Bux

I've always preferred the old two number series of yellow Michelin maps to the old three number series beginning with 2. Both were at 1:200,000, but the smaller area of the two number series made them easier for me to handle in a car. The newer the letter series beginning with 3 is, for us, the best yet as it increases the scale to 1:150,000. There are 45 of these maps covering Metropolitan France including Corsica, but one need only buy the ones pertinent to one's trip. I'd be the first to agree that using a PC in the car is not an easy task, that's why Mrs. B prints out alternate routes. We can then choose the one that suits our need or mood. The advantage of the route descriptions are several, although they are still only an auxiliary to the maps which I consider a necessity. When asking Michelin for a route suggestion there are some options which I believe include the shortest route, the fastest route and the most scenic route. The fastest route is not necessarily the shortest route and a web based served is going to be more up to date in terms of road repair and blockages than a printed map that may be a year old or more. In fact a good argument for a wireless online connection in the car would be to allow the navigator to get the latest road conditions. I'm a big fan of the Guide Rouge for France as a whole. There are better guides, but not one I know of that covers all of France as concisely as Michelin. To get more information, you will pay the price of lugging several possibly larger guides, which we sometimes do. I strenuously object to any comparison with Zagat. The latter is a compendium of institutionalized unprofessional opinion. My faith in Michelin has been shaken, but it's always been a reasonable source of information, and as reasonable as other guides, if not always absolutely reliable. If there is a Zagat that would let me find an inexpensive lunch in a small region of France, or a hotel in the same area, I doubt I'd have any confidence on its recommendations. I have found the NYC Zagat Survey a farce and understand why.

I'll add that "I would like ..." has a far different connotation than "I want ...," or even "I want ..." and that it's the sort of thing that makes a difference in a country such as France. It's a gentler, less demanding way to ask for something and they'll respect you more for that little bit of politeness. French society operates on a code of formal politeness. Transactions in shops are started by greeting the clerk. "Bonjour" precedes "Je voudrais deux croissants. S'il vous plaît." [That's "Good day. I would like two croissants. Please. (literally "If you please.)] It's still common for a customer to walk into a shop or bar and formally greet everyone in the place by saying "good day, ladies and gentlemen."

The Michelin web site is an invaluable aid in planning a trip to France, expecially on the road. http://www.viamichelin.com/ In addition to hotel and restaurant recommendations it has good driving instructions. Mrs. B will frequently print out several alternate routes for us when we leave and have them at our disposal when our itinerary is flexible.

I rather miss the days when I had to struggle in my less than proficient French. That I still try to do so and that by and large the French are willing to patiently hear me out can be attributed to a character flaw in both our personalities. One of the things expected at a three star restaurant is that the staff will have an ability to speak several languages. English is generally the first among all foreign languages spoken in western Europe. It is the language of international business and often the one used by multinational corporations internally. Once you leave the two and three star restaurants, there's less of a guarantee that anyone will speak English, especially if you leave Paris, but you're not likely to starve no matter where you choose to eat, although you may eat very poorly if you search out restaurants with big bold multi-lingual menus posted on the street. Everyone's encouragement and advice has been good and true so far. Allow me to add mine. There's just no point in traveling if you don't have any sense of adventure. You're young and will likely return to France as well as travel elsewhere, maybe even to less civilized places, in your lifetime. Value the great experiences for their greatness, but value the experience for what you will learn about France, French food, traveling, life and yourself. At your age, even disappointments can be valuable. Risk the disappointment in the hope of trying something new. (At a couple of hundred bucks a dinner, discuss the meal in English if necessary. I'm talking about the bistro meal.) As others have suggested. Learn a few words in French because a few civilities in French go a long way towards charming the French. Whether you're adventurous or not, learn a few words in French that will help you in deciphering a menu. Fortunately you can do that at any supermarket or diner. Seriously, French is the language from which we get an awful lot of our food terms. Pigs are pork (porc) at the table. Calves are veal (veau). Cattle are beef (boeuf). Pullet comes from poulet. You'd be surprised how much of a simple bistro menu an intelligent American can get right off the bat. Poisson however, is not poison and andouille bears no resemblance to the sausage from Louisiana. It's a sausage made from innards, chitlins and can have a very "barnyard" aroma. Do get yourself a pocket glossary of food terms and don't be afraid or embarrassed to use it in public. That sort of thing has helped me out in Japan. Here you have the advantage of a Roman alphabet. Last and not least, make some effort to learn more French. Things taste better when ordered in French. Actually the problem I have is that with a familiarity of French menu terms, I find I can second guess what I'm ordering from the French menu, but the English translation often leaves me clueless. One last thing. Nothing makes a better impression than conveying the sense that the person you're dealing with can teach you something. I guess it's an attitude more than anything else, but your body language as well as what you say will let the staff know if you are there to sate your hunger and expect them to satisfy your hidden agenda or if you've traveled all this way to learn about French food at the source. You're on your own if they sense the first. There was a good thread in this forum once about what some of us older travelers learned from friendly waiters eager to serve, but we were never offended when a waiter told us we made a poor choice and suggested something else. We never believed we knew what was best for us or that the waiter was there just to do our bidding. Bon voyage et bon appétit.

