vserna

I would rather think that something much more general than that is what applies here: pre-Reconquest traditions, even though they were often decisive (Andalusian and Moroccan cuisines are inextricably intertwined after eight centuries of Muslim rule over all or parts of Spain) in configuring Spanish cuisine (or, more precisely, "Spain's cuisines"), they are not as strong as the impact of the American influences. Spain was the European gateway for potatoes, tomatoes, maize and capsicums; potatoes (and sweet potatoes) were probably used for human consumption here before Parmentier's celebrated experiments in France. But what, in the end, is most important is adding the successive influences since the Middle Ages, which were piled upon an older Iberian and Roman foundation: Arab, Jewish (the Sephardic adefina is the immediate predecessor of all of Spain's cocidos, pucheros and other assorted boiled dinners) and American. (Not to mention Japanese in the case of the Basque cuttlefish in its 'ink', or Italian in the development of a Barcelona 'bourgeois' cookery in the 19th century...). The food writer Xavier Domingo used to say that the expression "Mediterranean diet" was incorrect; he liked "Mediterranean-American diet" better. Fusion thus becomes, not a modern buzzword with dubious connotations, but an inherent, constitutional element of the Spanish way of eating. Spain, more so than other European nations, is the product of successive ethnic and cultural fusions, and this carries over into its cookery. Not to mention the fact that, since Spain had so much to do with the development of the modern cuisines of Latin America and always kept an 'umbilical cord' with its former colonies, it has been considered as very natural here, even in modern times, to go to Argentina, Cuba, Peru or Mexico and bring back techniques or ingredients that could be successful here. So huevos a la cubana (fried eggs with rice, fried sweet bananas [not plantains] and tomato sauce) became a basic staple of the everyday diet, and the Basque meat-grilling techniques - so prevalent today - were picked up by Basque emigrants to Argentina and Uruguay in the first part of the 20th century. That said, the origin of 'patatas bravas' is less ethnically captivating! They were developed in the 20th century by a Madrid bar that eventually changed its name to Las Bravas and registered the formula of the genuine hot sauce that is liberally doused on just-fried chunky potatoes. (Of course, everyone else copies the sauce with more or less succes, more or less deviations, so that patatas bravas can be found anywhere). The original sauce's ingredients are onion, garlic, tomato pulp, saffron, sugar, Cayenne pepper, hot 'pimentón' or paprika pepper, a chunk of serrano ham (cooked with the other ingredients for flavor, then discarded while the rest is puréed together), flour, salt, olive oil and vinegar.

No doubt, Bux. That's a foregone conclusion. I am talking national trends and overall taste patterns, not specific exceptions. This carries over into any realm of human endeavor. For instance, I am Spanish and I hate bullfighting, whereas a number of American bullfighting (and bull running) fanatics converge every summer on Pamplona. Yet I think it would not be inaccurate to state that there are many more bullfighting fans in Spain than in the United States. Transpose that to food, and it's all I'm trying to convey here.

Mmmm... So you think they put Spam on market shelves just for its decorative effect, eh? You must be a very fortunate person living in a very fortunate part of the world, which deserves congratulations. Me, I once was a reporter covering areas of New York City where Spam is a big local item. But of course, if you don't want to understand the allegory which I'm (clumsily, no doubt) attempting when I mention Spam or macaroni and cheese, you're perfectly entitled to your opinion.

