Bux

Let me assure Steven that there exists in France, particularly among women, the cult of thin. Stereotypes are dangerous but the number of slim hipped small breasted women in France is quite noticeable, even to an American who hasn't tried to buy a pair of pants. This sets a standard not attainable to many. I believe Lucy has touched on this in her posts on France and in her Montagnac diet diary. Some French women do get fat and there's a thread in the France forum about the growing obsesity in France which some tie to the growing fast food industry in France. There's a thought to put in yout back pocket and sit on for a while. Let me also assure Jennifer and the rest of the membership that we are encouraging comments as well as questions, as long as they are on the topic of The Future of Dining as yours are. One of my responses to your comments would be along the lines of Fat Guy's. I recall reading about dining along the are on both sides of the Rhine. There was a concensus on both sides that German restaurants do not have the clientele that will allow them to cater to those who take enormous pleasure in dining and consequently, those Germans who truly love food in the way you and I may love food, tend to go west to dine as oftenas their schedules or wallets permit. The is one area where I do not believe globalism may be equated with an averaging of cultures and I believe traveling Americans have brought back many tastes from abroad including the enjoyment of taste. This has led to our development of cooking as a respected profession and to the growth of the ethnic restaurant business. I will concede that there is more than a little sliding in France where they've adopted the taste for "le big mac."

Some dictionaries define dining as the act of taking dinner. If dinner is the principle meal of the day, I suppose one can dine at lunch, if lunch is your dinner that day. Context is a large part of the meaning of any word. I think in this context however, your "eating that is elevated from the mundane and prosaic," may be as good a definition as we'll agree upon. I suggested that there may be a social context to dining, but I'm not sure one couldn't dine alone either at a restaurant or even at home. If we travel alone, either for business or pleasure, we should be able to dine as well as eat. In this context however, there are subcontexts. Even within a group that might consider visiting an Olive Garden, some will go to sate an appetite and others will see themselves as dining.

As Fat guy and I seem to be at opposite poles on this book, which one of us don't you recognize as a moderator, forum host or founder? I have eaten in the French Laundry and was treated well there, but I didn't meet Keller or see the walk in. Besides it was many years ago. I have no idea what actually happened in the Kitchen when Doug Psaltis was there. I don't know that I'm in a position to get more reliable hearsay than many others, and hearsay is always going to be suspect. I am more familiar with a restaurant in NY that's described in the book in detail, much of which doesn't sit with my knowledge of the restaurant. For one thing the owner's name is changed. More importantly his culinary background is turned upside down and he's presented to the reader with a lack of culinary experience that's utterly out of whack with what I, as a frequent diner, knew from was commonly reported in the culinary press or told to me by other chefs in the NY community. Such a fictionalized account should not have been necessary and I'm wondering why it was attempted. I'm also curious why only some names were changed. What happens is that as suspicions grow, so do innuendos. The pen is mightier than the sword, but no more so when used to report the truth than to spread rumors or lies. We've all been advised to believe nothing we read and only half of what we see. Is it more questionable to use innuendo in a forum post than in a print text?

To bad because my meal at Martin last month was better then Arzak or Akalare or El Bulli, also just wondering why does almost everyone who goes to San Sebastian skip Martin. ← I've only eaten at Martin twice and don't have too many trips to San Sebastian under my belt, which is ultimately where I file trips to San Sebastian. Berastategui's two meals may be at the top of my list of meals in the area and a prime candidate for yet another meal. The first great meal in the region came one day when we snuck down from France for a day to eat at Arzak many years ago. It was the meal than seduced us from France and we've been coming back to Spain on a more and more frequent basis. Mugaritz held the most promise from us for the future. I'm sorry to hear reports of decline. Akelarre, while excellent, was not as vibrant a meal as yours appears to be. All I can is that when I return, I'll still have a hard time eliminating some restaurants from my dance card. As is, the Pais Vasco is far from the only place in Spain that deserves a gastronomic visit. It's hard to find an area where I can visit all places worth trying in the time alloted to my visit. Tapas are another story and the old city is not the only place to have excellent tapas, altough it has a certain atmosphere that adds to the pleasure. . A successful evening of tapas in San Sebastian could easily rival the gastronomic delights of a meal in a stared restaurant. I'm short on time, but there's an excellent thread or two on tapas bars in San Sebastian including one thread I posted on the last time we were in San Sebastian. If someone runs scross that thread, it might be good to link to it in this one.

