Bux

Give the success of McDonald's, I'm surprised Taco Bell isn't in France already. It does seem a natural.

El Bulli. Ca Sento. Mugaritz. Las Rejas. Welcome to Spain, circa 2005! PS: Yes, that little faraway country - distance, zero kilometers from Hendaye... ← An interesting choice of restaurants, although an obvious choice of country. Adrià has been influenced greatly by French cuisine and by French chefs, I just don't know enough about the history of the other chefs, but having eaten in all the restaurants named in the past couple of years, I'd have to say the evidence of the influence is becoming subliminal at best. Surely the foundation is still there and surely that foundation will continue to be part of academic cooking school curricula, but I sense the creative influences being felt by the next generation of chefs in the western world are coming from south of the Pyrenees more than from any other single source. Make what you want of it, but standing in Adrià's kitchen, I was told that he owed more to chefs in the US, than in those in France. Was that hyperbole for a visiting American, or an honest tribute to uninhibited creativity? I don't know. From my perspective, the discipline I saw in Adrià's food was not reminiscent of the unsupportable "creativity" I've seen in American fusion cooking. The most influential chefs of the moment, may be those who were influenced by French haute cuisine, but who themsleves are Spanish. Within a few years, it appears that the French influence will be one generation further away. Ca Sento, Mugaritz and Las Rejas don't really remind me of French cuisine very much. When they do, it's often because of a weak dish. Don't get me wrong, there are wonderful French chefs still in their prime or not yet in their prime, but they don't exert the international influence they might have been expected to a half century ago. At the same time, I'd repeat my earlier comment that for all the influence French chefs may have on the generation of Spanish chefs that revolutionized Spanish restaurant cooking, French cuisine has never dominated the fanciest or finest restaurants in Spain and Italy as it has in the north of Europe and the new world. I'm also not sure this train of thought and sub topic are germane to the discussion started by Fat Guy. I may have been the one who took the train off track, nevertheless it may be time to take a look at the thread and for me or one of the other hosts to trim the distracting posts.

The sensory deprivation of cooking sous vide doesn't extend to eating sous vide cooked food.

I've really been tied up for the past couple of days or I would never have let references to Peter Hoffman's comments on Pacaud's use of curry as reported by Adam Gopnik in From Paris to the Moon go by without my comment. I have, on more than one occasion, posted with great passion on this subject. Hoffman was talking about a particular dish I found to be one of the most sublime examples of French haute cuisine. It remains a singular memory and I was delighted to read another member's description of the langoustine, spinach and sesame wafer with curry sauce some years after I had it. As I may have mentioned before, I was reading Gopnik's book with great relish, until I came to that chapter mentioning Hoffman and his views on curry. I was furious and couldn't read any further. I picked the book up some time later and again couldn't get past that chapter. Finally, I just skipped the chapter and went on to enjoy the rest of the book, although never with the same enthusiasm. Hoffman at the time, had evidently been studying Indian food with Madhur Jaffrey and very much under the influence of her teaching. I gather he had come to think of Indian cooking almost as a religion and it left no room for him to accept curry as it had been used in the western world for hundreds of years. It was a surprising and somewhat hypocritical view for Hoffman to take in light of the fact that his own food as evidenced at Savoy in NY, is a highly personal and very eclectic sort of fusion food. There's at least one thread on this site, probably not in this forum, that has a good number of references to "curry" as a seasoning in France and England going back some five hundred years. I disagree that such use and its development apart from any Indian context is improper. What bothered me was not that Hoffman was entranced by what he had learned from Jaffrey, but how little he knew about the use of curry in French haute cuisine and its development. I was convinced it was Hoffman who was at fault by not taking the time to learn how curry was used in France before speaking out. Equally annoying was how unquestioning Gopnik was about the statement. I can't even recall what Gopnik was trying to prove at the time. I suspect this is also an example of something that's not as simple as the French being insular. The French, at least through the late middle of the twentieth century, have tended not to ignore other cuisines, but to make them French rather than to demand "authenticity" as Americans so often do today. When I first came to Paris as a student and again as a young married person, I ate in a number of restaurants that I thought were typically French. The interesting thing is that at the time I really couldn't tell the different between the French bistros and the Greek and Balkan restaurants in the Fifth arrondissement. They all seemed to offer many of the same simple first courses and desserts for one thing. To some extent, even the Moroccan restaurants seemed very French to me even if they were a bit different in their specialties. It had a lot to do with the dominance of French cuisine, which not only conquered imported cuisines, but which was exported to serve as the formal standard for training many of the chefs in the western world. That was less true in Spain and Italy, but most true in the anglo speaking countries and many of the northern European countries reaching all the way to Russia, at least when the Czars were in power. French cuisine was he basis of our formal restaurant cuisine. "Insular" is not the proper term for such a wide reaching and dominating cultural influence.

