Steve Plotnicki

Glyn -This is simply not true. Among restauranteurs, chefs and pastry chefs, one would very likely here them use "better" in this way. A prepared dessert is "better" then just plain fresh fruit because their is more complexity to it. That is why dessert menus at high end restaurants aren't littered with fresh fruit choices. People want a "better" dessert then fresh fruit. It all gets back to understanding how I am using the word, and agreeing it's an appropriate use. Because it can be used in a number of different ways. For example, Sauvignon Blanc is a better wine then Musacdet. But as my pal SFJoe said recently, Domaine de Pepiere's Muscadet is a better wine then Lucien Crochet's commercially made Sancerre which is made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape. But that one example doesn't defeat the original proffer. Truman - Well it's all a matter of degree isn't it? Craft isn't serving peaches unadorned on a plate. They might served them uncooked (unlikely) but sliced and served with something like a peach cream and a peach sorbet. So just because they have minimal intervention doesn't mean that they don't apply the requisite amount of technique. Even in their raw fish courses the fish comes in a dressing and showered with things like chopped herbs or scallions to enhance the flavor.

Because the discussion isn't about food, it's about happiness in life.

Then it can be our respective legacies. In other words, we can agree to disagree. But you should read through my Piemonte thread which I posted in November. There are posts there from various members describing how things do not work properly in Italy and the frustrations attached with the experience of being there. The cuisine is but one frustration.

No my post stands. At best you can consider it insulting even though I don't think so because I presented it as a parody (Stone seemed to have gotten it) and I can present the same parody about les Tres Stooge (accent grave if I could do it.) If you want your statement to stand, it will have to stand up to the scrutiny of it being an accurate assessment of how I feel which it isn't. But in any event, none of it has anything to do with competence in coming up with an acceptable dessert. Either they can or they can't do it. I have not made any statements about why they can't and your allegation that I am claiming it is genetic is out of line.

All you have said is that you don't care for prepared desserts. But for example, the Pierre Herme Isfahan, which is a raspberry macaron filled with lychees, raspberries and some sort of cream filling, is a better dessert then just plain lychees or raspberries are. There is a mulititude of complexity in that dessert that goes beyond the same perfect raspberries that you can eat raw. But of course you might not like it better. But in my experience, even the best raspberries in the world are "better" when spritzed with some lemon juice and sugar. It releases certain complexities in the berries that you don't get when eating them raw.

I just saw this and I am trying to understand what is racist and bigoted about what I said? It's a pretty serious charge that I don't take lightly. I might think that Italy is culturally inferior to the rest of the western world, but what about that is racist and bigoted? I haven't said that Italians are genetically inferior, only that their system of doing things is antiquated and is perpetuated by incompetants. If you want to get into a discussion of why I think that is the case we can do that and I think you will see that my opinion is not derived from race at all (is there an Italian race?) But you should think before you make an accusation like that because it has nothing to do with what I said about Italy. I am not filled with hate towards anyone. Pointing out that people do stupid and idiotic things or are too incompetant to come up with a proper dessert has nothing to do with hate. It has to do with competence. Maybe you are willing to forgive those things (or the lack of) because you like it there but I am not. And I can be critical in the same way of the idiotic things they do in countries I prefer travelling in like France, or even in my own country the U.S. I can give you a list of stupid things we do in this country that will reach all the way to Malpensa Airport but that doesn't make me racist or anti-American. So I request you delete your charge and replace it with something that appropriately describes my feelings about being in Italy. Because it has everything to do with the Italian way of life, and nothing to do with the potential of the people.

I see Jason's in a good mood this morning. He must have had some Moo Shu Pork or something like that last night.

