Steve Plotnicki

But it is a form of communication. That is exactly what a great aesthectic is. A form of communication.

Louisa - But you're asking the sort of hypothetical question that is unanswerable. If you served that egg at the corner luncheonette, it would not make the same impact as it does when it is served at a three star restaurant. All food needs context to maximize its impact. You wouldn't like you eat a hamburger in a restaurant with a gilded ceiling. And I don't think that eating kosher delicatessen in a place that looks like Gramercy Tavern would be much fun either. So I'm not really understanding your question. And viewing sculpture is not interactive (at least with Rodin.) It might be profound and moving, but you don't physically touch it, nor put it inside your body. Food is different.

Innovation is important relevent to what else is happening in the marketplace. If the marketplace is old and stodgy, then it will welcome innovation. But if hasn't yet exhausted the latest ideas, it could ignore innovation. As for when it is appropriate, I thunk chefs have to be innovative near the beginning of their careers. I don't see many 50+ year old chefs being innovative now if they haven't been innovative in the past.

Deacon - Believe me I welcome the opportunity. Would you like to do it with food or wine? Or both perhaps? Can we bet on it as well? But it has to be an area I have expertise in. No zinfandels. The stuff tastes like toothpaste to me. And no California cabs or new world wines other than Harlan Estate. But Rhones, Burgs, first growth Bordeaux, better Barolos and Barabarescos, bring 'em on. I have a friend who is a wine importer. You can take him into a cellar where wine is being stored in barrel. And you can give him tastes from various barrels and he can tell you the vineyard the wine comes from, and even from what section in the vineyard it comes from. And I have other friends with similar skills. Knowing those people, the argument that taste is subjective is mind boggling to me. Taste, as Mr. Johnson so aptly put it in a different thread, is about discerning trace substances. And in food and wine, it's the ability to follow the trace substances through the vinification or cooking process where they get manipulated and combined with other trace substances. I don't understand the argument that people who can't discern those substances can have good taste? Please explain. Sandra - Ah I wish it was me. I wish I knew enough about theater to be able to have a more complex discussion about it.

Loufood - I was trying to say that you can't have a nice swimming pool with dirty water. Just like you can't have a three star restaurant without nice decor and a staff that offers top level service. But whether you like my analogy or not, the next sentence says the following; If that doesn't answer the original question asked, I'm not sure what would. No restaurant can be a three star only because of the food they serve. That's because it takes more then just food to have a three star meal. How about a buffet? Can there be a three star buffet? I doubt it. You can't compare the dining experience with viewing Rodin and Picasso. It's interactive, viewing Rodin is not. You have to have all the accoutrements of the meal down perfectly for a dining experience to be a three star experience. Mlpc - No you aren't being unfair. I can see that 3-4 more visits might allow me to understand his food to the extent that I would find no reason to return. And don't be shy about saying "been there done that." Marcus - That's a tough question to answer. How do I parse intelect from sensusal pleasure when they are so well integrated? It's not as if Passard offers senusality apart from the cerebral component. I think the biggest leap with Passard's cuisine is that the elements of heavy saucing and meat are non-existent. One has to learn how to enjoy the meal without them being there. I have a friend in Paris who owns a wine shop. He eats at Passard all of the time. But given the choice between L'Ambroisie and Arpege he will choose Pacaud because he likes to eat meat. Let's just say that I don't have that problem. And I found my meal enjoyable enough that I didn't miss the meat or the heavy saucing at all.