The closest thing would be a 'chèvre frais' (well, it's not English, but you get the gist of it): small, cylindrical, but creamier (albeit very consistent) than chèvre in the case of the best queijinhos, which can be made ideally from ewes or goat milk, the most famous ones being from thr town of Tomar (but actually they're made all over the place). As Miguel indicates, many today are made with cow's milk, but that's not the real thing. At Porto de Santa Maria you get a couple of slightly different, 'artisanal' cheeses that are at the same time very tasty and 'wild' - no processed flavors here - and fresh and light. Pepper, sea salt and some crusty bread. Wonderful appetizer. This type of things, to me, is more relevant to a country's gastronomic heritage than the greatest boiled, grilled or steamed shellfish around. I've had picture-perfect, pristine seafood in many, many places: Kumamoto oysters at San Francisco's Swan Oyster Depot, a whole turbot in Baltimore's delightful Black Olive (flown in from Europe, yet pure iodine-fresh!), littleneck clams at the NYC Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station, Carril clams at Loliña in, well, Galicia's Carril, langostino (striped) shrimp at Bigote in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, spider crab at Madrid’s Combarro (probably the most spectacular seafood place anywhere right now – I’ve seen wine writer Stephen Tanzer almost swoon over tiny ‘camarón’ shrimp there...), belon oysters at Le Vivier in Lomener in Brittany, a grilled Dover sole at Bentley’s in Mayfair, langoustines at J Restaurant in Stockholm, scampi at Antica Besseta in Venice, raw corvina cebiche at La Costa Verde in Lima... But, great as these things are, they are more a reflection on plentiful coastal waters than on a nation’s culinary genius. That’s why, for instance, cheese always means a bit more to me (culturally if not gustatorially), and Portugal’s genius with cheese, particularly soft cheeses (from milk curdled with thistles, as in southern Spain and northern Africa) led by the great queijo da Serra, is something else again. Or the ability to do what my father (a food writer himself) used to call ‘magically turning a dried-out rag (i.e., a piece of salt cod) into a culinary masterpiece’ – and that’s what the Portuguese can do with codfish. This is a gastronomic web site. Of course we know that during the week most French people eat a pallid, frozen steak with some frozen french fries, hurriedly sautéed after coming home from work. Same with Spaniards. I know lots of Britons who’ll just open a can of macaroni and cheese, and some Americans who actually eat Spam. And now we know that fried pork loin, some fries and some boiled rice, all lumped together, is a regular Portuguese staple. Goodness gracious, what boredom! That’s not really what we’re interested in, is it?

Yes, of course. Good sprawling now-luxurious beach restaurant (used to be a lot simpler before fame), the sensational fresh 'queijinhos' they serve as 'amuse-gueules' will impress an international client more than the good but very basically prepared fish or the famed seafood rice which is distinguished by immense amounts of black pepper in it. If this is the best seafood restaurant in the world, then I might be the maker of the best wine in the world...

This is preposterous, Miguel. One-upmanship is meaningless when proferred without factual backing. Your statement about fish and shellfish reinforces me in my impression that you have a pretty limited idea of what goes on beyond that Castilian border whence "no good wind" ever comes... Ever heard of O'Pazo or Asador Kaia? I, for one, am quite familiar with Porto de Santa Maria.

Mmmmm... No disrespect, Miguel, but why do I get the impression that I am more familiar with Portuguese food than you are with Spanish food? "Spicy, heavily seasoned, garlicky, oily"? The description you offer reminds me of 19th century French stereotypes about ghastly Spain, not of Spanish food as we know it and discuss it on this board. Of course, in Spain we're probably not quite as original - we will not usually put two different types of starch, like potatoes and rice, simultaneously in the same dish. But spicy food is popular in Mexico, not in Spain. (Or at least, not in the vast majority of Spain's regions.)

That's all I'm trying to mention. In Spain we usually eat... an incredible array of things! Pig's trotters, blood sausage, lamb's kidneys and sweetbreads, goose barnacles, elvers, pigeons (asphyxiated so that they keep their blood), 'fried blood', codfish intestines, bull's testicles, hake cheeks, calf's brains, and what have you. We also eat chicken, sole and salmon, of course. And burgers and tacos! Like any modern society under the powerful influence of American mores. But we haven't forgotten those other, primitive things yet. Thank goodness. It's not a matter of saying, as Fred ironizes, that anyone not eating those other, less standard foods, is "an ugly American". It's that we usually eat a larger variety of meats, meat cuts and strange seafood than what Americans are used to. (I am talking about general rules here - there are many American foodies that will eat lots of strange things including Colombia's fried ants. But even on this board one can verify a poster's puzzlement about people eating pigeons.) We have long been a poor country, and for centuries we've had to find anything that was edible and make it palatable. The Argentines were, until recently, so wealthy that they never had to develop a national cuisine - they had terrific steaks every day, so why worry about goose barnacles? (They had a lot of gout, too.) This concept of 'acquired taste' is so narrow in an Anglo-Saxon context that in this thread we're discussing, of all things, the 'acquired' characteristics of something as uncontroversial as dried codfish! Goodness, what would happen if we began discussing fried brains!

