Bux

Jul. 3, 2005 -- Note that my comment on the chef is incorrect as noted in a later post by vserna. My apologies to all. Francis Paniego of the excellent Hostal Echaurren in Ezcaray is the chef who will be running the restaurant at Riscal. Quite a bit has been written about Echaurren on eGullet. My understanding is that Andoni Aduriz (Mugaritz) is going to be the consulting chef at the Riscal winery hotel and that choosing him along with Gehry to design the building has less to do with hosting the tourists who might choose to visit wineries if they had a place to stay, than to make it a draw and destination in the way that the Guggenheim has made Bilbao a tourist destination. Fans of contemporary architecture will make both stops part of a tour of the region. Expect the region to change. To keep things in perspective, the draw of buildings such as the Gehry Guggenheim may be preferable to the draw of say, IberiaDisney.

I seem to have noticed that Banons in the US are wrapped in paper that looks like chestmut leaves. Is it still legal to import cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves?

The only way to be sure if you can get a reservation would be to call or send e-mail to either or both of the restaurants, but I believe Can Roca is closed for the first two weeks in July. Thus you may be lucky enough to reach them if you call right way. E-mail may be riskier. To the best of my knowledge, they both offer a la carte menus and various set menus. I know Can Roca offers more than one set menu as we ate there last month. Can Roca is a short taxi ride from the center of Girona. Can Fabes is in Sant Celoni and closer to Barcelona than to Girona. I suspect it may on be the rail line from Girona to Barcelona. In any event, Girona is about equidistant from Sant Celoni and Roses. Without getting into which is the better restaurant, I can't see leaving Girona to eat anywhere else without dining in Can Roca. We stayed in the Hotel Ciutat de Girona, in Girona and were pleased with our accommodations. Free wi-fi in the rooms as well. I've had lunch in Can Fabes, making the commute from Barcelona. I wouldn't want to have to do that after dinner. Can Fabes has rooms and there is a less luxurious hotel in town. Last minute rooms in Roses may not be easy to come by. This is a beach resort town. August is high season for Roses. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many places are already booked up. Cala Montjoi and elBulli are best reached by car or taxi from Roses. It's something like seven kilometers and I wouldn't want to walk that at night as the winding road is unlit. I don't really know how to get from Girona to Roses by public transportation, but I know others have done that. Search and you may find that information already posted in the forum.

L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon has many critics as well as fans. I am among its fans. For sure it's not the three star dining experience, nor may it quite match the very best of what's served in the multistarred restaurants of Paris, but I found the tasting menu thrilling and it allows a diner to focus his expense on the food, rather than on service, decor or ambience, not that I found anything wrong with any of those. It's just not the pampering one might get elsewhere with that kind of food at twice the price or more.

"épicerie" only means "grocery store". ← but generally a bit finer than an alimentation.

A reminder -- http://www.pagesjaunes.fr -- for finding addresses in Paris.

I also have a tendency to point out that Parisian restaurants live under a microscope. There may be no city on earth whose restaurants are as often reviewed as those in Paris. What's more, they are reviewed not only in French for local diners, but probably more often than any other city in other languages in periodicals and guide books as well. It's a rare tourist with an interest in food who arrives in Paris without loads of information. There may be many cities in the world where the question of where to eat will bring similar lists of places from many people, or where six out of ten suggestions will apear on 90% of the lists provided. In Paris, once you get beyond a list of the two and three star Michelin places, everyone's list may be different. I don't think you'll find many who will arrange the two and three star places in the same order, or agree on which restaurants in that list are over, or under, rated. As for searching in the forum for other threads on Paris, I will add that reading reports written soon after a member's eaten in the restaurant is going to be more useful than waiting for responses about past meals. Opinions of where to eat, when there are so many choices, are apt to be meaningless unless you know the person's tastes. Am I posting true to form, John? Les Fontaines, 9 r Soufflot -- almost in front of the Pantheon, between the Pantheon and the Jardin du Luxembourg.

I have been to Berasategui twice. The second time was even better than the first. It reamains my best meal in the area. A search should pull up my comments made while the meal was still fresh in my mind. Berasategui can be reached by bus and perhaps taxi from the bus stop, but I'd recommend a car, although it's a little hard to find from the center of Lasarte. So leave youself a little time to find the restaurant. Other than that, I have nothing truly negative to say about Arzak, Akelarre or Mugaritz. In fact, Mugaritz offered perhaps the most promise. Mugaritz probably requires a taxi. It too may require some stopping and asking for directions as you get nearer. As far as prices, in October of 2003, we spent as much as 300 € and as little as 215 € eating at Mugaritz, Akelarre, Arzak and Martin Berasategui. The differences were dependent on many factors including whether we took a tasting menu, and how much and what kind of wine we drank (although we rarely had very special wines). ViaMichelin and Campsa should be able to offer a good idea of current prices for those places. Print editions of the Michelin Guides are widely distributed and should b e easy to find in book stores in the US, UK and elsewhere. I don't think I've seen the Camspa guide in the US, but these are two guide books most travelers should know. Come to think of it, both of those web sites should be able to provide detailed driving directions to any restaurant.

