Steve Plotnicki

Actually I like Della Femina very much. They have one of the best steaks in the extended metropolitan area that they dry age on the premises. Much of their other food is very good too. Mr's P. and I typically eat there once a week during the summer. Nick & Toni's used to be good 2-3 summers ago. But the quality of the food has deteriorated over the last two years. But it's still a fun place to have dinner at. None of the other places are very good, save for the steak at The Red Bar in Southampton which is also top notch. Peconic Coast went out of business last summer, and I haven't been to the Laundry for 10 years though people tell me it's good now so I have to try it. Round Swamp Farm is a fabulous place. Though it's not close to where I live, Mrs. P and I often make the trip. But I heard that Villa Maria changed hands last year and the food isn't the same anymore. The fish and meat at Citarella, depending on the cut, are better then the same at Wainscott and Dreesen's. It pains me to say that because I'd like it not to be true, especially since I know Rudy at Dressens' for nearly 20 years, and you couldn't find a better person in the entire world, but unfortunately it is true. I live quite close to the Seafood Shop in Wainscott and I travel to East Hampton because the fish is typically better and fresher at Citarella.

Tony, Tony, Tony, you have to respond to what I've said in the context of how I made the statements. I said Indian food overspices for the western palate. And if you read what I said about it in the various threads, you would see that everytime I raise the issue it is in the context of the cuisine being more successful in restaurants in the west. I have also said that in the struggle between cultures of cooking, and the Indian way of spice being the centerpiece of the meal as opposed to the proteins, that Indian cuisine will conform to western standards. But nowhere do I say that Indian food is crap. You want to extrapolate that beause I couch the comparison in terms of flaws. You want to take my use of the word "inferior," because I say that a spice based cuisine is an inferior culinary concept and say that I am calling the food crap. That's all nonsense. I love Indian food and I eat it all of the time, relative to the quality that is available to me. But that doesn't mean on an evaluation of it's culinary merit, it isn't flawed and it doesn't mean that it isn't more then glorified home cooking. I wish you could talk to the many friends I have who refuse to go out to eat Indian or Thai food. In fact, Mrs. P and I realized that we had only one other couple we were friendly with who like to eat Indian food. And we don't go eat Thai food because Mrs. P hates it! And it isn't that these people don't like to eat or don't know good food or don't know how to cook. They do. I don't think you quite understand how big a hurdle Indian food has to leap over to be something other then an overspiced ethnic cuisine to many, and possibly most diners. You live in London where a large percentage of the population is from the sub-continent. It's not like that anywhere in the world. Chinese cuisine in the U.S. used to be marginalized this way. But what changed that, and what caused a resurgance of Chinese cuisine was the huge influx of people from Hong Kong. They brought their banquet cuisine with them and there were dozens upon dozens of new dishes to try that nobody every heard of before. And not only did that happen, but small, regional restaurants from unusual proivinces in China opened as well. It was a complete and total reinvention of Chinese cuisine in America. This phenomenon has not happened with Indian cuisine. Because despite the huge influx of immigration from the sub-continent, the menus still revolve around tandoori chicken and lamb curry. So I'd know you would like to call my "judgements," "sweeping generalizations," but they are a lot more considered then you give them credit for. I am a pretty keen observer of what is happening on the food scene. And when I make a statement about it, it's based on what I have heard and often experienced myself. People make this cuisine thing so much harder then it is. If Tibetan cuisine is bad, then we should just say it's bad. No sugar coating. And if eating it depends on understanding some unsual taste that needs to be acquired because it is too subtle for the untrained palate to appreciate, then lets hear about it. But let's not confuse it being good with our wanting it to be good because we have some type of empathy for the Tibetan people. All of this talk of a vegetarian society and ancient etc., it's all nonsense. It either tastes good or it doesn't taste good. And if you don't know whose definition of taste good we use, it's what the preponderance of knowldgeable people in the west say about it. And you know why the west? Because Fat Guy is a western style restaurant reviewer writing for a western style readership. Most cuisines are preceded by their reputation. I'm of the school that believes that if Dutch cuisine was so good, or German cuisine was, or African cuisine was, there would be literature telling us to get on a plane to go eat in those places. If you didn't know this already, there isn't literature like that. And if you want to know the reason why that is, it's because most people I meet who have come back from those places report that the food is crap. I have yet to meet the person who travelled to Holland, Germany, Czech Republic, Phillipines, Russia, sub-Saharan Africa excluding South Africa, and many other places who came home and said, "yum delicious." They all say the same thing. Bad food, if you are going for the food, don't go. So don't pin the sweeping generalizations on me, I believe that most of the gastronomic world feels the same way about these places. As to why certain cuisines turned out the way they did, who cares? Yes it is interesting to discuss as a matter of anthropology, but what does that have to do with reviewing whether the food tastes good? When I go to New England and have clam chowder, should I take into account that the settlers of the U.S. brought the English fish house tradition with them as a way to mitigate that my soup is bland? Anecdotal information about food is only a method of explaining why it tastes good or bad. But it doesn't make the food taste any better or worse. That is a sensory perception issue. And if you allow your sensory perceptions to be compromised by external issues, that is called a bias. Oraklet - This is an excellent point. One of the things the French did that made their cuisine so successful was to concentrate on the concept of sensual pleasures. That was previously a taboo, and stayed a taboo in other cultures for quite a long time. In fact some cultures haven't rid themselves of it.

