Steve Plotnicki

The gourmet food business in NYC has become a mini mass market of it's own. The amount of products that are for sale that are long in the tooth or at their last sale date boggles my mind. I never used to check dates so fervently but in the last few years I wouldn't be surprised if 20% of the items I buy are past their prime to the point that I find them unusable. I think the entire quality issue tipped when some of the markets, most notably Vinegar Factory and Gourmet Garage went to prepacking cheese. That toe in the water on prepacking was the entree into places prepacking cheese as well as other food items. As for butchers, aside from Lobel's where I buy my strips (and a hell of a good prime rib for T-Day yesterday,) the butcher at Eli's Market is quite good. They have the best rib lamb chops I've had in this town. And the dry aged ribeye they have in a case behind and above the counter can be great. When my office was in Greenwich Village, I used to stop at Balducci's on my way home most days. This was maybe between 4-6 years ago. It was at its peak then. And the butcher was especially good at that time. But the quality isn't there anymore. Nowadays I think Citarella has better quality then Balducci's when it comes to meat. But I'm not sure that based on the volume that a shop in this town has to do, that we are going to get much better. Nobody wants to open a place like Lobel's or Rosedale anymore and those businesses survive because they can be passed on to heirs or workers. Is it really better in other cities. If you are in Paris and you go into Fauchon or Peck in Milan is it really better? I'm sure it's better in some ways but worse in others.

Gary - For Brits, if a shareholder has equity in a company and the company dissolves and the equity is distributed to the shareholders, it is a capital gain with no tax. This might be the case for any of the restaurants mentioned or it might not be depending on how they have been keeping their books all these years.

How about Bistro 190 in the Gore Hotel and Zaika (sp?) the nouvelle Indian place at 1 Kensington High Street? Both short walks to RAH aren't they?

Well if you normally drink Romanee Conti, which costs between $2000-$3000 a bottle, well then surely $39.99 is everyday wine. And one can find something better then cognac to bath in as well.

Oraklet - The reason that the word is being used more these days is that much of what we eat used to be mass produced. And food producers realized there was a market for people who wanted things that were made with more care. And more care usually means by hand. The problem is, there were always small food purveyors who made things by hand. The local bakery by my mother's apartment, they bake hand made bread every day. But they are not artisanal in the slightest bit. The quality of their baked goods doesn't fit the definition the food industry has adopted which is that the finished product needs to be of a certain quality. Britcook - I don't know what you want me to tell you. Artisanal tastes like it's been made by hand. I said that a few thousand times a few thousand posts ago and you are still asking me that question. All I have added is that it doesn't have to be made by hand. It just has to taste that way. Any fabricator who knows how to engineer artisanality into his product (Poilane) is okay with me. And is clearly okay with the marketplace. No one should be deprived the use of that word on a technicality because the production process might not meet a strict definition. The test should be the way the product tastes, not the method of making it. To put more emphasis on definitions then on results will only end up with the bakery by my mothers house getting an artisanal designation and Poilane not getting it. Is that the result you want?

Nor did they have email.

Well if you read the article that was linked, it said that the Felton was recommended for those people who like Romanee Conti.

list the wines and we'll tell you if we can. If you don't want to, try winesearcher.com

My use of the term is actually more restrictive then yours. You want food that is produced a certain way. I am pointing out that the production method doesn't guarantee quality. Is handmade bread made with poor quality flour and commercial yeast artisanal? Is a piece of furniture made by hand but out of plywood artisanal? Is a hand made suit made from polyesther artisanal? I want to limit the use of the word to products that meet a certain level of quality. The only way you can do that is to allow knowledgable people to decide what is artisanal and what isn't. Your Caeser Salad story is sad but true. Used to be a time where I ordered a Caeser Salad and they would make it from scratch. Now I doubt that happens even 10% of the time. But that is a downside of a free market, free speech system. Our losing the use of that word in a proprietary way (to our class that is) is a small price to pay for allowing those who used to eat iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing the ability to eat a better salad.

Ed - Even though the number of different Chinese cuisines available today is far greater then when I was growing up (70's), I feel like the general quality of Chinese cuisine in NYC has deteriorated over the last 30 years. Do you find this to be the case as well? Or are we just more knowledgable these days and as a result we have become tougher to please? I have found that most Chinese food these days is a mass-produced version of Hong Kong cuisine, especially banquets. If I went to Golden Unicorn, Ping's, Sweet 'n Tart of The Nice Restaurant, could I tell the difference between their Salt Baked Squid?

Yes I often serve the Felton Road Pinot Noir. Especially when Aubert de Villaine is going to be a dinner guest.

Well why don't you call Joe's and ask for the telephone number of their wholesale division? They pretty much have an exclusive on stone crab distribution from what I understand. If you're ordering jumbos invite me.

