Bux

We are at the mercy of the reader and his belief in what he experiences from what he reads, but I think members have rightly thanked Steve Plotnicki, perhaps among other posters, for letting them experience a meal vicariously. The hierarchies of the arts was a popular subject among my fellow students of architecture. While it was generally agreed that architecture was an applied art rather than a fine art, we often argued that it was a mother art which incorporated the lesser arts of painting and sculpture. When it comes to arranging the fine, decorative, performing, etc. arts, I wonder if it serves any better purpose than arranging society on the basis of birth to the proper parentage. But then why say a cook is at best a craftsperson? I believe a cook can be a craftsperson, an artist, both or neither.

I've had pork marinated and masqueraded as boar. That's unfair of me. It has actually been honestly represented as pork with a strong flavor from the marinade.

There seemed to be a lot of Japanese restaurants in that neighborhood. I don't really remember prices, but many of them appeared inexpensive and from a casual observance it appeared as if they had a clientele of young Japanese students or tourists. Some of them would have looked right at home in parts of downtown Manhattan--say the Village or East Village--where $12-15 will buy you a lunch. It's very possible to eat very inexpensively in Paris and little or no trouble to find well cooked three course French dinners for $25-35.

Thanks for an interesting post that reminds us that even when one doesn't come anywhere near a starred restaurant, there can be something special about just having a bite to eat in France.

As others have noted it is a wonderful story. It's a classic tale of those who are able to pass on an obsession and articulate the origin of the obsession for posterity. It's a gem and museum piece as well for it speaks of a time and place. France was an even more special place to eat in those days. As noted, it still draws visitors whose main purpose is to eat, but France's relative place in the world and the world of food has changed. Possibly it's place has changed not so much because France has changed--though it has quite undeniably--but because the rest of the world and particularly the US has changed. I suspect it's people such as your father that brought back from Europe a love of the food that's largely responsible for the changes here.

Who dirinks magnum Opus with Bass Tartar? And we all know the real Ivan is dead. Of course the pepper was poisoned. Alas we have but a charade or perhaps more properly a facade of the real Ivan assuming the portrait gracing today's installment is supposed to be more up to date than the last one. Still it serves as a lesson for all. It may be bad manners in the US to reject the offer of a stranger's pepper, but the French know better how to carry on in a public restaurant where, for them, eating out is a life and death matter of a different kind.

Assuming the Hindu would not not sickened or offended by just the sight of another person eating beef, he may go to a steakhouse and dine with someone who eats beef as you propose. He will tolerate another person's right to eat beef, perhaps. I suspect he will not tolerate his child eating beef and probably not not his spouse either. I think in the sense that dietary restrictions work against intermarriage they actively promote segregation of peoples into separate camps.

"The best," "the top ten" and most halls of fame lists will always be suspect to me, but I found the site fascinating. I noted a number of nominations (best book in the world, best chef book, etc.) for books written in Catalan. One can only wish Franco were alive to see this resurgence of the public face of a language. This is a testament to the culture as a whole, but also to the place Catalan cooking has in the world at this moment. I'd also like to know more about the cookbook author described as "The Latin-America answer to Nigella Lawson" in the Spanish-Latin American entry for the Hall of Fame who, by the way is noted as having worked at El Bulli.

If, as Adam says, extra-dry was created for Americans, I would assume we like it drier than continentals, but perhaps not as dry as the English for whom brut was created. My personal opinion is that Americans don't actually like dry wines as much as they like to think they like dry wines. Thus wines labeled sec and extra-dry sell well as they offer the assurance one is drinking dry wine. In spite of the fact that some of the world's greatest wines are sweet, the word "sweet" has the connotation of cheap to many here. I have never seen a doux champagne here in the states and can only recall two brands of demi-sec on the market. I suspect I can do better if I try, but even the demi-secs are hard to find. I've never understood the appeal of a dry champagne with dessert or at the end of the meal and yet I've had restaurants offer me a glass of champagne at the end of the meal. It's ungracious not to accept, but I don't enjoy it. There's nothing better than a good sweet wine with dessert or in lieu of dessert. I've had guests bring brut champagne to a New Year’s Eve dinner with the "instructions" that it's for the stroke of midnight which is likely to be when we're having a nice dessert. I've learned to have a bottle of demi-sec around at such times. It will support a fruit dessert, so I don't have to use a thirty dollar bottle of wine to abuse taste buds.