That sounds like a hell of a good sandwich. Just the blue cheese seems a little out of place.

Yech is also very good. Keep up the good work. How about Emily's in Northville or Lark in West Bloomfield for French or Annam in Dearborn for Vietnamese?

India Girl - It warmed my heart to read this. Actually what did you eat, blood sausage? Tell me though, and let's be honest, how good is the food out in AA? What are the chances of finding good Transylvanian food? Or Carpathian food? Or how about the really hard question, can you find good TV or CP food in TV and CP?

But they obviously do because otherwise they would ignore it . And what I said on the merits was true. Your original post could have just as easily been about Dutch cuisine. If it was, the odds that someone would have refuted you by naming delicious foods are not very good. Rather, they quickly rush down the sociological, anthropological and political road and defend it on every basis other then how people generally think the food tastes. Read back through this thread. Lots of defending the Dutch, no explanation of why Dutch cuisine is any good.

Because they are afraid you are going to say this about them; So far on this thread, the sweeping generalizations, as have been on all of the threads, are by the people who feel uncomfortable making judgements about cuisines. My question is, why can't people be realistic about cuisine? My assessment of where gefilte fish stands in the world of culinaria is a pretty accurate assessment. As to where quenelles stand as well. Why do people resent that analysis? They always want to draw the inference that the conclusion of the analysis is that gefilte fish is unenjoyable when it doesn't do that at all. With all the complaining, you hear all types of arguing but very little argument that says, no, such and such a cuisine is really delicious. But you do hear plenty of excuses. If you look at it this way, and if you understood their economic plight, and if you understand they walk 14 miles a day, and if you were invited to a very wealthy home, and they possibly have a genetic defect in how they smell things, blah, blah, blah...... All excuses with no meat on the bones. Nobody is able to say the food tastes good. With all of my having a go at Dutch food, there wasn't a single defense other then herring stands on street corners. This is what someone wants to put forward as the defense to a proffer that says the cuisine is lousy. Why can't people just say the cuisine is lousy and they should fix it?

I wish this wasn't true. I once spent the better part of an evening trying to find a place in Basel that makes choucroute. We couldn't find a single one. Eventually we found a tavern type of place that had had sausages and saurkraut as a side dish, but nothing like Choucroute. Since Basel is in German speaking Switzerland, the style of food they ate was completely Germanic. Not Alsatian, and not like the French part of Switzerland, Germanic. Three very different places with three very different cultures, cuisines, and ingredients that go into their cuisines. There is a reason that countless Brits put their cars on Eurostar every weekend and shop in Calais or Boulogne. Supermarkets in Britain do not carry the same food. And restaurants in Britain do not serve the same food either. For a very long time, all that seperated them was a short ferry ride. Then a 30 minute hovercraft. Now a train that takes 20 minutes. There was never a reason for the two places to have two different cuisines, using completely different ingredients that were sourced from seperate places. Yet they are like night and day. I'm afraid all of this cultural segregationism about European history is unfortunate but true. And even now with the EU and no taxation on shipping ingredients across borders, they still buy thir wheat flour in Spain from a Spanish source and end up with an average product, when you simply can walk across the border to a boulangerie in France and the bread is delicious.

