What makes something haute cuisine?

[Tonyfinch]

"Fine Dining" probably works as well as anything else. "High Dining" might be about your state of mind when you sit down at table but I noticed "high end dining" has been used around this site on a number of occasions.

I agree completely with FG that haute cuisine can be awful. That's because it describes a level of ambition which is more prone to failure. The more ambition to "work" the food into something which transcends the basic ingredients that a restaurant shows the more chance there is of a kitchen or chef who is not up to the job cocking it up big time.

I've often come out of restaurants,especially in Britain and the States, thinking "if only they'd kept it simpler it would have been SO much better".

That's why if an ambitious restaurant does have a named chef its probably a safer bet as he/she's staking a reputation on a successful outcome.

[Oreganought]

I've always thought HC as being at the pinnacle of indulgence,where the visual was the most important aspect of this period,taste secondary.

And I don't believe HC can be duplicated in the modern era,for lack of

conviction in its application.One upmanship doomed to fail,if you believe

that simplicity is the natural evolution that any artform takes.

[Fat Guy]

Plotnicki, given the legitimacy of minimalism as an approach to haute cuisine, what do you do with a place like Peter Luger or Katz's or a barbecue joint or a pizzeria that serves something that can't really be improved upon? Doesn't that count as the highest level? I think there are some things that can be haute cuisine contextually even if they're identical at two different restaurants. For example, a porterhouse at Peter Luger can never be haute cuisine because Peter Luger isn't a haute cuisine restaurant. Whereas you can order a porterhouse at Ambroisie and it's quite similar to the one at Peter Luger (though not as good because French beef isn't as good as American beef) right down to the way it's carved. The main differences are the plating, the garnishes, and the context of the meal (you're at Ambroisie, there are more waiters than people, and the meal has all the trappings of haute-ness).

[Steve Plotnicki]

Hey Fat Guy you're good at this game. That was the right question to ask.

I think that ultimately what makes a porterhouse at L'Ambroisie different then one at Peter Luger's is the level of care the meat gets before they serve it to you. I have no doubt that the extent of the way they trim the meat at L'Ambroisie is much more detailed then it is at Luger's. And I believe that this attention to minute details even goes as far as L'Ambroisie serving the steak at the right temperature almost every time. And you and I know from our personal experiences of eating at Luger';s how inaccurate they are in this regard. And ultimately it ends up with L'Ambroisie slicing the meat so as to be able to arrange it in a lovely manner with garnish atop. As opposed to Luger's putting the egg back together again to make it look like a whole steak. The problem is that the extra care in trimming and the rest of the fussiness doesn't add much pleasure to eating a steak. In fact it detracts because we don't eat porterhouse steak to expresss the esthetic of refinement.

So foods like pastrami sandwiches, porterhouse steak, bacon & eggs are hard to express as haute cuisine because they are so perfect in the mode in which they exist in. Plain eating. It's why it is hard to make a haute cuisine cassoulet. Aside from my terrine example, what can a chef do? He can make a cassoulet, debone everything or cut it into easily chewable size bits and compose them atop a bed of beans. But has he improved it? I doubt it. Without adding some ingredient to make it preferable in that form, he has probably made it worse.

I can think of two examples of people changing the way a dish is conceived and presented that offer different results. The Algerian restaurant in Paris Le Table du Charly offers a tagine of lamb. But instead of giving you the entire lamb shank with the bouillon etc. and a bowl of steaming cous cous on the side, they carve the lamb up and serve it atop a perfectly shaped mound of cous cous. It's a more refined presentation that makes the dish worse. What makes a lamb tagine great in the first place is digging at those fatty bits stuck to the shank. But if you go to The Fat Duck and have the Crab Risotto with Guava Jelly and Crab Ice Cream, he has raised the level of presentation you usually see for risotto to a higher level. He fills a shallow soup bowl with risotto and smooths the top flat. Then he layers the top with jelly so it looks like it has been wrapped in cling wrap. Then he lays a scoop of crab ice cream atop. And it works. This is why I think any food can become haute cuisine. All you have to do is put it throught the h-c assembly line. Whether it works or not is a different matter.

[Fat Guy]

All you have to do is put it throught the h-c assembly line.

Part of that assembly line isn't in the kitchen, though. The front of the house is also part of it. Theoretically you could put haute cuisine in a Chinese-food takeout container and eat it on the subway, but at that point it's so out of context that it's probably not haute cuisine. So while I agree with what you're saying I think you're de-emphasizing the importance of setting. When Grace Kelly gets the homebound Jimmy Stewart that meal from 21 in Rear Window, they don't just send the food up to the apartment -- they send the waiter too.

