Bux

Was it banal, or just too often the only choice? Here in the middle of NYC, I can't manage to get enough wild boar, though I've suffered bores and boors enough. Steve Jenkins, the cheese master from Fairway in NY, listed a couple of Corsican cheeses--Venaco and Golo--among his favorites when participating recently in an eGullet Q&A. I don't know them, but it would seem they are worth looking out for. Menton1 posted about a Corsican restaurant in Paris called l'Alivi, 27 rue du Roi de Sicile in the 4th arr. It looks like the real thing and I see a 20 € menu. It might be worth it to ask for advice on where to eat in Corsica. I also see a Corsican beer made from chestnut flour on the carte de boissons. I don't expect it to replace beer beer any time soon, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to taste it once. I felt the same way about buckwheat beer in Brittany.

Get out there and eat. It's hard work but someone has to do it.

I would think it's worth seeing even from the outside. Check out the rest of Bilbao if you can't get into the museum in time and don't miss the "Fosteritos" as the locals refer to the cocoon like metro entrances after Norman Foster, the British architect who designed the stations. It worse comes to worse have some tapas in the Plaza Nueva in the Plaza Nueva in the old city.

Thanks for pointing out our oversight. The topic title has been corrected. Matthew, thanks for the web site link.

There's good eating to be found on both sides of the Pyrenees, I'n not ready to declare a winner, but the Michelin guides to France and Spain are not a good indication of the relative balance. There's a recent post on the France forum complaining of the paucity of good cooking in the Roussillon. Take a good look at the maps in the Michelin Guide Rouge and Guia Roja for both sides of the Pyrenees along the Mediterranean and you'll see a denser array of stars on the Spanish side. Even so, I'll agree that it's rougher to get multiple stars in Spain than in France. (Of course both countries have their more and less interesting regions.)

I suspect the time frame on restaurant reservations in that part of France are a bit different in October than they are in July and August.

When a dog bites a man, it isn't news. Man bites dog. Now you've got news. When a restaurant in France is 98% influenced by French cooking and shows 2% influence from America, the influence that's news is the 2% from America. We all understand the Mon Vieil Ami is an Alsatian restaurant. The intersting part is that the chef working in the restaurant, who is one of the owners, says he has been influenced by working in the states and that an American food writer sensed that when eating there.

Hellman's mayonnaise tastes nothing at all like homemade mayonnaise made with really good olive oil. My understanding is that the incidence of salmonella contamination is much, much higher in many parts of the US than in most places in Europe. I believe conditions at the farm, are to blame and that freshness is not as great an issue. We believe we are playing the odds by buying eggs from small local and sometimes organic farms where there are cleaner conditions and frequent inspections. We eat fried eggs sunny side up and softboiled eggs that are very runny. Spaghetti a la carbonera is made by putting hot pasta in raw eggs and the eggs are still quite uncooked when the pasta comes to the table. I probably wouldn't feed any of that to a baby.

John, isn't that how you determine if someone is a fine bouche? I do.

I was rather curious to see specifically what she referred to. As I said before, from what I could see (and pointed out) the major influences are from the Alsace. . 1. I am specifically referring to the abundance of fresh vegetables, especially in the starters, the utter freshness and connection to the garden. and while this is not necessarily limited to San Francisco Bay Area or New York City, I felt that almost every dish we ate on the menu could have come from a high quality usa restaurant. Seeing similar food in San Francisco, New York, Pairs and Strabourg would not enable the diner to determine which way the influences went. That Antoine Westermann is Alsatian, or that he has a restaurant in Alsace, is not proof that his food is Alasatian or that if it is, he's not also inflluenced by American restaurants. The fact that he's a Michelin three star chef is all the more reason to suspect he's been subject to international culinary influences. Pim may have seen the Alsatian influences at Mon Vieil Ami, and I have not doubt they are there, but none have been noted in this thread. Pineapple is certainly not a traditional Alsatian fruit and that Westermann uses it in a dessert, doesn't make that recipe Alsatian. Unless someone can make a strong case that Marlena is mistaken about "the abundance of fresh vegetables, especially in the starters, the utter freshness and connection to the garden," I'd have to say that this is distinctly not the mark of an Alsatian restaurant and it's not particulalry representative of traditional Alsatian restaurant cooking. It can only result in an Alsatian restaurant from an outside influence. It's a lot easier to look at the influences by being inclusive rather than exclusive.