Don't tell that to the Italians - they have founded the Slow Food movement and feel fully entitled to the very notion! Actually, Spain is a complex country culinarily as well as politically. We have, or used to have before modern cuisine changed everything, this old saying, "Southern Spain fries, central Spain roasts, northern Spain stews - and the Valencians cook big paellas." Indeed Catalonia and the Basque Country are 'stewing' places where slow cooking is paramount, as it is in my own part of Spain (Cantabria) and the Asturias. The alchemy of lower-temperature prolonged cooking is part of the culture here, and (now that I think of it) it may explain why lower-temperature techniques are becoming so successful in modern cuisine here: we were ready for it, perhaps. PS Hope you can make it to Madrid Fusión, there should be a few interesting debates (everyone here is looking forward to Heston Blumenthal). I guess Santi is not in it this year because they can't have all of Spain's best chefs every year!

It's a comfortable 330-mile motorway drive which can be done very easily in five hours or less. And a car is simply necessary to get around in the Basque Country.

I'd say 99% of the traditional dishes and products that are really interesting to eat in Europe are "acquired tastes": snails bourguignonne, bottarga with pasta, maatjes haring, botifarra negra sausage, squid cooked in its 'ink', andouillette, Venetian sarde in saôr, Maroilles cheese, lamprey à la Bordelaise, hake cheeks in garlic... There is often, I've found, a bit of a problem for a number of Americans (and Anglo-Saxons in general) when they face continental European culinary traditions: they tend to react with displeasure to too many unfamiliar and, to them, unsavory things. There is a tendency to stick to a few familiar, generally somewhat bland staples (chicken, veal, sole, salmon), which form the basis of most preferred dishes, in turn made distinctive only through cooking method, saucing or side accompaniments... Obviously a dish of lamb kidneys sautéed in sherry or pig's trotters can be much more intense and also more idiosyncratic... Heck, in a different part of eGullet I've found a thread in which someone wondered if some people actually ate pigeons, so it suddenly dawned on me that pigeon, a basic noncontroversial staple in Iberia, could also be in that 'acquired taste' category! Obviously there is a culinary sensitivity divide somewhere, and it may explain why our ages-old Iberian traditions are not more easily understood by some of our visitors. This is obviously not a part of the world for the squeamish. That said, I must fully disagree with your assertion that Lisbon is not a good place to eat bacalhau. There are wonderful bacalhau specialties in many restaurants, fancy or not, including O Nobre, O Funil, Verdemar, Pap’Açorda, the Solar dos Presuntos... For true addicts, of course, the Casa do Bacalhau. Heck, I’ve even had a very good bacalhau à brás while watching the fado show at A Severa! One last, repetitive (sorry!) but important point: acquired taste or not, bacalhau is the soul of Portuguese cookery, so that anyone who skips bacalhau will simply not understand the gist of Portugal 'à table'!

I am sure you are excellent technically, Simon, and a very capable chef. In my first post I was just sincerely amazed about your basic point: that you had no inkling about the cooking traditions in the land you were working in. I know I tend to sound kind of rough, but my point was said very earnestly: on your off days (few and far between, I know), hit the good-but-not-great regional restaurants right around you that specialize in 'cuisine de terroir', chat (in a mixture of languages if need be) with the cooks, learn about the basic sauces of peasant Catalan cuisine (picada, romescu and all i oli), get a couple of tips on such things as local sausage making (very important!) and on the Catalan tradition of using fruit for savory dishes, jump over the shallow mountain range east of Sant Celoni and do likewise in a couple of coastal places like Arenys de Mar where fish and shellfish 'de petits bateaux', as they say in France, dominate the scene... Get a feel for what the locals eat, have a little chat with Santi on what his mother used to cook (tell him Victor de la Serna suggested this), and goodness, for $8 plus shipping costs, you can get in a week's time a copy of Marimar Torres' and Gerald Asher's 'The Catalan Country Kitchen', which is chock full of valuable information! Cheers.