If this was true, the world would be one sorry place to live in. Fortunately, the world only acts like this is true and it exploits the fallacy of it all for profit. Fortunately there are those of us who know better. Not at all. I would like there to be a clear and bright line between good tasting food, and bad tasting food. It's my part in the effort to eliminate the bad tasting food from the world. This is wrong. The difference only becomes a "flaw" in the way you are using it, if it is genetic. Hopefully, whatever cultural issues have ailed the Dutch palate are now being corrected. In fact a few young Dutch chefs have published cookbooks about their cuisine. That's a start.

Possible but not really relevant. I haven't said that gefilte fish isn't good. I have pointed out that gefilte fish is disappearing. I have also pointed out that is hasn't been accepted beyond its own religious base. And the inference I draw is that it isn't as good as other fish mousee type dishes. And it isn't as if I tasted them both and I thought the world was missing the boat on gefilte fish that I wouldn't say so. But I happen to agree. A good quenelle is a sensual thing. A good piece of gefilte fish never transcends a sort of rustic home style cooking. Alas I suspect that German pork as good as it is, will not sway me. I mean it's pork . Actually what they do have in Germany that is great is Asparagus. One of the great simple meals in my life was in a tavern in the outskirts of Stutgart with a bunch of large stalks of white asparagus.

Yvonne - Two different things. Specific tastes that are part of enculturation have nothing to do with whether fish is high quality and tastes fresh or not. The Japanese want the tuna from Montauk because the quality is high and the fat content is high. In that instance, there is a universal taste that measures if it is good or not. But yes if we were speaking about natto, an acquired taste, that would fall under your scenario. Repeat after me; 1) In food there is no absolute truth and as a result 2) You can't prove anything by the exceptions. And for that reason, 3) You have to start with a premise that cuts across all genres of food so, 4) A chicken is a chicken is a chicken and, 5) A fresh chicken of high quality tastes good in NYC, Paris, Bombay, Singapore and Peking so, 6) Everybody knows and is in general agreement as to what a good tasting chicken is and what a bad tasting chicken is Most food that sucks revolves around bad tasting chickens. And I am just using that as a metaphor for bad ingredients. In fact the countries that consistantly use high quality ingredients in the vast majority of places you would eat in can probably be counted on two sets of hands. That's why this exercise isn't all that diificult. You go to Singapore and the Hainanese chicken is of good quality or it's not. There is nothing relative about quality. It is completely objective. But, one has to know how to detect it. I find it hard to believe that the Dutch are physiologically inferior or flawed in any way. It has to be a function of enculturation that was probably derived from religious values. Most eating habits are. You can convince me that Catholics have a greater tradition at the table then Protestatnts do, but you are going to have a very hard time convincing me that it is because Protestants are genetically inferior or flawed somehow. I just won't wear that.