Tony - But you are overlooking the fashion component of dining. Food, in all of its glory, is mixed up in a social occassion we call dinner. And there is more to the ritual of eating dinner then any one aspect of a meal provides. The dichotomy here (and I was trying to get at this earlier,) is that while food should be viewed through the narrow lens when trying to discern its attributes, as a practical matter those attributes get applied at social events. And when you go out to a fancy meal, it needs fancy food. So I think what drives innovation in this framework is our needing X number of fancy meals a year that make statements about our lives. And eating the same food year after year is a metaphor for our lives not going anywhere. Life in a capitalist world is about growth, and growth is about progress. Food just follows suit. Of course life is as much about stability as it is about progress. So while the Brits are chomping down on the trendiest Foie gras dishes at Club Gascon during the week, they are also eating their roast beef for Sunday lunch. Or the Americans are having their pastrami sandwiches or Chinese food for Sunday dinner. In dining, the old and the new are exclusive of each other. But even though that might be the case, when we say "better," we are really describing the active particpants who are trying to move the craft of cooking forward. But that shouldn't exclude me from saying that my roast beef dinner at the Dorchester Grill was "a better" meal then my crap meal at Racine which is far trendier and is trying to make some type of a statement. Macrosan - Gourmets are not conditioned to do anything. This is their chosen hobby and they are looking for ways to show their chops, or flex their muscles if you may. You cannot confuse their ability to do that with anything else. That is the outsiders perspective who doesn't understand their chosen hobby. Have you ever met people who travel all over the world to see the opera? Would you describe them as "conditioned to seek better operas? Nonsense. That is what they know how to do well. And gourmets know how to eat and to tell what is good and what is bad. To speak of them in any other way is as unwitting admission that one doesn't get it to begin with.

There is a counter trend going on here because we are in not the best of financial times. And during those periods, innovation and chance taking are not at their peak. But go to a place like Spain where real estate values increased by 18% last year and you will find some real risk takers in their restaurant industry.

Educated tasters will always say complex is better. Non-educated tasters, whose opinions carry no or very little weight, will qualify the statement the way you have. There is no instance where unripe fruit is better then ripe fruit. Sure you can create a circumstance when you need unripe fruit so it is preferable contextually, but in a vacuum, there is no argument that says ripe fruit isn't better. But you also change the subject when you make this type of statement. Ripe fruit is never bad, but it might be bad for people on a diet. You are describing the people and not the food. So good, better etc., are not relative words when you eliminate any outside context when comparing things. It's just that you are refusing to make the conversation about the food item, and insist on defining it in the way it affects you.

This whole story about Peter Luger's, and the issue of whether people actually know what they are talking about when they take some of these positions is a fascinating subject. I have a good friend who used to live in Denver and on the few times he went to Lugers he didn't like it. So I tried to explain it to him and since he had respect for my opinion about these things he decided to go back recently. So a few weeks ago I am out having dinner at City Hall and in the middle of dinner my cell phone rings and it is him calling from Lugar's. "Steveanooch" he says, "I gotta tell you, I'm at Peter Luger's right now and I don't see what people see in the place. The meal was absolutely mediocre." Fast forward to Europe last week when we are travelling together. He goes on this entire rampage about how Luger's is crap and how Mark Joseph is much better. So I'm saying to myself, okay maybe Luger's has gone downhill but I am still suspect. Fast forward to this past Monday night. We went out to dinner at Crispo together and then met another eGulleter for a drink afterwards. While we were having a drink the topic of DiFara's came up since that was the night everyone was going. And that conversation seguewayed into a discussion of NY pizza in general and eventually the topics of John's and Patsy Grimaldi's came up. So my friend says, "I don't like John's and Grimaldi's. The pizzas are too doughy. I like Joe's Pizza on the corner of Bleeker and Carmine." A hush fell over the room better. Was this a great pizza place that nobody had heard of? I was trying to picture this place in my mind. So I started asking questions about the ovens, the type of dough, etc. I quickly concluded that he was talking about a plain pizza by the slice place and that while it was possible that it could turn out pies as good as the brick oven guys, it wasn't very likely. So we got into my car and headed for a taste test. Joe's turned out to be the place on the corner of that little square by 6th Avenue and I must have had a hundred slices there when I was a teeneager and used to take the train in from Queens to hear music in the Village. And the slice he brings back into the car is your basic pizza by the slice. It might be great pizza by the slice, but it's the commercial product and not the artisanal one. Turns out, my friend wouldn't know a great pizza if it hit him in the face. And I'm sure it's the same for his opinion of the steaks at Luger's. I often wonder how many of these erroneous assessments get posted here or on other boards. A place like Luger's gets their choice of the top steaks, they age them for 21 days, their gas broilers are still working, where is the loss in quality coming from? It's like someone telling me that the Oyster Bar in Grand Central has gone downhill. For what reason, they are buying old oysters instead of fresh ones? Places like Luger's and the Oyster Bar have very simple formulas that their restaurants depend on. And unless someone tells me they went there and they noticed the formula changed, I don't see how they can downgrade them. Everytime I hear it, it smacks of being incredible, the same way it smelled incredible when my friend proclaimed Joe's as having "the best" pizza.