I toured in Spain by car in the mid sixties. Roads were primitive. Well before we entered the 21st century, Spain had some of the best roads in Europe. From Barcelona just about as far as Figueras, the road is all superhighway, but it's fine all the way to Roses as well. The seven kilometers from Roses to Cala Monjoi is no longer what I'd consider bad. In very recent years it's been paved and widened a bit, or so it seems. So what you've seen was probably just that last seven kilometers to elBulli, which is not in Roses proper, and what you saw was probably not in as good shape as it is now, but yes, that last seven kilometers is narrow. As I recall however, it's wide enough for two cars at all points. Still, many people who drive to Roses, prefer to take a taxi back and forth from Roses. As the drop off into the sea is on your left as you return to Roses after dinner, it's not as bad as it could be. I don't recall any markings, such as white lines at the shoulders or the middle though.

I'm wondering what the advantage would be, or at least I was. Assuming one used sufficiently high enough heat and you'd have to do that if you were then going to let the finished confit sit around for a while, even refrigerated, then you'd have the advantage of a sterile airtight package. It would be lot like canning. Eating Spain has brought me a new respect for canned goods, as has the introduction to canned boudin noir that's produced according to Christian Parra's recipe from the southwest of France. I'm not only thinking this would be the way to go for commerical confit, but wondering if the vacuum packed confit I've seen for sale wasn't cooked in the same pouch. Would it work?

The Michelin Guia Rosa says 56 kilometers. I recall a fair amount of traffic as well. Much of that was truck traffic, which might also explain the number of young women standing by the side of the road seemingly going nowhere. Naively at first, I looked to see if there wasn't some sort of rural bus stop.

I'd just as soon pour my own wine as well, except perhaps in those very fine places where I don't want to be responsible for wine stains on the linen. All that bleaching shortens the life of the tablecloths. I don't want the rising cost of luxury dining to be on my head. What I won't do is grab the bottle from the waiter's hands for reasons similar to not wanting the waiter to come running over to grab the bottle from my hands as I've had happen a number of times. I'll add that if a restaurant decides to keep the bottle on a sideboard, they really owe it to the diner to have a staff capable of handling the service impeccably. I once had a wonderful meal in a two star restaurant in France ruined because I was forced to chose between eating hot food without my wine or waiting for my wine and eating cold food. One of the reasons I'll rant a bit on eGullet is that I've come to learn how many chefs and restaurant owners read the forums. The idea of chewing out an individual for a perceived slur, or even a clear and definite offense, is not appealing to me on a public site, especially when the offense is years old, but general comments about annoying service practices may actually serve to focus restaurant owners and managers on the problem areas. There are inherent problems in this as well. We don't all have the same expectations. In fact, diners across the country have differing ideas of what's proper and what's correct. I'm unhappy to see a waiter clear one plate before the entire table is finished eating, but apparently, many parts of the country feel the opposite way on this. I'm also unhappy to hear a waiter ask if anyone is finished. It should be clear from the position of a diner's tableware, but I've dined with very well brought up people who are clueless about the diner's responsibility in the matter. Some of them have even been French. Perhaps I should quit before everyone jumps on the bandwagon calling me a snob.

I suspect so. I haven't found a reference one way or the other. One of us might ask when dining there. I was surprised to learn about Camdeborde's use of olive oil. I thought I'd share some old web pages I found. Here's a web page published by Lesier, a producer of cooking and salad oils for the French market, some time ago. On it there appears this qustion and answer. and here, in English, from an interview posted on the UK site, frenchedonist.com This however, is the quote I enjoyed from that page. Sure there are the ugly tourists, but I have met more than my share of the traveling American gastronome and they are often excellent ambassadors. There are some other good comments in that interview where he speaks of seasonal foods and local foods. It's not hard to remember why la Régalade was so popular.Edited for clarity.

