John Whiting

Who advertise themselves, quite rightly, as the ice cream for adults; i.e. a lower than usual sugar content.

My morning fix is their Foundation blend, which Jeremy says is the nearest they do to the Major's. It's pretty close in flavor and a lot closer in food miles.

I also subscribe to that method. Licking directly, all the best bits get in my beard.

Italy has the resolutely anti-snob Slow Food Osteria Guide, listing traditional "bistros" costing around 35€ or less. Their bias may well go too far in that direction, but I love them nevertheless.

Haven't been back since 2002. But I could walk in any evening, look around at the faces, and if they looked like those in the 19th century French paintings in the Louvre, it would still be OK. EDIT: If I had a staff of 100, my reviews would lack all character.

Believe me, it's true in London even of unknowns. If I were younger and these were still my roving days, I'd need a social secretary and a good doctor.

That's because, when I wrote it, they still were. I don't have a staff of 100 reviewers. EDIT: I'd love to keep my reviews up to date, but my Paris visits are at my own expense. I do date them at the end, so that the attentive reader is warned.

If anything it's too inclusive. I ate at one top-rated bistro that was OK but not that good, and at another that shouldn't have been there at all; nevertheless, it's led me to some good bistros the English guides haven't discovered and I've found it very useful.

It's informal, at least at lunchtime. It's closed Sat-Sun and Mon lunch. Midweek early dinner time I think you'd get in, but I'm not sure. I always book everywhere, just in case, even if it's only a last-minute phone call to save a useless journey.

My wife and I had a similar not-to-be-repeated experience at Le Pamphlet. http://www.whitings-writings.com/bistro_reviews/pamphlet.htm Fortunately this is very much the exception. Chez Mâitre Paul works in two evening sittings, but does it with leisurely tact. http://www.whitings-writings.com/bistro_reviews/paul.htm

Zagat will tell you what American tourists think about Paris restaurants. For a native view, consult Le Pudlo Paris. The 2004 edition should be out. EDIT: Yes, came out in October. Even for those whose French is as bad as mine, it's comprehensible enough to be very useful.

If you're talking about the Chez Michel near the Gare du Nord, then yes -- and yes! In it's former incarnation under a different chef it was included in Waverley Root's Paris Dining Guide of 1969.

And wait 'til you use the loo! http://www.whitings-writings.com/bistro_reviews/baracane.htm But my favorite has to be Chez Gramond. It's like stepping into Dr. Who's tardis and finding yourself transported back half a century. Is it still there? Pages Jaunes says it is. http://www.whitings-writings.com/bistro_reviews/gramond.htm

Patricia Wells does not habitually move among those who keep neighborhood bistros solvent, even though she may visit them from time to time. I try to search out unfamiliar ones when I go to Paris, chosen by means of a bit of advance research. Most typically, I find that the other diners seem to know the waiters by name. This whole milieu is the foundation on which the shakier structure of fashionable restaurants is built. The social butterflies who pride themselves on never supping twice at the same flower are the same followers of fashion who used to boast that they never missed a week at, say, Maxim's. Given the growing instability of society worldwide, it's encouraging to find so much continuity still prevailing on the fringes (in the fridges?) of Paris.

Hunan in Pimlico serves a closely related cuisine. It's been brilliant when I've been there, though Fuchsia, who first recommended it to me, says it's reported to have become a bit uneven.

Steven, I'm certainly not so antedeluvian as to object to photos per se. I think that all the classic books would have benefited from honest photos or even drawings of some of the finished products -- not to show the reader what they had to look like, but to indicate what the author had in mind. What makes me sad about the contemporary insistance on photos, artistically taken and lavishly printed, is that it makes virtually every cookbook a high-budget project. This makes it much more difficult for an unknown cook/food writer to get a book published. Ironically, it doesn't mean that only the best make it into print, but rather those the publisher thinks can be promoted into instant best sellers, which ususally means celebrity chefs or sexy women. The best colour pictures don’t come cheap. The total cost of producer, photographer, food stylist, ingredients, crew and post-production may well stretch to a couple of thousand pounds a day before the book so much as reaches the printer (or so Ann Dolamore of Grub Street tells me). The bottom line, as publishers are now so fond of saying (having scrapped the top line) is that an orgy of photography will multiply the already high publication costs.