Lesley, you may be a paragon of a kitchen employee, but no one has claimed the slapee got Psaltis fired. I don't believe Psaltis has said he was fired, nor would I be quick to believe any chef would fire a valued employee simply on the word of a runner. More to the point however is that you told everyone what happened. Had the chef, executive, or owner decided to fire the pastry chef on the basis of your tale would there be a different point to your story? What exactly do you believe this runner, assuming he was a runner--I don't know what to believe--was able to do to single handedly get the chef to fire Psaltis?

The eGullet Society for Culinary Arts and Letters welcomes you to an eG Roundtable and Discussion: The Future of Dining Michael Ruhlman (author of The Soul of a Chef and host of the PBS show Cooking Under Fire), Clark Wolf (restaurant consultant) and Steven A. Shaw (Executive Director of The eGullet Society and author of Turning The tables: Restaurants from the Inside Out) have posted some thoughts on what the 21st Century and beyond holds in store for the restaurant industry and its patrons. eGullet Society members are now encouraged to join in the discussion by asking the panelists questions and posting their own opinions during the week. If you are not a member, you can find out how to become a Society member by going to egullet.org and clicking on "Join the eGullet Society." Members may comment and ask general questions of the panel, or of a specific panelist, by starting a new topic. Any member may join in on these topics by replying in the thread as long as they stay on topic and follow the rules and policies governing all forums here. No one can predict the future and there's really no disputing personal taste, especially when it comes to food. We ask all members to allow their vision of how we'll dine, and how we should dine, in the future, to expand and not to attempt to narrow each others' perspective. The purpose of the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters is to increase awareness and knowledge of the arts of cooking, eating and drinking, as well as the literature of food and drink. The eG Society is an international one. Although the panel was composed of Americans and largely stuck to a discussion of dining in America, it's not off topic to discuss dining internationally. In addition to questioning statements made in the roundtable, you may raise relevant issues the panelists have not yet touched.

Stupidity is not a sin, but mendacity may be. We're begining to uncover credibility lapses. First you'd have us believe criticism of Keller is to be trusted simply because Keller is so well respected and now we're asked to accept a loss of credibily as no reason to doubt the rest of Psaltis' story. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Other than your friendship and business dealings, do you have any reason to defend the honesty of either author? To put it another way, do you have a compelling argument why I should believe them or not supect it was a more psychotic incident that lead to his leaving the French Laundry. It seems more credible than a description of Keller's dirty walk-in. Quite frankly, I do have a problem with the authors' credibility.

That's what I was thinking. Unless it came to fisticuffs (and perhaps not even then) I can't imagine a restaurant firing someone for slapping a runner's hand off the pass. When I accepted Doug's truth, I accepted it as I did each account in Roshomon. i have little doubt that there are other accounts, some of which may portray the move as somethig more than just a little unnecessary force. I have known restaurant employees to be fired for less than what would put you in the brig in army and with greater speed and no hearing. We live in a world Can you imagine it as the end of the beginning, or as a moment that culminated the parting of the ways? I can. I can believe people will be selfserving in what they see, not only in what they say, but this notion of Keller as a sacred cow seems a misreading of the reason he's respected in the first place. If the man is untouchable, can you imagine it may be because he deserves the respect he's earned. I daresay Michael (Ruhlman) has a reputation as a journalist to protect, as much as he has a friendship with Keller, and his writing has earned him a reputation of trust. He probably doesn't and I supsect he'd be just as happy not to have anyone appear to fight his battle, but the concensus I read and not necessarily from those who know Keller is that it would be silly for him to sully himself in relation to what's likely not to be nearly as important a book as some make out. Of course horse races are easier to predict than how people will ultimately react. That's why I thought Tony was on target in his first post and while I understand where the innuendos are coming from, I suspect they don't help either. The simple fact is that whatever negatives we might learn about this or any other incident, or anything about the Psaltis character that's not positive, may untimately hurt Keller if it questions why he put his trust in the wrong person in the first place.