[Steve Plotnicki]

When you and I agree everyone else is screwed. But then there is always Wilfrid who will find a way to didagree with us on Monday morning.

So what do you think this all means haute cuisine is? A technique? An approach to how to prepare and serve a meal? A philosphy, strategy, way of life? Or is it simply a category of dining and everything else like cooking techniques, methedology, presentation and service is calculated to fit within the category?

[Tonyfinch]

Here we go! I detect Steve now beginning to intermingle the terms "high" and "best": "cuisine expressed ay the highest level" sounds suspiciously like "the best cuisine" to me,whether it works in every individual case or not.

Haut Cuisine is not "cuisine expressed at the highest (ie. best) level". It is one form of cuisine. The language analogy holds.

Is Italian a "higher" form of expression than French? Is Punjabi a "higher" form of expression than Mandarin Chinese? These are meaningless questions to the point of being stupid ones.

Within each language you have those who speak it coarsley and those who speak it beautifully and all points in between but comparisons only work within the codes.

Thus what the Fat Duck does with crab can only be asessed within a certain culinary language. The word "haut" only applies because the French are obsessed with hierarchies throughout their cultural world. Haut as opposed to Bas, but not "highest "compared with what a top chef in Taiwan or Hong Kong may be doing with crab,which will have nothing to do with ice cream and guava jelly but which will be just as "high" an expression,believe you me.

[Fat Guy]

Or is it simply a category of dining and everything else like cooking techniques, methedology, presentation and service is calculated to fit within the category?

I think that's the best way to look at it in the present day. The cooking style is definitely central but the other stuff is important too. As you start subtracting various elements, it gets harder and harder to call something haute cuisine.

[Tonyfinch]

When you and I agree everyone else is screwed

Don't get too self congratulatory. It could just mean we're bored.

[Fat Guy]

Daniel Boulud's restaurants are an interesting example. He has three, one of which he calls restaurant, one of which he calls cafe, and one of which he calls bistro. But the guy is actually incapable of thinking in terms other than haute cuisine, so all three serve haute cuisine no matter what he calls them. They are too fancy to be what he sort of seems to want them to be. So you look at the db bistro menu and everything on it is haute cuisine, and the restaurant is very slick, and the dining room team is organized just like in a haute cuisine restaurant, and everybody eating there is rich and well dressed. So what do you call a restaurant like that? A bistro? Forget about it. There's not a single element of a bistro in db bistro. It's a haute cuisine restaurant. Were it a real bistro, they'd serve a hamburger. But they serve the db burger stuffed with foie gras and short ribs and served in a super-precious manner already cut in half and with db monogrammed toothpicks holding it together. Come on. "Duck Gelé with Crawfish Watercress Vichysoisse, Haricot Vert Salad and Summer Truffles," yeah, that's a bistro dish.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Tony - You should wait until I actually give my opinion before chiding me for it. All I said was that *the French* use the term *haute* because *they believe* it's the *highest expression* of cuisine. What I think about it has nothing to do with it. And try as you might to deprive them of the use of that word, it is not only the word they use, but the word people the world over accept as an accurate description.

But now I will give my opinion. It seems to me, that aside from certain Kaiseki restaurants in Japan that I know people travel to, the only restaurants in the world that I know of that people go out of their way to eat at serve haute cuisine. There are a few that specialize in Italian or Provencal derived cuisine, like Chez Panisse. And then there are great restaurants in the simple food category like steakhouses or farmhouses in France serving great roast chickens. But those places don't qualify as "haute." But it seems to me that the French have constructed a fair use of the word. Especially when "heights' means that the highest level of technique, ingredients, presentation, service and setting will be applied to the food. So yes it is "the best" of all of those things. It just not might be the best tasting food. And can there be haute Chinese cuisine? Sure. If somebody applies the requisite level of technique to each of those parts of the meal. Something I have yet to see in a Chinese restaurant. In fact let me ask you, aside from French restaurants and Japanese kaiseki, which different cuisines do you think have the requisite techniques to offer a meal on the level we are describing?

[Steve Plotnicki]

Not so fast Fat Guy. Some people keep cans of Bummble Bee tuna fish in the fridge but I keep individual portion size cans of "Duck Gelé with Crawfish Watercress Vichysoisse, Haricot Vert Salad and Summer Truffles,"

On nights Mrs. P. and I don't want to bother cooking a haute cuisine meal, I just flip the lid on one of those babies. And we always drink Crozes-Hermitage because that's the right thing to drink. We save the Hermitage for the haute cuisine.

