John Whiting

What this discussion points up is that ethnic groups with an old and complex culinary tradition have inflexible rules, both positive and negative. As they are infiltrated by modern commercially motivated cuisine, they may pass through a period incorporating the best of both worlds, but they will ultimately succumb to a global uniformity in which only the well-off can afford what was once the food of the peasants.

Here's a postscript to this comment. It came to me from a distinguished London cheese merchant:

If that were universally true, no culture would have survived in preliterate eras. Traditions were preserved by constant repetition, until every detail was memorized. Boredom is a learned emotion, taught by modern techniques of merchandising. Am I bored by yet another perfect cassoulet, which duplicates a previous perfection? I search for it!

I share dave88's pessimism about the population as a whole, but take qualified comfort from the fact that within our enormous nation there are various single-minded minorities, many of of them large enough to form small nations in themselves. They may be too spread out to support many restaurants of unostentatious integrity outside the metropolitan areas, but the growth of high quality internet mail order is encouraging, as well as the burgeoning farmers' markets. As for restaurants, the best source of information remains, not advertising, but word of mouth -- particularly if eGullet's collective virtual mouths are included in the equation!

Jonathan, "winner-take-all" may operate at the top end of the classical spectrum if you're looking at financial success, but these musicians are by no means regarded (by those who know) as the best. They often go on beyond their finest years (if they ever had any). For instance a late friend was a recording engineer, one of whose specialties was the note-by-note editing of celebrated pianists past their prime, even inserting brief takes from anonymous younger musicians when the pianists in question couldn't produce an editable version. (If it were possible to rescue the disasters of aging chefs, just think of the possibilities! ) Aliwaks, you describe the motivation of many an artist: they just can't help themselves!

I remain convinced that it is more interesting to compare the restaurant business with the performing arts, with particular attention to classical music, because these are the chefs I continue to be most interested in. Jonathan, what you say about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse is absolutely correct -- I know it from inside. All the surplus goes into enlarging and maintaining Alice's extended family of employees, which numbers well over a hundred. If Chez Panisse had been only modestly successful, it would have been much as it is now, only smaller and probably a bit shabby. I cast no aspersions on successful chefs, but it's certainly true that when a musician becomes more concerned with his income than with his art, and starts to perform as he thinks his expanding public would like him to, his art becomes hollow and bombastic. Basildog's manner of running a restaurant seems to correspond to the attitude of a number of small long-running chamber groups I've worked with, and it makes me wish that his establishment were more readily accessible to London.

Whoops! I meant, in fact, 20 to 50 euros. Some, of course, go beyond, and are worth it. (Or, alas, not.) I can't resist quoting, yet again, the observation by the great English food writer Jane Grigson, which I have carved on my kitchen wall: "We have more than enough masterpieces. What we need is a better standard of ordinariness." P.S. Glad that you too have found pleasure at Logis hotels.

There seems to be no precise distinction made here between the "low" and the "middle". For instance, I've eaten very respectably and enjoyably at independent Logis hotels all over France. This association demands that members' kitchens serve a "menu du terroir" which is locally based. The connection may be tenuous, but it shows an impulse to avoid members' cuisine becoming boringly uniform. These are not quaint little auberges populated by peasants, but decidedly middle-class establishments. The tables are probably covered in spotless linen and the set menus are liable to range anywhere between 200 and 500 euros. In other words, they fall unequivocally into the "middle" bracket that this thread seems to be trashing. They're the sort of places frequented by modestly prosperous middle-class families who love good food but would never read a review, open a guidebook, or concern themselves with what was fashionable.