To follow up on Jaybert41's post, while it's unusual for a restaurant not to request all of the table to take the tasting menu, many restaurants in France will offer a series of menus with different numbers of courses. Sometimes there are set menus offered with three, four, and five courses. In these cases it's common for diners at the same table to be having a different number of courses. Typically, a fine restaurant will set an empty plate in front of a diner not being served that course. It's mostly formality, but it could be used to share part of someone else's dish. Sometimes the space is just left bare, but the classiest treatment I've run across is when they bring out a small complimentry taste for the diner who was skipping a course. Understandably, a waifish diner who's worried about ruining her diet with three courses while her escort is scarfing down five or six dishes may not appreciate that touch, but I thought it was classy.

I've heard that about oysters, but never about all seafood and I've heard a number of reasons why that "rule" came about. The most popular explanation seems to be that it's easier for the oysters to spoil in warmer weather without modern refrigeration methods. I've not found that terribly convincing, but it may have played a part and that fact that the rule no longer seems to be in effect certainly lends credence to that kind of explanation, but there may be other health factors involving bacteria in the water. There was another expanation that is based on the reproductive cycle of oysters and that they don't taste as good after they've spawned. The most reasonable theory seems to be that oysters taste better in December than they do in June, but I have no way of doing a blind tasting. There was a thread a while back in the Texas forum about Gulf (of Mexico) oysters. The thead was actually about Sex, Death and Oysters an article by Robb Welsh in the Houston Press. In it, he champions the Gulf oysters although it seemed to me he offered some good reasons why cold water oysters are safer and tastier. He goes on to lend support to all three reasons I've heard.

I think Explorer has started the reply to oakapple. The way Michelin handles it's Paris section is far more complex than the way the rest of France is handled, but there always been some diversity in Michelin's focus beyond the star scale. There are the Bib Gourmand recommendations for restaurants offering good meals at moderate prices and the "two coin" symbol for those offering acceptable food below an even lower price ceiling. Restaurants that are especially agreeable are noted in red and the level of comfort or luxury is noted in the number of crossed forks and spoons. Explorer mentions some of the special listings. There is also a list devoted to restaurants open on the weekend (which is not common in Paris). The most interesting of all the special columns of lists in the Paris section is the one I first saw last year. This is for restaurants with Nouveau Concepts. If nothing else, this is an indication that Michelin is willing to accept and include restaurants that don't fit the traditional mold. It may also be that the decision to produce a New York guide is being made with the realization that Paris is becoming, if not as polyglot as New York, a place where people can eat in all sorts of new styles, even if they have to order in French. There are a lot of trendy new restaurants that just don't fit the traditional French dining pattern. Casual dining, a la tapas bar, is also making a breakthrough in Paris. These are things Michelin will have to deal with at home, they may as well tackle it in NY. While the Paris section breaks with the rest of the France guide, all of La Guia Roja for Spain breaks with the French pattern by listing tapas bars all over Spain. Restaurants in all locations are listed in order of comfort and then within each comfort group, by quality. A one star restaurant with five forks and spoons will be listed ahead of a three star restaurant with four forks and spoons. Tapas bars are listed after the simplest one fork and spoon restaurant. Michelin's format is not so rigid as to need to dilute it's brand to adapt to local conditions, nor has it shown any interest in lowering it's standards to raise the number of multi-starred entries to appeal to local diners. If anything, it appears to be unjustly slow to recognize accomplished restaurants in Spain. I will concede one point however, In London, where the dining scene may more closely resemble New York than Paris or Madrid, I've read a far amount of grumbling and criticism of Michelin as a less than useful all around restaurant guide. My guess would be that they'd have a working in-house edition for 2005 that would probably not be complete and which would probably be top secret, but we can all start looking suspiciously at neighboring tables and wondering that that's the Michelin inspector, and no one is going to have his picture pinned up in the kitchen as will the new NY Times critic.

