Steve Plotnicki

Only a little biographical information about someone/thing Toby raised. As an aside to this, and I don't know if you have ever seen this, many years ago, possibly 1975-1980, David Susskind had a talk show and his topic one week was Italian food in America. He had on Sirio from Le Cirque, Gianni from Bravo Gianni, the guy rom Primavera and a few more of the owners who created the entire Italian American genre. It's a great program and if you ever have a chwnce to see it you should. Anyway, back on topic.

Craig is right about the Italian-American cuisine. But aside from that, Nanni's was a good place when Nanni was alive. It was sort of the Italian version of the steak house Christ Cella. Very formal and businessman-like for an Italian restaurant. The prices must have been the highest in the city. Like $35 veal chops in the mid 80's.

I said famous pasta maker. Like Lionel Poillane, or Poujerain, but for pasta. Or an Italian chef (restaurant) who is famous for his pasta. Not a cookbook author who is writing about home cooking. The last famous pasta dish I know of was the Gualtieri Marchesi Raviolo Aperto which was a long time ago. That dish recieved international acclaim because it had gold plating on the top of the raviolo. By the way, the raviolo at San Domenico in NYC was once upon a time a famous pasta dish too. In France, every pasta bundle is called ravioli. Won Tons at Chinese restaurants are called raviolis. Even at Tan Dinh the Vietnamese restaurant, I believe their signature dish is called Ravioli de Crevettes avec Citronelle. Nothing beats homemade pasta.

It can only be one of two things. Your imagination or, there are different food distribution networks in each country. My kishkes tell me it's the latter. French restaurants buy from French wholesalers who get their food from Rungis etc. There must be a similar system in every country.

Lobster roll has nice flavor but is a bit watery I thought. The better item is the lobster knuckles. Hard to eat, but very rewarding meat (rhymin'). Good watch the day go by vibe at lunch. Even on a dreary day.

Well he was older then I am. So he had a better collection of older vintages, But I heard he had bad storage.

I have a better wine cellar than Franco had, He just had old Rioja. I have old Rioja and old Barolo. Not to mention those French wines.

It isn't that they don't impress me to be good, it's that the technique to make pasta isn't impressive compared to culinary technique you can experience that is impressive. Certainly you can understand that. Name the name of one famous pasta maker? There aren't any. And the reason is that anyone can do it. The technique you need to make great pasta isn't so original or demanding that there are unique talents in the field. And that is my standard. I don't really care what anyone is cooking and why. But I do want to eat meals prepared by unique talents. Just like I want to see music performed by unique musicians, or read books written by unique authors etc., etc., etc. That isn't an esoteric standard, it's a high standard. Bill - That was a nice try in blaming me for your bowing out. But let the record show that when asked to put forward the evidence to support your position, you didn't offer any. But I'm sure your a nice guy too. Let's go drink some old Barolo sometime. I've got some old Monfortino sitting around. Tony - That was a good post. Camille - And a poetic post. Craig - I'm happy that eating has changed in Italy. But what will really move this conversation forward are new dishes and the techniques they use to make them.

That's an easy one Claude. It's because when someone like me says that X is better then Y for the following reasons, people who are partial to Y hear that statement as saying, you shouldn't enjoy Y. And I have to admit, I'm guilty of that as well sometimes. Nobody likes to hear their favorite ending up in second place. What's funny about it (and I don't mean haha,) is that in a debate among French and Italian wines, a statement that says there are no greater wines then Burgundy and First Growth Bordeaux doesn't bring much consternation. But if you switch the topic to food, people lose the objectivity they bring to wine and they get defensive about it for some reason. Wilfird - Though you laughed at my kreplach joke, you missed the point of it. No pasta dish would contain enough culinary technique to meet the standards I am applying. No matter how good it is. Not that a pasta dish can't be part of a haute cuisine meal. The Provencal chefs used to include lobster, foie gras, truffle ravioli in their cuisine. But I was really asking Bill for something more then that. What I was looking for was a dish that came out of Italy that had the culinary impact of the Troisgros Salmon in Sorrel Sauce. Or, my favorite example, the Robuchon mashed potatoes. Not only are those dishes not esoteric, but they influenced every single haute cuisine chef in the entire world. I'd like Bill, or anyone else for that matter, to name an Italian chef or their dish that has the same amount of impact on the fine dining scene as the almost countless number of dishes I could name that came out of three star restaurants in France.