The unillustrated books tend to be old-fashioned (or classic, depending on one's viewpoint) precisely because they date from a time when illustrations were unnecessary. No modern author would attempt a cookbook lacking very large and seductive photos. Well, almost none. The Chez Panisse cookbooks continue to appear with beautiful drawings.

Andy, no argument with your article, which I thought was excellent journalism. And we seem to be closer on my basic premise than I thought we might. Indeed, if not more. Grub Street, a small food press in London, is one of the last to publish unillustrated cookbooks.

The photos are excellent as photos, but they make me long for the days when they were intended to be instructive rather than inspiring. What contemporary publisher would commission books like Pepin's La Method and La Technique? Food photographs have become decorative, serving much the same function as the illuminations in mediaeval manuscripts. They relate, one suspects, to the number of people who merely read cookbooks rather than working out of them.

They involve structural alterations in society which are unlikely to occur, such as various trades and industries being once more in the hands of people who love and understand them. They needn't be virtuous, they can even be greedy -- Hollywood, it was often said, was run by SOBs, but they were SOBs who loved movies. EDIT: The finest editors of the past have been those who were older and in certain respects wiser than their authors but were capable of admiration. Maxwell Perkins, for example, who turned the logorrhea of Thomas Wolfe into novels.

The following concerns the British book and magazine publishing scene, and doesn't necessarily relate to newspapers: There are observable trends in book and periodical editing, and one is that those holding the jobs are getting younger and younger. This may be optimistically attributed to a search for new ideas, but is more realistically explained by the fact that kids straight out of college are cheaper to hire. My wife has written five books on feeding infants and children, including The Nursery Food Book, which for five years has been the standard textbook for students in the Nursery Nurse diploma program. She taught infants in state schools for more than thirty years and in the evenings taught cookery to adults for over twenty years, so that she had a double perspective on the subject. In 1996, her first relationship with her editors went smoothly. They assumed that she knew more about her subject than they did and confined their observations to useful suggestions having to do with structure and clarification. From then on it was all downhill, culminating in her last book on Managing Nursery Food, for nursery school managers. It was for Times Educational, a Murdock press which one might expect to be professional. But the editor put in charge of the book was an arrogant young man who had just been moved across from sales to fill a gap left by a departing employee. He knew nothing of the subject – indeed, of writing itself – but rewrote the book into an illiterate travesty full of factual errors. It took my wife several months of open warfare culminating in a refusal to allow her name on the cover, and a threat to publicly denounce the book in the professional press, before he gave in and allowed the book to go to press as she had written it. Writing for professional magazines, she now continually comes up against girls straight out of college who rewrite her copy and whom she then has to diplomatically pursuade to allow her to vet the proofs so as to avoid factual errors which could even lead to law suits. Friends in the Guild of Food Writers and the Society of Authors echo these experiences again and again. They are the inevitable result of the ownership of publishing houses having passed into the hands of meganational corporations which make and sell books with the same callous disregard for quality as prevails in the marketing of T-shirts.

It could be a great book, after the OK Corral shootout over who would edit.

I'm rolling about on the floor -- not a pretty sight.

Don't be frightened. No one here can actually kill you. There's a whole alternative website consisting of people kicked out of eGullet, just as eGullet itself grew out of Chowhound rejects. Survive these three, and you'll be ready for a five-star kitchen!

Dropping in at St. John Bread and Wine yields the sort of fairly priced high quality snacking at odd hours that used to be typical of certain French bistros and brasseries and is becoming increasingly rare. My wife and I shared a suet pudding which she declared to have a crust superior to what her mother in Lincolnshire had made, and her mother (in my experience) was a damn fine traditional English cook.