Steve Plotnicki

Wilfrd - I was making a joke. I guess it was too subtle for you (or unfunny.) Next time I will use a smilie.

But the point is that people like Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges can produce a better quality meal than you can get at their restaurants. And if people are willing to pay astronomical prices for a different level of refinement, that's where a club like that would come in. Robert B. mentioned this recently on one of his threads about people having private chefs come into their home. This is just a variation.

"Obviously there was home cooking throughout England, so what exactly is it that the French had, at this level, that the British didn't?" Good ingredients, good chefs, good wines and good palates.

Because the level of experience they desire might not be available in local restaurants. Or might be available but only on a case by case, special occassion basis.

"I'm afraid this is another of those questions that doesn't have a definite answer unless you make it up." Especially if you append a question about the morality and ethics of what we eat onto the original question. But the second part about the tomatoes is a perfect outline of how the quality of food was diluted in favor of being able to deliver similar quantity all over the country. Not surprisingly, those areas of the country who could afford better quality tomatoes, and who lived withing reasonable shipping distance opted out of the mainstream and went back to a more artisinal approach.

We can discuss the Paradise Garage in a different thread. Save to say it was the pinnacle club experience. Les Bains Douches in Paris was also good for awhile. but again for a different thread. Well I think the answer to this is that someone should start an Urban Goumet Club, begun solely for the purpose of counteracting those negative food vibes that emanate from suburban country clubs. You know like the Tastevin or the other wine clubs are. This one can be for food.

Schonfeld - Well what do you like to drink? There has been a plethora of great wine made since 1995 in almost every region of the world. If you can be a bit more specific, I can be more detailed. Plus yous strike me to be of an age where extended long term cellaring might not be cost effective .

I have to add that in the U.S., the vocation of being a chef earns much more respect these days than it did when I was growing up. And I think the same is true for artisinal farmers although they are much less in the spotlight. But people like Bruce Aidell, Laura Chenille and others have made themselves household names among gourmet households. I think that's a good thing.

That juice bar at the Paradise Garage used to be good.

John was that a yes?

The King Kullen in the Hamptons is an odd duck. Because there is such a proliferation of farm stands out here, they sell lots of locally grown produce. But it isn't up to the same quality as the stands. But better than what they have at Food Emporium in the city. But the dynamic that really makes the store unique is that over the last 5 years or so the Latino community out here has grown disproportionately. Especially Mexicans and Colombians who have moved here to work on the farms, build houses, gardeners etc. So they have a huge selection of Latino food products, both in fresh foods and packaged. The Latino community out here is an amazing thing. Already there are three small grocery shops/prepared food shops. Just a few weeks ago we were riding in Southampton and noticed a takeaway food shop just outside the village. I ended up having a lunch of a sweet arepa (bland) and a papusa (pretty good.) I even noticed that in the main parking lot in Easthampton something called Latin Express. When I went to get a closer look it turned out to be one of those telephone places you see on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. While I'm glad to hear that N.J. has found a way to improve the supermarket, I'm sorry to hear it as well. We would all eat better if the people who supplied our food were more involved in the process. The quality at Citarella is what it is because Joe and the guys who work for him like Charlie G. watch the place like hawks. I have doubts that the same thing can work in an environment that is 10X the size. But I am always hungy so that means you can convince me. But I think Oraklet makes the point well. The range might have imporved but the quality deteriorated. Kraft Macaroni & Cheese today is worse than it was years ago because the scientists at Kraft have screwed with it so many times to get the cost down.

Not in Manhattan. I make my wife go . But I go to King Kullen in the Hamptons (possibly the world's greatest supermarket) and Publix in Miami Beach. Why do you ask?

This is such a hard question to answer because it isn't uniform across all aspects of food. Gourmet food shopping has dramatically improved. We used to have Balducci's and Zabars. Now we have Dean & Deluca, Citarella, Gourmet Garage and Eli's/Vinegar Factory. Artisinal products are significantly better in this country. Meats, cheeses, day boat fish, heirloom tomatoes, in every category there has been improvement. But in France there has been some detrioration on the artisinal level because of EU regulation. The general level of cooking knowledge and the general culinary awareness of the public is way higher than it used to be. I remember when coming into the city from Queens to go to La Crepe on 55th Street was a big deal. These days cassoulet is a household word. Not to mention that people eat all sorts of ethnic foods. If 25 years ago someone told me that housewives in Great Neck would prefer raw fish as there number one meal, you could have knocked me over with a feather. To see the best proof of this, go over to the "Club Food" thread and see Nick's menu for the club. It isn't the old meat and potatoes cuisine of yours. Much of it could be on the menu at a place like Gotham. So all in all I would say it's much better. Where it has suffered is in the middle. Food for the masses has went the way of the plaster wall only to be replaced by sheetrock. And like any other mass market item, in order to reach a wider audience they compromised quality. When the need to distribute millions of chickens of similar quality across the country is the main issue at hand, something in the production process in going to have to give in facor of making it be efficient enough to accomplish the goal. This is true in the entire supermarket range of food where in my lifetime the need to ship great quantity has in my opinion destroyed quality.