It almost seems reasonable to speculate that the dietary laws of any religion had origin in concerns for health/hygiene, but I'd find it as reasonable to say that over the years people have managed to find creative excuses for dietary laws by speculating about possible health and hygiene issues. I'd be more convinced that the laws weren't the result of powerful agricultural lobbies of the day. The cattlemen's lobby was far more influential than that of those who shot wild deer. This need for an animal to chew it's cud it rather absurd and animals without cloven hoofs is both too broad a category to make a convincing argument that they are less clean a type of animal. Control is a more likely issue, but the strongest arguments could probably be made for the use of this sort of control to support a group identity rather than just to subjugate them. The subjugation may have come at the onset, or later. Fat Guy wonders "if there isn't some sort of universal human need to create dietary regulations and rituals." I think people have great needs for rules, regulations and most certainly for rituals in their life and what is as central as eating? Our whole pattern of living is centered on a schedule of meals. Do we just eat all day or pick up a piece of food every time we're a bit hungry? Hmm, maybe this is the worst argument I could make. Here in America, where we lead the way to new horizons in eating, we just pull off the highway for a chain meal waiting for us in a Styrofoam box. And in the cities where deprived Americans must walk to get to their ultimate destination it's hard to pass many blocks without the chance to stop for a slice of life sustaining pizza. The percentage of people walking down the street with food or beverage in their hands is growing by the minute. The new social gesture of offering someone a bit of the food you're holding may replace handshakes and there will be yet another food ritual.

Tasting is a procedure and one that reaps benefits for the cook. After a while I think you develop a sense of how long any brand takes to cook. On the whole, I'm more worried about over cooking the wrappers than I am about the filling being hot. Starting out with frozen dumplings can be tricky that way.

I also grew up using waxed paper and my wife and I used waxed paper in the oven and on the range all the time. One day, not all that many years ago, a friend asked if we weren't concerned about the wax melting into the food. I never really thought there was wax in waxed paper, but there is and it isn't just one of those misnomers. Anyway, I found the experiments carried out by a couple of members and reported here, most interesting although we had already restricted our use to cold foods. I suspect there's little of no hard to come from eating the wax, but even if I can't taste it, it seems unpleasant.

Truillium I suspect it would quickly get too technical for my interest but a little knowledge of a generally misunderstood subject is most welcome. I think your last post was quite helpful so far. Thanks. You answered my questions very nicely. I assumed there was no added glutamate in cheeses such as parmesan, but I wanted the clarification. Of course the consumer will always have the lingering suspicion that additives are never the same as substances occurring in our food more naturally, but chemicals are chemicals. As you note, natural occurrances in aged foods exist in a complex mix of other flavors and simply adding msg may not achieve the same results. On the other hand, if natural combinations were fully satisfying we wouldn't have developed the complex rage of recipes we have as humans. We are always combining ingredients and adding a dash of this or that to improve the final flavor as the food is served. The interesting thing is that msg is commonly used in at least Japan and China, but has never made great inroads in western cuisine. I've yet to run across it in any quality recipe or cookbook. I'm not aware it is used in fine restaurants, but if it is used, perhaps some cook among our members will clue us in on that. To the best of my knowledge msg has largely been marketed under a single brand name in the US. My impression is that it's something we see as needed on a cheap piece of meat from the supermarket, but not something we'd use on a nice cut from an expensive butcher. When we see it on a the label of canned food, we assume it's compensating for the lack of real flavor. I'm not promoting this image. It's one I think our society has. Do others here have a different image of msg?

Let me also welcome you back. I found your comments interesting. I've kind of been a fan of Valent's. I say kind of because I live downtown and don't get to the upper west side much. I've also found it hard to convince others to go there for dinner. It's got to be a drag when one can't eat much carbohydrates or protein and then has the vegetable substituted to one that's also on the restricted list. I'm not sure it's a fault of the restaurant, but I'm sure he should have had the option of returning the dish and feel they really should have mentioned the substitution before bringing the dish. I suppose running out of food in the evening means it's all fresh. At least I hope so. Perhaps your duck salad was not so unorthadox. Was it in any way reminiscent of a salad frisse with bacon and poached or softboiled egg? That has greens, cured meat, egg with runny yolk and I guess some croutons. I recall a nice salad at Ouest that was a rift on salad frisee only there was smoked fish in place of the meat. It's hard to comment on the confit. It shouldn't be too fatty, but that's just too relative a term. The confit shouldn't have a thick layer of fat under the skin. Ideally the skin should have been recrisped. I had a very tasty, but still disappointing confit in a brasserie in Chartres this spring. Had the skin been crisped, I think my confit would have crossed the line from disappointing all the way to pretty good. Unfortunately my fries weren't very crisp either. It was a nice enough place and every restaurant in town was closed except for this brasserie in our hotel and one other place all the way at the other end of town and truthfully, it didn't look too promising either. You summation seems reasonable enough except for the implication that is should be comparable to JoJo at its best several years ago. I seem to recall JoJo as having higher prices, at least relative to the times--I've really noticed inflation in restaurant prices. I've also found JoJo to be less than consistent although I've haven't been there much either. Of course not being there much will either exaggerate inconsistency or miss my chance of seeing it.

