Bux

girlcook, your points are all good, especially about the cost of Paris. I've found Barcelona hotels not to be much cheaper than Paris, but it may be at a certain level where the problem is greatest. Food is definitely less expensive, although in both cities, I think you now need to choose wisely. If you're lucky, or perhaps if you do the research, I think northern Spain can provide much of what are regared as France and Italy's strong suits -- chef driven haute cuisine, and traditional cooking -- and do it as well as either of the other two countries. Can Roca (you're speaking of the restaurant in Girona, are you not?) doesn't get enough publicity. It is a suprisingly fine restaurant that would deserve attention for it's cuisine and service even if it were in Paris or New York. There's a chef from the UK who should be at Martin now, or may be arriving soon. He posts as ginger chef on eGullet. Say hello. I hope we get to hear a lot from both of you.

Rhetorical question, I presume.

It's been a while since I've visited Sancerre, but as I recall there was a tourist office, or some such place in the middle of town that had information about the vinyards. Not all wineries are set up for visits and in many cases visits are made less by sightseers than be locals and traveling Frenchmen looking for wines to buy by the case to put in their trunk. Rarely are the wineries set up to accommodate the kind of visitors that flock to Napa Valley.

The attorney general hasn't forced them to change the name to Ess-a-big-fat-roll? An excellent big fat roll designed to deliver the cream cheese to your mouth with little or no hole to lose the best part during the move to the mouth. Need I say more? So-so bagel, good roll.

It appears that the experts have changed their minds over the years and will change them again, if human nature remains what it is. At any rate, there remain differing opinions among professionals in many of these aspects and it's presumptuous to assume any of us has the one true answer. Above all, what I respect in this excercise is that dissent is accommodated and offered a respectable place at the stove. Once we've made our points, and explained the reasons for them, let's proceed.

Supply and demand. There's a demand for a donut this good and that demand come from enough people willing to pay the price. There's a limited supply of donuts this good. There aren't many people willing to make donuts this good for this price, let alone less. If anyone of us brought a donut this good to the market place and sold it for less, or brought a better donut at the same price, these guys would have to compete or go out of business. It's probably not worth it. It may not be possible, but if it is, no one is trying. In fact, as they sell out now well before the day is over, there's a market for more donuts this good at this price that no one is trying to fill.

No, the real question is whether or not there is a standard for bagels. The bagels of my youth were stars, not delivery boys.

Moi? I always thought New York water was relatively soft -- meaning it had few minerals. That's why soaps and detergents lather up so well. There's nothing wrong with being from the midwest, or the south or southwest for that matter, but it does remind me of a story told about a group of midwestern methodist ladies -- or were they southern baptists? -- who convened at a Miami Beach hotel some time back. As they were not the traditional clientele, the management went out of their way to be solicitious and at the end of the convention, asked how they enjoyed their stay. The answers were very positive with one exception, almost to a woman, they complained about the stale donuts.

It beats pimping, which is a no-no on eGullet. By the way, I don't think anyone is complaining about the incompetent staff in the restaurant, few of us have been to the restaurant. We're complaining about the incompetent wait staff on the show. We complain about what we know and what we see is what we know about the show. Indeed, what they show, is the show. If the show paints an unflattering picture of the restaurant, well I guess that means NBC is not an investor in the restaurant.

I appreciate the reasons Fat Guy leaves out herbs. I'm inclined to add a thyme, bay leaf, parsley, garlic, peppercorns, and a clove almost all of the time. I have an open mind about eating, but what comes from my kitchen tastes as if it comes from my kitchen and that's a distinct part of my theraputic process. All canned broths are too salty to be concentrated very much, but you can deglaze a sautee pan with canned broth if you're careful and cut it with wine. Canned beef broth is not as useful as canned chicken broth.I would use canned chicken broth to braise a pot roast before using canned beef broth. I would also not add any salt until the end. One our our few traditions, and we're not very tied to this either, is to braise a goose for Thanksgiving. The week before, I buy several pounds of duck wings and chicken bones in Chinatown and make a brown stock for braising the goose. The neck and trimmings of the goose are often added before cooking the goose, depending on our schedule.The browned goose is braised in this stock. I'm not sure anyone else has pork stock in the freezer besides us, but we use it to poach sausages we're going to eat cold or heat up in a pan later. We also use it to poach pork tenderloins as just below the simmer. We wind up with a very juicy and flavorful, but extremely lean piece of meat which we usually have cold in salads.

You might want to keep an eye out for the Sicilian pasta enforcement team. I hear they don't play as nice as the Swedish bikini team. I'll see your feta and raise you fresh chèvre (from France, no less). Some of us come here for an expert opinion, not options.