That's from recipezaar.com and may be a bit self serving, but it's pretty much the basis for the policy we've adopted here as well. We also take the ethical position that the creator and the copyright holder of the work are entitled to decide how it's used and when and where it's published. Many good arguments are made that it would be in the author's or publisher's best interest to allow free republication of work on a site such as the eG forums. That may be, but we feel it's the author's right to decide how and where his work may be used, or what's in his best interest.

Tony was right on target with his Roshomon analogy. The reality of any situation is relative to the person reporting it. Nevertheless, Tony has to allow those who enjoy dissecting an issue and examining it some fun as well. When I referred to the circumstances of Doug's leaving the French Laundry, I wasn't referring to any particular incident, but to everything that goes into making a job rewarding and an employee satisfactory to hi emplyer. Interestingly enough, I've been in the situation where I felt the need to leave a position precisely because it was both unrewarding and because I felt stymied and unable to accomplish anything. For some reason each time I tried to leave, I was made to fee more obligated to stay and the less I accomplished, the more praise I got. It was embarrassing and ultimately took some flare up to extricate myself from the situation. I think Doug did us a favor by sharing what he did. Perhaps he also did himself a favor. At least he spoke of the incident in a way that makes it reasonable to believe he understands others will have seen it all happening differently. As Tony suggested earlier, life and history are perhaps, a fiction. We all believe what we see, but all to often, we fail to understand that we also see what we believe. That takes me into the realm of noting that Fat Guy and Doug are friends, perhaps close friends and the Michael is Fat Guy's agent. Not so oddly, that's brought some criticism that we wouldn't have published these excerpts were such not the case.

Gagnaire was always problematic, but not because of consistency, rather because he generally refuses to do the same thing twice. As his wife has said, he just gets bored. The difference is, when he hits the right note, it's at such an astronomically high level as not to be believed. Even his biggest fans say that 1 or 2 meals out of 4 can sometimes have bad elements or even fail as a whole. I'm glad Matt had a good meal at Bras. I trust his taste buds. ← An intersting comment and one to bear in mind. First, it may tend to make any single meal risky, especialy if you will only have the opportunity have that one meal, and especially if that one meal consumes your budget for multistarred dining at Parisian prices. For those who've managed two or three meals, if the last one is faulty, it can send the signal that Gagnaire is slipping, when it may just be he's uneven.

Nice looking place. It's a pity it's so close to Michel Bras and has to compete with it at all. Both your menu and the Spring tasting menu were very appealing.

Once, last year in Michigan, or was it Indiana, to change the baby's diaper. The mother insisted it was the only place we were guaranteed to find a clean facility. It's not often that I'm in a car with a baby whose diaper needs changing.

The world is becoming a smaller place and more homogenized. As visitors, we tend to notice the differences more than the similarities, but France in changing and not always for the better. More than a few years ago, my wife and I looked at a rental property on the edge of a tiny village in Gascony. There was much to be said for the place. In addition to the nice house, there were nice grounds and free eggs from the landlord's chickens. The landlord herself was a charming Englishwoman who'd make an excellent neighbor. All that was missing was a local cafe bar where I could practice my French in morning over a coffee and again in the afternoon with an aperitif. Indeed, we saw the cafe premises, but were told it had closed recently along with the only food shop in town. Everyone gets in their cars and shops at the supermarket in the new shopping center not far away. Another story I've told is about being in Brittany and getting picked up by a French chef I know who lives and works in NY. He was taking us to his mother's house for dinner. On the way we stopped to get a few last things for dinner. If you can imagine the pleasure of anticipating shopping in a French market with a pro, you can empathize with my disappointment when we pulled into the parking lot at Champion, a hypermarché in the outskirts of Lorient. We did, on another occasion, shop in the weekly open market in Hennebont, a smaller town, where we bought the most incredible butter I've ever tasted and a roasted pork belly ready to eat. All that you describe is there, but it's no longer how the French necessarily shop. In some places, those neighborhood shops are very dependent on expatriate trade with vacation homes in the area, which raises the issue again of how the French eat and how they used to eat. Many visitors to France are looking to live the life they think the French led, or at least that part of it they find appealing.