Rousseau rings a bell. Attractive place with nice display of shellfish and a selection of crisp white wines by the glass, or at least a choice between Muscadet and the more local Macon Blanc.

One always has to be careful about burying one's head in the Guide Culinaire protecting one's self from the mystery of Chaud-Froid de Cailles en Belle Vue appearing on the menu, while the hip guys are all talking about lemon grass. P.S. I'm happy to feed straight lines if it helps.

Nor am I usually in the business of meaning to take sides. If I seem to in the cause of moving an interesting dialog, it should be noted that might have taken the other side if it presented a better opportunity to draw out the discussion. As full of myself as I may sound at times, I'm really here to be enlightened. Thus, I'd really appreciate your sticking around and pointing out interesting things, especially those where there's nothing to be gained by taking sides, but everything to be gained by an examination from all sides.

French food has changed, and it's still changing. The major apparent change in French food is not a change in what's seen in restaurants, but the fact that what's seen is no longer a constant. Even the early successes of nouvelle cuisine were quickly codified, classicized and served at many restaurants. There's far more creativity and focus on individuality in French cooking today. Not all this is for the good, but it is what's happening at the top and trickling down. Early on after my introduction to French food and especially that of haute cuisine, I started to make a determined effort to become a sophisticated diner, at least in the sorts of places that mattered to me at the time, and I tried to make notes filed away in that organic hard drive we refer to as grey matter. Forestière meant with mushrooms. That was easy and made sense, but many of the others just had to be learned by tasting or reading and there was nothing to do but memorize that sauce nantua meant a white sauce deeply flavored with crayfish. The commonly found sauces and garnishes came easily, but there was a repertoire of what seemed like thousands of names if you read the Larousse Gastronomic and Escoffier's works and even the dedicated haute cuisinista was unlikely to consume them all in a lifetime, let alone run into them on a menu. But they were all valid in terms of use to the chef in composing his menu. You'd be hard pressed to find many of the terms on a two or three star menu these days. In the sixties, a top restaurant would pride itself on its coq au vin. Today, Michelin might find that dish on a menu as reason to withhold a star. Forty years ago, those were international terms as much as they were French in that they were used in the best restaurants in Paris, London or New York and perhaps many other places in the western world. The "best" restaurants were French. Today, they're not French, or at least not as recognizably French as they used to be and that goes for the top restaurnants in France. Nevertheless, a translation of à la forestière would come out as "in the style of the forest," or if done by machine as "to the forest." A simple "beef stew in the style of the forest", is quite different than "beef stew to the forest," but the latter is still intelligible. The problem grew with the nouvelle cuisine custom of adapting terms to clever new uses. One of the worst translations to miss the concept was when "civet de homard" came across as "stew of furred game of lobster." Of course that's nothing compared to "Madnesses of Injury Slice of bread and Delicacies Exquisite" to convey "Folies de Dame Tartine et Friandes Exquises." The discussion on the France forum, to a certain extent revolves around the question of whether the poetry of the original is lost in translation or whether it is raised to a new and appreciably higher level of abstraction.

