Bux

Funny you should mention Cotes de St. Mont. Not long ago, I was in a wine shop looking for some cheap wine for daily use. I had picked up some innocuous Alsatian pinot blancs and was looking at a Rueda. A salesman I know, saw what I was buying and came over to me with a bottle of Cotes de St. Mont saying it was really very good and one of the few things at that price worth his recommendation. I had never heard of the appellation, or is it a VDQS, but I took a bottle. Unfortunately I only took a bottle. We thoroughly enjoyed it and when I returned a week later, they were sold out. This was a white. Do they also make a red?

I've always been a fan of the little mom and pop shop food shops and of the great artisan bakers, cheesemongers and such, but I've been incredibly impressed by the range and depth as well as the quality of the best stuff available at some of the hypermarches in France.

How common is this and is it not common at certain levels of restaurants? Is it less common or uncommon at destination restaurants -- basically the three and four star NY restaurants? I also assume this is an American thing and maybe a British thing. Can anyone comment about restaurants in France, Spain and Italy? I ask because in the few restaurants I have second and third hand knowledge, there seems to be no visible animosity between the front of the house and the kitchen. I know cooks and chefs who socialize with waiters, captains and managers and who seem to consider the staff as part of the same team.

Those are interesting questions. I don't have an answer to any of them. As far as quality goes, I recall looking at the brand and thinking it was an interesting concept, but when selecting Breton butter cookies to carry in the car for whan I craved a sweet snack, I relied one of the local Breton brands I knew were of high quality. There's not much to be saved when buying a package or two of cookies a week over the course of a short vacation. I doubt these products are filling a complete void or that they're responding to an overwhelming demand in the marketplace, but I suspect it's a marketing effort that may be based on a perceived consumer need or interest. On the other hand, I'm sure there's more than a bit of promoting the idea that a consumer can depend on one brand for all these specialties. The questions I'd have are along the lines of who's actually making the products in each region. My guess is that they're subcontracting out to processors in the regions much the same way private label foods do in the states or the way Sears gets it applicances built. It would be interesting to know how well they can standardize the quality of the line as well as the relative value of the different products. Even relative value is relative. Sometimes there's very little difference between various brands of some food stuff and sometimes there's a world of difference. I'm also interested in hearing about how old your two kids are and if you had any chance to eat out with them, and how they reacted to what they ate in or out of a restaurant.

It's been a long time since we visited Kanazawa. We stayed with an American friend who was teaching there. What I remember most was the market and some wonderful fresh seafood. There was a sushi bar/restaurant just on the edge of the market. There was a line to get in and I remember looking at the plastic displays outside while on line. As we got inside, I saw a waitress carry a bowl of sushi rich covered with uni. I nudged my wife and said "uni chirashi sushi," which got some smiles and giggles in the room. I suppose it also brought a sigh of relief to the waitresses that we weren't some totally clueless westerners expecting cooked fish. I wish I could tell you more. I wish I could go back soon.

jeunefilleparis, ballast_regime et al, I was impressed with Liebrandt's basic technical finesse. I have had rubber shrimp and overcooked fish from at least one award winning kitchen in NY. My scallops at Papillon were precisely cooked and translucent in the center, but try as I might, there was no proportion of dark chocolate and scallop that pleased my tastebuds. We returned again and when we did, the food was less adventurous, but more enjoyable, but not compelling. Still I find it sad that the restaurant couldn't seem to find a clientele for either kind of food. WD-50 remains a place I must try for myself. I suspect most of us are not all that hard to sway, at least a bit. I wonder how much more effect one's table companions might have than any review. Perhaps they won't convince you that you are really enjoying food you don't like or vice versa, but they can certainly have an effect on how you appreciate the food. For many reasons, my wife is my best dining companion. Often, I've thought that more people at the table tend to distract from the attention to the food at hand, even when they are respected connoisseurs with a common food interest. Thus I was struck when a good friend and not infrequent table companion of ours remarked that a meal at El Bulli, needed to be enjoyed with several companions. What I took from his comment, was that the appreciation of seriously creative food is enhanced by discussion with others, just as the appreciation of a good book or film is made more meaningful by a discussion with others. The unique and wonderful thing about a dinner, is that unlike a book or film, the discussion can not only happen, but is most rewarding, while you are engaged in enjoying the creativity at hand.

David is not only correct about this summer's sale, but in retrospect, I think July may be the traditional summer sale month. Some time ago, I recall being in Paris in July on my way to a wedding in Brittany and thus remember the exact month. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to buy a couple of knit shirts in incredibly ice cream colors at an excellent price at a rather chic looking shop. I also remember the time we arrived in Paris in January and the hotel recpetionist trying to be friendly, asked if we were here to shop. We gave her a puzzled look and said "no, to eat." Paris' reputation as a center of haute couture just never seemed to affect me.

Such as we have here in the states. I value your Veyrat post very much. Trust me, I've returned twice to read it thoroughly, but I think Magaret has summed up the value of this post quite well.