Marlena, you should be well aware that a French chef with any pride at all, will refuse admittance to his restaurant of anything genetically modified.

I have only eaten at Roellinger's once, but I'm a devoted fan as the food was must heads and shoulders above the other two or three two-star places in which we've eaten since in Brittany. I don't know either of your two choices. I would strongly encourage you to stop off and have a couple of lunches, or more, at local crèperies and drink cidre not wine. The savory buckwheat crèpes are referred to as galettes de sarrasin. My favorite fillings are the more traditional ham, cheese and egg. On previous trips we've had spectacular eggs in Brittany and my absolute favorite galette would have to be one with an oeuf mirroir or fried egg sunny side up sticking out on top. When I've had my fill of traditional galettes I might opt for a less conventional filling, especially one containing andouille the lightly smoked tripe sausage not to be confused with the Cajun sausage by the same name. A well balanced lunch in a crèperie would include a dessert crèpe as well. I'd also go very far out of my way for a lightly caramelized kouign amman oozing butter and of course as many caramels aux buerre salé, preferably the Gwen Har Du brand with their black and white label, as I can manage in the short time I'm there. I also tend to leave Brittany with my pockets full of those caramels. They're mostly found in patissieries along the southeast coast of Brittany.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply that the chefs at Mon Vieil Ami were not inspired by America only that I don't see any attempt to copy the food they cooked in the US. Perhaps they are cooking a very similar menu, but I suspect that in DC, that menu would have seemed very French to an American clientele. I understand the point and noted my own conversation with a French chef several years ago whose own greatest inspiration was from his stint in the US. 1. Modern western cuisine is very international these days and at levels far simpler than haute cuisine. There are any number of menus in little restaurants in Paris that would not seem unusual in restaurants in NY or SF--or even in American cities with less of a history of French restaurants. 2. I see no discrepancy between this and the fact that the menus may have been worked out in Alsace with Antoine Westermann. Let me thrown in another story I've told here before. About nine years ago, I met a young French cuisiner working in NY. He had been here a year or two as line chef and then sous chef at one of NY's best restaurants. I asked him how his work here would be regarded when he returned to France, specifically how it would look when stacked against working at Georges Blanc, his last employer in France. He said it would be as if he stopped cooking for a few years. No one would care at all where he worked or what he did in the states. New York was no place. Not so many years later the same chef and I were discussing his recent trip to Europe and the meals he had eaten there. It quickly became obvious to me that because of his position as sous chef in one of NY's best French restaurants he was getting VIP treatment right and left in both France and Spain. Much of the attention was coming from chefs who had eaten his food and who had met him in NY. I reminded him of our earlier conversation and his reply was that things have changed drastically in just a few years and that was several years ago. French chefs are aware of what's cooking here and are being influenced by it.

I would suspect that people who Corian cutting boards also use marble and stainless steel cutting boards. Can you be assured of getting water hot enough to sterilize anything in a dishwasher or are you referring to the action of a cleaning liquid or additive? The thing I've noted about all the sources quoted so far, are that plastic cutting boards without deep scratches can be more effectively cleaned than wood. This would seem in to indicate that platic boards are expected to be discarded quite frequently.

While we have a vested interest in having al your readers navigate their way through the site and hit as many pages as possible on the way to John's Digests, they'd be served well if you put in a clickable link to the heart of the matter. http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=42908 I agree that the DIGEST: Paris Restaurant News & Reviews is worth the price of admission to eGullet and would be reason alone to pay a fee, if there was one, just to read the forum. As no good deed goes unpunished, we'll see if we can reward John by getting him to do more around here.

Pastry is a far more encompassing term. Dessert is a subcategory of pastry. On the whole I tend to prefer French pastry to that of Spain, but I've had excellent desserts in Spain, especially in the fine restaurants.

