Steve Plotnicki

Either one. Historically there must have been a distinction as to what made something HC in the first place. Present day variations or improvements would be a continuation or outgrowth of the techniques or the philosophy. Yes?

This issue came up on Fat Guy's thread about the relevancy of Italian food. It's clear that pretty much everyone, whether they prefer haute cuisine to Italian cuisine agreed that whatever Italian cuisine is, it isn't haute cuisine. Even though Francesco spoke of an Italian equivalent of haute cuisine that isn't really practiced anymore. But enough time spent on those Italians. What is haute cuisine? Is it as simple as turning roasted mushrooms into a mushroom flan? Is it reducing chicken broth into a jelly ala Robuchon? Or adding enough butter and cream to make my mashed potatoes a "haute cuisine consistancy? Or how about a soup based on the essence of crustaceans? What is the difference between the seafood soup at a tratorria in La Spezia and the Lobster Consomme at La Maree in Paris? I can give thousands of examples like these. And if I knew more about desserts, I would raise examples there as well. So what exactly is haute cuisine? Because I can tell you I know it when I see it (taste it,) but how do we draw the distinction between it and other types of cuisine on paper?

Macrosan - Actually it suggests that Lloyd Weber expanded musical theater to include aspects of opera. Other composers like Rodgers and Hammerstein were closer to operetta then real opera. He (and his co-writers) even chose certain themes that were grander in nature then themes that are typical of the musical theater (Jesus Christ Superstar& Phantom.) But clearly his millieu is musical theater. Sweeny Todd if you know the show is more like opera then anything Lloyd Weber wrote (don't ask me why because the answer is too technical for me to explain.) The Most Happy Fellow by Frank Loesser is another show that is written like an opera. As to your other point, well you are correct when you say that the low cuisine is included in the haute cuisine. To practice either one, you have to roast mushrooms. It's what you do with them after they are roasted that makes them different. That givs me an idea for a new thread which maybe explores this point through actual cooking technique.

If you asked 1000 children why they don't like opera, I guarantee you that a majority of them will say that it is too serious. And even if they do not use those exact words, and they point to how people sing, or what the themes are about (both musically and storywise) you will reach the conclusion that they mean too serious. In fact almost all music without a backbeat is considered to be serious music by the public. Of course this definition falls outside of any discussion about the actual definition of the word "serious" as held by pedantic existentialists on Internet forums. Schaem - Do you spend a lot of time tracking down cookbooks from current Italian chefs who have Michelin stars? Do you travel out of your way to go to their restaurants the same way you would travel to go to Pierre Gagnaire? Are you or your chef inspired by recipes by today's Italian chefs?

This makes no sense because noise can be art. This is just a more complex way of expressing preference. Just like silence can be art. Whether it's good art or not is another thing. But both noise, and silence can be (notice I didn't say they definitely are) valid expresions of an esthetic by an artist. We've had this conversation before. My definition of art is food that is intended for the sole purpose of an esthetic (isn't that what your chef means when he says that) and not for the purpose of being eaten for pleasure. We can apply this definition to everything. Take a bacon cheeseburger on a seeded bun with lettuce, tomato and ketchup dripping down the side. It can be a delicious wonder. But we can also spray it after it is cooked and display it in a museum as something that expresses something about American life. So when I ask if PG's food has crossed the line, I am asking about whether his cuisine is too contrived to evoke a response to the esthetic he is trying to create and isn't balanced in terms of the sensual pleasure that comes with dining. Simply, more to think about then to savor. Does that make sense?

There wasn't but even if you compare the amount of attention Italian cuisine gets compared to cuisines that don't qualify as haute cuisine you will reach the same conclusion. The trendsetters come from Spain, the U.S., Australia and Japan. Whether the way you define the cuisine that comes from those places as haute cuisine ir not, they all have chefs who get lots of attention and Italian cuisine does not.

Excellent response Mr. Jones. Looking at it through that lens, haute cuisine can be considered to be the last bastion of cuisine that was dependant on terroir and their introduction of modern techniques relied on it being balanced with a need to express that terroir. But the other way of looking at it is that the Spanish school has put *too much* emphasis on technique and not enough emphasis on local ingredients and ultimately the question will be whether someone will turn the technique into a popular cuisine? Do you think those are the right questions? Like opera, I'm not sure that a higher artform will ever be created when it comes to food that is intended to be served in it's natural form. Despite the fact that one can serve pureed and smooth mushrooms instead of roasted ones, the goal is still to present mushrooms. But extracting the essence of the mushrooms for another purpose seems to be a radical change to me. If you stick with the musical analogy and look at the development of music and assume food will develop in the way music developed, serious food will become a museum piece and a popular version of cuisine like rock and roll will dominate.