And I like spaghetti aglio olio. Especially with a few red pepper flakes thrown in for good measure. Maybe a small scampi or two floating around somewhere too. Chilly white wine and a cool ocean breeze .

No it didn't change the flavor at all. That's the whole point. All that changed was how rapidly I could recognize what the flavor was. I didn't think it was a radish instead of a red pepper. The taste was always familiar. And when the red pepper was revealed, it was obvious. You are not drawing the distinction between cogniscence, and a true change in perception. That's the point we have been trying to make. A change in apprearance does not alter the qualities of the food, or our cognitive ability in the long term. Yes, people might be confused at first, ala the wine experts in Yvonne's example. But eventually, they would have overcome it. When ChefG serves his pushed foie gras with pear puree, it's a dead ringer for chestnut cream. But, it still tastes like liver. Not at first, because the visual and textural clues lead you down a different road. But eventually, buried in the pile somewhere is the taste of the liver which was always there to begin with. Good tasters would figure it out eventually, even blindfolded.

Adam - You keep leaving out the important bit. "The question is, in the context of the dining experience, simply, can external influences influence taste/flavour of food." Once you interpose that, all they can do is change the visual clues. And while in the lollipop example I couldn't figure it out at first because the visual clues had changed, it didn't make the red pepper taste any different. All that changed was how quickly I could tell it was red pepper. That's because I have learned how to pick up the taste of red pepper by rote. But if when I was child, my mother fed me salad ingredients blidnfolded, and then together in a salad, I would have done it on the first lick. So this very biog point the scientists are making, doesn't say much about humans and their acuity. But it says a lot about the flawed ways we have trained our palates.

I know that. I don't like that. I find it a primitive approach to cuisine. It is fine on the tratorria level, but a failure on the grand restaurant level, which is the level I'm very interested in dining at if you haven't noticed. But we've tread that ground before so let's not go there again.

Yes but you get right to the foundation of the Plotnicki theory here which is, it doesn't matter because a preponderance of informed opinions govern what the right flavor is. Let's say you were a farmer growing heirloom tomatoes. You planted a few different clones, and as the tomatoes ripened, you did some testing on them. Acidity level, residual sugar, etc. How would you know which one will be the favorite among goumet diners? That's right, you can't tell. I mean you could guess, but that's no guarantee. And this is exactly why it is a craft and not a science. The tricking part of the modern dining experience is really a matter of exploting the poor way our plates are trained. They give you a lollipop and you know it tastes familiar, but you can't get your arms around what it is. But once they tell you it is red pepper, you recognize the taste right away. All they have done is change the visual cues. And over time you would train yourself to not rely on the visual cues as a way of correcting the situation.

Okay, next time I'm at Gordon Ramsey, I'm going to order a jacket potato and gravy to have as a course by itself.

No that's not it. The gourmands are saying that one can be trained to not rely on visual clues. The scientists are saying that is impossible. And the gourmands respond to this by saying that 1) you are underestimating what gourmands do, and 2) even if you are right, as a practical matter of what occurs in the dining experience, the change in our perception will not be material. I'm not sure what the scientists response has been to this point because they insist on focusing on the finite answer, yes their could be a change, and not the practical conclusion which is that a change that is likely to happen in the context of the dining experience is immaterial so for all intensive purposes, the reasonable answer is no, it doesn't really change anything. But the desperation for science to win out over gourmandise is best exemplified by their clinging to the test results where wine tasting experts were given white wine with red food dye in it so they thought the wine was tannic. A situation that doesn't happen in a restaurant. P.S. I love giving responses like this because I know Adam must be sitting around his office throwing darts at my picture .