I'm scratching my head because steak is the same as a can of blue paint. A steak tastes good or it tastes bad. It's a function of quality. If you think a sirloin from Sizzler tastes better then a steak from Lobel's, you don't have a good sense of taste. It's not a matter of opinion. It's the same with Farmhouse cheddar versus Kraft slices of American cheese. If you think the Kraft slices are the better cheese, you don't know anything about cheese. I really don't see much controversy with any of those statements. But I'm sure you will find a way to disagree with them. That's because in order to reserve the argument that taste is subjective, you will say that there is no definitive proof that Lobel's sells better steaks then Sizzler does. But at the same time, when you are in the mood for a top qualioty steak, you won't go to Sizzler, but you would visit Lobel's. Gknl - You have switched the pea. Saying something tastes like drivel is not the same as saying someone's taste is drivel. I have only said the former, I have no desire to say the latter. Where the latter comes out is when someone offers their taste as proof. Bux - I'm trying to understand why you don't think that people who know about jazz get to decide what is acceptable jazz and what isn't? Who decides what is acceptable theater? And who decides what is acceptable painting or sculpture? Who decides anything?

Yuck who would ever taste one. Have you ever seen one? They are quivering. I've seen a double delivery and it wasn't a pretty sight .

It tastes better than a placenta does.

I got it now. It's okay for you to say with specificity that the Supreme Court was wrong about Bush but the same level of specificity isn't available to someone criticizing your opinion of food .

That's sort of like asking if someone would you enjoy swimming in a beautiful pool as much if the water was dirty? Ambiance, environment, formality, decor, service, presentation and a few other things I'm forgetting are all part of the three star experience. The food might be the main aspect of it, and it might drive things to the extent where it makes up 80-90% of the rating, but the other things are of major importance in making the meal enjoyable. Mlpc - I long to be tired of eating at Arpege. Unfortunately I've only eaten there twice and I haven't used up my quota of desire. And indeed I have already booked a table for the end of October. But I have to tell you, when you were describing your meal, it sounded like you enjoyed it and it doesn't really seem to fit with the conclusion you reached.

When I first read this thread I didn't quite know how to respond. I've eaten at Veritas a number of times (including on the evening the NY Times 3 star review came out) and I've had some very good meals there and some plain meals there. But what I can tell you, and I say this without making a value judgement, is that people who are serious wine collectors love Scott Bryan's food. To be honest, when eating at Veritas with them they usually like the food far more then I do (and I'm a pretty serious wine collector too.) I could never tell if they were biased because of the wine list, or he happens to make food that is well suited for their palates. Knowing wine collectors, and knowing how they have their palates calibrated, I concluded 75% of what drives their reaction to the food is that Scott has figured out some match to the way they see things. And the other 25% is a bias in favor of the place because of the wine list. But regardless of what percentage you apply, if you accept the premise that he has a skill in pleasing that type of palate, it certainly explains why anyone who doesn't fit the description would find the place overrated.