I think it's obvious, and in turn I ask what is the concern about our fear? Most of us fear sharks, enjoy the movie Jaws and have few qualms about going swimming in the ocean. We don't have to stop eating beef to show our dissatisfaction with the way our livestock is raised and the way our governmental agencies handle problems, but we all know that icebergs don't look very big from far away and above water. We understand that the little bit that shows is often representative of a much larger problem. All of the problems you cite are worthy of our attention. That we have so many problems doesn't call for us to stop becoming more informed about any of them. It should be just the opposite, in my opinion.

I'm not sure I agree. It's been my impression than 90% of Americans think the service and ambience is far more important than the food when choosing where to dine. "Foodies," although I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that term, are a very minor subset of Americans who dine out, although they are disproportionately represented here in the membership. I'd say that most Americans place little emphasis on the food and a small percentage focus almost entirely on the food. I won't make a judgment call, but it's obvious that the foodies resent not having their own writing the reviews for the NY Times. There is no restaurant in the world that is more about the food than Adrià's elBulli and yet I've been compelled to comment on the phenomenally professional service lately in my posts on our recent meal. Moreover, I've come to realize how important that service has been towards enabling my appreciation for Adrià's food. I have gone, since my first discovery of food as an obession, from dismissing anything outside the kitchen, to putting up with the luxury service and style that accompanies haut cuisine in order to eat said food, to learing to appreciate that service in itself and now perhaps in my old age, to learning to synthesize the entire experience. I used to make fun of those people, now it's like going to the opera and appreciating it as a recording, that is, without enjoying the scenery, to dimiss the rest of the restaurant.

There is also la Dernière Goûtte owned by an American and specializing, I believe, in wines from the Languedoc-Roussillon. Possibly that's a shop of greater interest to someone living in Paris looking for good buys and interesting wines than to someone shopping for a single great wine to bring back at a savings.

That is the real bad news of the thread. The good news is that Spain is still more than jamon. Indeed, Spanish food is more than jamon.

Varying and opposite opinions are held on almost every subject and no more subjective a field exists than taste. The most fallacious arguments to support subjective opinion as objective evidence use price or popular demand as proof of quality. Sales figures from a small chain of restaurants in France and the UK, would be highly dependent on what the chain was offering in the way of product selection and relative pricing of those products. Although it is my personal subjective opinion that Spain produces finer hams than Italy, I won't deny that I could sell far more of an inferior grade of prosciutto from Italy at two dollars a pound, than I can sell the finest Serrano ham from Spain at $100 a pound. Advertising and promotion often have a lot more to do with sales than quality or value. The accusation that certain members, whose intelligence, sophistication and knowledge of food has already been demonstrated in the public forum, are entrenched is insulting to the membership at large. That their opinions are suspect or less worthy because if their heritage is is an argument that's counterproductive to discussion on the merits of any issue. It's especially unfortunate when it comes from a member whose own credibility has not been proven and who's built a reputation of putting down expert opinion. Loaded dice seem to roll in favor of their owners all too often, but it doesn't alter the laws of chance. What troubles me as moderator and host of this forum is not that members have different tastes, or that I may see some of them as not having discerning taste, but that certain attacks on taste seem to be little more than trolls for flames and arguments. Noting that we all have different opinions after belittling other opinions is not so much a retreat from your stance than it is camouflage. That's not hard to digest, it's hard to swallow. It's not necessarily rude to come into the Spain forum and argue that prosciutto di Parma is better than jamon Serrano. What is rude, is to start the discussion here and then rule out the local participants as being prejudiced on account of their heritage.

I should have remembered that information from the Lubow article. I don't particularly have any first hand knowledge of what goes on in the kitchen. I'd guess that this site has been the greatest source of my inside information. We've had a few stagiaires posting here with varying intensities. What I posted about the experimentation stopping in Barcelona was more of an assumption on my part than the product of any first hand knowledge. In any event, I didn't mean to speak in absolute terms. I noted that Adrià's mind probably never stops creating. He's always creating, but he's also always refining. In retrospect, what prompted my thoughts on this matter was that just about everything I've been served at elBulli has seemed to have been highly developed and brought to a high level of finesse and sophistication. My reaction after my first meal was that it was unlike what I would expect of eating in the laboratory of a mad scientist or even an adventurous and improvising artist. It was more like discovering a new continent and and finding a civilization that developed slowly over a long period of time and being invited to diner. No matter how little I was moved by a dish or two along the way, there was something about each and every dish that commanded respect. All too frequently, creative chefs don't take the time to develop an idea fully. I shouldn't doubt that Adrià is creating all the time. It just feels as if it takes a considerable period of time before his ideas make it to the diner's table. I could be wrong. Appearances can be deceiving. Nevertheless, Lubow's comment about "inspirations that strike after July" tend to support the idea that it takes months of development before an inspiration is food for other than thought. In fact, I seem to recall that Lubow's article was one that brought home the deliberate and painstaking development of Adrià's ideas. While you may see riffs on a theme, I get no sense of improvisational theater at elBulli. Some of this discussion may hinge on where each of us draws the line between massaging nuances in a dish and bringing forth a radical new idea, but I am not the source of opinions that do not deserve to be challenged.

