John Whiting

With most of March's files in a state of amnesia, I can't remember whether I've posted this before but, for a summary of Chez Panisse's origins which Alice has vetted and approved, see my article The Green Gourmets

It was the only non-bistro part of my summer's eating in Paris and I had to include it -- it was magnifique!. To call the page "Twenty-Nine Paris Bistros and l'Astrance" would have sounded too much like Monty Python. :D

In the middle price bracket, have a look at my reviews of Thirty Paris Bistros

Steve klc writes: Thank you Steve. In one brief summary you've written an all-purpose review of virtually every such "world-class" event. I'll carve it on the wall. :)

Quote (tommy @ April 02 2002,17:26) do you believe that a bottle benefits from "breathing" if it remains in the bottle uncorked for 30 minutes? I ask to taste it and if I think it needs time to open, I ask that a glass (or glasses) be poured. It'll be ready quicker there, with more air exposure. This is one circumstance where I don't mind my glass being continually topped up. With some wines, I suppose, one should phone in one's order several hours in advance. :)

Occasionally I have had the wine waiter considerately (not pushily) ask if I want to order the second bottle early so that it will have time to breathe.

Sounds interesting; I'll ask Clarissa to email me a copy. This is probably related to biodynamic horticulture*, a very complex regimen evolved from the teachings of Rudolph Steiner. It's beyond my credibility, but the food tastes good. *Dorothy Parker: "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."

It's surely not an accident that these are celebrity chefs who are best-sellers, which, for international promotional purposes, is much more important than best-cookers. No one, apart from Jeffrey Steingarten, can afford to go flying around the world sampling the winners; but millions will collect their books and, in the case of foreign chefs, buy them as soon as they come out in translation. That could be the key -- watch how these awards correlate with the announcement of new translations of all the winning chefs into all the languages represented.

Thank you. I'm really glad you've enjoyed _Cornucopia_. Paul's friend Colin Spencer, who appears in the opening acknowledgements and also under a pseudonym (pp.17-20), is bringing out his history of British Food in October, published by Grub Street. He's a great food historian (Germaine Greer has expansively called him the greatest living food writer) and this will be his magnum opus.

This abandoned thread concerning Romania has reminded me of the memoir I’ve been meaning to write for almost thirty years. Finally, this is it. Thank you, Steven, for the title. ROMANIA, ROMANIA Years of living (if you can call it living) under Ceausescu schooled the Romanians in the finer points of paranoia. When I was touring the Warsaw Pact countries in the 70s and 80s, Romania was the only country in which I felt everywhere an ominous presence, a funeral pall which hung over not only the bleakly monumental city of Bucharest, but also the primitive countryside through which we were driven by bus to concerts in Tirgu Mures and Sibiu. Peasant farmhouses along the road, elaborately festooned and brightly painted - as alluring as the witch’s gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel - had broken windows patched with whatever materials were to hand. We stopped briefly at the birthplace of Vlad Dracul in Sighisoara, deep in the Transylvanian forests; it was a comfortable bourgeois house whose modest well-proportioned rooms were almost reassuring. Not a bad sort, that Dracula. A bit of a thirst, perhaps . . . I awoke in Sibiu on a Sunday morning to find the ancient town under a soft blanket of new snow. Everyone was bundled in their winter furs and on the way to church. I quickly got dressed and followed them. I found the huge onion-topped church full both of worshippers and the echoing magnificence of a Bach choral prelude. The German music, service and sermon were a reverberating remnant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Our last evening in Bucharest we were entertained by Miriam Marbe, a much-honored Romanian composer in her early fifties whose international reputation had helped her to hang onto the comfortable if threadbare family home. I chatted for much of the evening with her precocious and ravishingly beautiful fourteen-year-old daughter. It would be difficult for her to go to university, she told me – although tuition was free, the price of admission was in fact the gift of a new car to a government official. The dining table was spread with a feast of salads, cold meats and pastries which must have dented the food allowances of every one of the twenty or so artists who had banded together to entertain us. The wine – deep, well-aged, almost black – was nectar. How much would still be left after we departed? And what would they eat for the rest of the month? A reminder of how desperately these people lived came at the end of the evening, when I discovered that my leather gloves were missing. I commented innocently that I must have dropped them somewhere in the bedroom where we left our coats, whereupon a search ensued which I gradually realized was only a face-saving ritual. Years later I told this story to another Romanian composer with whom I was working in Stuttgart. As I was leaving at the end of our week together he stopped me in the driveway and handed me a package. “We owe you this,” he said. It contained a pair of fine leather gloves. A couple of years later I was having coffee with Miriam in a café on the Champs Elysées. Suddenly she leaned across the table and lowered her voice. “That man,” she whispered, “the one with the fedora, sitting at the bar. He is a member of the Romanian secret police.” Such paranoia! I had to laugh. She sat back and muttered something in Romanian, whereupon the man quickly turned around and stared at her. When we had finished our coffee and gone outside I asked her what she had said to attract his attention. She shrugged. “I only remarked,” she said, “that at least his socks were Romanian.” Miriam died last year – I learned that someone had composed an orchestral piece in her memory. At least she lived long enough to enjoy her country’s long-delayed liberation. Her beautiful daughter must have wangled an education somehow, for she is now a journalist in Holland. She won’t have any trouble getting interviews.