[Fat Guy]

Another set of examples would be those haute bistro places in Paris. That's what Boulud is trying to emulate here in New York with db, although places like Blue Hill, Toqueville, and Annisa are I think better analogs. These restaurants are about pulling haute cuisine out of its fancy restaurant context. So do they serve haute cuisine? It's a close call. Certainly, they're on the edge.

[jaybee]

Occasionally a dinner guest will compliment me by saying "this is very gourmet" or this is a real "gourmet" meal. How would you distinguish the descriptor "gourmet" from "haute cuisine?" Gourmet, it seems to me, expresses food that meets the highest standards of taste, presentation, culinary skill and art.

I agree with CathyL as far as complexity goes. I posted several times about a lobster consomme made by Rostang Senior down on the Riviera that was nothing more than a bowl of slightly golden clear liquid and exploded with all the tastes of great lobster. Undoubdetdly a complicated preparation and the simplest of presentations. Very gourmet, indeed.

[Fat Guy]

When people say that they usually mean the food tastes like fancy restaurant food to them. So I wouldn't necessarily make a distinction, or at least I'd say there's plenty of overlap.

[CathyL]

All you have to do is put it throught the h-c assembly line.

Part of that assembly line isn't in the kitchen, though. The front of the house is also part of it. Theoretically you could put haute cuisine in a Chinese-food takeout container and eat it on the subway, but at that point it's so out of context that it's probably not haute cuisine. So while I agree with what you're saying I think you're de-emphasizing the importance of setting. When Grace Kelly gets the homebound Jimmy Stewart that meal from 21 in Rear Window, they don't just send the food up to the apartment -- they send the waiter too.

A very important point, FG. Jean-Georges says his eponymous restaurant sprang from a need to get back to his roots - haute cuisine. Including the rituals of tableside service, where finishing a dish allows the customer to savor the aroma and visuals of final preparation.

That's expensive to pull off, and the labor is a bigger line item for HC restaurants than kitchen talent or ingredients. But there's a consensus here (well, as much as there can be such on eGullet) that without haute service it's not haute cuisine. As Steve P. suggests, what we're discussing is not just cooking at the highest level but dining at the highest level.

I'd be interested in more perspectives from restaurant chefs and other industry folk.

[Steve Plotnicki]

These restaurants (BlueHill etc.) are about pulling haute cuisine out of its fancy restaurant context. So do they serve haute cuisine? It's a close call. Certainly, they're on the edge.

No they do not. I don't think they pull haute cuisine out of it's context. Rather they have adopted various cooking techniques used in haute cuisine restaurants and have adapted them for a bistro context. Just because you use the same method of slow-poaching fish in low temperature olive oil that some famous three star chef uses doesn't mean you serve haute cuisine. There is the choice of fish, how perfectly it is trimmed, what veggies you source, how you prep them? Now I love eating in Blue Hill but are they as discerning with what they put on your plate as Alain Passard is with what he puts on his? I tend do doubt it. Even though I'm sure at times it's the same, or the diminution is so little that it is indiscernable.

I'm always reminded about rhe converstion I had with someone who was a stagiere at a big time NYC haute cuisine restaurant who also staged at another big time NYC haute cuisine restaurant. They said the difference between restaurants A & B (A charged much more money for a meal) is that they are quick to throw something away if it isn't perfect. Butcher a chicken just the slightest bit wrong and Didier (oops ) will look at it and tell you to throw it away (at least they must make chicken salad for the staff. But at restaurant B, the famous chef will look at it and make a suggestion as to how to save it, i.e., they serve the food with knowing imperfections. And I think regardless of how the dishes are concieved, whether we are talking about a simple poached cod or a boeuf en gellee, the issue comes down to how much time you spend on making it perfect, i.e., application of technique as I like to say. The higher up the rung you go, the more technique they apply. And of course this includes Cathy L.'s point about the technique continuing after the food leaves the kitchen

[Fat Guy]

I wonder if this gets to the heart of why I don't think Blue Hill is as great as many other people on the site think it is. I think that when I look at Blue Hill I see a restaurant trying to serve haute cuisine and failing to do so. Maybe I need to be applying a different standard.

Where is Robert Brown? We're on page four already. Don't be shy.

[Bux]

Where is the line between h-c and bistro food. Anybody? Chefs?

I would maintain that there is no "line." There is a large grey area in which many people will disagree about whethr it's haute cuisine. There is a vicious circle of chicken and egg rather than horse and cart in operation. A chef may get a reputation for creating haute cuisine and after a while, anything he serves is seen as haute cuisine. The argument of whether or not an exceptionally fine rendition of a classic peasant dish becomes haute cuisine becomes easier for some to answer when the chef who prepared the dish is Bras, Passard or Guerard.