Gavin - Absolutely correct and if you read the French board you will see people like Robert Brown and myself basically saying this. Then of course there is the argument about whether the Spanish chefs who make headlines these days are really offering new technique that is permanent or is it some varition of HC for the "connoisseriat?" But if you move to Avignon, try the 1991 Beaucastel Roussane Old Vines. One of the greatest wwhite wines you will ever drink. 1994 and 1999 weren't bad either.

Now those were a bunch of good responses. But I think that they further hone the issue. The more we talk about it, the more the definition of "relevance" becomes, "conversation about the technique that we describe as haute cuisine." The inference that the technique is usually good comes from the fact that we like to talk about it. But I don't think that means that we think that every application of the technique is a good one. This board is replete with reviews of bad or mediocre haute cuisine meals. And I refer you to my recent Pierre Gagnaire thread for an example. JD also raises the issue of their being a current trend in cuisine to serve impeccable ingredients and he raises Alice Waters as an example. Craft would be a good example as well. But what they serve at Chez Panisse and Craft is derived from the Italian strategy of preparing veggies. Go to Arpege and Ducasse where they are sweating the veggies in high fat content butter on a low flame for 2 1/2 hours and they have transformed the dish from Italo-American to haute cuisine. Of course the line there isn't a bright one, but there is a difference in the approach and the philosphy and even more important, where those vegetables fit in your meal. Gavin - It's not a matter of fuzzy lines between disciplines. It's a matter of there being a definition of opera that at some point means the music you are performing isn't singspeil and it is opera. That doesn't mean that two different disciplines can't share many of the same techniques. I'll give you an example. Andrew Lloyd Weber's most famous songs are constructed in the same technique that was used to construct the famous opera arias. But he has combined that technique with the framework of a pop song. What he did was to extract the guts of what makes an aria tick (the hummable parts) and he applied pop music techniques to the core idea. So the characters that sing songs like Memories seem to be singing something profound because our ear has been trained to react to those type of harmonic combinations as serious music. But what makes it truly ingenius (and I use that word in a commercial sense, let's leave arguments about whether it is any good or not aside) is that the character who sings the song expresses themselves like a character from the musical theater. And ultimately that is how his music gets categorized. It isn't opera, and it isn't pop music. Because ultimately what determines that something is musical theater is what the character is expressing and the mode they express it in. Does that makes sense to you? Wilfrid - The question is about Italy for obvious reasons. First of all, the food is so delicious there. Secondly, they are so close to France. Third, the basics of each cuisine are sort of the same. So a question of why there is such a great disparity between the countries is obvious. We don't ask the same questions about say Germany because there isn't really a tradition of great cuisine there.

Jones I think that is a bad example. No French chef would suggest that at it's core, haute cuisine, or French technique, doesn't rely on the same roasted mushrooms that Italian cuisine relies on. But the conversation is about the layer of technique they added on top of the ability to roast perfect mushrooms. That is why I always analogize haute cuisine to opera. Everybody sings, but opera is a fancy technique that singers apply when singing opera. Haute cuisine is exactly the same. Everybody cooks but cooking in the haute cuisine style means applying a certain technique that was devised specifically to practice the artform. The artform has already subsumed many of the techniques used in Italian cuisine. Steve Klc - Your point about there being Maitre' d'Ouvres is a great one. There are everything from mater carpenters to master butchers (by the way, I understand that Plotnicki in Russian means master carpenter.) This celebration of craftsmen is now being copied all over the world. Without the codification systems that the French came up with of course. Now we have branding instead .