For a bit of further nostalgia re Club des Cent, see my memoir of Maxim's

Henry, I'm glad I was able to help avoid bad feeling or even litigation. In your search for a name, may I suggest the Everyman Guide called _Restaurants of Paris_? It's a history rather than a "where to eat" guidebook and it's loaded with names, photos, graphics, literary references, quotations and everything you might think of. All the illustrations are listed as to source. I don't know a single volume that's so packed with curious information on Paris dining. I think it's out of print, but it shouldn't be impossible to obtain. You should own it -- it's indispensible. The ISBN is 1-85715-846-6 P.S. I want to know when you open this holy shrine to Paris gastronomique! :)

Beautiful! When a civilized diner meets a civilized chef, nothing is impossible. :)

"I put a tape recorder under my napkin. The down side is that you can't always understand the tape because of the noise! " I once hid a miniDisk recorder in my mashed potatoes and ended up eating my words! :D

I've never been bothered by making notes in a small diary, and no one I've been with has ever been bothered either. As I've already mentioned, I like to be in a restaurant when it opens, so photographing an empty room is no problem either. As for being taken for a critic, so many people now make notes and take photos that it's scarcely noticed. And it doesn't matter to me whether I'm taken for a critic or not; nor does it give them the opportunity to improve bad food. To compare taking notes with using a cellphone -- the distraction is comparable only if you're shouting into a recorder.

Thr trouble with an obscure historical name like Club des Cents is that its appropriateness, and the historical associations which can enrich a dining experience, will probably be unfamiliar to 99 o/o of the diners. All they will bring is their uninformed sense of the words' literal meaning. Perhaps they will think, unconsciously, that, unlike Stringfellows, it is a club for the decent. :)

Henry phoned me about this and I pointed out to him that Club des Cent, rather than being an historic Paris restaurant, was in fact a select private club which until recently had met at Maxim's and is, so far as I know, still in existence. (The original prerequisite was that a prospective member must weigh at least a hundred kilos.) So if he keeps to this name, he may find himself involved in confusion, if not litigation.

There's one aspect of complaining that we have avoided. Everyone with any familiarity with the restaurant scene knows what can happen to a dish sent back to the kitchen by a dissatisfied customer. What may be in it when it comes back is best left unconsidered, along with whatever had been previously left by scampering rodents.

"If you had a meal prepared by a great chef in the 19th Century, the whole table would get the same meal, many, many, many, many, courses, and not individually plated at that." In fact, at a banquet you usually got portions only of the food that was near you. The serving dishes were so enormous that passing them, or even having them carried, was out of the question. Under such conditions, the seating arrangement took on a gastronomic as well as a social significance.

"This isn't the same level of offense as McDonalds secret french fry recipe of earlier years (cook them in tallow but don't tell anyone). The difference is that one is obvious." God knows I'm no lover of McDonalds, but this story has grown into an urban myth of exaggerated proportions. What happened was that, when they went over to vegetable oil, many people quite understandably missed the flavor of dripping, and so the food magicians in New Jersey came up with a chemical extract from beef which was able to provide something of that flavor with a minute quantity -- much less actual meat content that one would get out of grill contact, for instance. In fact, the quantity was so minute that it would not legally have to be listed as an ingredient. But since the most vociferous objections were religious -- i.e., the food had to be as microscopically unpoluted as for Passover -- they ended up in serious trouble.