Deacon - I'm glad you were honest enough to bring the debate down to what I believe is driving the argument against my position which is politics. As we said when AHR and Jordyn and I were discussing this thread over dinner the other night, the issue here is really class warfare. It has nothing to do with food. But I can also tell you that my position has nothing to do with politics either. With being Republican, Tory, or anything else. In fact I think if you had a private discussion with me you would find my politics are quite liberal. But what does that have to do with calling a blue can of paint blue and insisting that its color isn't a matter of opinion? That's what my argument is, and that's the issue at hand here. Everything else that people raise is a fancy argument to avoid dealing with that issue. If you give me latitude to deal with that question, as a can of paint gets more grey and less blue, is it blue or grey? And the answer to that question is it depends on how precise an answer you want. If you tell me my choice of answer is limited to primary colors, then an argument will ensue as the issue gets muddier and muddier. But once the choices you are given include some variation, the argument lessens because there is more room for agreement. That's the first part of why we can't settle this discussion. There needs to be an agreement as to what terms we are allowed to use to state our position. You and many others here want to deny me use of words like "right" or "correct" to state mine. You have gone so far as to call my use of the words "right wing." But how do I ever state my position by the stringent criteria I want to use if those words are unavailable to me? It gets even more complicated then that. Even if you and I agreed to these terms, we would immediately run into the problem that Mr. Johnson and GKNL pointed out. If you drop a ball it will fall to earth 1000% of the time. Taste is not that precise. Except as I said a few posts back So let's take an example. Suppose I went to my mother and I went to Daniel Boulud and I asked them what is the right amount of a certain ingredient to add to a dish. My mother's answer would be appropriate for a home cook and Daniel would look at the question through the lens of haute cuisine and his answer would be appropriate to that. Which one is right? Well it depends on the question asked doesn't it? So when the same question is asked about what to drink with steak, it depends on what question is being asked doesn't it. You tell me, if anyone came on this board and asked about what beverage they should drink with steak, do you really think they are looking for an endorsement for milk or tea? There are rules for everything in this world. It's just that in some fields, especially ones that have to do with aesthetics, the rules do not contain a formula to calculate winners and losers. Take writing a business plan or a computer program. They are artforms just like anything else and there is an aesthetic about them. But at the end of the day there is a way to measure how good they are. Good ones make money and work, bad ones lose money or crash. But when it comes to food, art, music etc., people who partake in them have this funny need to reserve judgement for themselves. They want to reserve the right to say that the highest scoring restaurant in Zagat isn't the best one. But at the same time they want to be able to state their own choice as to best restaurant. But then when someone else comes along who has eaten significantly more high end meals comes along and applies a more stringent standard as to what is best, all of a sudden they switch to saying that taste is subjective and there is no best. The audience is always fickle. That's because as consumers of art they want to apply a standard that makes them feel good. Do you not see how applying that standard is wholly different from applying one that tries to put feelings, biases, and desires aside and tries to evaluate things according to a different standard? Are people who do that snobs? The term snobbery is always invoked when the criteria invoked by a person or a certain group of persons is too stringent to allow everyone to participate. But in order for it to be snobbery, the criteria had to be chosen for the express purpose of exclusion. Of course that would describe the aristocracy. I mean what about them makes them different from anybody else? They are just flesh and blood. But why does it describe people who know more about food then you and I and who do nothing more than tell us that we got it wrong? We wouldn't be excluded because of any other reason other then our own incompetency. Calling those people snobs because of our own incompetancy is merely reverse-snobbism. J.W. & Bux - The part about the Royal Albert Memorial was a joke intended to tweak the nose of my British antagonist. Fashion was the example. But your proffer that things change with time only says that the standards have flexibility to them. That doesn't respond to the point that the issue is what the standards are at the time the question is asked. If I asked you who the best chef is, the implication of my question is based on existing criteria. To say that because the criteria can change with time makes the question unaswerable is a non-starter. It just an attempt to prevent me from using of the word "best." Because I can keep narrowing the question until there is a "right" and "wrong" answer. Also I think that J.W.'s point about art being considered afterwards is a fabulous one. But it's really the same point I'm making. I say that artists (whether they be chefs or musicians) create something and then experts evaluate it. A marketplace of criticism ensues and people interested in the aesthetic adopt a generally held opinion about it, or maybe a series of opinions. Gknl - I read this to say that political correctness is more important then the truth. I have no quarrel with that position and it's an admirable one. But the price you pay is a lowering of the level of the discourse Tony - Talk about critics trying to move themselves up to the head of the line. That entire theory adds up to we are going to replace objectivity with subjectivity in the first instance. After a film overcomes that hurdle, then each reviewer can be objective. Oy. It sort of sounds like Soviet socialism when they try and make the workers more important then the people who actually have the good ideas. Without people who have good ideas, the workers have nothing to work on. Fortunately there were more movies to write about then there was space to review them in because you would have seen that editor change his policy pretty quickly if the end result of the policy meant there were empty pages each month.

The best cous cous in Paris these days is at Timgad in the 17th, and Mansouria on rue Faidherbe in the 11th. I think Timgad is the livelier of the two. It's just off the Avenue Grand Armee between the Etoile and Porte Maillot.

Tsquare - You fall into the same trap as Suzanne. I am not debating what nicest means. To people who want to live with glitzy chandeliers, a home in Miami Beach designed by Louis Lapidus in the 60's is the nicest. And to those who want to live in a classic modern style, a Charles Gwathmy beach house might be more their style. Or I would choose to live in Pierre Charreau's glass house myself (I like the block it's on and I go visit the house all of the time.) But those are three examples of architects who are/were succesful in the genres they worked in. But there were many other architects that worked in those genres who were not successful. Or who had worse taste. Maybe even bad taste.