Now you're getting desperate. I didn't say that gefilte fish was bad, only that it isn't good enough to transcend the unique parameters of the cultural and socio-economic construct that created it. Pastrami doesn't seem to be falling prey to the same obstacles. And these days, people eat bagels at bible meetings in Idaho. Gefilte fish does not share that type of popularity and acceptance. Gefilte fish is a dying dish. It is a staple of orthodox Jewish homes (especially ones that use talking fish .) But you will find it in less observant Jewish homes only around the high holidays and at Passover. Less observant Jews eat things like quenelles, fish mousse, Chinese fish balls etc. the rest of the year. You know why? BECAUSE THEY TASTE BETTER THEN GEFILTE FISH DOES It is really that simple. Do they not taste better to you? Are you going to tell me that gefilte fish tastes as good as the best fish mousse or the best quenelles? Unfortunatelty it doesn't. And I wish it did because both my mother and grandmother made some pretty good gefilte fish, that they served with Manischevitz. Too bad they didn't know how to make a nice fish mousse from something like Pike and Crayfish and serve it with a Sancerre. No that's not it. Jews are willing to adopt two different standards when they dine. One is based on their own unique cuisine and one based on a universal standard of what tastes good. Unfortunately, this is a cultural impairment. a compromise that we live with. That is why I find some of the arguments people are making, like Adam's and Yvonne's, that come from a liberal perspective, sort of odd. From a political perspective I would very much like to agree with them. But giving things a long and honest look, I just can't. You can find a very good tasting gefilte fish but it is what it is. It is a not particulary graceful fish dumpling made from fish that has been put through a meat grinder. I wish a more graceful version existed, one that was minced by hand by chefs who developed a great proficiency at mincing the fish so the dumpling would have a certain refinement to its texture. But nobody had or has the imagination to do that. If you want to ask an interesting question, that is the one. The difference between gefilte fish and a quenelle is pretty much how they grind the fish up. Jews were happy with a course grind and a coarse tasting dumpling. Was it because their life was hard? The French on the other hand made a fish mousse to be cooked in the shape of a log and then sliced into rounds. The end result was smooth as a babies ass. Metaphor for good life that goes along smoothly? Certainly the Jews could have figured out a better way, a way to improve gefilte fish beyond rustic home cooking. But they didn't. Why didn't they do that? To say they liked their cuisine the way it was is a bad answer as far as I'm concerned and is at the heart of relativism in food. Bad food or self-imposed limits on cuisine cannot be excused because they were the result of some type of culturalism. That is xenophpbic and exclusionary because culinary culture should not be limited to what we curerently know, as well as who currently practices it. And most importantly, it shouldn't be constrained by race, regligion, politics or anything else. Yes, yes and yes. The ingredients in Belgium are superior to the ingredients available in Holland. Same with France and Germany right acoss the river. Same with Spain and Portugal. Most countries get food though a centralized food wholesaling system in their own country. The Dutch are supplied through their own market system which specializes in the food they like to eat.

I happen to like Yassa and think it's a good dish. But I dare you to find one prepared well and with good quality ingredients. Maybe you can in Paris but in this country? And I got the bit about the stews from the review of Jessica Harris's book online. That column claims that she claims that the cuisine is mostly stews. Why wouldn't it be? Moroccan cuisine is stews in large part? You keep confusing the concept of cuisine and what it is, and how people prepare the cuisine we are discussing. Flemish food and French derived Belgian food both taste good because the ingredient base is the same for each. But cross the border into Holland and the quality of the ingredients drops five fold or more. Why does that happen? Or why does the quality of the food drop so drastically when you cross the Rhine from Mulhouse into Basel. A footbridge seperates delicious food from German mediocrity. Why is that? You can hardly find a choucroute once you cross that river. You know there is no reason that 99.9% of the bangers you eat should taste like shite. There should be a way to fabricate delicious ones. But that's not the issue. The issue is why the typical one you get in even a good place in London is so dread awful. And to tell me, a foreign visitor to London, that if I went to Lidgate's in Holland Park and bought their home-made bangers and were able to cook them up in my posh Notting Hill or Holland Park house (I would have those pumpkin colored walls they all seem to have,) they would be great, that is not a responsive answer to the question of are the bangers any good in London. Yvonne - Well on one of the other threads, someone commented that there is no such thing as universal taste. I disagree. There is universal taste. People are rarely in disagreement about what tastes good. So when you assess a communion wafer, it gets measured against that standard. But don't take what I just said to mean that any single person has tasted everything. That's not what I meant. But a delicious tasting fish in NYC is a delicious tasting fish in Singapore. We all know what fresh and high quality fish is supposed to taste like. This is something different. Acquired tastes are different then bad tastes. Just because some things taste bad unless you learn how to appreciate them, doesn't make them bad things. Bad things will never be appreciated. Take margarine. Will that ever be good? Will non-dairy creamer ever be good? Will those contaminated vegetables my wife had in Bolivia ever be good? Wine is one of those things that at the beginning taste bad to some people but with practice can taste good. But the problem with wine appreciation is that most wines, especially wines bought in restaurants are drunk too young. When you drink young wines, all you taste is tannic acid and the wood from the barrels the wine was aged in. You usually taste very little fruit. So on it's face, the taste of wine can be offputting. In order to taste wine properly, you have to be drinking wines that are typically 10 years old. And in some instances, 30 years old. Wines that are younger then that are drunk more for evaluation of their future quality rather then for pleasure. Where I agree with you is that people are taught to drink wines that aren't ready yet and they believe they should like them even though they do not taste very good. That is a cultural construct because there is no real way for a novice to objectively measure how delicious the wine will turn out. But when the wine is mature, I don't think anyone would need any knowledge to be able to tell a delicious wine from a bad wine. Sure there are some wines that are more diffificult to understand because they have a certain type of complexity to them. But you don't need to be a rocket scientist to like ripe, sweet fruit that is balanced with the right amount of acid.