As I recall the woman asked for vegetables, not steamed vegatables and she was probably eating in the wrong kind of restaurant more than the wrong country. It was a hotel restaurant at any rate. In Spain, a plate of simple vegetables would likely be garnished with ham. Hell, in Spain I saw tripe listed in a column under the heading of vegetables. Norman butter and cream tend to be seen in the north, down through Paris and Burgundy. Traditionally, they weren't all that much featured in Provence or the Basque regions, for instance. The thing about Michelin three star restaurants is that they are a French concept, but the average Frenchman is probably never going to have a single three star meal in his life. They cater to a small segment of French society and the whole three star syndrome is dependent on foreign tourism.

It doesn't bother me a bit that I don't get everything Adrià is doing. I don't get MacDonalds' at all.

I have no end of answers to this question. For starters, there's "use a knife and fork." That's the way the French eat. They also hold their fork in their left hand while eating and while cutting their food, but that's not so universal as one might expect, and plenty of people do it that way in the states anyway. The reply I'd most like to make would be to ask "why?" or perhaps "why would you like to try to do that?" as I don't think you can exerience food as a typical Frenchman does unless you are a typical Frenchman. Is there a typical Frenchman? Is there a particular Frenchman whose experiences you'd like to have? Let me go back a step. When I go to France, I know I'm eating better most of the time than most of the Frenchmen, and women for that matter. Be careful of what you wish for. When we visit friends in the Languedoc, shop and cook, I'm told we eat better than their neighbors who, by and large, don't always care that much about food. Generally speaking, when I'm in France, I eat better when I'm eating in a restaurant than when I'm cooking. Okay, I'm being facetious to some degree, but the truth is that without a French background, how are you going to prepare meals that are going to be a French experience. For home cooking, I suppose you'd need to adopt a home, or have one adopt you. Still I maintain there's not one typical French experience, there are many and beware, the first summer my teenage daughter went to France on a home stay program, her family went to great efforts to have Coca-Cola and Ketchup in the fridge for her. After she told them we rarely have either in our refrigerator, she didn't have the heart to mention that we don't served frozen fish sticks for dinner either, especially as that didn't seem to have been purchased for her. The day two families took the kids to town, they dropped the kids off for lunch at MacDo. My daughter looked up to the second floor windows of Hiely, then Avignon's best restaurant and where she had dined with us. The second year, she did much better with a family who ate more like Frenchmen, or at least how I would eat if I were a Frenchman. I know because a few years later we enjoyed an excellent lunch at their house. For all that, Randy's suggestions have merit. If you have a small kitchen at your disposal you can shop mostly at épiceries, traiteurs and charcuteries and eat at home without the need to do too much cooking, but here, as in a restaurant, you'll be bringing your sensibilities to each purchase. I might suggest you look into rural gîtes and tables d'hôtes where you might find more typical home cooking. I apologize for what might mosty seem to be sarcasm, but after over forty years of traveling in France, I've come to grips with not being a native. The more at home I become, the more I become aware I'm not a Frenchman. And on the rare occasions I've invited to a Frenchman's home for dinner, it's rarely to eat someting I'd have purchased and cooked if I were shopping in a French market and cooking in a French kitchen. It's hard to step out of one's skin.