Well, being a chef de partie with no idea about the culinary roots of the country surrounding you is mindblowing to me. My 23 year-old nephew is now a chef de partie at Mugaritz, and despite his lack of Basque roots and the absence of purely traditional dishes in Andoni Luis Aduriz's kitchen he certainly knows what porrusalda, 'koxkera' codfish and leek-blood sausage are! Re "no matter how much recon I've done, things are different in the trenches" - yes, but when they're really different is when you've done no recon at all! At any rate, a few basic pickings on Catalan cuisine: From Totally Spain's web site: "In Catalonia good eating is a matter of priority for most. Catalonian cuisine, which has been subject to so many influences, is sophisticated, flavoursome and varied. Fish and seafood are always fresh, and sausages and meats are of the best quality. This cuisine features delectable cold dishes like esqueixada (desalted cod salad), escalivada (roast aubergines, onions and red peppers) and xató (curly endive lettuce, cod and anchovies). Most popular dishes in Catalan gastronomy are butifarra (Catalan sausage with beans), longaniza (local spiced sausage) and fuet (a delicious type of salami). In addition, Catalonia is one of Spain’s great wine-growing regions and where its most popular beverage is the champagne-like cava (sparkling wine)." More, from the Catalonian autonomous government: http://www10.gencat.net/gencat/AppJava/en/...ple/cuisine.jsp A link on the great late-winter tradition of calçots (baby scallions): http://www.tertuliaonline.com/culture/arti...les/CALCOTS.asp Catalonian cuisine in English-language cookbooks: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...=glance&s=books Finally, on the llenega negra (Hygrophorus latitabundus, a.k.a. H. limacinus), whose season is right now, a few recipes (in Catalan) from restaurants specializing in fungal cookery, which is one of the great glories of Catalonia's cuisine every fall and spring: http://www.gremihostaleriabergueda.com/cui...articipants.htm

We journalists tend to go on assignment to a new place after having amassed tons of information about that place. I now realize that cooks don't act the same way. So you're doing your stage in Sant Celoni but you could indifferently be doing it in Saint Petersburg (there's one in Russia and another one in Florida), huh? My advice: get yourself a Catalan cookbook, and use some of your free time around the Montseny to eat at humble local eateries like La Costa (La Costa del Montseny) or Can Barrina (at Montseny), enjoy a couple of things you'll taste nowhere outside Spain (including some of the wild mushrooms, especially the llenega negra), and get a taste of it all yourself.

Fusion has been with us forever, Bux. Potatoes and tomatoes and beans from the Americas were fused onto our European diets and recipes three or four centuries ago, and France's classic 'canard à l'orange' is a fusion dish because the concept for an orange sauce came from China. Tempura is a fusion element in Japanese cuisine, because coating-and-frying was taught to them by Portuguese and Spanish missionaries 300 years ago; in return, the Japanese taught Basque fishermen how to cook squid in its own 'ink', something that had never been done in Europe or the Mediterranean basin, and squid ink in turn became a strong component in the modern Spanish ways of preparing fish. Modern communication has just facilitated and speeded up things immensely - and made stupid forms of fusion also immensely more frequent. But when well done, I think any combination can work very well, even if half the idea comes from Mexico and the other half from Thailand. My colleague Rafael García Santos is a rabid enemy of any fusion, but then when faced with a rice dish where the Japanese influence just screams out at you, I've seen him say it's fine, it's not really fusion, it's culinary talent... When Alberto Chicote of No-Do in Madrid does a tataki of barely seared red tuna on a bed of 'ajoblanco', the Andalusian garlic-and-almond 'white gazpacho', he is just making a great dish. Fusion or no fusion. In general, in Spain we have no prejudice about anything from abroad that may either combine with or accompany one of our traditional staples or raw materials. If it works together, bring it on. Bad cooks will do it badly, but then they're bad cooks, aren't they?

