John Whiting
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Posts posted by John Whiting
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Bravo! I find myself agreeing with every single word Steve has written. Am I getting old?
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When you get to know a chef or a writer or an artist, you get to know both their strengths and their weaknesses. It is much more interesting, and useful, to write about their strengths and to make clear what they are. This is an unlikely extreme, but if I knew a chef who made the world's best cassoulet and the world's worst bouillabaisse, my efforts would be bent primarily to calling attention to his cassoulet. Taking delight in mere condemnation is a mean-spirited pleasure.
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- I partly agree with and partly depart from John Whiting.
I don't actually find anything in what follows with which I disagree. I wonder what I implied that I was unaware of. Although I didn't say so, I certainly believe that, given a modicum of integrity, friendships with practitioners of whatever art or craft you're writing about is not only inevitable but essential.
Anyone writing about food, or writing about food writers, should read John Hess on the subject. John was restaurant critic for a year for the NY Times in 1973-4 and reported thereon in the book he wrote a couple of years later with his wife Karen, _The Taste of America_. (It is republished in the U of Illinois Food Series.) See especially Chapter 13, The Hustlers, and also the appendix, which contains several of his reviews. As a food writer, I react to John Hess rather as a sculptor might respond to Phidias or Michelangelo -- wonderful! Now where do I go from here? As for Karen, one of the most formidable challenges I ever faced was a dinner sitting beside her with John on the other side. She has a well-deserved reputation for not suffering fools gladly; fortunately she's very tolerant of court jesters! :)
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I fail to see the problem with renovating the dining room. It never struck me as that distinctive or original in terms of decor (have I missed something?)
Steve, I've never eaten there. That's why I posted Cooke's letter without comment. From me, it was really a question.
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Steven Shaw writes:
I don't care what everyone else says about you.It's time you listened -- they're right! :D
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Steven, there are not many food/travel writers I read with both admiration and envy. After that, you're one of them. :)
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"?"
Aside from the campy running metaphor, it didn't bother me particularly. A lot of people are enthusiastic about Blumenthal; he has put to good use the various scientific titbits he's picked up from Harold Magee. After reading the review I'll definitely look into the luncheon offer, if it's still going.
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Bourdain's cooking may have been rooted in classical French cuisine but he made it all his own and it was elaborate and involved.
It's interesting that the Connaught Hotel remained at or near the top of the Good Food Guide's recommendations from the first edition in 1954 down to the present. This tells us something about both the Connaught Hotel and the Good Food Guide.
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John, as a gesture of solidarity, I plan to cease bathing at once.
I will not be so gross as to quote Dorothy Parker's rejoinder in another context, "How can they tell?" :p
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You have to try and evaluate everyone the same, no matter if you are acquainted with them or like them. And that means writing a negative review if you have to. Even if the chef never talks to you again. That's the price of being a journalist.
This applies, of course, not only to critics and reviewers of all sorts, but to news reporters and commentators as well. Those with a reputation inevitably make friends who work within the areas concerning which they write. It's up to the individual readers to exercise intelligence in evaluating, over a period of time, the objectivity of those whom they regularly read. We all have people to whom we go for guidance, and others whom we read merely for gossip, if at all.
In other words, critics must be evaluated with the same scepticism which they are presumed to exhibit on our behalf.
As for Roy Andries de Groot, it would have been rather difficult for a famous blind food writer to show up at an important new restaurant under a cloak of anonymity. :)
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You are evidently more concerned with microscopic Parker-like gradations of stratospheric excellence than I am. I'm happy if a reviewer evaluates the ratio of expertise to expense with sufficient accuracy so that I don't get a nasty surprise.The point of this discussion is whether the things at the margin can be slightly changed to push a place from three stars to fours stars or similar. -
I've said this before, but how can an incompetant chef working with inferior produce bring forth a culinary masterpiece just because he knows that it will be publicly evaluated? Likewise, can a depressing decor and an ill-trained staff be magically transformed? Something which can be influenced is the degree of attention one gets, but it's easy to spot obsequiousness. An observant reviewer will readily detect whether other tables are being properly served; there is a palpable atmosphere in a room full of unhappy diners.Equally, can a reviewer who is recognised and therefore is given special service do their job properly.Will a duff piano-pounder play like Rubenstein just because he knows there's a critic in the house?
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For many years, that's been his problem. :)Sorry Sandra, but nobody corrects Allistair Cooke. -
Steven, I've just caught up with this one. Honestly, I'm of two minds on the subject. I think that a lot of the campaigning for private self-denial is merely a ruse to shift responsibility for ecological conservation from the massive overconsumers to the private superego. On the other hand, coordinated private behavior does indeed add up to a statistically significant effect.I mean, isn't the whole point of conservation that everybody should do what he or she can, or at least do something? And that if we all do that, it will help? . . .I want to know what Whiting thinks. Whiting, do you align with me on this one?But -- take this down to the personal level. There are all sorts of ways of conserving water. In a household, one of the most effective, which has been extensively promoted in California, is partially filling up the toilet supply tank with bricks or stones. As for not drinking tap water, how many of these virtuous diners will go home and squander hundreds of gallons through their garden sprinkler systems to be certain that their lawns don't turn brown? And are you really helping to conserve the earth's resources by drinking water that's been transported halfway around the world, bottle by bottle? Go on, make a *real* contribution to water conservation -- skip your shower this morning and just wash the smelly bits! :)
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Does this letter from Allistair Cooke prompt any comment?