JAZ - No Stone's point (and Lxt's) was that the sunrise and the Mona Lisa aren't a meaningful comparison when comparing that analogy to the peaches because they are not in the same category. And to get them into the same category you really had to invent one (the most beautiful sight.) But peaches and a peach dessert are both desserts so you don't have to invent any category. They are easy to compare. The reason you say they aren't (as in determining which one is better) is because you aren't willing to accept the scale we are setting out as to determining an appropriate use of the word better. So let me say it more simply. A cooked dessert is a "better" dessert then plain fruit because plain fruit applies no technique by a chef and when I measure desserts that is what I am looking for. In my book, fresh fruit is no dessert at all. Now don't say wait a minute, I can serve a bowl of fruit for dessert. That's just changing the subject. When I say "dessert," I mean the thing that a chef prepares for you. And when a chef puts a raw peach on a plate in front of me, that isn't preparing anything. As I always say, we typically fight over the use of words. People are very stingy with the use of words like "better." I'm not sure why other then they cling to the subjectivity argument which is really a surrogate for preference. Because as you demonstrated in your Mona Lisa/sunrise example, any two things can be compared. Because depending on how you are defining the word "sight," one or the other will be the better sight of the two. But whether the comparison will have any meaning is another thing. And I submit to you that few people are thinking of the comparison between the Mona and the sunrise. But lots of people are thinking about peach desserts and creating a hierarchy around them. Stone - I think Peach Melba and Bananas Foster, not to mention Baked Alaska, are three of the greatest desserts ever created. They are the golden age of desserts as far as I'm concerned. Maybe I'm just a sucker for that hot/cold thing.

Yeah what she said.

Marty - Go to La Grille for a terrific turbot for two served with the world's best beurre blanc. It's in a sort of out of the way place in the 10th arr. though. Kind of like a mile due north of the old Les Halles. JAZ - What does the fact that people make both corn flakes and corn souffle have to do with it?

My dislike of Italian cooking has nothing to do with my not being able to eat pasta. There are always other minestre to eat like risotto or polenta. It has more to do with the fact that there is no cooking there. When stinco and osso bucco are the heights of culinary technique, that is boring. In fact for a restaurant that is considered among the best in Italy to be featuring stinco as a main dish, it is sort of embarrasing in my book. Italy is a great place to eat lunch. But they should airlift people into neighboring countries for dinner. We've debated this issue on other threads here. What I can't understand about Italy is with the great natural resources they have there, how is it that they have not managed to create a formal cuisine that goes beyond mere roasting or braising. There is no aspiration there to acheive a higher culinary level. And some people claim its because their base ingredients are so good that they don't need to. But I don't buy it because I see they have people who have tried. To me they just can't figure out how to do it because they are incapable. And I also don't buy this progression of tastes and textures business. The French have a progression of tastes and textures in their tasting menus but they also manage to actually apply cooking technique to each course while doing it. I'm happy I don't go there very often because the entire country frustrates me. When I was at Malpensa on my way to Lyon, I called someone I know who is half Maltese and half British but grew up in Malta. As I voiced my frustration over the various idiotic things that occured in the mere 24 hours I spent there, she affirmed my opinion by calling Italy a "Mickey Mouse country" with Malta being "Minnie Mouse." In fact there are so many little infuriating things that happen there that we decided that from now on when they occur, we just look at each other and say "tre Stogari" which is our idiomatic phrase for the Three Stooges. That is what we said to each other as the person at our hotel was struggling with telefono Italia trying to get the phone number of a particular wine bar we were looking for (they were unsuccessful.) Or when Alitalia cancelled our flight to Lyon because of fog when we later found out there was no fog in Lyon. To me it isn't that big a stretch from those things to not being able to figure out how to make a more complex broth for fish then "cream of white beans." What else do you expect when Lario, Curlissimo and Moe (pronounced Mo-ay) are in charge of everything? Thank god they aren't in charge of the wine.

Yes. What do people have to do with it? Corn flakes is to corn on the cob is to corn souffle. What do people have to do with the increase in complexity I have just outlined?

But that's exactly what I am trying to do. A great pastrami sandwich is inherently lesser then average Foie gras, just to give an example. But I can make that statement because I have weighed all the variables and have flattened them all out on a single continuum called dining. Now whether or not you find use for this exercise is another thing. But as I keep saying, once you raise usefulness you are speaking about people not food. But if you remove people from the equation, Bananas Foster is a "better" dessert then Bananas and Sour Cream because nobody is around to raise the context that B & C might be better at a simple luncheon.