Sugiyama has a great way to prepare shumeji mushrooms. They just throw an entire piece of mushroom directly into boiling oil. No breading or coating of any kind. They don't let it cook for too long, just long enough so the outside of the muchroom gets a bit shrivele. And then they sprinkle some salt on it while it is draining. The end product is a great combination of a slighly tough exterior with a soft and warm interior that gives two different kind of mushroom flavors as well. It's a good combination of textures and flavors.

But this is not fair. I never said Indian cuisine sucked. I like Indian cuisine and think it's a great cuisine. But, it does have limitations because of the way the cuisine is prepared. As to the rest, I can't speak for Tibetan cuisine because I never have had it. But Senegalese seems to be based on relatively simple stews, i.e., it is an unsophisticated cuisine, and the food in Holland is world famous for being crap. But the issue isn't whether you can get a good meal in Holland, Tibet or Senegal, you probably could. But will you? I was just in Amsterdam two months ago. We ate at a mediterranean bistro one night and the food was fine enough. The second night we wanted a riijstafel. So I bought a guidebook and tried to book a table at the highest rated place but they were already full. So I booked a table at one of the famous classic ones that has been in business for 20 years and is on the fashionable shopping street, and which was rated slightly lower then my first choice. That night on our way into dinner, we ran into friends of ours in the lobby of our hotel, he being a famous movie director. They were in town for the opening of one of his movies. They had a reservation at the first place we tried to get a table at. They call the restaurant and are able to increase their reservation to four people so we go with them. The food was pretty good, nothing unbelievable, but fine enough Indonesian cuisine. Later that week I saw them in Paris. They told me that the next night the studio that was releasing the film took them to dinner at the place I was originally booked at. The "classic" place on the fashionable shopping street. They said it was so awful. Food cooked in what they called rancid oil. But the Dutch people there were raving about the food. Low standards are just what they are. Low standards. Some people just have crap taste. Why they have it is a question that is outside of the one that asks, do they have it? I agree it's puzzling when entire societies seem to have crap taste but it is frightfully true. Drive through America and see what people accept as good food. It is absolutely horrid. Margerine, non-dairy creamer, poor quality baked goods, chickens injected with hormones and antibiotics, vegetables washed with chemicals and raised in a way where they have no color and no taste, frozen fish that is watery and has no flavor, all called delicious by the locals inhabitants. Preference can not, and should not, be a reasonable explanation that excuses their culinary incompetence on the part of the people who prepare the food or the people who eat it. Nice try. My post goes to the ability of the Dutch to be objective about their own cuisine, and to request wholesale changes that improve it. It does not make any assertion that Dutch people can't tell good food when they eat it, only that they are willing to accept their own bad food on a daily basis. Jews do the same sort of thing don't they? Who would go back to gefilte fish after eating one of the more sophisticated chopped fish preparations like quenelles or Chinese or Italian fish balls? People who have come to appreciate something in a cultural context that's who. Non-Jews are not seeking out gefilte fish which is a big clue. But they are seeking out bagels, and pastrami, and Jewish style chopped liver, all things that are good outside of their original reason for existing.