Thanks everyone very much for finally coming around to my long held position on this , that it all comes down to a matter of technique and how you apply it. Haute cuisine is a language. It's a way for a chef to speak. Fried squid, regardless of how good or how perfectly prepared is not part of that language. And what we call "relevant" really boils down to the fact that French chefs speak in that language but Italian chefs do not. And to compound things, there are chefs all over the world who are speaking in, or are using a variation of that language. But depite this Italian cuisine is a language of its own as well. And just the same as haute cuisine, it is copied the world over. But the cooking techniques employed by the chefs are not as obviously complex as the routines in haute cuisine. So technique is not at the epicenter of the cuisine. Ingredients are. So whoever said that the reason the Italians do not cook haute cuisine is that it means cooking in the French style and why would they do that, they're Italians, has asked the wrong question. The real question is why hasn't Italian cuisine evolved in a way where they have created a cooking technique that is as evolved in the same way haute cuisine is? They didn't need to copy French cooking, they could have created their own techniques. Why didn't they? To say that they didn't have to because their native cooking is so delicious is a bad answer. That's like saying there was no need to invent opera because there was great musical theater. It's called progress. A rethinking and reformulating of existing ideas into a more complex technique to be applied to your discipline and your patrons. There are only two reasons it doesn't happen. Your customers don't want it or you can't do it. We can take a portion of the best funghi in the world and we can get the best Italian chef to roast them, saute them or even grill them if they are the right type. And they can be perfect. But "relevant" means making something like a Flan de Champignons. And when we talk about food, it really is a conversation of the technique involved to make dishes like that flan. It's about a transformation of the food into a new form of communicating what is great about it. That's why places that serve a great plate of roast mushrooms are fantastic to eat at, but don't offer much fodder for our discussion aside from their being highly recommended.

Well relevant as defined in this thread means "the things we spend time talking about" and we don't spend much time talking about Italian food at the high end. This board is replete with conversation about ethnic restaurants (and I'm including Italian as ethnic) and also questions about how to cook the food at home. But while people talk about a good dish or meal they had at a Chinese restaurant, or how to cook Chinese at home, there aren't 300+ response threads going on about a single Chinese restaurant or chef like there is about Pierre Gagniere. Face it in France, the craftsmen have been elevated to a lofty status. So we talk about them. We know there names, know what they look like from pictures. Does anyone know what the Gambero Rosso guy looks like?

Robert - I think there is a question to ask that has nothing to do with coming to a conclusion about which cuisine is better, or even more relevant. How come there isn't a prong of Italian restaurant cuisine that has garnered worldwide attention to the same extent as certain French chefs, Spanish chefs, and certain chefs in the U.S., Australia, and a handful of chefs from other countries get? It doesn't add up in a country with such good food.

Hard food, hard life. Soft food.....

Franceso - I wasn't talking about Bocusse because I have never been. And I would think that Bocusse has two stars on historical merit alone. But I would say that La Palme d'Or in Cannes, and Jacques Chibois in Grasse, both 2 star restaurants as far as I know, are infinitely superior to Al Sorriso. One of the problems with Al Sorriso is something that I find is typical for Italy. They haven't managed to elevate the local cuisine that extra notch or two that the better French restaurants have. You see this repeatedly all over Italy, and it goes to the point of no star chefs. I have never eaten at Guido (though I'm going shortly) but I hear that they have made a refined version of Piemontese cuisine. Whether it meets the same standard as what goes on in Troisgros etc. is another thing. If we discuss this on a technical level, velvety stocks and lots of pureed food certainly helps those French chefs. It's the difference between a Zuppa di Pesce and a Soupe de Poisson. Those soups are a starting point as to why the cuisines are different. I think things just flow from that there.

Well this is the heart of the subjective/objective debate. Anyone who thinks Stravinsky's music isn't art doesn't know what he is talking about, or has let his personal feelings interfere with his abilty to think rationally. Because whether or not you like his music, that is separate and apart from being able to recognize what about it is art. And I don't care what anybody says, whatever definition of art you impose, Stravinsky's music meets the standard. But it's for that same reason that Gangaire's food might be art, but not be good food. I see those as two separate things. I would never argue that Gagnaire's food is bad art. As so many have said here, there are brilliant flourishes and improvisational statements etc. But the same thing that might make it good art can be preventing it from being good food. As for maggots, the way you state it is as if it's relative and it's not. It's one thing to say that a three star chef might devise a recipe that includes maggots and within that framework he will construct an argument as to why they should be included in the cuisine. But until that happens, I can safely say that they are excluded. I think it's a terrible mistake to confuse the potential inclusion in a discipline with saying that taste is relative. Taste is only relative outside of the rules one accepts for the discipline. So the fact that a farmer in the west of Spain might be eating maggot infested cheese has no relevence to this discussion. We are talking about what they are serving on rue Balzac. Not the theoretical possibilities that Pierre Gagnaire might serve that cheese one day. He might serve human flesh if it came to be in vogue. The argument that everything is art or can be good if presented by the right person is a good argument. But it can't leave out the fact that haute cuisine means that you have to serve maggots in the style of haute cuisine. Possibly a greater burden to overcome for a chef then finding anyone to order the dish.