Beer is an excellent drink all by itself, but in spite of the fact that it's more filling than wine, it's also a great accompanyment to food. In some instances it's better than wine. In Spain, where they make excellent and inexpensive bubly wine (Cava) and produce great aperitif wines in Jerez and Sanlucar de Barrameda, I've found the most common aperitif in good restaurants to be a pilsner or lager beer, although the more serious the restaurant, the more likely they will continue with wine later in the meal. Have you given much thought to pairing food and beer? How strong is your interest in food? Most wine connoisseurs tend to appreciate good food, although I've run into more than my share of those who feel food should be background to wine and will choose a restaurant with a great wine list over one with great food. Any thoughts about beer connoisseurs and their relationship to what they eat? Are there really fine restaurants with great beer lists? Actually, you should just feel free to expound on any aspect of the the title combination--beer & food.

Oysters in les halles de Lyon have been mentioned a few times on this board. I know I referred to having them on a report of one of my visits to Lyon. I seem to recall that I misspelled the name of the stall as well, but it was one I'd recognize immediately. Later, someone posted that it was the preferred place. I'm not sure on what authority that preferrence was made although it appeared as the more inviting one to us, at the time. Are there more than two oyster and seafood bars in les Halles and do you have a preferrence for one over the other(s)?

Welcome Mark. I suspect you will find other threads up your alley. If not, please start one. I can't really take sides between the "hamburgers" and the "Buck Run Farm’s Grass Fed Beef burger" when the seemingly superfluous words add meaning, whether or not I care about the meaning they add. Redundancy is another matter. The classics are "creamery butter" and "farm raised just about any cultivated vegetable." "Wild tuna" may be in the same category, although I think there is some farmed tuna. "Wild Caught Tuna" however, is in a class by itself as a phrase. Is there a restaurant seving tuna that's not yet been caught, or does the phrase mean to distinguish tuna caught in the wild as opposed to some wild and crazy tuna that's been trapped at a tame cocktail party on Manhattan's upper east side? "Organic Wild Mushroom" is another phrase that seems too long. Is there some less than organic corner of nature I should worry about when eating wild mushrooms elsewhere?

I think there are different kinds of VIP treatment and different restaurants do different things for different kinds of VIPs. Daniel used to send out a basket of madeleines to VIP tables, but when Time Out featured them in a side bar on the restaurant pages, they wisely decided to send them to all tables. I'm not sure what, if anything, was added for VIPs. Mrs. B likes to spot the number of amuses that go to a table. The assumption being that the VIP table will get more, but across a large dining room, it's hard to spot who's getting a little herring roe and who's getting a healthy dollop of caviar on their canape.

As I posted above, it's my understanding that they didn't move to midtown. They closed the Chinatown restaurant and opened one in Fort Lee, NJ. Sometime later the son of the original owners opened the restaurant in midtown.

I'm with you. I often eat in restaurants where regulars, visiting chefs, etc. get better treatment than I do. I'm pleased for every favor shown to me and if none is coming I'm pleased to get a good meal for the price and don't concern myself about favors done for others.

It's interesting how open he is about the VIP thing which always seems to be a secret and which often upsets people who aren't VIPs. I had someone tell me that dinner at a certain other fine restaurant in NYC, was the best she's eaten in NY and that she thought it a very fair value for the money. In fact it was as good a value for that price as she's ever had in NY, but that she won't return because there was another table that got special treatment.

Perhaps I haven't stressed that enough, but much of my reliance on the Michelin guides in France and elsewhere in Europe including the UK, is on finding an unstarred place to eat. One doesn't need a Michelin guide to find the restaurants featured in every guide and magazine article. It some cases it represents the best at each price point or each area, but what's important is that it represents a reasonable choice in each neighborhood at the listed price. If you come to NY and you've never heard of Daniel, le Bernardin or Jean Georges, you probably aren't interested in that sort of restaurant, but at the price point at which most tourists eat you'll find an endless supply of restaurants. Some of these are excellent and only a cut below the top places, while others, not much less expensive are patently unrewarding. Zagat reviews are unreliable because a very good restaurant may get a "2" from a Zagat participant who loves ADNY, a much less rewarding restaurant may get a "3" from someone whose favorite restaurant is Olive Garden. That there may not be any overlap between the restaurants these two types frequent, the numbers may be unrelated on any scale. Madrid has one 2 star restaurant, and six 1 star places. There are no 3 star restaurants in Madrid. Ditto for Rome Barcelona, a hot bed of new cuisine, has no multi-starred restaurants at all and seven 1 star restaurants. Milan has two 2 star restaurants and two 1 star restaurants. Brussels has a 3 star restaurant, a 2 star restaurant and four 1 star restaurants. Say what you will about British food, the London has three 2 star restaurants and twelve 1 star restaurants I don't believe they will create three star restaurants by lowering the standard, with the possible exception of allowing for a shorter meal and even turning tables. They seem to have no trouble publishing guides that are short on three stars and in no hurry to make France appear to be anything but the capital of haute cuisine.