Heron - I can't really recall. My best memory is that the sweetness came more from the tomato then the mustard ice cream. But is sugar an ingredient in mustard? If so it had to have some sweetness.

Zeb A - By the people who know what tastes good. Just like the rules of jazz were made by the people who knew what sounded good. And the rules of fashion were made by the people who knew what looked good. Do you really have another theory about this? Suzanne - Bear with me for a minute. You keep calling it "the market" as if there is one big market. That's just one way to look at it. There are really mulitple markets that the overall market subsumes. Some markets revolve around money. Like real estate. The nicest homes almost always cost the most money, given that the location is equal. Other markets don't revolve around money. Film criticism is an example of a market that doesn't revolve around money. It revolves around who writes the best criticism. My point, and I keep trying to make it, is that the people who drive each market are those who have a vested interest in the market they function in. And the most talented people (as measured by each market,) have the largest impact. Do you really disagree with that?

I'm sorry to see that you can't argue this on the merits. You should know that to thouands of people who lurk on this site, they all read your last post as the malice of the loser. But I still can't help myself from pointing out the following. How could somebody with as poor a palate as yours tell who is a connoiseur and who isn't? Yeehah. I love arguing food with them Brits.

I'm really befuddled by the fact that because there is a range of acceptable answers to a question, you can't see that the lack of precision isn't a fatal flaw in the equation. The problem isn't that I can't get the formulas on both sides of the equation to balance. It's that you insist on saying that one side of the equation is fixed, i.e., taste is subjective. It's the opposite of that. Taste is objective but the standards change according to the issue and topic. That way the equation always balances. How "good taste" gets measured is dependant on what we are trying to measure. And if we frame the context and the variables correctly, we will always be able to tell right from wrong. In fact we do this all of the time. If you were listening to a symphony, you would bring a certain set of assumptions with you. But if you were listening to jazz, you would need a different set of assumptions. And if you went to see a jazz show and you brought your classical assumptions with you, expecting it to be good on that basis, it means you don't know anything about jazz. To say that you are entitled to say that jazz isn't good, when you know nothing about it turns the world on its head. That's because there are rules as to what makes something jazz and what makes it classical music. And those rules are the standards that jazz is measured by. And that is the case whether you want to admit that or not.

Robert - I think what really makes Arpege a great experience is that Passard actually knows how to organize and orchestrate a tasting menu. That's a skill you don't see as often as you did in the days of old. I mean the dishes I had were good but look at the order and how he built textures while introducing flavors. I keep repeating myself but balance is the key. Mustard ice cream is great when there is a hint of mustard and the tanginess of the vinegar is offset by the creaminess of the fat and the way that cuts the tang. But add the wrong amount of mustard, or have the wrong fat content and the dish can go down the tubes. I think that Passard's cookbook isn't really about his recipes, it is really a primer on how to balance flavors when cooking. I have no first hand evidence of this but, to get spinach the way he served it to me, the leaves of the spinach have to be a certain thickness, and have to have a certain firmness to them. And the fat content of the butter needs to be a certain level or the butter needs to have been manipulated at the source. And the exact temperature that it is sauteed at needs to be revealed. I might be wrong but, I think that the reason Passard's cuisine works so well is that he cooks with that level of specificity. Vivin - The greenmarket phenomenon needs visible chefs to promote cooking techniques that people can practice at home. How happy would everyone be if they knew how to make Passard's spinach? There is a need to develop a type of cooking that takes the best advantage of those markets. Passard is poised (technically) to be the chef that style of cuisine rallies around. But he isn't a self-promoter in the same way as other chefs, so he isn't likely to be the one to consolidate the concept of market cuisine into a worldwide phenomenon.