There are many people I'd share a bath with, but none of them stay at hotels that don't have private baths. Most of them are movie stars or supermodels. That's not an amentity my wife feels I've earned. About the only time I'll ride in an unairconditioned car in the summer in France is when we're with our friends and their dog, but that's because the windows need to be rolled down. Enough said.

Perhaps that's the best quote to use to break in with a wish that everyone could read Jacques Pepin writing about stock from his early days at the Plaza Athénené in his memoir. (Page 96, if you have the book.) I'll quote just a bit, but there are more interesting parts that are too long for me to type. They made demi-glace from the first stock and glace de viande from the second. Both were defatted and neither had salt.I found it interesting when he noted that as first commis he had the responsibility of making the glace de viande and inevitably made too much, which excess he sold to caterers, sharing the profit with the chef saucier. Lest you think him a thief, this was apparently an accepted tradition and a perq for the saucier and his assistant. +++ My own two cents comes from an amateur with lots of bad habits, but enough dedication and interest over the years, so that there are bound to be some truths in what I do and think when cooking. Chicken necks are one of the best parts of the chicken for making stock. I tend to use the words "stock" and "broth" interchangeably. If that's not quite correct, sue me, or at least be forewarned. I find canned broth sometimes acceptable, or at least better than dried cubes, but agree that there's no substitue for a good homemade stock. The meat from a long simmered stock will be tasteless. If you want boiled beef, first make a good beef stock and then simmer your beef in the resultant stock until done. Your boiled beef will taste better than if it was cooked in water and your stock will improve. The same goes for poultry. A stock made from meat and bones will generally be better than one made from just bones, or just meat. A stock made from the carcass of a roast bird is not likely to be as rich as one made from a whole bird. I'd also prefer to roast fresh bones than use the carcass, but bear in mind that a stock from a used carcass is almost free and can later be improved with fresh meat. On straining, I often stop at a pass through a very fine meshed chinoise, but I'll also clarify a stock from time to time depending on how it's going to be used and how it looks. It's hard to watch a pot and easy to let a stock pot come to a boil too often. When that happens, the scum that should rise and be skimmed off gets incorporated into the broth resulting in a very cloudy broth. I've found that even an unappetizing opaque grey chicken broth can be brough to an almost transparent golden clarity by clarifying it. I use the technique set forth by Julia Child in Volume One of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I think this is an ambitious undertaking and this first lesson was emminently successful. I hope I've contributed a little.

As a student in the summer of what must have been 1960, I happily stayed in rooms with neither air conditioning nor baths. Sometime during that summer, I met an older American guy, a teacher I believe, and I remember him saying he wished he could still travel cheaply without the need for certain amenities. I immediately resolved to toughen myself so that I could travel no matter my future circumstances. I've done quite well and think I could survive without the few luxuries I allow myself or shall I refer to them as the ones Mrs. B. forces me to endure. Air conditioning is not a luxury for me however, it is a necessity. A private bath is another, but fortunately, rooms without private baths have become far rarer in the past four decades. Air conditioning has not entered the French culture to the degree that plumbing has. I don't have a great need for a room phone and pay phones are far cheaper for making outgoing calls, but over the years we've made friends abroad and we often have the need to be reached. I enjoy TV however, far more than I do at home where I can understand what they are saying -- perhaps that's why I enjoy it. Seriously, I wouldn't hang around the hotel watching TV, but it is a window on the local culture and I will often keep it on while I'm in the room. I have an American friend who spends more time in France than in the states. I don't think he has a TV in his apartment here. If he does, he doesn't watch it. He bought one in France because he felt watching it helped improve his language skills. The problem with French TV is that it's very talky and boring, although at least one channel runs some racy stuff late at night from time to time.

I think this is a good example of how a few photographs can help whet your appetite to dine in the restaurant. I'd be curious to know if permission was granted for reprinting those reviews, or if anyone even asked. The NY Times review has a graphic that says it from their premium archive. That's a pay service. There appear to be links to help and search, but they don't work.

A very nice site. Everything that's on the site is very easy to find. The site is all one level deep, which makes it an easy site on which to find your way around, but there are some hyper text links for short cuts anyway. It's a small site, so the menu at the bottom of each page also functions as a site map. This is an inherent advantage of small sites, but you'd be surprised at how many designers don't take advantage of inherent benefits. It's a lightweight site that doesn't bother with animation or depend heavily on graphics. "Lightweight" is not meant to be a derogatory term here. I have DSL, but my guess is that this site will load quickly for those using antique browsers on a dial-up connection, which means just about universal view-ability and quick access to information. It's a handsome site, if the kind you could bring home to mother perhaps. If you've never heard of Chez Panisse, it might not get you excited about going there, but few people have never heard of Chez Panisse. That shouldn't be a problem and besides, I think that's Alice's style. I might like to see some information about the kitchen. The menus are recent. The fixed restaurant menu is posted for the current week. The a la carte cafe menu is two days old and I assume relatively indicative of today's offerings and certainly of today's prices. The Special Events page is a bit confusing. Most the events are annually recurring days, but two special weeks honoring Italian white truffles and Zinfandel are shown with 2002 dates that are at least seven months stale. It would have been easy to update that page. I would love to see some information on each cookbook. The titles are in blue indicating a link, but they are only a rollover that makes the cover appear as an image. A recipe or two would have been nice, but these are less faults than they are latent opportunities to expand the site. Overall, it's probably an excellent model for any restaurant to use as a guide.