"Madnesses of Injury Slice of bread and delicacies exquisite." "Folies de Dame Tartine et Friandes Exquises." Of course. Folies = madness de = of Dame, I don't get. Usually lady, but there seems to be some technical, mechanical term in which it's used to refer to ram or rammer. I still do't get injury. Tartine = half a baguette, or "slice of bread" that's been buttered, jammed or otherwise made into an open sandwich. Friandes = delicacies Exquises = exquisite. That "blanc battu des Mont d'Or" leaves me clueless. Is there some Mont d'Or dessert? I know of a Mont Blanc--chestnut puree topped with whipped cream. Is there some Mont d'Or of beaten egg whites (meringue) perhaps. Reading about Chef and Madame Orsi and just looking at the page titles leads me to believe this can't have been the work of anything but a machine translation. It's certainly not the work of anyone with even a smattering of English. It's a poor service to the restaurant and to the English speaking reader. The web site, even in French, is a triumph of style over substance. It is self serving rather than communicative. It's not the first restaurant site I've seen like that. It appears as if it's a site done by designers full of their own importance and less interested in communication between the restaurant and the diner or the public. In English those faults are compounded. When will designer's learn that we come to a site for information and not necessarily because we're bored and want to be entertained. Lucy, My guess is that the restaurant may not be so receptive to a proper English translation. For one thing, you will have to overcome the mistaken impression that they have an adequate site in English now. We have to assume they've paid well for the site they have and been sold on the ability of the designer to provide the translation. Even if they're interested, they'll need to have the complete site text altered and in the process, confront the designers. Nevertheless, you have nothing to lose and maybe you'll find free lance work if you can convince the designers the site is gibberish now. If nothing else, maybe you can get the sense of what those mysterious dishes are for us.

If so, they'd better locate a bunch of them in Midtown, n'est-ce pas? There are many hotels and many places to eat in midtown. At any price point they are not all equal. Many travelers would consider trusting Michelin's recommendations. I don't necessarily feel uncomfortable when I book a room at a hotel in Europe that's not in the guide, but I do feel comforted when I know my hotel is recommended by Michelin. That's the inherent point about the guide at the less than ultimate level of hotel or restaurant. It's not necessarily a list of all the acceptable choices, but all of its recommendations should be acceptable. I suspect the market of visitors from Europe, where the guide has an enviable reputation in spite of recent developments, as well as visitors from Asia and South American who are familiar with the Michellin brand endorsement as a result of having used it in Europe, is sufficient to warrant consideration of publishing a guide to New York. The time may have come and the strength of the euro may have contributed to this decision, although obviously the consideration began some time ago when the dollar was stronger.

This is undoubtedly true and reasonably stated. I don't think Michelin expects to put a red guide in every household in America. Georges Duboeuf doesn't expect to put a bottle of beaujolais on every dinner table either, but he sells enough wine and those who buy it are unlikely to say "Who the hell are these Michelin people to rate our restaurants?" A small segment of a large market can be a market in itself. Where Explorer makes a point is that in some circles, the opposite is true. The French cachet is a plus when it comes to food and wine. There will be plenty of people who will trust a French recommendation for a restaurant over an American one, even in NY. Relais et Chateaux however is not a rating, per se, but an association of inns and restaurants. Membership is selective, but it is also by fee. Inclusion in the group is not really a rating as much as it is a guarantee that the member holds to certain standards. It started in France, but is an international organization with member restaurants and inns on just about every continent save Antarctica. Not every restaurant is a Relais Gourmand either. Some are just luxury places in which to eat decent food.