You are just arguing how it gets plotted. It doesn't really make a difference does it as long as a hierarchy according to some standard is constructed? An example might be that you might enjoy Pavarotti singing an aria in the Metropolitan opera better then in Shea Stadium. But the setting has nothing to do with the quality of his performance which is discreet from any other variable. Same with the argument around the peach. When Robert S. says that sometimes one wants to eat a peach out of hand, he is imposing context and the context has to do with the diner and not the peach. The peach has the same characteristics regardless of the other variables. But it might taste diferent to you based on where you are eating it or what kind of mood you are in. That is why I think it is linear when merely looking at the peach as a dessert. Context needs to be struck from the equation in order to properly compare it to Peach Melba or other peach desserts. Jaybee - People's reactions to food is a function of what they know. Why would anyone ever want to know less about anything? Unless of course, knowing more has made them unhappy somehow. But I am finding a hard time understanding how knowledge leads to unhappiness, which is sort of what you are implying in the guise of a question.

Oh I miss Yuet Lee.

Well let me ask you, can you enjoy a beurre blanc that wasn't made at La Grille?

You are all so stingy with allowing the use of the word better. It really comes down to the fact that you want to reserve the use of the word for your personal preferences. But if one was to divorce their personal preference from the discussion, there would be no debate about whether a plain peach is even as good as a perfectly cooked peach. Let alone disputing that the perfect peach, prepared perfectly, is "better" then a plain peach. All you have to do is write down what each one offers on a piece of paper. And indeed people have done that through the centuries. It's called cooking. So much for the virtues of the perfect peach. It was so good that people have spent millions of hours trying to improve it. Otherwise; Jaz - But I'm not describing the dining experience. I am describing each individual dish and plotting them on a linear scale. That they each apply to a different dining experience is discreet from where they fall on the continuum of dishes. But you see you keep changing the subject. You are describing how people react to the item, i.e., describing people and not the item. I am trying to talk about the item and the item only. I am trying to remove subjective preference from the equation and look at the variables. So my animal instinct has nothing to do with it. And trying to say that a great peach dessert is better then a plain peach is not analogous to the Mona Lisa. It is analagous to say that the form of a play written for theater is a greater artform then a skit is. Or that grand opera is a greater artform then light opera. That leaves room for lousy peach desserts and great natural peaches because after all, they are both presented as desserts. Well I haven't said that things are better just because they are complex, I have said that among things that are good manifestations of what they represent, complex things are typically better then things that are less complex. That is why the Barolo producers plant nebbiolo instead of babera in their best terroir. It is a grape that makes a more complex statement so they plant it where the terroir is most complex. So the only reason we don't agree on "better" is because if what I wrote above. You want to reserve the use of the word for yourself just because you might disagree about barbera and nebbiolo when any objective evaluation of those two grapes and their terroirs would show that the "better" grape is the more complex one. And as for better meaning better quality, well despite the fact that everyone presents it as if it is totally subjective, I would think that most of us would be in agreement about what is better and what is worse. And it pains me to say that people who disagree with the norm, most likely do not know the difference between the two. Because to taste the best Barbera in the world and then to taste say, 1978 Giacomo Conterno Monfortino and to not be able to say that the GC is better is to either not know, or to think of the world on the multi-dimensional scale you describe which gets back to the debate of the semantics of the world "better."

This is an excellent point though I'm not sure it applies equally in every region. I have never met anyone who could describe which specific location of Chateauneuf the wine they were tasting came from. But I do know people who can tell which Cote Rotie vineyards a blend has come from. And then there are people who seem to be able to tell exactly which row of the vineyard certain Burgundys come from.

You know I read that on a different thread after I got back to the states. But just to show you that Gambero Rosso isn't alone, the 2003 L'Espresso Guide gave Aimo e Nadia a score of 17 which put it in the top dozen highest restaurants in Italy. I hate to keep beating this anti-Italian drum but, for anyone to consider that restaurant anywhere near the top tier of restaurants in Italy is embarassing to the entire Italian restaurant scene.

Actually while I understand your point, I am actually trying to say the opposite. Using your example, DiSpirito's scallop starter is "better" then a perfect peach because there is more complexity to it. It doesn't have to be that way. Some things in their natural state are extremely complex like truffles. But in general, the complexity that DisPirito adds to the scallops with the tomato water, mustard oil and uni (adding acidity, sweetness and texture among others things) is what puts it higher along the scale then just plain Taylor Bay scallops. In fact if raw ingredients or plainly roasted ingredients were typically better then prepared versions, we wouldn't have much need for restaurants would we. So the quality (of a dish) is dependant on the level of complexity.

They both obviously never tasted white zinfandel.