It's the pasta of sports.

At 4:10 am I can't help you. But I'm sure there are all night delis somewhere. Sarge's on the 3rd and 36th. Are they still open 24 hours? Someone must be. Befriend them so you can bring your own (salami.)

Gee I remember a discussion about this once on the wine boards. If I got it right, the air that the wine is exposed to when you pour it from the bottle into the decanter is enough to start the process of oxygenating the wine. And I don't think that constant exposure adds much to the mix. Remember, we are talking about a chemical reaction the wine has when it is exposed to oxygen. The issue then becomes how much additional oxygen do you need to expose the wine to to keep the process going? I don't think it's a matter of maximum exposure. But I stand to be corrected by our local eGullet chemist or oenologist.

Well cold chicken is better then warm chicken because the disgusting flavor of warm chicken has vanished . Cold steak is terrific. Especially if it is leftovers from Peter Luger or a place that broils a good NY strip. It's something about the marbled fat coagulating and sort of getting to be a foie gras or butter consistancy. Sliced thin (go to Petak's) it makes a terrific lunch.

Gavin - Well that's the type of argument the one with the "old fashioned" way of doing things would pitch wouldn't they? They might also say that airplane travel might be more efficient but travel by luxury liner is the "only way to travel" and "real travelers" only travel on the seas. So that's just nothing more than marketing. Robert - How come they all have weekend homes in the Berkshires and not the Hamptons? The reason the major cities don't have good restaurants has to be because of economics. The reason that people don't talk about the freshest and best foodstuffs is because there is nothing to talk about. I had great chestnuts and carrots from the greenmarket last week. What is there to say about them aside from they were fantastic? But the way that the restaurant I ate in prepared them, now there was something to talk about. This is why the French are dominent. They changed what the meal was about. They added all kinds of layers of preparation and service to the mix in order to create something called a "dining experience." And a star chef is just one, but probably the most important component of the dining experience. And as Francesco asked, the real question is why has Italy failed to produce star chefs who transform Italian cuisine in a way that makes us as interested in the fine dining they offer as we are about fine dining in France? I believe that people who are interested in fine dining, as we are defining it here, have pretty much written Italy off their list as a destination for that purpose. I mean I did after my last grand meal there which I took at Al Sorriso in 1998. As someone here said, not even as good as most of the Michelin two stars. And it has three stars! And meals I've had since then at restaurants in the Alba region continue to confirm that opinion. The food can be very good, but there is no brilliance to the cooking in the same way you find at countless places in France. But the dichotomy is, and I think that Marcus is in the same place as me, we find it hard to believe that is the case. In a country where the simple food can be so delicious, how the hell haven't they been able to produce a chef who can add the extra layer of technique to the experience? I think whomever said that the cooking was left for women was onto something. But I don't think it's really a matter of men or women, I think the issue is the quality of people who enter the workforce as cooks. In France, being a cook meant becoming a respected member of the workforce. I'm not sure that chefs have the same social status in Italy. Look at how many qualified men and women in the U.S. and Britain became chefs over the last 30 years because the way we perceived chefs changed. Prior to 1970, did chefs have college degrees? I can think of three off the top of my head that are graduates of the best universities in the world. Is there an equivelent to this in Italy? The other issue that hasn't been dealt with is the general conservative nature of Italian society. Whether you point to the Church, or the fact that they had a fascist government, or even that stupid defense their soccer team insists on playing while they keep some of the most talented offensive players in the world harnessed, they don't really love change.

I've got the answer; BYOS (bring your own salami) Go down the street to Petak's and ask them to do you a favor.

It's not a matter of pleasure in food, it's pleasure in food within the constraints of haute cuisine which we are discussing. That pretty much means maggots are out I think. And game hung too long might be as well. And people who don't like Stravinsky's music might not think it's good art, but they will admit it's art. Same with Gagnaire. Everyone will admit its food. But not everyone will think its good food. But it can be good art even though its bad food at the same time.

Too posh. How about a hot dog?

I love abstract roast duck. Now what would the point be of turning a duck into something else?