When we dined there, I had a question for the sommelier about our wine. My command of French is hardly very great, and I spent a good deal of time forming the question in my mind before I called him over. He responded in French and I did not fully catch the meaning of his answer. I suppose many people, having asked the question, would have been more interested in the information about the wine, but I believe he sensed it was important for me to get as much as I could without resorting to English. I have no doubt he spoke English quite well. Nevertheless we continued in French which I am sure required great patience on his part. If I missed some nuance of the answer, I was still glad to have had the chance to carry on the conversation entirely in French. I'm always leery of telling this story lest someone assume this is another apocryphal story of a Frenchman unwilling to help an American by speaking English, rather than a tale of a man's patience. The moral here is that we all come away from any situation with our own spin and all recommendations, including whether or not to visit Paris, must be weighed with whatever knowledge you can make of the one telling the story. While I found the staff unsmiling, I found them to offer exceptional professional service and of the sort they felt was expected.

How does one break the hold of Michelin, AA and all the other local raters? I think it's a hard mind set to break, especially once one is on the track. And it's probably worse once you reach the top. In a way I'm speaking not only of chefs and restaurateurs, but of diners on vacation. Home in NY, I have no trouble spacing out my meals in haute cuisine temples, but on the road in France for just a week or two, The urge to collect as many memorable meals as I can grows large. Admittedly, the thought of consuming four or five stars a day for a week is too daunting for me. The challenge is to have little meals that are memorable, if not in the grandiose way that the multistarred meals are. You have some advantage returning to an area and staying there long enough to learn where these may be. For me, Brittany provides the cheap thrill more than any other part of France, perhaps. It's a rare crèprerie, that can't produce an excellent gallette au sarrasin and not infrequently one with an oeuf mirror of intense flavor that far surpasses even farmer's market eggs back home. Often the memorable little meal features some local product in season -- absolutely fresh river fish, or berrries at their peak -- but the memorable food can often be a surprise -- a slice of pizza with chorizos and roasted peppers from a truck with a wood burning oven. The great pity of that pizza was that I didn't have more instead of stopping for lunch at a small town cafe where I ordered a salad that arrived topped with cheese shot from a can and accompanied by bread that could have only been served in place that also used canned cheese. Fortunately, dinner was at the hands of someone who did worry about everything, although it was at the tail end of his active career.

I get this Could you possibly cite a few lines?

I can comprehend the idea that someone can chop or slice a bushel of mushrooms without a cutting board faster than I can on a board, but I find it hard to believe that same person can't do a better and faster job with a board if he tries. After all those arguments where I've taken the position that no cuisine is inherently superior to another, someone has finally offered a sold argument in favor of Japanese, Chinese and French cuisine actually being more highly developed and superior. The cutting board is to cooking as the wheel is to the rest of technology.

The pity about NY bouillabaisse, and perhaps Parisian bouillabaisse as well, is that people think that after having three or four, they may have some idea of what the real dish is about.

My mother used to cut on a china plate. I'm not sure if she knew why her plates were scratched or her knives dull. I see real cooks on TV cut against their hands and it annoys me to watch the way the sound of fingernails against the blackboard must annoy others. Paring, peeling and trimming are something else, but cutting is always done on a board. We have several food service approved plastic boards which I'm convinced harbor lots of germs in the scratches. Lab tests back me up on that. Wood boards seem not to harbor bacteria the way the plastic ones do. Even dishwashing leaves me skeptical. That explains my use of our old butcher block counter without reaching for a cutting board so often, although admittedly, fish, meat and poultry always get cut on the plastic boards -- they can easily be put in the sink or dishwasher. Bread is always cut on the counter and, often enough, so is parsely and garlic. Periodically the suface is cleaned with salt and lemon juice.

Our dinner party table is approximately 68" square. It was hammered together out of six one by twelve pine boards. It was meant to be a temporary table to be used while I designed the perfect table, but it grew on us and over time there seemed to be no reason to improve on it. Naturally we talked about a table cloth for years, but nobody makes an eight foot square table cloth. Besides we had recently returned from a trip to Japan and were enamored of natural surfaces. Once again there seemed to be no reason to improve on what we had. Unfinished soft wood is very porous. Although we scrub it down every now and then and rub mineral oil on it, it has developed a nice patina and you can hardly see individual stains. Our family table is a 30" square wrought iron patio table with a glass top. Glass is a noisy surface on which to eat. We have a bunch of square table cloths for that. We gave up on polyester years ago and will only buy cotton. On a daily basis we use cheap cotton napkins from a supply house. One batch was particularly out of square, but still useable. In Biarritz, we actually found good linen napkins that pleased our sensibilities and bought eight or ten of them which we use for company when we remember. They are large, heavy linen in a natural color with some deep red striping. I also have a rather elegant French antique chest of drawers that we use to store my mother's collection of tablecloths as well as the collection of unused tablecloths my mother-in-law emroidered for us, in her taste. Our daughter has a normal sized and proportioned table, but won't take any of the cloths. We should have a garage sale. We could really used the drawer space.

