What do you think an Italian restaurant could do to earn a four star rating and still remain fundamentally an Italian restaurant? Could a Chinese restaurant earn a four star rating and still remain fundamentally Chinese? If the answer is no (and I think it is) then we are left with two ways we may look at this: We may suppose that this is an indication of the supremacy of French cuisine over all other styles, or we may look at the star system as a fundamentally French measure and understand that it may not be entirely appropriate to judge a Chinese restaurant on a French scale.
It's like deja vu all over again ....
We have had this discussion in the past -- luckily the level of argument has gone up a bit since some of the participants last time round have left the site.
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Yes, but some of the 97s are drinking nicely now: I have drunk Ducru and Latour a Pomerol recently and they were both delicious, fruity and not massively concentrated as you say. Not great wines but worth a try -- it might be to your taste
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I don't want to nitpick, but I feel that I should point out that Vitamin C is in fact ascorbic acid--not citric acid. The two are very similar so I'm not sure if the distinction has any ramifications in the area of cheesemaking. Maybe an expert can chime in here.
This is eGullet -- we are generally pro-nitpicking.
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There is one good Italian restaurant in London -- called Assaggi. This is authentic and good. It is not very well known because it is small and the cook does not appear on TV.
This is by no means a generally held opinion; knowledgable friends have spoken disparagingly of it. I've eaten very well indeed, more than once, at Artigiano in Belsize Village, which was highly commended in this year's PAPA awards. I'm sure there is someone out there who will immediately rubbish it. It's like arguing over blind dates.
I have had a very good lunch there and an ok dinner. Both were 'authentic' (I have lived for 8 years in Italy) and within the parameters, shall we say, of a reasonable restaurant in Italy. It has some serious flaws I think, but most restaurants do. In somma, it's close enough.
I certainly don't mean to imply that this is the only authentic Italian restaurant in London. And people argue about restaurants in Italy too -- so a bit of controversy is all part of the mix.
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There is one good Italian restaurant in London -- called Assaggi. This is authentic and good. It is not very well known because it is small and the cook does not appear on TV.
I am sure there is one in New York. Maybe it just isn't very well known.
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Guy Jones of Blooming Hills Farm in upstate New York
Tim Starck of Eckerton Hills Farms in Pennsylvania
Cherry Lane Farms of Roadstown in Bridgeton, NJ
Mario Batali stands by them too; they are his three primary vendors at Babbo.
This illustrates my point!! In Eurpoe, a good tomato is readily available to everyone a short distance from their home;
In the US, 280 million people can not possibly be served by 3 tomato farms--
And yes, I also think that most Americans have never tasted good produce...
Europe is a bit too broad -- it is perobably easier to find good tomatoes in New York than it is in London or Stockholm.
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But I think we may have missed a point that needed to be discussed before that one: I'd be interested in exploring the commonly made assertion that Italian food is totally dependent on high-quality local ingredients. I began to suspect that this was bullshit when I started thinking about pasta. For one thing, the raw material is being imported. For another thing, there is no particular need for regional production. And perhaps most importantly, it seems there are countless pasta dishes that don't depend particularly on the excellence of fragile hard-to-ship local ingredients. Especially when you consider that Parmigiano-Reggiano, middle-market Italian olive oil, and made-in-Italy dried pastas are common fixtures in supermarkets throughout the industrialized world, I would think that many pasta dishes are not all that geographically dependent.
A lot of other ingredients are not that local -- e.g. Pachino tomatoes in Milan or whatever. I think there is a specific problem with pasta asciutta in the U.S., but we don't have that problem here in the UK, and we have a similar Italian restaurant problem.
I reiterate my contentions that I made above that got lost in the American produce bickering, that one of the key issues results from the fact that people rarely eat a primo and a secondo, and that the chefs make things too complicated because of the way the restaurant market changes so rapidly in major non-Italian cities.
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1.[...]There is also more popular resistance to industrial uniformity of foods in Europe (not to mention genetically modified ones...) than in the USA.
I'm skeptical about the first half of this assertion given what I keep hearing about the mad homogenizers in Brussels. Europeans did elect them didn't they... so they do represent a majority of europeans, don't they?
nicely put -
Mmmm 67 Yquem.
Mark -- I find a lot of German sweet wines have too low acidity to my taste -- is this unusual? What are some good types that have good acidity?
There are also some good sweet wines from the Loire (coteaux-de-layon) , from Alsace (I especially like Ostertag SGN) and also some nice red ones from Italy -- recioto di valoplicella. And of course vin santo from Italy (Avignonesi). Also Chapoutier vin de paille from the Rhone. Lots of good stuff out there, and sweet wine isn't as fashionable or expensive as other types of wine so you have a good price/qualit y ratio.
But when you say you 'just want to work up to the more expensive stuff" and you start with Yquem ..
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I think what a good tomato is depends on ones experience. I periodically had to readjust my notion of what a good tomato was during the years I lived in Rome. "Ah so what I thought was 10/10 is in fact only about 8/10 and this tomato is a 10". And then again a few years later, until now, living back in England I am rather exigent and hard to please. Luckily things improved a bit while I was away, and some tomatoes have some flavor so all is not lost (and Italy is only a short plane ride away).
I think even a regular visitor to Italy won't really scale the heights of tomatodom. You need a few years south of Florence to get to the bottom of it.