While I doubt Ferran ever sits still and I'm sure his cerebral processes are usually in high gear, I would expect to see minimal improvisation and change over the course of an elBulli season. My impression is that the kichen at elBulli is not that much of a laboratory. ElBulli is only open for about half of the year. The other half of Ferran's time is spent in Barcelona at his workshop. This where the creative process begins, and to a certain extent, it's where it ends. I've always been reluctant to describe any of the food served at elBulli as experimental. The experiments are carried out at the Taller. The successful fruits of the experimentation are served at the restaurante. While taste is subjective and Adrià's food is highly personal and creative, I don't think diners are served anything that can be described as an experiment. A dish may not meet expectations, and it certainly may disappoint and not taste good to any particular diner, but I strongly suspect it's the product of great refinements made over a period of time. No one who's interested in elBulli should have missed The Cabinet of Dr. Adria, A visit to the el Bulli Laboratory posted back in July of 2003. While it's largely about the design elements related to the restaurant, which go far beyond the graphics and decor with which most restaurants are concerned, the ost offers more than a glimpse into the Taller. The elBulli web site is another required destination.

Judith, one of our observations was that our meal this year was almost devoid of texture. a great majority of the dishes were soft or liquid. There were many moments of intense flavor. The lamb's brains was not one of them. If I could venture any opinion it was that Adrià was very much focused on intensifying flavors this year. SD referred to the powerful taste of the olivas sféricas earlier. Describing this dish to someone in Madrid, I was asked if olives themselves weren't spherical and offered an intense olive flavor. It was indeed hard to define what made the artificial olives worth having. All I can say is that it's a different taste and a different experience than eating olives. This is what Ferran excels at, offering us the different experience -- one that allows us to renew the joys of our early experiences with food. It's often been said that youth is wasted on the immature. ElBulli offers us the chance to discover anew the joys of discovering food, but this time around we can bring our jaded, but sophisticated palates to the table.

Starting with number seven (my first six choices are sushi bars) I might suggest the Bar at the Modern, Gramercy Tavern, db Bistro, Union Square Cafe, Blue Hill, Hearth (not the bar bar as much as the bar beside the pass looking into the kitchen) and Casa Mono (totally different from Babbo as opposed to Lupa, which is different, but Italian).

At the most basic level with little or no transformation you can use it for stuffing almost anything from cabbage to mushrooms to pasta. In the hands of a talented chef the possiblities are endless. Judging from the potato show, get the right panelists and hamburger ice cream might produce a winner even if the chef's taste buds are brought into question. You won't see chefs such as Keller, Ducasse or Trotter on this show. They have nothing to gain from the exposure and are not likely to put themselves up against a panel not guaranteed to be composed of serious food experts.

This thread has gone well off topic for this site. We are a food site. War, poverty and a number of other issues are far more important than barbecue or haute cusine, but I need to remind all that 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. If we are to continue as a food site, we need to restrict the discussion to food. Hunger is an issue related to food, but a conclusion that hunger is related to poverty does not allow us to devote ourselves to a discussion of poverty nor the social and political issue revolving around the cause and solution to poverty or an inequitable distribution of captial or resources. We have removed about a dozen posts, over 40% of the thread, that were essentially off topic for the site. We're not sure there is anything further than can be said on the issue of hunger without addressing unlying causes that are off topic for this site, or that there's a solution to be discussed that doesn't involve poliltics and off topic social issues, but we'll leave the thread open for as long as the discussion stays on topic for the site.

Aux Lyonnaise should work, although it could as easily be in Lyon as Paris. I suspect that's actually okay in his book. Let me add Bistro du Dôme, just behind, and under the same management as, le Dôme in the 14ième. Primarily a fish restaurant as you might imagine. Good food, although not as good as Aux Lyonnaise.

I, on the other hand, am an inveterate street menu reader and I don't have to be looking for a place to eat or even hungry, to stop and read the menu. I stop and read street menus as regularly as I peer into charcuterie and patisserie windows. They catch my attention almost as predictibly as a pretty woman, albeit without risk of a poke in the ribs from my wife, which also may explain why I do it so freely by habit.