Marlena, Thanks for confirming what I had already come to believe about "influences" ... does this mean that the French will someday be able to recreate our vibrant California cuisine and New Orleans lagniappe that we have grown to treasure right here in America? Hopefully ... and le barbecue du sud? c'est possible? I am sure they were always able to recreate our cuisine, I'm not so sure they will ever want to recreate any of it. Maybe that's wishful thinking on my part as I'd like to enjoy the regional differences in cuisine as I travel, but it's also based on what I see as a spiritual or conceptual influence rather than an interest in doing any literal copying. Picaman's illustrated description of his dinner at Mon Vieil Ami shows it as a distinctly French restaurant. There's no recreation of anything one might describe as American. I think what Marlena describes as an evident "contemporary american influence" has little to do with specific dishes but is part of the cross pollination of ideas and philosophies that has allowed the French to refresh their own cooking at a time when it's become a bit stale or stagnant. I'm also reminded that much of thinking behind these ideas started in France. Alice Waters who's credited for revolutionizing California cuisine came back from France wanting to recreate what she found there--fabulously fresh vegetables grown for their taste, not for shipping.

No. My search for a place to get my glasses fixed led us in the other direction and I spent most of one day wearing sunglasses. Ca'Sento and Calatrava's new museums were also in the other direction.

Merci beaucoup. I just found that myself by Googling. I couldn't find it by searching on the IHT site. What's most remarkable is that I read that piece when it originally appeared on the op-ed page of the NY Times. I didn't think much of it then and was surprised to find it the subject of Brian Priestman's letter to the IHT. We have put the cart before the horse here though or so it seems. Kelly's point is that French cooking, and by that perhaps he means haute cuisine, has become international. When he speaks of American influence, he says "in part." When he speaks of Parisian bistros being influenced by "the ascendancy of bistros and brasseries over starchier French restaurants," he's on the wrong foot by naming three places that arrived in NY long after Constant and his group, including Camdeborde at la Régalade, left their jobs in fancy two and three star restaurants and began opening bistros designed to turn heads by not garner stars in Paris. I'm sorry, but Kelly seems to have it backwards. Why does he find it revolutionary that the chefs in some of the most formal restaurants have worked in bistros. Young cooks have always taken whatever jobs they could get as apprentices. Kelly's comment about "This showbiz element of New York food culture is still viewed with suspicion." seems less true today than ever before. I don't frequent these joints for the most part either here or in Paris, but Fresh_a has given us posts that contradict this statement. About the only thing in his article I can't refute is the idea that formal restaurants may not be as profitable as bistros. I just don't know, although they obviously take less money to start up and therefore present less risk. I think he missed the mark and the article says very little. Can someone put a better spin on it and tell me what I've missed. I also feel the letter to the editor hardly addressed the article except to relay the news that people in the provinces eat more simply than those in Paris. That's obvious, or would be if in fact, most Parisians ate haute cuisine with any regularity. They don't and Priestman ignores the decline in the standards of French cuisine nationwide in recent generations as well as the move from the farm. His talk of food from neighboring farms flies in the face of the fact that France imports foie gras and frog's legs and that les gros escargots de bourgogne have almost been wiped out as a commercial food source, but is this line of thought relevant to Kelly's article anyway.

I'd much prefer to talk about what we're putting in our stomachs than what we're putting on our backs, but talk of shoes, sightseeing and dining at better restaurants makes me want to give a plug to a most comfortable pair of shoes that do not look at all like "walking shoes." These are a pair of cap toe shoes with soft rubber heels and soles made by Allen Edmonds. They are almost as comfortable as sneakers and about as dressy as any shoes I own or at least as dressy as any other brown shoes and I think they come in black as well. They required no breaking in when I bought them. They are my preferred city shoes at home and when traveling. They lace up and thus I don't like to wear them on airplanes and they are so dressy that they seem incongruous with khakis and a tee shirt.

Least respectful? I don't get it. Are you describing a black leather jacket and blue jeans or a blazer and dark dress pants? I'm sorry I wasn't clearer. I meant guys who looked like all they did was come home from the office wearing a suit and take off their tie before going out to dinner. I think it would be alright to decide one wanted to wear relaxed or casual clothes for a great meal, but make them seem specially chosen. I'm afaid I'm tilting at windmills and that this is already an accepted style of dressing.