Ignoring the argument whether food is art of not, there are two parallels in other crafts, applied arts and design categories. One is what separates archtitecture from just buidling and whatever it is, nothing stops the Museum of Modern Art from featuring folk and indigenous "architecture" in its exhibits. A better analogy might be seem to be between haute cuisine and haute couture. If Yves St. Laurant designs the jeans are they high fashion? If the right super model or society babe wears Levis to the opera, is she making a fashion statement? When Daniel Boulud makes a hamburger, is it haute cuisine or a fashion statement?

[yvonne johnson]

I wonder if this gets to the heart of why I don't think Blue Hill is as great as many other people on the site think it is. I think that when I look at Blue Hill I see a restaurant trying to serve haute cuisine and failing to do so. Maybe I need to be applying a different standard.

G. and I were discussing BH a few nights ago, and our thoughts touched on something cropping up here. The dishes at our three dinners at BH appeared to be haute cuisine light, no rich sauces whatsoever. A dish on the menu that we've noticed is poached duck. Again, poached sounds like diet food. Why be shy of cooking duck in its own fat?--that's haute in my book.

As for Annisa, Tocqueville and BH, which you placed in one category. I see some sense in this grouping, but I see Annisa as being more haute (using the rich sauces as a criterion) and being better for it. Not near JG, but certainly in that direction and not a bistro.

Now, what about oysters and caviar? Peasant food turned haute cuisine/fine dining, yet there is no fancy sauce, no execution, yes, there's selection, but the chef maybe does nowt with them. Expense I guess makes these items haute in this case. Maybe I exaggerate as these items can be combined with other ingredients in a skillful way.

[jaybee]

I am trying to think of another field where the distinctions between "haute" and the rest are analogous to cuisine. Perhaps fashion or couture works if you combine the originality of design, innovative use of materials and add extreme craftsmanship in the making. It seems that these three must be present to define haute couture and perhaps the same goes for haute cuisine. Absent any one in a restaurant and you have

fine dining, perhaps gourmet food but not haute cuisine.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Yvonne - What makes Blue Hill and Annisa (I've never been to Tocqueville) similar is the scope of the operations. There are only a few restaurants in that category, and by that I mean size of the place, level of ambition as to the cooking, level of service and price point that are open anymore. Of the restaurants in that category that we would say try to serve serious food, how many more are there? There is Fleur et Sel, 71 Clinton, Savoy (which is the original in a funny sort of way,) I can hardly think of another. Ultimately what ties those restaurants together is that they could be realized on a greater scale. Any of those places could transition to a Gotham or Gramercy or Union Pacific style venue easily if they made the food preparation a bit more serious and ambitious and added some frills to it. As for each of the restaurants, you are right in that Annisa is the most elaborate in terms of food preparation. But that's because Anita's technique is mostly French so it's fancier by default. I guess shorthand for that is her food is adorned (with sauces.) But the Blue Hill philosophy of cooking the food from the inside out (modern French culinary thinking for eliminating or lessening the reliance on sauces while keeping the same intensity of flavor,) is just as French in style. It's just less obvious. And it allows their cuisine to be presented as New American, where Anita's clearly comes off as French/Asian fusion. But it is so that they can keep their status as a New American restaurant that BH says the dish is "poached in fat." Because if they called it confit, that would make it too French and I don't think that is what they are trying to express. They are trying to express local artisanal ingredients prepared in a contemporary style. It just so happens that most of the techniques employed originated in France.

[Fat Guy]

I too don't see sauce as integral to the notion of haute cuisine. Sauces are definitely part and parcel of old-style haute cuisine, but modern haute cuisine even in France is relatively light on the sauce and often has none. And of course, looking at it from a different angle, there are plenty of sauces (like the brown gravy Americans put on turkey) that are not haute cuisine.

Have we failed to mention the most politically incorrect thing about haute cuisine?

Haute cuisine is expensive.

[jaybee]

Haute cuisine is expensive.

That's like saying bespoke suits are expensive, or handmade, artisan furniture is expensive; it has to be, unless the owner/chef is a philathropist and a very rich eccentric.

[jaybee]

but I keep individual portion size cans of "Duck Gelé with Crawfish Watercress Vichysoisse, Haricot Vert Salad and Summer Truffles,"

And where, Mr. P does one buy such haute cuisine in a can? They sound good. Does Eli sell this stuff?