Good restaurant service is largely most evident when the service never calls attention to itself, but elBulli takes this to another level. In fact, it may be precisely because there is, of necessity, so much interaction with staff as they explain the highly individual and creative food, that even the most sophisticated and experienced diners lose sight of how well run and how much of the front of the house operation goes on behind our backs. Just as the food is more than the sum of the courses, the experience seems greater than the sum of its parts. Above, and not for the first time, I said the food was labor intensive. So is the service and all that goes into the experience, including making it all seem effortless. The dollar has been on a slide for a while and topic of conversation more on the France board than the Spain one perhaps, but I suppose in a way, I'm lucky to have been around when the dollar was strong and the franc and peseta very weak. The tables have turned and it's the EU citizens' turn to enjoy themselves at bargain prices. Should I be consoled that I might never have developed such a taste for foie gras had I not traveled in the Perigord when the dollar bought ten francs. At its price, which amounts to close to $200 this spring, elBulli is more than fairly priced when compared to what one pays in NY, London or Paris for a top meal. It's getting to Cala Montjoi that's expensive, but we amortize that cost by having a few other good meals along the way.

Postscript: I composed most of my post above, last night, but didn't post it until this morning. I see blakej had pretty much the same array of "snacks" as we did, but that his site has better photographs. I see that instead of melting the cheese on top of the popcorn, they decided to make cups of the melted cheese crisps while they were still warm. Either that, of one of us had the course served upside down. I think it's a good example of the way food is approached by Ferran. There's always room for improvement and change for the sake of variety.

I'm not trying to play dueling images with SD, but looking at the table, I'm reminded that on our first visit back in the days they were serving lunch, we very much enjoyed having an aperitif, snacks and tapas on the terrace and then having coffee there again at the end of the meal. On our next visit, the terrace was full by the time we arrived and we were ushered directly to our dinner table. For that reason, we made it a point to reserve and arrive early this time, so we could enjoy the terrace before dinner. A word to the wise. Of course for those of you who dine in the kitchen, that's another story. SD's olive photo is far better than mine in spite of my advantage of shooting outdoors. Here are images of the beet loops with vinegar powder, (lazos de remolacha) parmesan marshmallows and black olive "oreos" which were presented together. We were drinking cava on the terrace at the time. "Little doves of cheese," actually popcorn with melted and crisped cheese, and ham canapés. The menu for a reminder, is here. Not to be overlooked, along with the service, is the style and presentation of the meal. The wire mesh and perforated steel is very effective against the weathered wood of the table and I believe frames the food very well. Oddly enough, this is one of the restaurants in the entire world that seems to be entirely about the food, and yet I think the ambience, service and style with which the meal is presented is exceptionally important in supporting the food for its full gastronomic effect. With each visit, I'm coming to understand how important that all is to the meal. The "cotton nymph," (ninfa de algodón] a wrap whose effect was not entirely unlike a Vietnamese summer roll, although not exactly like anything I've even eaten, actually came off very well. I was all prepared to dismiss this as the dish that didn't work, but there's more air than sugar in that cotton candy and it's no more sweet than many of the new dishes I've had in Spain lately. The last of the tapas, although not necessarily the end of the fun and games, was the imitation elBulli caviar or, as it was called on the menu, caviar sférico de melon. Neat, cute, amusing, but a repeat of the olive technique and not as effective a taste sensation as the olives. The little melon "roe" look more like candy than caviar or salmon roe. The pits you see in the pictures are passion fruit seeds. I saw them as an attempt to bring some depth to this dish, but I also found them a disturbing visual element. At this point we were shown to our table in the dining room. Cocktails, snacks, hors d'oeuvres or tapas were over and it was time to start dinner. The one thing that should be evident is that there's a lot of thought behind the labor intensive dishes. The pacing of the service and the interaction with the staff as they present and explain the dishes is an important part of the experience. All of the staff appeared ready to offer details and explanations in Catalan, Castilian, English, French and perhaps other languages. Our table of five was comprised of diners who generally spoke one of those languages fluently and sometimes two of them, but we didn't share a common language in which we were all fluent. More work for staff who handled it all in stride and lots of fractured French at the table. More than in any other restaurant, a meal in elBulli is the center of attention and the dominating topic of conversation. When I have a moment, I'll check the indoor photographs and see if they are interesting enough to post. You've already seen the oyster and pearl, our first course at the table and one of the most effective dishes that went well beyond the attention to the effect of the "spherical technique" to produce a well rounded dish that would be impressive in any meal.

Maybe they were having a run of late commers that was scewing up their whole reservation system and this was the polite way of bringing it up.