Peter - Even though I have little affection for pasta, you misquote me so many times that I need to correct you. I haven't said I don't like pasta, if you read my pasta thread, I have an entire list of pasta dishes that are fabulous. Including a number of dishes in Italy. What I say is that pasta is usually not worth eating because it is made poorly or is just an extra course that has no meaning to the meal. Pasta was a way for people to have a filling meal when they didn't have much money. You could afford to buy a small amount of meat, make a ragu etc., and flavor the pasta. Every cuisine has their variation of this. Eastern European Jews ate egg noodles with pot cheese (like cottage cheese) with cinammon etc. Flour mixed with water into a paste and then dried is a foundation of home-style cooking because it didn't cost many zlotas to make it. The odd thing about pasta and Italian restaurants is that at the high end, why restaurants didn't reject pasta as everyday food? Can you imagine if the British had the same fascination with sandwiches, and that there was a sandwich course in the middle of every meal. Yes, in the middle of your meal at St. John, you ordered a small, fancy sandwich. Why? Well it's a sandwich, and you have to have a sandwich course with every meal. Or how about a pie course? Dinner at Gordon Ramsey for an appetizer, pie, main dish, dessert and home. Pasta can be great, but most of what you are served is junk. Cibreo in Firzenze has the right idea. They don't serve pasta because they say to make it perfectly, you have to make it perfectly for each order and they say that is too time consuming. Too bad this concept didn't catch on with more high end restaurants in Italy. Because IMO, the cuisine is chained to a concept that doesn't need to be part of the high end dining exprience anymore. There would be much more culinary evolution in Italy if they could shed the pasta course from the fine dining experience. And it would have no impact on what you eat at your local delcicious tratorria.

Claude - On my next trip out, we will go. I even know where we can get '69 Roumier Bonnes Mares to drink .

Actually I agree and disagree with you about that. I think that French bistro cuisine fails in the U.S. for many of the same reasons that Italian cuisine fails here. You need authentic ingredients to make it taste right. Face it, only a goose from Toulouse gives off the right kind of schmaltz to make a good cassoulet. But French haute cuisine style cooking does work pretty well here and I will tell you why I think that is. French technique is fungible. It subordinates itself to the ingredient. In fact the entire strategy is to wring everything out of that ingredient. So it isn't dependant on a local flavor profile like cassoulet or bouillabaisse. You can take Maine lobster or free range chickens and build your dish and sauces around the natural flavors of those ingredients. Italian cuisine, since it is dependant on the unique flavor of each regions ingredients, can't function in this country. Where the hell are you going to get the baby goat that Cesare uses? If you don't have that goat, you might as well be eating a NY strip steak. To me, the closest you get in this country to approximating Italian cuisine is at Chez Panisse and Craft. Not that they are Italian necessarily. But their focus on ingredients is Italian-like. And their approach to preparing the food takes a lot from the Italian tradition, and I guess in Chez Panisse's case from the Provencal tradition, which is really Mediterranean and closer to Italian cuisine then we often realize.

We all agreed to this pages ago. But we said, this isn't a likely scenario in the dining experience so what is the point of raising it?

I'm surprised to hear you mention Il Mulino since I always thought it was one of the least authentic Italian restaurant in the city. So much so, that it could easily be categorized as Continental and not Italian. If you dig deep into the archives of this board, there is a thread where Il Mulino is discussed in detail and from what I remember, a number of different people make the same comment that I just made. Conceptually, San Domenico is a much better restaurant. Too bad they don't seem to care that much anymore.

No just an Excel spreadsheet. Why would you need a real database program to do it?

It means, science explains what connoiseurs notice. Science might be able to tell you what about a Monet enraptures people, but it can't do anything useful with that information to make great art on it's own. It's organic. People need to point science in the right direction. But nowhere did I mean to imply that there isn't a proper place for science. It just can't act in a vacuum. But you don't get to go to the special, secret places that we connoiseurs go to and aren't allowed to tell anyone about. Ahem

Let' see if we can switch the subject and play nice. I noticed before that you said you used to keep a database with all the reviews and scores on Italian food and wines. Did I get that right? I keep something similar for Burgundy and Rhone wines. And recently I started maintaining it for Barolo and Barbaresco but it's in the infant stage. The whole spreadsheet is over 4100 entries. I've been starting to prune out producers who I will never drink though. People like Dominique Laurent and Chapoutier. But is a pain in the ass to keep the data up to date.

But didn't I just say that a few posts back? "The art of food and wine appreciation revolves around people who have the cognitive ability to determine what is good and what is not. All science ever does is explain why they feel that way about it. " And if I had my taste in steak plotted out, or examples of great tasting steaks that other people recommended plotted out, I would go into The Palm and order a steak based on those coordinates, providing that they listed them on the menu that way. But that still means that the standard for what is delicious is based on what humans like to eat. And what connoiseurs notice is good . You should find some connoisuers to hang around with Yvonne. You'd eat better .