If you click on the recipe link for the mustard sauce, that will take you to the Joe's Stone Crab site. Do you know how to navigate to the mail order page or do you need instructions?

But this is the history of food. The French were savvy enough to realize that by offering people choices, that it would allow the population to express societal preferrences and that environment would offer the best opportunity to put top quality food on people's tables. They believed that their population would choose well and indeed for a long time they did. Other cultures were more interested in imposing restrictions on eating and drinking habits (how about pubs closing at 11:00pm for one?) because they didn't have faith in what people would choose. You tell me which one worked out better? Even in the U.S. this is true. When the Feds were foreclosing on farms in the 60's and 70's, i.e., eliminating choice, our food quality went in the crapper. It was only as a result of many different "artisans" starting businesses and offered us more of a choice that it improved. You know the bad parts of democracy and free speech are worth tolerating for the good parts. And if people bastardize the use of the word artisanal, so what? I promise you they will be eating somewhat better as a result of that process. I'd be happy for the people who eat at McDonald's if they offered them "artisanal French Fries" and they got a slightly better product. If that happened, the rest of us would just have to find a new word to describe what we like to eat.

Gee I was talking about the language not the people. Do you capitalize when you are referring to the language? I would if I was describing people living in England, not people who speak english/English. Is that incorrect?

Schaem - You are mistaken about how the AOC works. The AOC was and is an administrative panel of experts that designated vineyard sites based on the unique attributes. For example, they concluded that Montrachet has unique characteristics and they sampled wine from different locations in the vineyard and they drew borders. You cannot label your wine Le Montrachet unless the grapes were grown within those borders. And it's the same concept when you apply it to food. Charolais beef is both a particular breed of cow but the cows also have to graze in a specific location to get the designation. But in both examples, there are producers who make lousy bottlings of Montrachet, and not all Charolais beef is going to be top quality. I'm not expert enough about the beef to explain why that might happen but I can tell you that in the Montrachet vineyard, there are better and worse locations. I'm going to back into the explanation of terroir if I keep going down this path. The French, when tasting various bottlings of wine from the Montrachet vineyard, would speak of it as exhibiting the characteristics of the Montrachet vineyard or not exhibiting the characteristics. Much of the time the difference is in the technique the winemaker uses. For example and to switch vineyards, Claude Dugat's Charmes-Chambertin is made in a modern style and as a result the specific attributes of Charmes-Chambertin vineyard do not come across in his bottling. But if you taste Christophe Roumier's Charmes-Chambertin, it offers all the characteristics of the vineyard. Both wines get the AOC Charmes-Chambertin label, but one wine expresses the terroir and the other one doesn't. I am saying that the market has adopted a similar use of the term "artisanal" to the way it uses terroir. When they say something "expresses the terroir," they mean, tastes like it comes from X location. I am using artisanal in the same manner and saying that the key factor is that it appears to have been made by an artisan. Of course you are not going to find many things that are mass produced that actually taste artisanal. But when something is borderline, it gets decided as a matter of the public tasting it and accepting or rejecting the term based on the characteristics of the product. Gavin - Well I live n a country where the President says Nucular instead of nuclear, and where it is now acceptable to say aks instead of ask. But then again, you live in a place where they have a mumph of Sundays . JD - I think that the real test is does it taste as if it was made by an artisan. Because if it tasted as if it was, but it really wasn't made that way, and they lied about it, how would you know?

But all you are describing is a standard of quality. If LMVH bought Boulangerie Poillane, and installed a master baker to manage a production line of bread making, and the mass produced product tasted as good as the bread did before they bought the place, no, it tasted better, would we be removing the artisanal designation? Robert S. - You are 100% correct. We use artisanal to say, made the old fashioned way. That's really all the phrase means in a practical sense.

Schaem - Because all else has failed him, resorts to the relativity argument. He further evidences that english speakers do not understand the concept of terroir and how the French use it as both a marketing term and an assurance of quality. I do not know where it is, and actually John Whiting probably does because he has mentioned it to me on occassion, but I wrote a long explanation of terroir on some thread many months ago that JW characterizes as "spot on." You should read it. Because I am using the word artisanal in the same way. Once again, taste is not subjective. It is on a personal level but it is not on the market level. The marketplace will accept a definition of artisanal based on how something tastes, not based on how something is made. People do not really care how something is made if it gives them the taste, quality and characteristics they are looking for. Indeed the French do exactly what you suggest. They send in a panel of people who are expert tasters to assess the quality of things and label them accordingly. Do you find it that strange that reasonable people who know something about food can reach a conclusion about a product? I will say it a little less politely this time, either you get it or you don't. There are those on the thread who have chimed in and said that they realize there are artisanal products that might not be made artisanally but they don't care if the word is used as long as the requisite quality is there. Then there are those pedantic nitpickers who want the word to match the process and nothing else. Let the record show that they would prefer to put merde on your table and call it artisanal while denying something truly delicious which has the requisite characteristics the use of the term. An artisanal frozen TV dinner anyone? I heard Schaem is serving them.

