Steve Plotnicki

I ate there in the first week they opened and my meal was fair to poor. I also hated the Basque country decor feeling it was very much out of place in NYC. But I guess I should try it again based on these posts.

Steve - Well what is unusual about it is there is more money spent on food here then anywhere else. One would think that in the much larger pie called NYC, someone would be able to carve out a small slice for Adria influenced cuisine.

Steve - Well you're describing innovative by chef and I've been describing it by customers. It makes no sense that there are customers for Adria derived cuisine in cities that are typically culturally behind NYC in most things (no insult to those other cities intended . And whether they might be cuisine of that nature in NYC, there is nothing like what I had at Trio last weekend. Liz - Personally, serving foie as something to give a dsh body seems like a waste to me. We would have perferred to eat foie as the dominant taste rather then pear. In fact we couldn't understand the point of foie in this dessert other then wow factor. Bux - You cannot compare Daniel Boulud to da Vinci. The later's studio (and assitants) only released one version of a piece which the artist deemed perfect. The kitchen at Daniel pretty much mass produces the sea bass with potato scales. And many of those dishes are not perfect when you apply the standard we are using here.

Liz - It was served as one of the dessert courses. The intensity of the pear puree outweighed the flavor of the foie gras. We would have liked to sample it as an appetizer. To do so it they would need to serve twice the amount of foie with just a dollop of pear puree on the side.

For Chicago, actually Evanston, Illinois, I'd say that's pretty innovative. More innovative than NYC.

Actually I had a number of things that were innovative this weekend at Trio. One of the things was a pear puree served with "pushed foie gras." Foie gras (cold) was pushed through a tamis (sp?) and it was served alongside the pear puree looking like pureed chestnuts. The purpose of the foie gras was to give the pear puree body and silkyness. It could hardly be tasted. In fact we said that it would make a great foie gras dish if the flavors were balanced differently. The other thing that was innovative (though I understand it's straight out of Spain) was a lobster dish that was served with rosemary vapor. The lobster was in a small dish that was served in a larger bowl full of fresh rosemary cuttings. Then when they placed the dish in front of you they poured boiling water on the rosemary. So everytime you bent over to take a bite of the lobster, you were surrounded by an intense scent of rosemary. The thing about these two dishes were that they were amazingly simple, yet particularly complex. And innovative I might add.

Special pasta bowls.

Tony - The last time I looked, there hadn't been any advances in pasta in a few hundred years. But you will have to reserve judgement until I post the thread. I rely heavily on the opinion of others who have practically eliminated pasta from their diet.

I for one will be a happy camper about the replacement of pennicilium in roquefort. They take burnt rye breads and scrape the crust onto the cheese. The mold eats it way through the cheese and that's how the veins are formed . Not a great thing for somebody who can't digest gluten.

Well innovation that is over the top isn't helpful either. When we ate at Trio the other night, some of it was fantastic but was buried under the flourish of courses that included some overcomplexity on each dish.

Maggie - Well they had to figure out how to carve up those old potato farms somehow so they could build houses on them. But they made each subdivision set aside two thirds of the land as reserves so what you get are clusters of houses around a common open area and it doesn't seem overbuilt.

Balic - My gluten intolerance is something that happened in 1990. Prior to that I ate as many bowls of pasta as anyone.

Really it's spelled differently? Wait until I post my long worked on thread about pasta. It's could set the eGullet record for responses, other then the A. Balic thread of course.

Pumpkino - Well that's good. In fact you should take Jaybee's advice on where to eat.

And there are some people who will always be punters.

There are really very few classic brasseries left in France that aren't controlled by the Flo Group. That famous one in Nantes, La Cigale, comes to mind as an independat brasserie. Marty in Paris is another. Otherwise I can't think of any.

Not that I want to give Pumpkino any good advice but, I'm not sure how long ago Jaybee ate at Maison Kammerzell. It was taken over by the Flo Group a number of years ago and now serves the same commercial kitchen food that the other restaurants in the chain serve. But fortunately yhey don't serve any pasta.

Boy would I welcome this. But the chances of it happening are slim to none. Because in addition to the scale of the restaurant, the chef actually needs to be behind the stoves cooking almost all of the time. Not "executive cheffing" as has become the rage in chefland.

I hate tongue. Wilfrid does not want "essence of partridge" on his plate. He wants to gnaw at tough to chew game that has lots of flavor. That isn't the trend in cooking even if they were to veer away from the same six proteins. If anyone hasn't noticed, meat is very much on it's way out as an important course in haute cuisine. To me it's a function of the technique the chefs want to apply. You simply cannot manipulate meat in the same way you can manipulate vegetables, or even fish. Meat is meat and is usually best when unadorned. This weekend I was served squab, partridge, venison and bison along with beef and lamb. Surprisingly, the beef was by far the best of the meats. It was slices of the cap of a prime rib and it had so much flavor we couldn't believe it. They just laid the slices of beef out and covered it with superthin slices of white truffle which were amazingly subtle. And the partridge was great as well because it was wood grilled and they served it with cubes of golden beet and red beet and the smokiness from the wood played a good foil to the sweetness of the beets. Point is, it didn't make a difference what meat was being used as long as it was flavorful and it was paired with something that accented its flavor. But when the meats weren't super flavorful, I would probably have enjoyed them more if they were simply roasted. The problem lies not in the proteins, the problem lies in the restaurants. I make a better steak at home then 95% of the restaurants in NYC. That shouldn't be the case. And indeed it wasn't where they served me that cap of prime rib because they got what I consider to be the appropriate amount of flavor out of the meat, something that doesn't happen often at the upper level in NYC.