Howdy, strangers. Just looking in briefly. Jonathan, I find these sentiments -- how shall I say it? -- a perversion of the history of cuisine. I have always regarded cookery as an activity in which everybody wins. The fact that most of those running restaurants have been sucked into the distorted values of the society in which they live does not make it impossible to cook for the pleasure of one's self and of others, even for money. Whenever I return to Paris I like to go back to a few neighborhood bistros, tucked away in remote corners, where the same chefs seem always to be cooking for the same diners. They don't seem to be struggling particularly harder than everyone else -- who's doing really well these days aside from the reconstructers of devastated countries? But the food is still good and the atmosphere is still good. And to lump sports and the performing arts together as Winner-Take-All "markets" -- pop music no doubt, but if you made such a statement to even the "winners" I know and have worked with in classical music, such as Simon Rattle, Ralph Kirkpatrick and Alfred Brendel, it would bring steam from their ears. Others whom I know happily spent their lives as dedicated "losers" and were admitted late into the Pantheon. They hadn't been banging on the door -- certain people went out looking for them. In short, monopoly-driven world commerce does not serve as a useful model for every other human activity.

Jonathan, it is illuminating to re-read the Bible's account of the three temptations of Christ. Having yielded profitably to the first, it is difficult to resist the other two.

Curious that no mention is made of the UC Davis wine wheel, an attempt to use neutral, non-emotive terminology with some semblance of scientific (i.e. observational) accuracy. It used to be available on their website, but now you have to buy it, rather expensively.

Jonathan, you’ve touched on a dichotomy that is central to my own food experience. I am less and less interested in grand restaurants and celebrity chefs and more often in search of small establishments like the local shop whose threatened demise makes you unhappy. But as a resident of London, the way I find such places in France is through guidebooks and electronic communication. For instance, when I went to Paris looking for calorific cheeses and sauces, eGullet came up with the best leads, including bistros I’ll go back to again and again. And yet, turning the wheel full circle, you point out that the forces that promote rapid and long-range communication also threaten the very existence of these small establishments. As News Editor of Fine Food Digest, I find that much (though not all) of the news that I gather is unequivocally bad. The publisher accepts this, and in fact asked me to take it on because I was adept at digging out information that would make his retailers wince. Survival is not best served by ignorance. Behind what you say is the inescapable suggestion that the very structure of the multinational corporation that is rapidly becoming the model of government and even of the arts carries within itself the destruction of those intimate, non-hierarchical personal relationships from which the most notable human activities have always evolved. As you accurately observed, I would add, *especially* at the high end, even after spending a great deal of money for it.

Even I am not that cynical. I've encountered egos aplenty in the restaurant trade, but I've also known a few who were as humbly dedicated as the better sort of artist, scientist or scholar. And some who simply had fun. Whichever category they fall into can usually be whiffed subliminally as soon as you walk into a restaurant.

Jonathan, your comparison between chefs and CEOs is intriguing. I would question whether ruthlessness, intransigence and elephantiasis of the ego are quite so essential to the success of a restaurant, at least on a modest scale; but so far as their collective notoriety is concerned, they do have one thing in common. Their newsworthiness depends in large measure on the dangers that attach to their profession. CEOs did not get nearly so much attention before their grosser illegalities were revealed and they began dropping like grunts in front-line trenches. So the suicide of a chef or two will only serve, briefly, to fill a few empty tables. The collosseum would have been empty if all the gladiators had left the field under their own power.

One simple restaurant, reeking in literary history, has survived from the days when eating at a Prague restaurant was like reading a book from George W's library. It's called U Kalicha, and it was the hangout of the writer/artist team responsible for The Good Soldier Schweik. Its website tells you all you need to know. It's simple and hearty, like a Munich beerhall. http://www.ukalicha.cz/english.html

Several years ago when I was on a lo-fat *and* lo-carb diet, I toured Wales and Western England with a small opera company. I ate alone at restaurants listed in the Good Food Guide (the rest of the company didn't want to spend the money) and I asked for meat or fish that was on the menu, but simply grilled, without the rich sauce, without the starch, and with extra helpings of vegetables. All of them (about 8 as I remember) cheerfully accommodated. Of course this was a request for something simple, but it was nevertheless something different, which throws some minds into instant panic. In Paris, I've had good response asking ahead for something I know isn't on the menu; for instance a seafood restaurant that used to offer bouillabaisse but no longer does.

Perhaps this should be a separate topic, but it nevertheless relates to the use of musical terms when talking about food. There is an inexorable trend, born of advertising, to invent catchy new words for familiar concepts. It's called jargon, and there are dictionaries devoted to it which become obsolete as soon as they are published. But it's not surprising that a public which demands endlessly new sensations would want new words to describe them -- or new words for old sensations when inventiveness is exhausted.