Well you can draw any inference you want, but I am quite confident that the proper inference to draw is that they have a culinary deficiency and that is why they eat crap food. Same for the Brit's who eat deep fried haggis and nagers fill of cereal, and same for the people who prefer McDonald's. over a nice, fresh, juicy and properly grilled hamburger. People are willing to settle for crap food because they accept what's offered to them. And the reason they settle is they can't tell the difference. To say that their preference is what determines good and bad quality is relativism. Crap food is crap food. Either you know it or you don't. The Dutch, do not seem to know it and if they do, they don't seem to care. "Tastes good" is only a vacuous statement to people who have no sense of taste. You can ask 50 million Europeans how the food tastes in Belgium, France or Italy and they will tell you great. And they will also tell you the food in Britain and Holland tastes like crap. Everyone seems to know what good food tastes like within a reasonable range. That standard isn't changed because people grew up with inferior cuisines so they got to like bad food as a matter of habit. The standard for measure is all food. Anything else is relativism.

They believe the food they are served is good enough. That very same food would be rejected in other countries. That they are happy eating what they eat can only be attributed to, can't tell the difference, don't care about the difference. There is no other explanation I can see that makes any sense. Your explanation seems to be that there is some cultural reason their cuisine and palates developed the way it did, and therefore, they like their cuisine. I say that is relativism. Bulgarian classical composers who tried to write symphonic music are not judged against an intra-Bulgaraian standard, they are judged by a international standard that compares all composers of symphonic music. Same for cuisine. The standard is tastes good. The Dutch, for some reason, do not know, or do not care, what the phrase tastes good means. {i}Tastes good to them{/i} doesn't get us anywhere if the other 99% of the worlds population thinks it tastes like crap. To me this is just a fancy way of saying, it tastes good, or it doesn't taste good. And yes there are things you have to acquire a taste for. But there are some things and cuisines that are just plain awful. You can't confuse an assessment of a cuisine based on being acclimated to it with an objective view of the way it really tastes.

Tony - Nonsense. An understanding of a culture and their traditions does not make anything taste any better or worse. Taste is a function of quality and proficency of preparation. A standard that has no borders and sees through race and religion. Fat Guy's original question had to do with what a western restaurant reviewer would do when confronted with strange cuisines that peformed poorly in ethnic restaurants. Clearly the context is that this is information to be presented to readers who patronize other ethnic restaurants. Those readers have a universal standard they impose which measures cuisine(s). Anything to do with sociology, socio-economics, anthropology, while interesting as anecdotal information, has nothing to do with how the food tastes. Unless you are the restaurant reviewer for National Geographic. People just want to know if it tastes good or not. This is just more relativism. When someone says that a cuisine is good or bad, or executed well or poorly, they are making a statement based on what is generally available in restaurants. What is available in a ski-resort town that is populated by transient foreigners who are a captured audience is bound to suck, and is not a good example of anything. But I feel like you keep mixing up two different things. Provencal cuisine can be delicious. It is a well formulated cuisine that is logical in the way it uses ingredients. And the end result has a purpose that is intended to showcase the best characteristics of the ingredients. But go to the Vauclause and the food in the restaurants in the region is resolutely mediocre, and sometimes even worse. I have never found a holiday to that region to be enjoyable gastronomically. I always leave disappointed. And I always tell people that the food in the region isn't very good. But all of that has nothing to do with the fact that a daube, when prepared properly, can be a great dish. The cuisine from the region is great cuisine, but the actual food in the region is not up to the quality you get in most other places in France. Two different things. Wilfrid - When my recording company was open in London, our Benelux based distributor had someone who ran their Amsterdam office, a very tall Dutch guy by the name of Wally. Sweet guy. One time he came to my office in Manhattan on a business trip. I had never been to Holland but heard many a tale about how the food was shite. So I cornered him and grilled him about the food. No matter how I asked it, the answer to my question about whether you could find any good food in Holland was no. And I was trying not to take no for an answer! I kept asking him that surely their must be someplace, and he would just shake his head and cut me off and say no. People liking bad food because it is what they grew up with is no excuse. Good food results as a matter of people being proactive about it. If people demand better quality food, and are willing to pay for it, that's what the suppliers will offer them. And if they are happy eating deep fried haggis, that's what they will get. And the reason the Dutch don't eat as well as the Belgians is because they don't know the difference.

