New York

[Bux]

Frankly, when I'm in New York I crave thin-crust pizza.

Check out what Sullivan Street Bakery has on tap at lunch time on weekdays. They usually have one or two very interesting and exceedingly thin crusted pizzas that are rather creative and rustic. I wish they made them at dinner time and delivered. In fact they are a small production item and you may have to wait for the next one to come out and the facilites for eating a slice are no more than a counter in the corner.

[Bux]

Service in France -- especially at the kinds of places where good service is important -- is simply a more evolved art than it is in the US. Which isn't to say there aren't great servers and great service to be found here, or terrible servers and service to be found in France.

Service in France is also an art that requires the diner to know his place in the ritual or his part in the dance. In Paris, at the high end, you still find a more informed and appreciative diner to be the norm and that's not the case anywhere in the states.

[Bux]

I think you may be underestimating the amount of culinary creativity that the rest of the world has been deriving from New York in the past 20 years. If you talk to chefs around the world, especially Michelin three-star chefs, it is a given that New York is a critically important restaurant city both in terms of quality and creativity.

Old story, I've told it before on eGullet, but it fits here I think. I meet a young French cook working in NY in the mid nineties. I ask him why he came here and he replies to improve his rather rudimentry English. (He's already worked in London.) I ask how his position at one of NY's top four star places will look on is resume when he returns to France. He replies that it will be no different than if he took the time off from cooking altogether. Fast forward about five or so years and I talk to him after he's returned from a trip to France with his girl friend. He talks about the way he's treated wherever he went. As a sous chef at a top four star French restaurant in NY, I get VIP treatment whenever I eat at a two or three star restaurant. They all know my restaurant, it's famous and revered in France.

Another story about a young chef from Bordeaux. Out of cooking school in France, he comes to the same NY French restaurant to stage. He returns to France and opens a restaurant in the Pays Basque. We visit him and eat at his restaurant. The food is fresh and so much different from the rest of the places serving tourists in St. Jean de Luz. He tells us that he never saw such quality produce as when he came to work at that restaurant in NY. He tells us he makes his own desserts. It's something he learned from working in NY and we realize that maybe all the other restaurants in St. Jean de Luz buy their desserts premade. His customers want to know where he gets his desserts. He's not a two star restaurant (he's not even listed in Michelin). They don't believe he makes his own deserts.

[Bux]

Certainly, Robuchon's new Atelier also reflects this trend. When you think about the fact that both Ducasse and Robuchon are doing restaurants that nod to the New World rather than the Old, it's pretty telling. I suppose it's convenient just to say they're doing it for money, but does anybody believe either one of these guys does restaurants just for money at this point in his career path?

While I certainly think, as I've said a million times, that Paris is dominant with regard to French cuisine, I also think it's a given that New York has a significant number of excellent contemporary French restaurants where you can get world-class food. And, again, the second you look beyond the small culinary subdivision called French cuisine, Paris is revealed as completely and utterly boring compared to New York. Look at what's happening in New York right now -- all you have to do is flip through the first few pages of Zagat to see that there is no Paris equivalent of this kind of diverse and exciting activity. Look at the new Lever House restaurant, look at Mix, Schiller's, 'Cesca, Atelier, WD-50, Fiamma, even Otto for that matter. There's never been a project in Paris -- and there probably will never be one -- that approaches the ambition of the Time Warner complex project: Gray Kunz, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Thomas Keller, and Masa Takayama will all have significant ultra-modern luxe restaurants under one roof, and perhaps Charlie Trotter as well. The Spice Market from Vongerichten and Kunz, Steve Hanson's Vento Trattoria, Ono from Jeffrey Chodorow, Lucy from Phil Suarez, and and Riingo from Marcus Samuelsson -- what's happening in Paris to compare to this? While 300 important restaurant openings will happen in New York in 2004, what will happen in Paris? Most likely, 50 more French restaurants will open and France's global culinary mind-share will continue its long, slow contraction.

On another front, twenty or even ten years ago there was only one direction of the flow of culinary education: from France to here. But now it is totally commonplace to see, in good New York restaurants, stagiares from Michelin two- and three-star restaurants in France, and from French culinary schools.

Let me differ with you here. I didn't get to Robuchon's but from my reading and hearing about it, I'd have to say the influence of Spain must be on the magnitude of eight or nine times greater than any American influence. Both the US and France, or at least both NY and Paris have been influenced by the Spanish tapas bar. On the plus side for NY as a world food center is that they picked up grazing before the French did, but the Spanish still do it better and they're just beginning to get creative about it themselves.

I also think you're offering too strong a foreigner's outdated view of opportunities to eat in Paris. When I asked Dorie Greenspan for a list of new places that might be below the international radar, most of them were for places in which we could graze and at least two of them seemed to feature Spanish hams and products. I've long been a fan of a place next to Poilane that specializes in open sandwiches. While the concept of the meal as a minimum of three course was de rigeur for lunch and dinner when I first visited Paris, the option of the "formule" in many small places offers the choice of two courses from the three course menu art a reduced price and cafes and Brasserie have always offered sandwiches and plats du jour. I don't know when saladier places snuck into Paris, but it's always been possible to graze or snack in Paris.

However, as I've already posted, I strongly agree that within the past decade the flow of ideas and knowledge is not longer a one way stream. That and ease of transportation may only make the original question in this thread less meaningful in that there's less centralization and less reason for it to exist. Great restaurant cities may be less dependent on great chefs or great local produce, than they are on a clientele willing to support the great restaurants. That's not just referring to the multi-starred destination restaurants, it's also about having the foreign population to support "authentic" "ethnic" restaurants as a local population with the curiosity to add to the that clientele.