Wilfrid, old fart that he is, is doing something that I find to be fairly typical. He is articulating the old as the new. Retro might be fashionable, but only for a moment. And even if it is fashionable it certainly is not new. In the music industry, every few years some guy with a lot of money comes along and believes that you can get rich by releasing CD's by all the famous bands that were dropped by the big labels. But this guy soon finds out that there is limited money to be made. That's because the big labels dropped the bands because they didn't sell anymore. And that's what would happen in this town if a place opened up and the cuisine was based on game, offal etc. It would probably work (if it was done well) but it wouldn't be a gold mine. It wouldn't be something that compared to St. John because there is a tradition in England of eating game and offal that doesn't exist here. Here, City Hall is probably as close as we are going to come to that type of restaurant. Challenge could, but doesn't have to mean new ingredients. It can be the same old boring ingredients but paired and prepared differently. I didn't find any unusual ingredients at Arpege, what I found was extreme care given to balancing ingredients. I wish I could find someone in NYC who cooked at that level and with the same amount of care.

Why do you say that? The young are typically the biggest consumers of the modern. It's their generational expression that makes a school of cooking take hold. There is no shortage of young, well-to-do people in this town. The original restaurants cited in this thread are all a product of a demographic that was between 25 and 45 when they first started. It's just now the demograhic is 40 and 60 and both are getting a bit long in the tooth. But where are 25-40 year olds expressing their own generation through food? While I understand the intent of this position, I find it circular in its logic. Change means challenge whether people like it or not.

On a personal level, with all the restaurants that opened on the lower east side over the last 3-4 years, you don't have any real trailblazers there. Yes I like Prune and I used to really like 71 Clinton when Wylie was cooking there but considering the lower rents, the area could have become a hotbed of innovation. Instead, it's more about trendy and less about creativity. Mogsob - Well I don't see what eating at Annisa and Blue Hill has to do with the high end being on top form including being innovative in their cuisine. Can't those things both exist? I eat at Blue Hill probably as much as anyone else and with all the great meals they serve me, it doesn't replace the fact that I had to go to Illinois to eat a cutting edge meal.

Having had dinner at Trio in Evanston, Illionois last night (review to come later today,) you couldn't find a place that had a "sharper edge." And furthermore, it was completely full and the crowd of people eating this totally atypical cuisine looked fairly middle of the road to me. No signs of maniacal foodies. Simple, suburban looking folk allowing thermselves to be fed unusual pairings and preparations. That NYC (in fact the NY metro area) doesn't have a restaurant of this type amazes me and underscores the uniformity of the cuisine there. Again, Paris doesn't have a place like it either. That NYC and Paris do not have anything like it can either be a coincidence, or it can be a harbinger that their culinary dominance is ending. I think that we are giving short shrift to economics here. In order to have a place like Trio, which I guess the Paul Liebrandt restaurant on Central Park South was similar too, you need an investor to believe in the concept as a money maker. That's a tough one because it's risky. Bux mentioned Danny Meyer. Well one thing you can say about Danny Meyer is that he typifies the type of restaraunteur that investors are looking for. Safe, expanding the middle to include new diners. And that's why the food tastes the way it does at his restaurants. And while expanding the middle might be a good thing on a socio-economic level, it's bad for the people who want to eat cutting edge cuisine. So we are left with those who purvey top quality ingredients in simple yet perfect presentations as our standard bearers. So you get Craft and Jewl Bako as the preferred places to dine. And while I certainly enjoy dining at places like that or in that manner, neither of those places express a unique cuisine. And I don't really care how we get there. Whether it's through Wilfrid's suggestion of including harder to understand meats in the cuisine (more about this later) or whether it's a simple cuisine based on balance like Passard's, I want a chef with a personality so when I eat there he is nmaking an individualized statement. That's the thing that is getting harder and harder to find. And in some instances (Daniel Boulud most notably,) personality has almost been completely replaced by a certainly safety and uniformity which is great for that upper middle but boring for me.

But it's not a smear. Speer's buildings were designed to curry favor with Hitler. Had he not tried to please Hitler he probably would have designed them differently. That's why they are "Hitlerian in nature." Is this an odd way to say things? Aren't there things that are "Napoleanesque?" It just doesn't have the same negative connotation because he wasn't a genocidist. And that building on the outskirts of Rome that was designed during Mussolini's reign is never associated with the architect, it's always associated with Mussolini because it was designed to please him and is such a perfect symbol of fascism.

Robert S - Your post was near poetic. Liz - When I read those menus my eyes bug out of my head. Because while they read in a way that indicates that they will each taste differently, I know from experience that in many instances they will all taste the same. I had dinner at Trottter's last night and aside from the issue of whether I liked the meal or not, an aspect of the meal is that a defined cuisine didn't seem to be expressed. Yes that might be nitpicking on my part and that is clearly a higher standard then other diners impose but, when you eat a lot of meals at this level, one looks for (at least I do) something distinctive about the way the food is thought out. And while I had a number of excellent dishes, nothing about those dishes left me with an image in my mind that this is what Charlie Trotter stands for. This statement was never true of Jean-George's cuisine. It was always distinct. But what has happened to his restaurant isn't that his cuisine still doesn't have his personality, it's that since he's a corporate mogul instead of just a chef and the edge has been taken off the cuisine. And one of the ways they have toned down the cuisine is by not making the flavor pairings as acute. So the menus read well, but the finished dishes often lack the level of precision that I desire. And you know what, I think their standard customer doesn't want that level of precision. They don't want sharp edges and acute flavors. They want softer, more palatable combinations that don't scare them off.