I found Zeitoun's and Doc's last posts very interesting. If there's intelligent life in outer space, I wonder if it's as fickle as humans are. I remember when some people were asking why the creative new chefs in Catalunya and the Pais Basque haven't developed signature dishes. Now we have posts questioning the lack of menu development. Nothing personal in my remark, I note that both Zeitoun and Docsconz see the upsides of the situation and I think that the recent reflections in the thread are good healthy observations and comments not only on the restaurants involved, but on the appreciation of food and cooking in general. Sometimes these moments of reflection are more important in sorting out our individual appreciations of food and restaurants than the long detailed reports accompanied by great visual images. Those of us who are lucky enough to consider ourselves, at least to some extent, globetrotting gastronomes, but who haven't enough time or money to spend all our time eating out all over the world, are faced with the continual chore of trying to decide to return and get a deeper understanding of a restaurant's, or a region's, cuisine, or to broaden our experience base. It's a chore we suffer perhaps with the envy of many.

I suppose to some extent it may be a matter of how long in advance you have to call for a reservation. I called about a month in advance, that would be par for most places in NY with any credibility -- for an off night. What I don't know is how recently the last table was reserved. From my perspective, the ideal restaurant would fill up the day before. That way I don't have to make my plans long in advance and I don't have to worry about it going out of business. Most of his food arrives looking as if it were created or conjured, rather than "cooked." I say this with no disrespect. I've had the same sense about Adrià's food. It breaks ground in terms of the way we perceive cooking and food. Adria has been criticized for using "industrial techniques." In essence, what I think that means is that he's preparing food less like cave men in close proximity to an open flame and that it's going to be harder for the average amateur cook to go home and replicate the dish.

A lot of what we pay for a really expensive meal must go to the salaries of the many who serve us, not to mention the fact that a percentage tip gets bigger as the tab increases. I really enjoy those meals where wine glasses are touched up dozens of times before the bottle is finished. It's not just that glasses are never allowed to go empty while there's wine in the bottle or that all the glasses are kept filled at the optimum level, but there's an awareness of who's drinking more and who's not drinking. A pox on waiters who fill everyone's glass with another ounce or two so that those who don't drink much wine are left with a glass that's more full at the end of the course, than at the beginning. At the opposite end of the scale are those restaurants where the bottle is left on the table for the diners to handle. I can deal with both approaches and some of my best meals have been at those ends of the scale. What restaurateurs, and waiters who have never dined out themselves, don't enjoy wine, or have never picked up the tab, don't understand is that there's very little safe ground between the two extremes. The other night we ate in a little place in the Village. My opinion of the place is lower than most people's, but it has its strengths and weaknesses, all of which is beside the point. Above all else, it's a place where it would be most appropriate for the waiter to just leave the inexpensive bottle of wine on the table and let us deal with it. Unfortunately towards the final moments of the meal, when I'm pretty much finished eating and drinking with a third of a glass of wine and my wife has more food and less wine in her glass, the waiter fills her glass to almost half full and then unceremoniously dumps the rest in my glass leaving me with two thirds of a glassful of wine. This leads me to another grip, although it's my wife who has the bigger gripe. It seems that many waiters assume the man will drink most of the wine. My guess is that my wife will drink 55% of the average bottle of wine. None of this necessarily touches on the practice of dumping the wine in the diner's glass early in the meal in hopes of selling another bottle. I wonder if it's even a ploy to sell more wine or just that a waiter is trying to do more than he can in the way of "serving" the diner and trying to get the wine service out of the way while he has time. It's a disservice, but it will continue to be a practice because I don't think most people see it as poor service. They certainly don't complain. So much for my rant. I also wanted to note that this: is wonderful because it avoids the assumption that good or bad is a matter of the reviewer's taste. It's not always easy to be objective about food, but it raises the level of discussion when appreciation of a dish over rides the concept of liking or disliking it.

Cool that Wylie wrote the foreword to Roca's book. Although Wylie was cooking to a full house the night I was last there, and it was a Tuesday, Dewey Dufresne agreed that critical success has been greater than popular success so far. I suppose you could say that he's not listening to either PT Barnum or HL Menken, or just not craving popular success all that much. Dufresne is pronounced something like Du-frain or Doo-frane.