Atrio is a spectacular restaurant in the lovely medieval town of Cáceres, between Madrid and Lisbon, and a Wine Spectator Grand Award recipient for its mindblowing wine list. Extremely refined modern cooking; just one Michelin star, which again reinforces my point that Michelin takes great care of the Basque Country, Catalonia and Spain's seaside resort areas, but neglects or underestimates inland Spain: Atrio is at a similar level with Las Rejas. Fatéma Hal was an anthropologist before she became a professional cook and opened the very successful Mansouria restaurant in Paris. She is known as the great researcher of the Moroccan culinary heritage. Morocco, our neighbor to the south, is one of the great sources of admiration and inspiration for fusion-minded Spanish chefs along with their – rather less unusual - other sources: Italy, Japan, Thailand, Mexico and of course France. One of the strong points of José Carlos Capel's Madrid Fusión concept is a powerful international base, which reflects the openness and lack of isolationism in today's culinary scene in Spain. This is both significant and singular - Europe's Latin countries (France, Italy, Portugal) tend to focus on their own bellybuttons when it comes to culinary (and vinous) matters, and Spain has somewhat broken that pattern. José Carlos has one terrific adviser on the international scene, Juan Manuel Bellver, a young journalist who has dined in literally every great restaurant in the world. Last year they brought in Pierre Gagnaire (France), Marc Veyrat (France), Michel Bras (France), Tetsuya Wakuda (Australia), Alfonso Iaccarino (Italy), Heinz Winkler (Germany), Patricia Quintana (Mexico), Tasanai Phian-o-Pas (Thailand), Gönul Paksoy (Turkey), Hiroo Miki (Japan) and Charlie Trotter (USA). Plus the top Spanish chefs, of course. This year they have, in addition to Fatéma Hal, Heston Blumenthal (UK), Carlo Cracco (Italy), Carlo Cerrato (Italy), Alain Llorca (France), Hervé This (France), Yves Mattagne (Belgium), Nobu Matsuhisa (should we say... The World?), Marcus Samuelsson (USA) and Charles Tjessem (Norway), the winner of the 2003 Bocuse d’Or award. Last year they honored the founders of ‘nouvelle cuisine’: Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard and Pierre Troisgros, and this year they have organized a tribute to the greatest of these guys’ pupils since the 1970s: Joël Robuchon (France), Frédy Girardet (Switzerland), Alain Senderens (France), Michel Roux (UK), Gualtiero Marchesi (Italy), Juan Mari Arzak (Spain) and Pedro Subijana (Spain) will all be on hand. I don’t want to miss that – these guys really revealed to me what great cuisine was like, way back when... Arzak will be doing double duty as a lecturer-demonstrator amid a strong group of Spanish cooks, from the established stars (Ferran Adrià, Hilario Arbelaitz, Martín Berasategui, Ruscalleda) to the newer guys: Carlos Abellán (Comerç 24, Barcelona), Raúl Aleixandre (Ca Sento, Valencia), Alberto Chicote (No-Do, Madrid), Aitor Elizegi (Gamíniz, near Bilbao), Joaquín Felipe (Europa, Madrid), Francis Paniego (Echaurren, La Rioja). The specialized workshops are also a pretty good Madrid Fusión feature. This year: ‘the future of catering’; ‘the best breakfast in the world’; ‘wine and cheese, harmonies and failures’; ‘computerized restaurant management’; ‘the secrets of Ibérico ham’; ‘the world of chocolate: varieties and textures’; 'Cuban cigars’; ‘rice dishes of the world: the main techniques’; ‘an insight into malt whisky’. Plus a couple of blind wine tastings including one of ‘ world class superstars’; last year, Dominus 1995 beat out Pétrus 1996. The fact that Christian Moueix owns both does not diminish the feat of a Napa wine dominating the best from Bordeaux and the rest of the world! By the way: I think admission (500 participants was the maximum attendance allowed) is now closed, so this is obviously not spam for them... (Unfortunately, the wine tastings are not open to all participants... )

Their web site is now up and running: http://www.madridfusion.net/

Er... sorry, Elissa, but Carme Ruscalleda and Fatéma Hal are, well... women. Not a bad representation in a profession that is still 95% the fiefdom of men.

Check out the program, from Adrià to Blumenthal, put together by my good friend José Carlos Capel, the restaurant critic for El País: http://www.e-restauracion.com/madridfusion2004.html

After all the subtle hints, why do I get the vague impression that blind lemon didn't like MB all that much and seems keen on letting everyone be sure of that fact?.........

You had bad luck. I've never eaten in more than two hours at Las Rejas - and it's a frequent stop for me between Madrid and my 'agribusiness'!

Yes, Andoni Luis Aduriz should get a better rating from Michelin, but it will be difficult for him to get a "far better" one! He already has two stars, so there's just one step up the red book's ladder left for him to climb...