A propos of almost nothing, I notice that most of the butcher shops in NY’s Chinatown prominently feature Smithfield hams. Actually, what I see are cured shoulders in white fabric bags proudly labeled “Smithfield.” They generally hang in the shop and are not in a refrigerated case. Of course they could be dummy displays. I’ve never seen anyone buying a whole ham, or shoulder, and I assume they are cut up and prepared/sessoned and then sold as the pieces of cured meat I often see in cryovac wrappings.

I have been to El Bulli in warmer weather and recall taking my jacket off while sitting on the terrace having drinks and hors d'oeuvres at lunch. They no longer serve lunch. In any event, I am sure I did not wear a tie either time. I also distinctly recall seeing some diners in shirt sleeves in the restaurant including one table of men who seemed very well known to the staff. At least in the summer, it is no longer unusual to see men without ties and often without jackets in such French three star restaurants as Michel Bras and Michel Guerard. Looking at the red Michelin for Spain, I realize there are at least a half dozen starred restaurants in the Catalonian provinces I haven't visited. Four and a half kilometers outside of Roses in the direction of Figueras is La Llar. I have no personal information about the food. Just outside Figueras, which can't be more than a half hour from Roses by car, are Empordà (to the north) and Mas Pau (to the south). (I suspect Empordà is the same place referred to as Ampurdan by BlackDuff. It's possible that one is the Catalan name and the other the Spanish or that one of us has an incorrect spelling.) I've had both places recommended to me for the restaurants and hotel accommodations a few years back, but have never been to either. I've stayed in the Duran, which is right in the heart of the city and a perfectly adequate hotel, if not fancy. Much further away, but still only about 65 kilometers from Roses is the Michelin two star El Celler de Can Roca in the suburbs of Girona. We found this to be an exceptional restaurant and Girona itself is easily worth a day of sightseeing. I am still adjusting my out of date impression of Spain as an old fashioned conservative country stuck in the past with heavy restaurant furniture left over from the filming of El Cid and food to match. It's easy to dismiss El Bulli as the exception, but Can Roca made my head spin. If it were in NYC, Chicago or SF, it would be seen as having a very smart contemporary decor, professional and knowledgeable staff and food worthy of notice. Of course the prices would have to be doubled or more if it were in NYC.

I don't believe it's common for msg to be used at the table. It's generally used in the kitchen. That said, I recall having a meal in Tokyo where the waiter put a small scoop of a white powder in our bowl before filling it with broth. My wife asked if it was msg and we were told it was. She asked to have her soup without the msg. I'm not sure if one could as easily add msg to a solid food as easily as to a liquid.

Salt has a very easy to recognize taste for most of us. I could tell it apart from most other things. I guess I might have better phrased my question as could one easily taste the difference between msg and some tasteless powder? I don't recall tasting pure msg, so I didn't know if it had a taste. It doesn't really matter what we call the taste, until we know the taste. Salty would be meaningless until I had tasted salt.

Since my in-laws have both passed away some time ago, we don't get down there that often. Thus I'm not up to date on where to eat, but my advice is generally to eat in places that serve Puerto Rican specialties, avoid most of the hotel restaurants and anyplace that serves continental food. You may want to ignore my advice however as I would avoid any restaurant that described itself as serving continental food and you imply a belief there are great continental restaurants. Actually, continental can also mean the US mainland, in which case it's probably also best avoided. The one place I'd search out is la Casita Blanca. Calle Tapia 351, Villa Palmeras, in Santurce. (787 726 5501) It had a great variety of low key home cooking of the first order back then and I hope it's still reliable. There were a few young chefs opening interesting restaurants--even in hotels--but I'm sorry I have no recommendations. The one chef I knew seems to have closed his restaurants in San Juan and I'm not sure what he's doing now. The "national dish" seems to be asopao. Asopao de pollo is about was about as reliable a dish as any I've run across anywhere. The local chickens were very tasty, although these days I won't bet that most restaurants don't use frozen birds from the US.