" It's interesting that no one has mentioned those areas -- large parts of Portugal, for instance -- that rely on the cork industry for their livelihood. This, of course, is no reason for staying with corks forever, any more than automobiles should have been suppressed in order to protect the manufacturers of buggy whips. Nevertheless, it should be dealt with as part of the total picture" Well I'm happy to include them in the total picture if all the wine collectors can deduct what we've lost over the years due to their ineptness and uncaring as an industry. Forget about the TCA problem, which one would have thought the cork manufacturers in Portugal would have solved by now through research, how about the hundreds of thousands of bottles of wine that need to be thrown away due to the fact that they provided a poor product. Someone who bought a bottle of wine in 1950 and opens it in 2002 first finds out it's bad because they milled the cork wrong or cut it in a way that prevents it from being a tight seal. Of course there are people who pay $3000 for that bottle at auction in 2002 only to find the same surprise. It seems to me, that the cork industry has historically acted monopolistic about their product and I'm not exactly sure they deserve our sympathy.

Okay I will farm, oops I mean frame the question.

Ron - The data shows that screwtops make an air tight seal. And as Fat Guy has noted about Australian wines, they probably age better in an air tight environment. Air (let in through faulty corks) is the number one murderer of good bottles of wine. The amount of air un the ullage (the space between the wine and the cork) is enough to allow the wine to go through the reduction process. But still the problem is that any of the name wine producers in the world are afraid to switch. There are other problems with corks that make them a poor choice other than TCA. They are irregularly sized. Some manufacturers mill them slightly too thin. I have bottles of wine from Marquis de Riscal from the 50's where for different bottlings they seem to have used different lots of corks. Some of the corks are a hair too thin and those bottles are oxidized. But some of the cortks are milled properly and those wines have aged perfectly.

"And, as should be obvious, the discussion of the wars was a response to Steve's question about what happened to British cooking in the twentieth century - that, Steve, is what you asked about." Wilfrid - That isn't quite right. This conversation started many months ago and the response to the original question was that the restriction laws wiped out the quality of food in Britain. You then have the fine research you did on the ensuing 70-100 years of British dining which gets you to about 1870. But you have a large gap in British cuisine (in terms of what commoners ate) between 1870 and 1914 which is when the war started. But that period seems to be (unresearched and this is my main question) the period when bourgois cuisine and restaurants started to come to the fore in France. Because while France suffered through both wars the same as Britain, they continued a tradition of eating well after each of the wars were over. But you say, and this is where I think we split, that Britain couldn't do that because they were decimated by the wars in a way that France wasn't and you point to rationing etc. I say hogwash. There wasn't a tradition of commoners eating well before the wars started, hence, no tradition to continue and that is why the food wasn't good. The best evidence of this is that when rationing was over in Britain, the food still wasn't good. There wasn't a tradition of fine dining (except for the monied classes) to spring back to.

Oraklet - These points have all been made on the board before. Yet for some reason, we can't get Wilfrid to ackowledge that the French public having better access to quality cooking via restaurants had something to do with French cuisine becoming dominant. Because not only did haute cuisine become the international standard for fine dining, bourgois cuisine became the international standard for home cooking. Though I haven't offered the proof, it seems to me that this phenomenon is unique to France because they cut the head off the upper classes (literally that is) and it meant that a wider range of people could enjoy the talents of the culinary elite (cooking skills that is.) I doubt that the same phenomenon occured in the U.K. for as wide arange of people. And while Wilfrid and Adam keep saying that England's bad lot happened due to the wars and rationing, I believe there was already a great disparity between the two countries prior to the wars. Or why else would people in England need to eat pie?