My visit was six years ago as well. I've been in Brittany a few times since and dined in a few other two star restaurants there. Each time I deeply regretted I was not back at Roellinger. I wrote about our meal then. No doubt it's cliche ridden writting, but may shed some light on his past, if not present attitude towards food. If you go, I recommend taking the tasting menu. The whole menu, as with many creative chefs, is more than the sum of the parts.

Actually, it was the other two restaurants I might suggest before Miramar. I suspect John Whiting has a good point. Bouillabaisse is a bit ruined by its own success and it's prepared today for reasons quite different from those that gave birth to the dish. That does not make it a less tasty dish to seek out, nor should we insist that it's inauthentic if it's not a cheap dish. Change is the only constant in life and there's no reason bouillabaisse shouldn't develop or that its role in our dining habits shouldn't change.

We are fortunate men.

Michel, also known as the Brasserie des Catalans, is where I had Bouillabaise when I was in Marseilles in December of 2000. I did not choose the restaurant. I believe it was chosen by the English couple we were meeting, but it may have been chosen by the French wife of their friend. She's from Marseille and that couple now lives outside of the city. R.W. Apple's discription right down to "a waiter dressed up as Popeye" is a good part of the reason I'm loathe to recommend it too highly. Nevertheless, it's well away from the port area and not really a tourist trap as far as I could tell. Both Miramar and Michel-Brasserie des Catalans have a star in the 2003 Michelin and they are the two restaurants recommended for bouillabaisse. Miramar, on the Vieux Port, is the one more likely to have tourists fall into it and it seemed to be the more expensive restaurant. Forty years ago, we had a very unpretentious bouillabaisse right on the port. Today, I'd be loathe to just a pick a nice place out of the blue, on the port. We did that for a lunch and it was a disaster. I'd go with L'Epuisette, another star, but not noted for its bouillabaisse and closed from August 11 until September 2, or maybe Michel-Brasserie des Catalans. That may leave you with one choice. The only advice I have is to get a bottle of Cassis blanc, or maybe a Bandol, but the Cassis may be better priced.

For what it's worth, Barcelona is likely to be hotter than Paris, although an evening breeze may be rarer in Paris than in Barcelona. There may well be no fan in a French hotel room. The French abhor a breeze. It gives them the chills. I have watched the French close windows and doors on stifling evenings for fear of a draft. The French being who they are, you should not be surprised if Berthillon, the famous ice cream shop on the Ile St. Louis, is closed in August. There are still those wise enough to make business decsions not for the sake of profits, but for their own quality of life. Much is actually closed in August, but Paris no longer closes down for the summer as it used to a couple of generations ago. Where would I go to buy an electricla fan in Paris? I suppose someone living there could give a better answer, but I might try Darty, the appliance chain, which has a shop in the vulgar shopping mall -- Forum des Halles. It's only a few blocks away from the great kitchen supply places that sprang up in the area when it was home to les Halles, the wholesale food market of Paris. August, by the way, is one of the two traditional months of sales in Paris.

I've enjoyed your posts from France today and none more than this one. Auberge Saint-Fleuret seems anything but a destination place. By all accounts, it's hardly the match for Cour des Loges, let alone l'Auberge d'Éridan, in terms of drawing power or as topic of interest, yet I find this post so poingant. It's not likely these days that I'd plan a stop in a one roof inn with no stars and the Auberge Saint-Fleuret doesn't seem the sort of place, I'd be lucky enough to fall into, especially as I already have a couple of favorites in that area. I do know that it reminds me of the places my wife and I discovered many years ago and they were the ones that formed my love of French food and country inns. I am heartened to see that the food is very contemporary and up to date without being cliche ridden. There are times when I've felt that below the starred level, the food of France is dying. This is a good area of France. We were in the region early last spring and on the whole, we ate very well, but at places we knew. Some of the places we chanced upon were less rewarding and served food that could often be described as stodgy renditions of the classics, or misunderstood attempts at creativity. A well crafted meal is no longer a sure thing in France, but I'm happy it can still be found in little out of the way places.

Snowangel, give that kid an extra dessert, and make sure it's home made.

I suspect not. We haven't made waffles in years either. As I recall our breakfast waffle and breakfast pancake batter recipes were almost identical. For both, the eggs were separated and the whites beaten and folded in.

I always thought he was a horse's ass. I always thought he didn't much like anything about food, especially touching it and cooking it and that he played to that same same audience.

Actually it is produced in both Switzerland and France. In both countries it is protected by an Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée. The Swiss AOC designation seems to date from May 3 of this year. The French recognized the AOC in March of 1981 and regulated it in July or 2000. The Swiss regulations call for milk that is heated to around 65° C, which is less than would qualify for pasteurization, but really not raw milk as some of the bacteria is killed. I can find no information regarding heating or pasteurizing milk for French Mont d'Or. In France, production begins on August 15, but the cheese may not be sold until September 10. From the Waitrose page on the cheese comes an explanation of why an Engllish speaking diner may confuse the cheese with the dessert.