Yes, we like to eat a lot faster than the French do. That's a fact. It's often a problem with foreign clients. This from Josep Pedrell, the chef-owner of the delightful Joan Gatell restaurant in Cambrils, south of Barcelona - one of the greatest spots for smackingly fresh seafood-based traditional Catalan cuisine: "We serve a lunch here in little more than one hour. But the moment I hear French spoken or a French accent when someone occupies a table, I warn the kitchen staff, 'Attention, French at table 15!' They automatically know what to do: we will not serve them lunch in less than two hours. Otherwise, the French will feel cheated. They don't understand anything but a very leisurely meal when in a restaurant gastronomique." The French are right, no doubt; we are way too impatient, we gobble up food. But we Spaniards come from a society where, less than 50 years ago, many people were still on a survival diet amongst great poverty. And it takes centuries for the habits of newfound prosperity and culture to take hold...

I personally don't consider Las Rejas as a definite three-star place (yet), but absolutely two stars, which it doesn't even get from Michelin. The drab surroundings contribute to the entirely original atmosphere, in my view, but I'd think Manolo should move elsewhere to really get a crack at three stars, the way Michelin's collective mind works. He's had opportunities (like that of taking over Zalacain in Madrid, once a three-star restaurant itself), but he doesn't seem to be prepared for the big time pressures.

That's also why, when all is said and done, I'm more satisfied with modern cuisine with a sense of place and roots (say Santi Santamaria, Manolo de la Osa) than with one with no such sense at all, with the possible exception of Ferran Adrià's and sometimes (only sometimes) Pierre Gagnaire's cuisine, where the sheer genius can be satisfying enough on its own. It's not just that cookery should not be cut off from its environment, it's also the fact that it would be foolhardy to ignore, a) that some intriguing ingredients can only be found locally in their pristine form, and b) that over the centuries, or maybe just a few decades, the locals have developed an intimate knowledge of those local ingredients and developed eminently interesting techniques for cooking or presenting them. Some people say that today anything is available anywhere, so that looking for local ingredients and techniques is lamentably passé. Well, it's simply not true. Looking at the sorry condition of Spanish cheeses like torta del Casar, irremediably dried out in a fridge at New York's Dean & DeLuca's, I have wondered how the experience must have been for someone who, reading Sam Gugino's alluring reports on Spanish cheese in the Wine Spectator, had tried that sad memory of what once was a fine, almost liquid cheese. Then there's your suckling pig in Estella: it's probably a different breed, and done differently, than the 'lechona' (a female suckling pig) that Manolo cooks for hours over very low heat at Las Rejas. Or from a suckling pig in Segovia, the 'suckling pig capital of the world'. Different gustatory sensations within one country, with what on the surface is the same dish. Of course, now that we're in the fall, this is exacerbated by seasonal produce: how to describe the aroma of milky agarics (Lactarius deliciosus) being grilled over a wood fire in Catalonia, or the sweetly chewy texture of an omelet stuffed with 'setas de cardo' (Pleurotus eryngii) in a Castilian mountain inn? You have to be there and taste it there. Dried cod is, indeed, another thing: this can travel perfectly to the remotest corner of the world, and sometimes perfectly cooked cod dishes can be tasted in modest Portuguese inns in New Jersey. Still, it's in Lisbon or Coimbra, with a bottle of fragrant alvarinho-based Vinho Verde or with a more substantial white from the Douro, that the dish will really sing. When I travel, except on 24-hour lightning trips where I try to eat at the single most interesting restaurant, be it modern or not, I always mix (at least one-to-one) modern places with traditional ones in any part of the world. Otherwise, the experience would be an incomplete one for me. Yesterday I took an Italian friend to the venerable Lhardy restaurant, which has been open in Madrid since 1839, and where locals often forget to go because, like the Prado Museum, it's both so unchanging and so available that it's left to the tourists (how often do New Yorkers climb up the stairs to the top of the Statue of Liberty?) Well, there's also the local crowd of addicts to 'cocido madrileño' (the Madrid 'pot-au-feu') - it's one of their specialties. I hadn't been there in at least five or six years. Well, the cocido was delectable, with the perfectly tender chick peas (not an easy feat, that), and the lovingly preserved surroundings (the small Japanese dining room, where 150 years ago Queen Isabel II spent some torrid after-lunch hours with a few of her lovers) combining with the food and a couple of glasses of Rioja to make a foreigner penetrate the skin of this city better than he or she would have been able to anywhere else. And that's also part of a restaurant's experience...