Tony - Based on my knowldge of UK tax law for UK citizens, why isn't their sale of the restaurant a capital gain of which there is no tax? And if they wanted to hand the restaurant on to an heir, why couldn't they structure a purchase over time and take back paper which got paid off slowly?

Macrosan - For those of us who keep track of restaurant closures in France, I can report on none of any real importance. And I think I can say the same about Italy. Of course it might be the case that as a coincidence that in the U.K., many people who left the city for a country life did so at the same time and are reaching retirement age at around the same time. But that isn't what the article purports. It describes a phenomenon of owning a high end restaurant in the country as being exceptionally hard work whereby the owners have chosen to close as a result. My point, is that if the size of their businesses were larger, which would result as a product of having more recognition, they could higher more staff and take it a little easier while keeping their restaurant open. This is what seems to happen in France. Will you not agree that the phenomenon of many people walking away from successful businesses is an unusual one? It just doesn't happen, regardless of profession, regardless of location, unless the economics aren't clicking.

No they have to taste as if they have been made by hand. Britcook wants them to actually be made by hand. I find that an unneccessary distinction. We gave two examples of things that are mass produced on a small scale which people consider artisanal, Pain Poillane and Le Pain Quotidian. In fact Pain Poillane is considered by most people as the height of artisanality. But Britcook might want to deny them that designation as a matter of semantics. Yet there are bakers all over France these days who have hung a "Fabrique Artisanale" sign outside of their shops who make complete merde who he would be happy giving that designation to. If anyone wants to know why they traditionally eat well in France, and not in the U.K., just follow the argument in this thread. The French (like the Americans) are happy to throw a phrase like "artisanal" into the marketplace and allow it to become a marketing phrase and then let consumers actually decide what tastes artisanal and what doesn't. In fact I am certain if it became an issue with a certain artisan who modernized their facility to the extent that it became questionable whether he met the technical definition, they would send one of those administrative groups in to taste his product and to see if it exhibited the qualities and characteristics of an artisanal product. The Brits on the other hand are more obssessed with the proper use of the english language then they are with food tasting good and they would clearly deny the use of the phrase artisanal based on the type of strict definition that Britcook would enforce. This is why the French have employed, and I must add, enjoyed the fruits of on their dinner tables, the use of the word terroir. And it is why english speakers the world over are eating things like spam and pop tarts while they are scratching their heads trying to figure out the exact definition of the term.

While this might be the operative definition of artisanal, it has no bearing on how we use the phrase. Before anyone is interested in how something is made, it has to taste as if it was artisanally made. That is the whole point. I defy anyone to eat a slice of Poillane's country loaf and tell me that it doesn't taste artisanally made. It is nonsensical to say it doesn't no matter what production methods Poillane uses. And it's the same with Gerard. Nobody really cares how he makes his chocolate as long as they taste like they have been made by an artisan.

For this very serious question, I resorted to my father's best friend, a Holocaust survivor who comes from the same town in Poland that my father came from. He used to make such good kishka that my father tried to arrange with the Long Island Rabbinical Counsel to sell it in his kosher butcher shop. It never happened because they were a bunch of goniffs. But here is his response. And it's amazing that these days Holocaust survivors have email! first of all you need the the intestines for the outer stuffing, corn flakes, grated carrots a little flour and the beef fat and an egg, stir all ingredients together and stuff and boil in a large pot and keep on piercing they fat should come out, and whala you have dellicious KISHKA Now that piercing the intestines is pretty amazing technique if you ask me.

I disagree. I think that is only one way the word is used. It is also used to describe the style the product is made in. And further to FG's point, why can't the method be industrialized? What is the difference if the result is the same? Are you telling me that once upon a time that Pain Poillane was artisanally fabricated but when LP figured out how to make the bread in a factory setting, it lost its artisanality? Even if tasted exactly the same? I don't think consumers really care how their food was fabricated as long as it tastes like it was made by hand. These disputes about what should be allowed to be called what always come down to the same issue. Let the public decide. Look at what the French did. They allowed crappy bakers who own a single oven to get the artisanal designation when a baker who might make a good mass produced product can't get it. It is much easier to allow the public to assign their own standard as to what they think tastes as if it is artisanally made. If they're happy with that definition why aren't you?

Ah leave it to the French to turn artistry and craftsmanship into commerce. They have solved the problem by assigning the phrase to any small producer. That actually isn't a bad line of demarcation.