The [London] Daily Telegraph 28 March 2002
Re: Imminent destruction
SIR - Following on the sad retirement of Michael Bourdin, London's greatest practitioner of simple, classic French cooking, the appalling news has just reached the colonies of the imminent destruction of the Connaught Hotel's restaurant.
Is there not a London authority, like New York City's Landmark commission, that can, after public petitioning, freeze the approach of the Philistines and, after designating a building as a historic site, ensure that it is not to be defiled or destroyed by "developers"?
New York's commission was comatose for years until it was rudely awakened by the irrevocable gutting of the old Pennsylvania railroad station (Rome's Baths of Caracalla, as fine as the original). Most recently, by a timely intervention, New York's Grand Central Station was saved and splendidly restored. If you have no similar check on "major redesigns", I suppose nothing can be done about it.
An eye that cannot appreciate the unique Edwardian elegance of the Connaught's wood-panelled dining room probably itches, for its next project, to do over St Paul's in the Pompidou, or Outdoor Plumbing, style.
From:
Alistair Cooke, New York
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Sounds wonderful! Our itinerary is fixed (it had to fit around a recording session in Angouleme, which is paying for the trip :) ), but I'll file your posting away for another occasion.
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The label is slightly misleading. When the Carthusians returned to their ruined monastary in 1940, they decided that the manufacture of the liqueur should be industrialized, and so they built a distillery in near-by Voiron. They still own it, but it is under secular management.According to my bottle of Chartreuse, it's made by Carthusian monks, neat Grenoble, France.I have a vague memory that a 50cl bottle of the VEP cost, when I bought it, around 300ff.
I prefer prethenthe.Anyone tried absinthe? -
I've no idea - how would I know :( Clement Freud, who has spent a lot of time in kitchens, speaks of it openly. I had enough experience in US Army kitchens to learn that "officers' mess" had a certain appropriateness. Anyway, my reaction to any sort of human enormity is, "If it can be done it will be done."
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Indeed, I'm surprised to hear people who know the restaurant business talk of sending dishes back to the kitchen when it's so widely known what may very well happen to the next dish before it's presented to them. :(But that might make a good thread on the general forum--STORIES OF REVENGE! -
Call this pretentious if you will :) , but when I'm eating a "serious" restaurant meal, I take it with a Zen-like concentration on the experience as an entity in itself. In a certain sense I "enjoy" a bad meal because, by paying close attention to it, I find it instructive. If it's particularly awful, I start to chuckle to myself over how I'm going to use it for raw material. Even during my particularly unpleasant experience at Le Pamphlet, by the time we were ready to leave we were actually laughing.
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Thanks for the warning. Fortunately we will have had a big lunch with friends at a fine restaurant in Angouleme, so we can go very easy on dinner.
We would have stayed again at the Moulin de l'Abbaye, which we love, but we thought we'd try someplace different. Sigh.
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Charteuse V.E.P. [Vieillissement exceptionnellement prolongé] is a refinement of green, with longer aging. It comes in a 50cl bottle packed inside a strong wooden box with a sliding lid which is vaguely suggestive of a diminutive Dracula.
I first encountered it at the Auberge de l'Atre Fleuri in St-Pierre-de-Chartreuse, the inn made famous by Roy Andries de Groot in _Recipes from the Auberge of the Flowering Hearth_. I was able to get a bottle in a gift shop as I was leaving the area.
It is not particularly sweet and has a very herbal oleaginous smoothness which masks its 104 proof wallop. I am drinking it at this very moment. I've had the bottle for a couple of years and it's still half full. If I were a rich man I could become addicted to it.
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For two weeks from April 23rd, Mary and I will be staying at a series of middle-to-upper hotel restaurants, mostly in the Dordogne. They have been chosen from Alistair Sawday’s “French Hotels, Inns and Other Places”, a list which is a notch above his “French Bed and Breakfast” volume. The latter is a guide which I’ve used ever since it first came out in 1994. I have found it consistently reliable in the most important sense: good or bad, I am almost never taken by surprise. Correspondence with Ann Cooke-Yarborough, who was largely responsible for the entries, revealed the guide’s secret ingredient: taste.
These hotels have been selected more for their ambience than for their cuisine, although I expect the latter to be at least enjoyable. For this trip, Michelin can keep its macaroons in the cookie jar.
La Commanderie, Brizay
Domaine de la Tortinière, Montbazon
La Maison des Chanoines, Turenne
Chateau de la Cote, Brantome
Manoir d’Hautegente, Coly
Le Domaine de la Barde, Le Bugue
Hotel Restaurant Le Chateau, Lalinde
La Terasse, Meyronne
If anyone has experience of any of these, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
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Must this noble experiment in cooperative journalism go the way of other utopian societies, both corporeal and virtual? Let us rise above our petty differences, to the greater glory of gluttony and gastronomy!
Connaught Hotel Dining Room
in United Kingdom & Ireland: Dining
Posted
Come, come! Cookie's deviations are frequently more interesting and entertaining than most people's straight lines.