Oh dear! Don't get me started on Peter Sellars. I was the sound designer at Glyndebourne for Nigel Osborne's "Electrification of the Soviet Union", which Peter directed. He succeeded in making a complex but coherent libretto so incomprehensible that for several weeks of rehearsal I couldn't understand what was going on -- until I got hold of a copy of the librettist's original text in which he had sketched the stage directions as he imagined them. Everything fell into place. When the production went to Berlin, Sellars appeared in a radio roundtable discussion, along with the composer and librettist, and thoroughly trashed them both, together with the opera they had written. I learned later that he had ambitions of directing in Berlin and so had disassociated himself from a work which he knew the Brechtians wouldn't like. Sellars is popular with producers for two reasons: his productions are always controversial and get a lot of attention -- the ultimate fusion chef -- and they are, if necessary, very cheap to realize. Cosi in a Cape Cod dune shack -- very economical!

Whoops! Counterpoint in its more complex forms such as a double fugue may include more than one theme, but it is most commonly a single theme worked against itself in two or more key signatures, usually a four or a fifth apart. In its simplest form it is merely a round or a canon, in which the line is delayed but unaltered.Thematic contrast is more typical of sonata allegro form, and even this may be reduced to a single theme in which the contrast is only one of key signatures.

Steven has described the situation succinctly, without resorting to metaphor. I don't think that "counterpoint" contributes anything in the way of understanding or clarification.

Why not an opera whose performance takes place in a banquet hall, during which a succession of appropriate courses is consumed? An English National Opera performance of Prokovief's Love of Three Oranges included odor-producing scratch cards which the audience was instructed to activate on cue. Fortunately, the performance smelled much better than the cards.

To the first question, the answer is, I think, that "counterpoint" is not a useful term to describe a technique of contrast that is often used, whether or not the chef would consciously give it a label.The second question throws it wide open. Whatever, the concept, however ludicrous, a modern chef will be found to exemplify it. The spectrum from the inventive through the fantastic to the decadent is all too well represented, particularly at the further end.

Of course Jonathan’s question deserves a more serious response. I yield to no one in my passion for J.S. Bach. I enthusiastically recommend the recent Brilliant edition (that’s the label’s name) of his complete works in a boxed set of 160 CDs for a bargain £250. They have been leased from a variety of sources, but all 200-odd surviving cantatas (out of a probable 300) have been specially recorded for this release in Dutch performances under a single conductor that are among the best I’ve heard. Having declared my loyalty to Western music’s greatest composer, I must nevertheless question his relevance to cuisine, of whatever ethnic origin. Music, including polyphony, exists along a strict continuum that does not allow us to stop and savour it except by artificial means that do violence to its intentions. There have been some modern composers, such as Charles Ives, who have delighted in bringing together clashing juxtapositions such as marching bands approaching from different compass points, but these are in the nature of collages or cut-ups in which we recognize fragments of the familiar incongrously juxtaposed. Efforts to mix methods and formal structures from different disciplines, thus converting them into metaphors, can be amusing – Satie, when accused of writing music which lacked form, wrote a series of compositions “in the shape of a pear” – but the novelty soon wears off. A single meal’s dishes may be combined in any manner that a chef is willing to accommodate (particularly easy in a buffet or a Chinese banquet), but to compare one’s successive mouthfuls with the structure of various art forms would, I think, verge on the precious.

No, providing you are prepared to insert several eating implements into your mouth at the same time!

Ah, surprise! An empty and fleeting pleasure, though much beloved of the 18th century landscape gardener, Capability Brown. Thomas Love Peacock had the last word to say on the subject in Chapter 4, "The Grounds", of _Headlong Hall_: "Allow me," said Mr Gall. "I distinguish the picturesque and the beautiful, and I add to them, in the laying out of grounds, a third and distinct character, which I call unexpectedness." "Pray, sir," said Mr Milestone, "by what name do you distinguish this character, when a person walks round the grounds for the second time?"