Maggie - Reims is a mere 90 minute train ride from the Gare de l'Est. Aside from the beautiful cathedral (a virtual copy of Notre Dame in Paris,) you will find no better way to cool down than in the cellars of the Champagne producers while taking a few tours. Of course having lunch at Boyer wouldn't suck either. Less gastronomic but more outdoorsy is Fountainbleu, a 45 minute train ride from Paris. There you can tour the old palace and walk through the royal forest. You could also visit the Fountainbleu branch of the Paris cheese shop Barthelmy. Not sure where else to recommend as most other places are 2+ hours on the train.

I think Marcus needs to reread what I wrote. Because what I said was that there aren't 52 restaurants a year that merit a complete review. And in weeks where a singular restaurant isn't reviewed they should review multiple restaurants around the same theme. That way even more restaurants would be reviewed than they review now. This was actually Fat Guy's idea in response to my point that MarkJospeh steakhouse didn't really need an entire review. And if you read back a page or so, you will see that I said that it would better on certain weeks if Grimes reviewed good ethnic restaurants in the boroughs, rather than another Tuscan restaurant that gets a single star and nobody really cares about.

Well restaurant reviewing isn't completely analagous to other types of criticism. A seat to a ballgame is $30, the movies $10, the theater $100, a book $25 and the cost to see a building is the price of a subway token. Three meals at Ducasse is $1000, possibly more depending on wines. Plus the amount of time you have to allocate to eating somewhere three times is significantly more time than anything else that gets reviewed. And as to wine, well Parker I believe said he can taste 150 wines in a day. Reveiwing 150 restaurants takes a year and a half and that is if you eat at one a day every day. The real answer to this is there just aren't 52 restaurants a year that a Grimes type needs to review. To me it would be better if they skipped some of the lesser places they review and like FG suggested, offer multiple columns. For example, when soft shell crab or mushroom season kicks in, I would prefer if the Times ran a column with five or six places that offered them and described them at each place. I would find that much more useful than a review of a new one star Greek fish house on 53rd street.

Lesley C - Your points are all well taken, but in reality all you're saying is that restaurant reviewing for newpapers is a business. And since they give the service away for free, they have limitations in what they can do. But other disciplines have scholars who write criticism for non-commercial publications and take a different approach, or write for publications that afford them a great amount of column space (how about film reviews?) Restaurant reviewing has been delegated to a lower rung of interest. And I'm not saying things like film do not warrant a greater amount of column space than food does, but it would be nice if food was upgraded and given greater deferrence. I think you would find that there is more interest out there than you realize. You know one of the problems with food is that there is no national food reviewer of note (US I mean.) Somebody like Robert Parker has 40,000 subscribers to The Wine Advocate who pay what, $40 a year? Or the Wine Spectator has something like 100,000 subscribers. One would think that their is even more interest in food.

Fat Guy - Well said. My complaint about allocating an entire Friday review to MarkJoseph is that it is too much copy just to make the ultimate point. It really doesn't merit an entire article. But I guess you also have a point in that there aren't 52 interesting restaurants to write about either. But I think the Times would be better off giving some of that column space to great ethnic restaurants in the boroughs even though they are more likely candidates for the $25 and under column. As to the 1%, it isn't that a review should be geared to that 1%, it's that a review should cover the entire spectrum. From the $20.20 meal to the best meal. What goes on in a restaurant each not isn't just one experience, it's a multitude of experiences and the goal should be to report them all.

Bux - Quite excellent points. If I can add anything to what you said, it isn't only that 1% of the population is interested in architecture, it's also that only 1% of the buildings built are interesting enough to write about. An inexact percentage but you get my point. And to be honest, the same is true about restaurants. What is interesting about the Mark Joseph steak house? I can encapsulate the entire restaurant by saying "this Peter Luger copycat...."

I have something to add to this. I wonder why a segment of the food industry feels it is appropriate to describe a request for better, more detailed, and more exhaustive information about restaurants as "elitest?" Would anyone describe a request for more detailed writing about any other discipline the same way? Do people describe thorough reviews of automobiles as elitest? Are articles about sandwich presses elitest? Would they have been elitest last year before the pressed sandwich boom but not this year because pressed sandwiches are in vogue? Is it the action that is elitest or is it the percentage of people? Is the classical music reviewer for the NY Times made to review the Philharmonic through the ears of the average listener and is he called elitest if he doesn't? Who put food in this ghetto and why are people in the food industry so determined to keep it there?