It's been quite a few years since I've had a Montreal bagel, but it was from St. Viateur, or so I recall. It was better than anything I had tasted in NY at the time. Since then, bagels have not improved in NY. If St. Viateur has kept its quality up, this New Yorker is on your side. As to whether the St. Viateur bagel could compare to the bagels of my youth in NY, well that's just too far back in memory.

Yes, of course there's that. I suppose it's a mised blessing.

Troisgros' salmon with sorrel sauce was a nouvelle cuisine classic and served all over France. Daguin was the first to serve magret (grilled rare duck breast) but it soon became a southwest standard and then an international dish. The spread of recipes isn't "news." Anyway, you can't copyright recipes. All you can do is make it better than everyone else and have the world know that imitation is always second best. You can also improvise on the original and you can credit your source and inspiration. I think that changes everything and this surprised me a bit in the article. I don't know if Daniel's recipe for sea bass in potato crust is still on his web site. It's a dish he created while working at le Cirque and one his clients demanded later when he opened his own restaurant. This is what he had to say about it on the site and in his cookbook. I think it sums up why he's upset when he's upset and sets an example of professionalism. I appreciate Scott Conant's feelings, but I think he over reacted. Then again I'm dependent on the writer's spin and choice of quotes for that view. I'm glad however, that I don't know the name of the pasty cook who didn't have the honesty not only to praise Conant, but to both credit him and improvise to make the dish her own. There is a code of ethics even if it's poorly followed.

Would someone care to nominate a restaurant web site they think is particualrly successful or unsuccessful? We could them discuss its merits and faults. It would be interesting to discover where we all agree or disagree and it might prove to be a fruitful excericise.

What some of you are doing here with taste like that.

Nikolaus, I agree and have always made a great point of saying that a chef is, above all, an executive. His job is to organize, train and run a kitchen whose success is not dependent on his being there. At the very least, I hold him responsible for not leaving unless he can trust the staff he leaves behind. When the chef is also the owner, his responsibility carries over to the front of the house as well. I raised the issue, not to justify bad service on Gagnaire's absence, but because the one very negative report I've heard about Gagnaire came from a couple who dined there when neither Gagnaire or his wife were there and I'm trying to learn if this could be a factor. I will note that these people were also unimpressed with the food. I could say they have conservative tastes, but they are also the same people who raved about Roellinger years ago and who warned me I might find his food too adventurous for my taste. I will say that Gagnaire can transform products and that the resulting dish often bears little resemblance in taste to what we might expect from the ingredients. I can understand that some diners may find this upsetting in a manner that gets in the way of enjoying the dinner. I've drifted from the service aspect, but the one negative set of comments I've received came from diners who were unhappy with both food and service. I'm a diner of limited means -- I suppose we all have our limits, don't we? I've only eaten at Gagnaire twice. After the first meal, which thrilled us, I was quite careful to whom I would recommend the place in spite of our excitement at having dined there. He had two stars in Paris then. After our second meal, I have become more willing to recommend Gagnaire to any gastronome who can afford to eat there and who has dined at enough other fine restaurants. My reasoning is based less on the likelihood that Gagnaire has universal appeal than it is on the fact that I think he's a force one needs to deal with to have a founded sense of contemporary Parisian food, if not contemporary western food. For many, the risk may not be worth it and for them my reasoning may not be sound.

Gareth, well said. If I were to disagree or argue about any point, it would only be to get further involved in semantics and definitions. I think I'd add, if I haven't said, or implied, it someplace before, the value we place on creativity seems to be a contemporary focus. It was the watchword for the creative arts in the last century. In terms of food, I think it must be accepted that French food began to stagnate a decade or two after the war and needed something to revitalize it. What's going on in Spain is something else again and something I find fascinating. The Catalans have a history of very personal artistic expression -- Gaudi, Picasso, Dali, etc. The Basques, on the other hand, seem to have a reputation for conservative tradition.

It's been a while since we've eaten at La Regalade, but I once described it as my favorite. I'm glad to hear it's still satisfying. I've heard reports that over popularity has taken its toll on the service, if not the cuisine.

I have, at times, been surprised to learn which tables a restaurant considered its best tables, not to mention to learn at which table some VIP refused to be seated, or insisted on being seated. I can only assume I still have a lot to learn about behaving like a big shot.