At the luxury haute cuisine end of dining, restaurateurs and chefs will be coveting Michelin two and three star ratings far more than they will care about their NY Times rating. Sure, they will want top honors in each, but they will want want the top rating from Michelin more. As others said earlier, the locals know their restaurants and don't really care about either rating all that much. As I said, the tourists are going to look at the Michelin Guide and those stars may be worth more than any other guide's or reviews in tourist trade at the top. How many visitors to NY are truly familiar with the NY Times' ratings for more than a few restaurants? The interesting thing about Zagats, is that these guides sell well, but have very little credibility with the element that fills the top places. The question will not be about Michelin's credibility with diners who frequent the starred restaurants, but whether it will it sell to those who don't eat at the multi-starred places. It might sell to foreign tourists, but I doubt it will sell well to that segment of the American market. Will that matter to Michelin? Traditionally, the guide has been an advertisement for tires. At least that's how it started, but I suspect the NY edition is being seen as a profit/loss operation. That Fat Guy hasn't used Michelin nor referred to it speaks less about Michelin than about Fat Guy's travel style. I would as soon be on the road in France without at least a recent copy, than a spare tire. The more I travel in France, the more I depend on the Michelin. I also depend on it for more than restaurants. I need those city maps with their one way street indications. I need them to find my hotel, my restaurant and to find my way in and out of town. All these, of course are reasons why the guides are best sellers in France and why they are unnecessary for a traveler in Manhattan. Patricia Wells' Food Lover's Guides are always out of date except for the year following the occasional revised edition. They are still a treasure trove, but unreliable as a restaurant guide. I should also note that I haven't found Ms. Wells' reviews as reliable of late, but that's a subjective note. It's all well and good to stress the money and effort that go into the NY Times' food and restaurant review program, but for all that, it's never earned the respect in NY that Michelin has in Paris, nor has it earned anywhere the international respect that Michelin has for it's guides. However, there's an enigma about the Michelin guides to other countries. In Spain, for instance, chefs seem obsessed about their Michelin rating, unless that's only in the north where the French influence is most strongly felt, but I don't sense the guides have much power over locals' choice of where to eat. Then again in France, as in NY, the general public doesn't eat at the multi-starred restaurants very often, if at all. Fat Guy's comment about Michelin doing best in France where it's all French food is right on target however. That's both the problem in has in other countries and the problem is starting to face in Paris. It's far more difficult to rank restaurants on their system when they all don't follow the same general mold. If there's a city where the restaurants don't follow a mold, it's NY with it's diversity of ethnic restaurants and styles of restaurants. Whatever you make of my comments, my point is that this is a gamble for Michelin, but there are good reasons why they've got a chance. They do fill a void, if only in some markets. Can they sell the numbers of copies they need to make it worth their while is a question that remains to be answered. Can they sell to visitors looking for restaurant recommendations at the unstarred levels, but in proximity to their hotel for instance?

No. Most of the local population doesn't even read English that well. By and large the IHT sells to tourists and visiting businessmen. It is disproportionately important, but that's not to say it's very important. Patricia Wells is well respected in France and at one time was food or restaurant critic for l'Express, but that's not her currently role and she's not currently speaking in Frenchmen or native Parisians in her IHT columns. By and large, you won't find a Parisian restaurant ignoring its Michelin stars, and I don't expect to find one bragging about a positive review in the IHT, the way a NY restaurant will refer to itself as a four star place because of the NY Times review. There's nothing comparable between the IHT and the NY Times, except in the eye of a New Yorker.

We've eaten in the Phoenix Garden on East 40th Street a few time with friends who live in the area, but not recently. Thus I can't comment on the current quality, but my understanding is that this place is owned and run by the son of the Chinatown Phoenix Garden owners who opened a place in Fort Lee when they closed the one in Chinatown. I won't swear to this, but my recollection is that this comes from a conversation with the owner. While I can't comment on the current state of the food, the quality was excellent when we ate there years ago. As we live within walking distance of Chinatown, it's rare that we'll go out of our way to eat Chinese food elsewhere--places such as Vancouver or China are an exception.