No it's not. It's just saying that they can't meet the criteria set forth. Same as not being able to solve a math problem. And you know what, taste is easier. Because when it comes to matters of taste, there's a range of acceptable answers. So to not have good taste, someone has to be pretty poor at meeting the criteria. Suzanne - You have pointed to why some people are worker bees and some are bosses. The bosses have taste to an extent that is sufficient to participate in their field or their market. And the worker bees conform to that image. But if the workers have good enough taste on their own, they can break out of the fold and make their place in the world. The market measure who has good taste and who doesn't. And like in every other example I raise, the people who are most expert in the market are the ones who drive the market. So Lauren, Chanel and Westwood do not need to have the same sense of taste. That's because while they each work in fashion, there is a seperate market within fashion for each of them. But if you are to define good taste as anyone who is successful in the fashion industry, then yes, all three of them have taste sufficient to operate in fashion.

This is exactly right. The reason I don't make value judgements about the palates of people who grew up in the U.K. is that having grown up on the grey mush they eat over there, their palate was clearly trained in a way that could be described as idiocyncratic. And that's putting it nicely Wilfrid - My apologies but I couldn't resist. Tsquare - I love how you turned my statement into one that says every architect has good taste. Of course there are architects who handle the utilitarian aspects of the profession where taste isn't part of their job. So can I have leave to amend my statement into saying that people in the design aspect of the job are supposed to have good taste. Of course they don't always, and even when they do, what they design isn't always in good taste. But can we agree that if I made a list of all of the famous architects of the 20th century, good taste (in design that is) is what they had in common?

Do you mean to say that a person who has worts that almost completely cover their face and body can be considered handsome or beautiful? Looking that is. They certainly can be a beautiful person. Do you think that the person who thinks someone who meets that description is handsome or beautiful can be considered to have good taste? Can someone who thinks the Royal Albert Memorial isn't ugly be considered to have good taste? If good taste is subjective, why would good taste be a qualification of people who work in the fashion industry? Or of architects? Or of orchestra condutors? If the standard was merely subjective then anyone could do those jobs. But it's a fact that hardly anyone can do those jobs. Isn't that empirical proof that taste is objective?

"Do you not want individualism at that level. Isn't that what wins 3 stars and what you are paying the 300 Euros (bargin) for?" That's a hard question. On a personal level, both for selfish reasons as well as wanting my fellow diners to eat better, I would rather see Passard's techniques spread throughout the world of fine dining. Lord knows how many chefs there are with dazzling techniques. Very few chefs are working in the market ingredients millieu of fine dining who make food as interesting as Passard, or even just on the haute cuisine level. There needs to be more of it in my opinion. Not that it is in competition with cuisines that rely on fancier and more manipulative technique. I surely enjoy that as well. But if the philosophy spread it would give diners all over the world additional choices of where to have a good meal. That's the most important bit.

But for that to be true, you assume that being a better taster is an asset when it might be a liability. Where you keep going wrong, is you keep refusing to admit that there is such a thing as good taste. The ability to hear things better, see things better, and taste things better. Being able to do any of those things more intensely doesn't necessarily mean you can do them any better. For example, even if it's a bad one, let's say someone had super-vision and the acuteness of it prevented them from seeing the beauty of an Impressionist painting the way the artist intended it to look. Or their hearing was so acute that what we commonly hold to be in tune was heard as completely out of key so they couldn't enjoy a string quartet because it sounded like people scratching their nails on a blackboard. Good taste is to be able to appreciate it within the context something is supposed to exist in. Like reading, either you can function in that context or you can't. The scale doesn't slide.

I disagree with this. The standard for evaluating whether someone can read or whether they can't is their actually being able to do it. They don't change the standard for dyslexics and call illiteracy reading. (My most sincere apology to anyone with this type of disability.) It's the same with tasting. Someone who is a super-taster with a palate that considers delicious things to be off has no sense of taste (as good taste is defined by commonly held standards.) The standard doesn't slide because of their diability. Good try though.