Tony - I'm sorry you have to frame it in terms of race. I don't see what race has to do with something tasting good or not. It is sad that everytime we try and evaluate a cuisine on the merits, somebody has to make excuses for the ones that are poor cuisines. Imposing a non-culinary standard on food evaluation is relativism no matter how you cut it. The only way anyone will ever eat better is to point out that the food they might find acceptable, is not very good. That is how standards get improved. Otherwise the world is happy eating one big deep fried haggis. It is necessary if it is true. It is the truth that will set you free. And the statement doesn't purport to say that you can't find a good meal in Austria, it just gives a generalized overview of the cuisine that one will most likely find when they go there. Only delicious counts. the original question was about restaurant reviewing. Do you think the standard for restaurant reviewing is going to change? Yes we can see Jay Raynor now tell his readers to travel to sub-Sahara Africa for "healthy and nutritious" meals, which might be delicious if you happen to find the right cook but might also be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Pan - The phenomenon of the food being dramatically different when you cross borders is one that has puzzled me more then once. Just look at Belgium and Holland? The food is phenomenol in Belgium and poor in Holland. And they used to be the same country less then 150 years ago. That's why they probably split apart, the Belgians couldn't stand the Dutch dragging their cuisine down! Or cross the border from France into Spain and see how the quality of the bread detriorates in a few short miles. Ot drive from Italy into Switzerland and the culinary standard changes.

Extremism? I'll remember that the next time I'm eating something delicious. That it's extremely delicious.

Lots of cuisines are poor cuisines. I don't mean poor as in lacking money, I mean poor as in concieved poorly and executed poorly. It has nothing to do with the parameters of how the cuisine came about. It solely has to do with how the food tastes. When we traveled through Austria many years ago, Mrs. P and I pretty much had to hold our noses everytime we went into a restaurant. That's because they cook with lard, not a particularly good quality lard either if you ask me. Even in high class restaurants. Every meal we ate in that country was horrible. We couldn't wait to leave because the food was so rancid. And it wasn't me, this has been confirmed over the years by a number of my friends who have traveled there. There is going to be no more relativism regarding food. I am commited to striking it down in my lifetime. The faster everyone admits that crap food is crap, the faster we will all eat better food. And that goes for people in Africa too. You aren't doing them any favors by not being honest about the food they eat. If you really want to help them, speak the truth.

You are talking about Sociology and not cuisine. Cuisine either tastes good or it doesn't. You don't get a Pass Directly To Go card because you are from a poor society. My wife spent 6 months in South America, mostly in Bolivia, after she graduated from college and before she went to law school. She describes the food in Bolivia as "horrid." You couldn't eat anything that grew on the land because it was all contaminated. The fruits and vegetables would be black when harvested. But there were women who carried baskets of home made Sultanas (which are like Empanadas) and sold them on the street. To this day she talks about them as if they were one of most delicious things she ever ate. So delicious food is delicious food, and crap food is crap food. But she also talks about taking the train into Argentina from I believe Peru. You have to change trains at the border. She talks about how horrible the food was on one side of the border. But when you crossed into Argentina it was like coming into Switzerland with cafes everywhere and the most delicious cream filled pasrties. So let's not be relativists about what delicious food means. And while I understand that in many societies the people are so poor that they can't afford to begin to think about the concept of good food, that has no impact on whether the food they do eat is delicious or not. There are many poor societies in the world with delicious food that they are able to farm for sustenance. Or fish for etc. And there are wealthy societies with crap food like Holland. The two have nothing to do with each other. Fat Guy - I'll take that as a back-handed compliment!

Yes but they are two different cuisines. It just so happens that Senegelase is a blend of the two cuisines, most notably demonstrated by cous cous being part of their diet.

Oh you mean North African food. That I know. I go to eat it there all of the time. I was talking about sub-Saharan cuisine like Senegalese.

They must not be in the neighborhoods I frequent . In fact, even in the funky 11th, I can't remember seeing any. Which arrondisments are they in? Let's try this link; Djembe Online The restaurants seem to be in the 18th, where the clientele is probably significantly African, or there are two on the same street in the 11th. Then there is one in the 4th and one in the 13th. I'd hesitate to call that loads. And they seem to revolve around music more then food. World music in Paris is unbelievably popular. So that makes sense. But I never heard of anyone running out to eat the cuisine by itself. But maybe I'm missing something.