Somewhere along the way, I forgot to throw in a reference to the conversation I had with a chef in St. Jean-de-Luz in the Basque Coast. He was a Frenchman who studied the culinary arts in France and came to the US to do a stage at Daniel in NY which is how I got my introduction to him and why we ate at his restaurant. Two of his telling comments to me were about his American experiences and how they affected his thinking about food. One was that he had never tasted fruits and vegetables so fresh as those he found at Daniel. While I'll admit that Daniel Boulud has his own sources and that not all of them sell at the Greenmarket, this was quite a statement about attention to raw materials. The second thing that struck me was about how he was influenced by Francois Payard, the pastry chef at Daniel while he was there. Most of the restaurants in St. Jean-de-Luz offer the same traditional desserts and by and large, they outsource these desserts from a central source. My chef, made all his desserts in house. They were original and his clients wanted to know where he bought his desserts. They didn't believe a small restaurant would bother to make their own desserts. That's where the state of the art is now in France and one example of how American cooking has inspired French food. I suppose there's some irony that the American inspiration came from a French chef working in America, but Daniel Boulud's tradition is French, but his sources and clients are largely American.

I wish I'd read the original article. While I'd be the first to agree that you don't know France by knowing Paris, I also have to say that I don't know exactly what Kelly may have said by reading the letter to the editor from which you've quoted. Paris is not France. The comparison in the letter to the relationship of Washington, may not be as good as a comparison to NYC. Washington is a lot more "American." It appears the letter writer doesn't know Paris. There's no food sitting around in Les Halles, at least not since the wholesale food market was moved well out of the city to Rungis. "Outside the cities produce is fresh - it does not sit around for a day at Les Halles before being served" "Yes and no," I'd say. More and more rural French people are doing most of their shopping at hypermarchés and often shopping by price rather than quality. At the same time, I will admit that many of the hypermarchés have a selection of artisanal products and fresh vegetables unheard of in the US. Still I don't believe it amounts to the bulk of the sales. I've shopped with friends who live in la France profunde and had the cheesemonger select local cheeses for us after asking it it will be for lunch or dinner today or tomorrow to pick the one at the proper ripeness. At the butcher next door, we talk about how we will cook the chicken and whether we'll want lardons for the coq au vin. The patrons waiting quietly will contribute oral recipes rather than complain about the time it takes us to make a selection. If I'm not mistaken, both these shops are scheduled to close this year, or have closed. The supermarket in town has expanded. People, even people living in France can have a romanticized image of France. The real France profunde is more often found in black and white movies. Times change. I wish I could lay my hands on my copy of Mort Rosenblum's A Goose in Toulouse. In it, he gives figures about the turn around of France from a rural agricultural nation to an industrialized urban society. The move from agriculture to city work has revolutionized the relationship of the French with their food. Nevertheless, I don't know what points Kelly tried to make, what restaurants he used as examples and what he thought America had to offer. I'd far rather have to find a meal in the middle of France than the middle of The US any day of the week. I eat much better on a road trip to France than I do on the road in the US, but in France I don't eat as well in the middle range as I did forty years ago, while I eat much better in the US than I used to. We've still got a ways to go and show no sign of wanting to eat that well. If we cross levels with France, it will be their own fault. For all that, there's a lot the French can learn from our cooking and, in fact, I think American cooking has been influential in France in the last third of the 20th century. The influences have been both good and bad. For all that, I'm finding Spain very interesting at both the creative level and the traditional rustic and rural level. All the hip writers are writing about Spain and French chefs are up in arms about that, not articles about American cooking.

It might just make the vinaigrette taste great though, like an infused oil or whatnot. "Sitting for ages" brings new meaning to "fresh." As for infused oils, I've been under the impression that they have a shortish shelf life. At least the "fresh" ones do.

We try and keep twice as many jarred salads as we have bottled dressings. Wait a minute Jinmyo, I don't really buy that line of thinking. If you count all sorts of pickled vegetables as salad, "salad in a jar makes far more sense than dressing in a bottle. Anyway, sometimes Mrs. B puts the leftover vinaigrette in a jar to shake up and reuse if we're lazy the next day. Whenever the mustard jar has been scraped as clean as I can scrape it, Mrs. B will make salad dressing in the jar by shaking up some oil and vinegar. There is the chance I can go to the refrigerator and find a vinaigrette in a jar, which is close enough to a bottle. Manufactured dressings, not likely. We usually have one good extra virgin olive oil for salad and an olive oil for cooking open. We usually have a few vinegars open. You could think of this as deconstructed salad dressing in bottles.