I've only been up to Stone Barns once, so my familiarity of the food is based mostly on what I've had at Stone Barns in Manhattan, but I'd never call that food simple, or simply prepared. I've often referred to the dishes as "gentle," but I wouldn't call them simple any more than I'd refer to the Bach cello suites as simple music. I would agree that "spectacular" might not be the popularly operative word to describe the dishes, even by those who actually believe the results are spectacular. Spectacular brings to mind drums and brass to tread a little more dangerously into analogies. I've learned to expect the restaurants I most love to be panned from time to time. Taste is highly subjective. Statements such as "I can get better prepared food with ingredients of equal quality at close to half the price" are basically unchallengeable, even if only one person believes it's true. I suspect I've heard someone pan every restaurant I've loved, at least once. People, myself included, seem to have disappointing meals at three star restaurants, yet Michelin seems to uphold the rating the next year. As for chicken being "still just chicken," I'm curious as to what else it might be expected to be. I'd be happy that it was better tasting than other chickens. I remember one of my early visits to Gramercy Tavern and someone whose taste I greatly respected although she was young enough to be my daughter, told me to order the chicken. She was rather insistent because, as she said, she knew I wouldn't be likely to order chicken on my own. Come to think of it, in my youth I recall reading the words of a critic who said he tests a new restaurant by ordering a simple roast chicken. These are different times I suppose, but the chicken at Gramercy Tavern was just chicken, perhaps even just chicken simply roasted, but it was spectacular. Though of course, it was a simple dish, not a spectacular dish. De gustibus non est disputandum.

Stereotyping of a culture or a "people" is far eaiser than reaching some understanding of the cultural complexities. It can be dangerous to act on what amounts to such cultural prejudices, but I think we can discuss them here in a friendly and educational manner if we deal with them as casual first impressions. It's also worth noting that even when the stereotype applies to a vast majority of a population there are other factors that will drive changes in the society. If people believe the French are entrenched in their own cuisine, I've usually felt the Spanish are even more so, but a small movement of chefs there has managed to make the country appear as the avant garde in terms of cuisine at the moment. What also may make the French seem resistent to culinary change in some eyes may not be an actual resistance, but merely the outgrowth of a very strong national cuisine that takes what it can use and quickly makes it seem French.

Black Berkshire pigs. I tend to think of them as the porcine equivalent of heirloom tomatoes.

Sadly they went out of style late in the middle of the century, but the 20th century never produced anything cooler than a silver cigarette case. A very close second was the red tin that pckaged Engllish Benson and Hedges cigarettes. In the late sixties, I actually started smoking again, just so I could carry these around after buying a couple of cartons in England. The soft paper pack of Camels I thought was so cool in college suddenly seemed so common that I quit for the second time when I ran out of Benson and Hedges. Movies by the way, are not what they used to be and the characters are not as cool as when they smoked cigarettes. Show me a great movie and I'll show you someone with a silver cigarette case. On the other hand, some people say it's Technicolor that changed everything. Wine labels have never been, and will never be, as cool as cigar bands either.

Just exactly how full is NY of these places? I didn't trip over any on my way to the subway this morning, nor have any hit me over the head. That you found one is hardly proof that there are many, nor proof that illegal bars not paying taxes wouldn't find some reason to exist. I suppose we should repeal the cigarette taxes since there are so many bootleggers smuggling cigarettes into the city. What I do notice on my way to the subway is the cover of an old issue of New York Magazine with a headline foretelling the death of NY's bar and restaurant scene. The magazine is in the window because the issue featured the wares of the shop in whose window the cover is posted along with a cut of the article mentioning the shop. Anyway, without getting into the ethics or morality, such dire predictions have hardly come true. Bars seem to be thriving in the city. Illegal activity and attempts at tax evasion are probably also doing well as they always have. All lwas are not bad, but all laws that make it a crime to do something, will inevtiably produce more law breakers. Arguments against smoking bans have to be more logical than just that people will break the law. If murder is no longer a crime we are likely to have less crime, but no less killing.