My first experience with a menu degustation was at an obscure Lorraine restaurant which immediately became a favorite of ours, Le Mas in Longuyon. There it was an unspecified menu with an unspecified number of courses, based on what the market had to offer that day. My wife and I have been back again and again over the years, once staying two nights and having the menu degustation both nights. It was entirely different the second night; both nights were supurb. On another occasion I was with a party of eight at Andre Daguin's Hotel de France in Auch. I was the only one at the table who wanted the menu degustation. M. Daguin came to our table and explained that it would make the tempo of service irregular and awkward; however he would adapt it and shorten it in such a way that it fitted smoothly into the pace at which others were being served -- they did not, for instance, have to watch me being brought yet another plate while they waited for their own next course. In the end I had virtually a menu degustation, but was charged substantially less because it was not complete. This occasion was also noteworthy because two of our party were vegetarian, back when such eccentricity was not gracefully accommodated in French restaurants. M. Daguin came out from the kitchen and consulted with them at length about their likes and dislikes, ultimately providing them with meals (different from each other) which were as complex and as interesting as those of us carnivores. In other words, he improvised dishes not on the menu and successfully juggled four different tempi, like a virtuoso conductor performing a Charles Ives symphony! Finally, I have no interest in a menu degustation which is merely a fixed assemblage of all the most luxurious ingredients in the kitchen. If there is no improvisatory element, it's as boring as a jazz riff which is read note-for-note off the page.

"Agreed. And what really "sux" is that I don't know for sure if those meals were wonderful or whether I was just easier to please." As philosophers have pointed out for many centuries, food and sex have a great deal in common.

Thanks for pointing this out. I don't know what happened; that's not the way I entered it. I'll try to fix it.

"But you forgot to answer the question" When I leave it to the chef and still get a bad meal, that's it. If he can't cook and doesn't know it, there's no hope. I'd go back to a restaurant where I liked everything except a single course. I probably wouldn't go back to one where I actively disliked the clientelle. I would go back to one where I had to wait a long time if the atmosphere was pleasant and the food freshly prepared and worth waiting for. (Alone, I take a book and ask for a table with a good light.) If I particularly like a place I'll tear up the schedule. A year ago my wife and I were in New York for four days and went with a short list of restaurants. The first night we went to the front bar section of Gramercy Tavern. The room was so spacious, the foliage so breathtakingly beautiful, the food so good and the service so laid back but discreetly attentive that we went back two more meals in two days. One was in the main dining room, but it was more formal, more conventional, less surprising, and so we went back "home" to the bar. By the time we left New York we were friends with the whole front-of-house staff. Note: Only then did my wife and I reveal our press cards. Up to that point we were nobody in particular -- just a couple of happy diners.

I'm in the fortunate position of being a food writer, semi-retired, with no obligation to review a restaurant I don't want to. I'm also blessed with a palate which enjoys every kind of food there is (within reason), so long as it's properly prepared. And so when I go into a strange restaurant of which I expect good things I might show the waiter my press card and tell him to ask the chef what he would serve that night if he were going to be eating it himself. And I would make it very clear that I did not expect a free meal. "Aha!" you say, "you've stacked the cards in your favor!" Yes indeed. But how much difference does that make? Merely revealing your identity will not transform a bad chef into a good one. And in asking him to choose the menu, you are challenging not only his competance but his taste. If I get a bad meal under such conditions, it can't be because I ordered the wrong dishes -- how can a chef not know what he does best? Sometimes the challenge might move a chef into ostentatious vulgarity; well, if he's that kind of a chef -- of a human being, in fact -- I want to know it. His restaurant is not for me. As for the service, if I am treated with fauning subservience and note that neighboring tables are being neglected, that's another revealing detail. Shaun Hill has expressed much the same sentiments. He tells me that anonymity isn't important and that if he recognized a reviewer or inspector he would tell the senior staff but not the juniors -- they might very well get flustered and make a mess of things. As for himself, he'd just get on with it and pay attention. Finally, one of the things I liked most about l'Astrance was that I was discreetly treated as though I were someone important -- and they were treating everyone else the same way!