(metaphors mixed deliberately
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The question on the table, for me at least, is "Why aren't there great Italian restaurants outside of Italy?" I think when that is broken down, one has to ask "What makes a great Italian restaurant?" And the most basic answer to that has to do with ingredients, because if the ingredients aren't up to snuff outside of Italy, that's the end of the conversation. And if the ingredients are up to snuff outside of Italy, then we can move past the ingredients explanation and move on to questions of culinary training, consumer demand, and other factors.
What I'm saying is that I think there are plenty of ingredients outside of Italy to work with. And I'm focusing on North America because that's where I have my experience -- if I lived in Argentina, I'd focus the inquiry there. That the great ingredients of North America may not be particularly easy for Joe Consumer to obtain is beside the point, because they are pretty easy to obtain if you are a well-financed restaurant chef in a major North American city.
I agree with you about ingredients. For me there are three remaining issues:
- the selection of the dishes
- the rhythm of the meal
- the way those dishes are cooked
Now here in London one can buy good Italian tomatoes quite easily ( M and C) and lots of people go often to Italy but still good Italian restaurants are hard to find. This is because the restaurant-going public are rather fickle and obsessed with novelty, and so don't like the same old boring spaghetti con le vongole, grilled sea bass, prosciutto e melone and so on. It's not sexy, the chef hasn't been on TV and so on.
Secondly, people don't eat a full meal -- it is very rare in London for people to have antipasto, pasta and secondo. If nobody does this then you compensate by making the pasta dish have a lot more sauce so it is more of a piatto unico, and it all gets twisted into a variant of the French style meal starter/main course/pudding.
And the third thing is the chefs can't resist the temptation to fancy it up. And put extra garnishes or ingredients in the dishes. For example, in the Zuni cafe cookbook, which I recently bought, there is a recipe for a carbonara style sauce which has ricotta and peas in. Now this is a fine and delicious dish, to be sure, but it is really a combination of two dishes -- one is a pea and pancetta sauce, and one is an egg yolk and bacon sauce. And when I cooked it my wife said -- why are there peas in here?
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You are claiming that tomatoes (at the high end) are better in America than in Italy? I know that the tomato was originally American, but don't you think you are exaggerating a bit?
I believe I said "as good or better." I would certainly be willing, however, to put the tomatoes from Tim Stark of Eckerton Hills Farm, in Hamburg, PA, up against against any in the world.
So your point is that there is (at least) one supplier who is as good as the best in Italy, rather than that there is parity over a significant chunk of the high-end marketplace?
I can't contradict you -- I have probably spent less time in America than you have in Italy. I shall seek out some of these fine tomatoes the next time I am over.
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The reason good produce is hard to find in the USA is that consumers are more concerned with how things look instead of how they taste.
I think Americans are also very price-sensitive consumers.
One of the amazing things about Italian frutterie is the way you will have 3 baskets of strawberries or whatever at different prices , whcih look the same, and one basket costs three times as much as the cheapest. When you ask them what the difference is, the man will say "well these ones come from Terracina (or Pachino or ...) and they taste much better!" And they do ...
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If those-who-moderate think this tangent might be better as a separate thread, please feel free to split.
Solely based on the Ducasse book, the following are ingredients where I agree with him that North American product is as good or better than anything available in Europe (and in some cases there is no significant European production). Obviously, we're talking about top-of-the-market stuff here. I've put a * next to some where I think the American product is particularly excellent:
snip
Tomatoes
snip
In addition, I believe the case against shipping has been overstated. Many of the world's best ingredients are extremely stable and can survive boat-shipping no problem. Others do quite well with air shipping. Sushi-quality fish is a good example of something that is at the extreme delicate-and-perishable end of the spectrum of ingredients, yet fish is successfully shipped every day -- to the satisfaction of the world's top sushi chefs -- from the Northeastern United States to Japan . . . and vice-versa. I don't think Europe even plays in that league, though I could be wrong -- can anybody tell us whether there's significant traffic in European seafood heading to the top-level sushi places in Japan?
You are claiming that tomatoes (at the high end) are better in America than in Italy? I know that the tomato was originally American, but don't you think you are exaggerating a bit?
I think there is a lot of Pacific seafood which is better than the stuff from the Atlantic -- sea urchins being a good example, and there are some clams and so on that just don't exist on the European side.
There is some good fish in the North Atlantic, and the North Sea but they are both rather over-fished.
The Mediterranean is rather warm and doesn't get cold when it gets deep which is necessary for good fish. They do have some very good seafood, and the swordfish from Messina is famous, but I don't think it compares to the best deep cold ocean stuff.
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there are 2 Zaccagnini
Ciccio Zaccagnini from Bologano (PE) in Abruzzo and
Fratellli Zaccagnini from Staffolo (AN) in le Marche who make Verdicchio
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I haven't drunk it but 'vini d'italia 2004' gives it 2 black glasses (which means good to excellent)
and says (I translate literally for comic effect)
'demonstrates a well expressed nose and a secure and balanced gustatory development'"
hope this helps
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Is it Zaccagnini?
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moved to other thread
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Legal (duty) problems or just general packing problems?
Babies/Children in Restaurants (merged topic)
in Restaurant Life
Posted
Americans have a propensity to talk loudly and order coca-cola in fine restaurants. This is not racial prejudice but national prejudice which perhaps isn't so taboo.
And this is not about unruly children but about children in general -- I think everybody agrees that unruly children should not be allowed -- the question is whether all children should be banned from high end restaurants. In particular I object to the idea that well-behaved children should not be allowed because of the prejudices of other diners, based on what I admit are real propensities of children.
And I did say
And I don't appreciate that qualification being snipped off. But let's not get too pompous. Merry Xmas all!