Some years ago, we happened to have had the good fortune to meet a charming woman who was running a program out of her family's summer home which is an 18th century manor surrounded by vineyards in the heart of Gascony. Her chef was from San Sebastian where she also had her own cooking school. We never had the time or chance to actively pursue our interest in representing the school as agents, but for several years we had active pages with information on our web site. Those pages are still on the server although no longer linked from the rest of the site. The links back to the site may be broken as well and the e-mail address shouldn't work, but you can sneak a peek here at these URLs. The photographs don't do it justice and certain information is likely to be out of date. I'll try to find the URL for their own site if anyone's interested. While I haven't taken any of the courses, not been there when a course was in session, I can vouch for the charm of the owner, the house, the grounds and the area. http://www.worldtable.com/reports/ecole.html http://www.worldtable.com/reports/ecolephotos.html http://www.worldtable.com/reports/ecolefaq.html

Beaumes-de-Venise is best known for it's sweet muscats, but its red wines are generally lesser known and a good value.

At first I thought it was odd to see so many less than exceptional restaurants on the list, and I realized I missed restaurants I would no longer frequent even if they were still here. Some very mediocre restaurants, perhaps even some very bad ones, have some very good memories associated with them. I remember Clementine when it opened, but I also remember a change in direction and menu. I don't know how long it had the kind of food that drew us there, but I suspect the clientele wasn't there to support that food. When it downscaled the operation in terms of food style, we lost all interest. We already missed what it had offered originally even when it was still open. Dubrow's is a magic word from a very distant past. The one at Flatbush and Church Avenues in Brooklyn was a not infrequent lunch haven during high school. I suppose I've put more about my time and place down with that than anything else I've posted. There was probably a time when I lost all interest in that kind of food, preferring instead to eat the many other cuisines that were new in my life. Much of what they served probably carries on in the many luncheonettes and coffee shops, but it's not really the same. Even the food isn't really the same. I believe the last of those old high ceiling art deco cafeterias has disappeared, at least in Manhattan. It's a pity on many levels. The Russian Tea Room, the old Russian Tea Room, has a few poignant memories for me. The replacement Russian Tea Room was gaudier in a way that offended me. The original decor was somehow charming. The old RTR was a New York institution. The new one was a tourist center. I miss the old one. Nevertheless, it never really figured in my dining plans even before it was ruined for us. We visited the new one twice because it was new and because we had reason to expect much better from the chef. I don't believe he was given the support he needed. The French restaurants on the west side, generally on Ninth Avenue in the fifties, are sorely missed, although I wonder what, if any, place they'd serve in my dining pattern today. They served the crews of the French liners that used to dock at the piers further west. Their demise was a part of larger local and global changes. Some moved a bit east and became part of the theater dining scene. They were a regular part of dining out in the early days of our marriage and a regular part of our social life. I don't know if I miss some of the more upscale French restaurants in the east fifties as much. We couldn't afford them as often. I remember le Chanteclair at whose bar I often met friends in college. I think I ate there once or twice. It was owned by two French bothers who were ex-Grand Pix race car drivers if I'm not mistaken. It was that glamour that attracted me in my youth, rather than the food. Cafe St. Denis, on the other hand, was a place I recall from the time we began to take a serious interest in food. They made a dish, Pintadeau en Croûte or something like that, which provided an epiphany for me. It was guinea hen braised in red wine and served under a pastry crust. It was sort of a coq au vin meets chicken pot pie, with a guinea hen substitution. Not exactly what we think of as haute cuisine today and it's a pity we don't often find that kind of cooking done as well today as it was then. When good food becomes a drug, we often go to excess and forget the early pleasures. I suppose I miss my own innocence as much as Cafe St. Denis. No one has mentioned Luchow's in this thread, although it has been mentioned before on the site. That seems unforgivable, although I've often wondered if it's a place I'd choose today.

Those interested in the Sanlucar should read the recent Sanlucar de Barrameda, A lazy week in Cadiz, Andalucia thread. In spite of a local garbage strike that made the Bajo de Guia a no go, Adam Balic was most enthusiastic about his visit.

Perhaps Lance Armstrong, in a yellow jersey might be able to sell corn on the cob.

Corn, on or off the cob, has not traditionally been people food in France. That it's animal fodder is not going to help, although it does appear with greater frequency than it did forty years ago when it was never seen on a plate. I think I've mainly seen corn in salads, mixed or composed salads and somehow in exotic salads entitled "Mexican." Give the French time. They had to be tricked by Parmentier to get them to eat potatoes. Somehow, given French table manners and the degree to which those are ingrained, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting to see corn on the cob however.

Timing is eveything, well at least after size.