Now we're getting into an area that's less relevant here and probably should be discussed elsewhere, but here goes, NYC is not Paris and vice versa. French food is celebrated the world over and Paris is the captial of French food in many people's minds. NYC is celebrated for it's many residents of different ethnicities and for it's diverseness particularly in restaurant fare. Traditionally, Parisians have not asked their spouses, SO's and dates if they'ed like to eat Chinese food, Italian food, or deli tonight. Most of the restaurants in Paris have been French restaurants. The best ones have almost always been French restaurants. The best restaurants and the most interesting restaurants in NYC have not been American restaurants for a great stretch of time. Today, American restaurants make a better showing in NYC than they ever have in my lifetime, but what proportion of your interesting meals out are in American restaurants? It's not that I'm a tourist in France and a resident in NYC. When I meet and entertain Frenchmen or other Europeans visiting NYC, I almost always want to take them to a Chinese restaurant. When I've met residents of Paris, I don't recall any of them suggesting we go to a Chinese restaurant.

Ed Schoenfeld recently asked about recommendable Chinese restaurants in Paris over in the Chinese cooking board. If any of our Paris visitors or residents have some good information on the subject, they may want to post it in that thread.

I've never had a really good Chinese meal in Paris or in France. This is not to say they don't exist, but that I haven't been tempted to find them and have only used Chinese food as a familiar snack or quick lunch. The residential neighborhoods of Paris are filled with traiteurs asiatiques. These are mostly take out places although some of them have a few tables and chairs for on premises consumption. For the most part they are neither very good nor terrible although that's a personal opinion based more on how the food looks than how it tastes. I don't have much experience actually eating it. My most recent experience was in Chartres when I stopped, half out of curioisty and half out of hunger and had a quiche chinoise which was reheated in a microwave for me. It was a cross between egg foo yung and a Spanish tortilla/Italian fritatta and not half bad although indefensible. It was round in plan and a flat oval in cross section. I took it into the street where I ate in out of the bag. It's not very French to eat in public like that, but I love eating street food, even where it doesn't exist. There was a thread I believe, in the France board about Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants in Paris. They both exist and there are supposed to be some really good Vietnamese restaurants, which should not be a surprise. On the whole however, the sentiment I most recall being expressed was why would a tourist in Paris want to eat anything but French food. I suppose it depends on many times you've been to Paris and how often you return as well as your interest in that particular foreign food. The best answer to your question might come from a native, or at least someone living in Paris. Loufood is there now. As I recall, she's studying French cooking and she recently said her uncle had a chop suey joint in Chicago. That would suggest she had some qualification in the area. Maybe we'll hear from her.

I was about to echo your thought. Frozen dumplings, usually from our regular butcher in NY's Chinatown are almost a staple in my freezer, although we buy very few frozen products and don't much use the our freezer. I stopped long enough to realize that frozen fresh raviloli or tortellini are something else we do keep in the freezer even if we buy it fresh rather than frozen. That is a western equivalent.

In light of the other thread somewhere on waxed paper, I'd say parchment might make more sense. On the other hand, I'm assured that the wax used is food grade and tasteless. I've often just oiled the stainless steel steamer bottom. On the other hand, I mostly just boil the dumplings I buy.

There was a carte two years ago, but none this past spring. I'm not sure if that's the policy for next year or not. Perhaps this year was special as they were celebrating the 20th anniversay with a retrospective selection of dishes from past years. Nevertheless, I believe a tasting menu is the way to go, especially on a first visit. I suspect you will not have to worry about eating the same meal twice if you should be so lucky as to get reservations on two nights in a row. (On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd want to eat at El Bulli two nights in a row, but that's another topic for discussion.) On both of my visits we were accompanied by a friend unable to eat fish or seafood. at both times we informed the restaurant of the fact in advance and each time they were prepared to serve a special tasting menu to him. At last spring's visit, he had eaten there just a week before and he was assured the menu would be totally different when he returned. I don't think you will have a problem, but to err on the side of caution, let them know in advance you would like a different tasting menu each night. You will have to make do in French or English. Both of these appeared to be languages with which most of the staff had a good degree of flunecy. With a straignt face, I could tell you that the Spanish dress more conservatively and wear more gold jewelry than Americans or the French, but Roses is not Madrid and there appears to be no formal dress code. Either jacket and tie or smart casual will be appropriate. In fact, in the warmer months, I've not found a jacket and tie to be required dress in any of the top provincial restaurants in Catalonia. We've been to most of the starred restaurants in the region outside of Barcelona and I only recall El Raco de Can Fabes as being populated mostly by those in jackets and ties.