I've noticed that a large number of the cheeses I've liked at DiPalo's, my great NY source of cheese and everything Italian, come from Piemonte. Most recently, I had a nice wedge from a Valtellino cheese. At least that's what I thought Marie called it. I had asked about some goat cheese unlike the soft fresh goat cheeses I usually buy. It was similar in a way to some aged Spanish goat cheeses, although I'm not sure this was all goat's milk. There wasn't much information on the simple label. It was quite good. I believe it's from the Piemonte. ← I am slowly learning just how much variation there can be within cheeses of the same name. More recently we enjoyed a soft ripening Valtellina. It had a hard crust, so hard in fact that although I generally enjoy the rind of most soft ripening cheeses, I had to cut this one off. Inside parts were so runny as to have the consistency of heavy cream or a very ripe Vacheron Mont d'Or.

That Psaltis went to the French Laundry precisely to write about it may seem laughable, but one certainly wouldn't expect someone writing about his career to omit telling about the rise to his most important job. What's at issue here are the circumstances under which Psaltis left the French Laundry and how that may have colored his description of the French Laundry and Thomas Keller. That, as you seem to suggest, it may have been added to the book at a time when Doug might have still been emotional about the experience is something that also has to be taken into consideration. It's not risible to suggest that he might be an emotional or vindictive person. Though you were here in NY at the time, you ask us to remember that the French Laundry was left with a dearth of talent and problems. While possible, we don't know that for a fact, and a good carpenter never blames his tools, or so I've been told. Keller's refusal to dignify the book with a response may not be an indication of anything other than Keller's character. To suggest otherwise is to make innuendoes of your own. The suggestion that Keller is the subject of hero worship also implies the press is uncritical, rather than offering an accurate portrayal. Fair enough, even those charged of making human sacrifices are entitled to a courtroom defense.

Only if you're willing to prepared to argue that it's less rich than the typical American lunch of a double cheese burger with fries washed down with a milk shake and that Americans, generally eat that day in and day out, will anyone concede that your proposed meal is anything like what any Frenchman would put together in one day, let alone in one meal. Either way, I fail to see the humor. My guess is that the average Frenchman eats a hell of a lot more fish than his counterpart in the US. Have you ever thought to study the fat content in the typical deli meat sold in an American supermarket. It would make the richest rillettes seem like chicken breast. The French aren't in the habit of starting the morning off with a couple of eggs fried in butter and some bacon or bagel loaded with cream cheese either. The humor's not there, not because it's offensive, but because it doesn't hit close enough to reality to be funny.

Can I assume you've had some experience at the French Laundry that would confirm whatever the Psaltis brothers have to say? Why do you assume they are inherently honest and that the book isn't simply self serving?

I will try and avoid the use of "most" or even "many," but more than some of the cooks I know who have staged in France have been able to do that only because some French chef in the US arranged it via the old boy network. Nevertheless, some cooks manage to wander in and make the right impression and succeed. In both cases it's being in the right place at the right time. The surest way to do that is to work hard at impressing the right chef in the first place.

My understanding is that more often than not, there's no choice for two of the three courses. In their defense, I can only say that I thought the prices reflected the economy of the kitchen, but many will be willing to pay a bit more for choice. Of course it's also a poor choice for anyone with dietary restrictions.

The best meals I've had in the Loire Valley in recent years have been at two star restaurants in Onzain and Romorantin, but that's even further away. I haven't been to Jean Bardet so I can't really tell you well it compares to the Hotel Lion d'Or in Romorantin. The latter was exceptional, even for a two star.

I'm wondering if this whole thread isn't just promoting a stereotype based on myth or, at best, an out of date cultural misunderstanding. The first time I traveled in France I noticed signs in bars prohibiting the consumption of alcohol by minors. In the rural area of the Languedoc where friends lilve and where we have to drive to get to the nearest decent restaurant, we're always conscious of the fact that any back road may have a road block after dinner simply to check that driver's are not under the influence. Thus our driver is the one of us who's only had one glass of wine. I'm not aware of any law in the US that would prohibit anyone who consumes two liters of whisky from saying he doesn't drink, either. At least the typical drunken Frenchman is less likely to be carring a loaded gun, if you get my drift.