Nossiter's "Liquid Memory"

I don't even remember all the names. But they were all vile. The stench of too-old fish from down the block, less enticing than the Marie-Anne Cantin aroma for sure. Milky-eyed fish. Scallops that looked like a guy wading into a cold ocean. Gap-fleshed turbot. I could cry.

I will search in southerly directions next, thanks. Gotta be something. I suspect the problem is more the inclination to wander into the 7th than the neighborhood in general.
 
originally posted by Thor: making a really good dish of thin-sliced potatoes and dairy products isn't that expensive...
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As you must have seen from your trips to the Odiferous Cheesemonger, good dairy products are extremely expensive. And cheap alternatives are attractive.
 
The difference between good ingredients and the alternatives (unless one is going to use, I dunno, powdered potato slices) in the dish in question is not monetarily significant, I don't think. But maybe I'm wrong. No one's asking restaurants to use the best of all creams or the best of all micro-heirloom potatoes. But shoddy ingredients with added curry powder does not advance the cuisine. That's all I'm arguing.
 
originally posted by Thor: But shoddy ingredients with added curry powder does not advance the cuisine. That's all I'm arguing.
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I thought you were arguing that if there was a Temple of Classic Cuisine on the corner, then all the other restaurants on that block would have incentives to not worry about doing mediocre classical food and instead turn out higher quality inventive food.

I was arguing that they would still have incentives to use cheap potatoes and powdered milk. Because they're cheaper and it's a pretty competitive economic environment these days. I'm no expert on French restauration but from what I understand the clientele supporting basic local cafes and bistros has generally declined as we move into the modern faster options. Those who do go out will pay the extra few Euros for quality. Something has to give.
 
No, not my argument. I think that far too many restaurants are trying to do French Classical, but they're doing it like this: hey, we put Bambi and saffron in our cassoulet that we otherwise made to Grandma's recipe, oh how modern and advanced our cuisine is!

I think that if more tried to perfect the paradigm, as they do in Italy without consequence, they'd be better off than with the faux modernism. Plus, it might free those restaurants that want to do something else to do so, rather than everyone (as it seems, surveying menus here in France) mostly worshiping a standardized menu. As it is, there's a situation where a given restaurant must somehow adhere to a French Classicism ideal (with stupid tweaks) so they can actually have customers, while at the same time trying to be unique (with the aforementioned stupid tweaks) without really being allowed to be unique. I do tend to trust the Great French Chefs on this point, in which they claim they're hamstrung by their clientele, more than my own perceptions. I had great traditional Basque cuisine. I had great Basque cuisine that was so modern it can't even be assessed. I had everything in between. Where is that, in France?

Keith, I'm not van Gorp and would not argue that a given restaurant dis-served me by not constructing an la minute tasting menu to my dilettante specifications. (And this -- sorry, Prof. Loesberg -- is where the emoticon goes.)
 
originally posted by Thor:

Donostia-San Sebastin kicks both of their asses into the next millennium, by the way.
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Anthony Bourdain thinks so, too. Really pissed at myself for making it as far as Bilbao and not going the rest of the way. I really wanna go there!
 
Rahsaan: let's put it this way. Great French food is freakin' awesome. A fantastic use of not always superior ingredients, in a brilliant transformational cuisine. An advantage Italy doesn't have, with its focus on ingredients. I cook French food a lot, and love eating it, and am looking forward to it while I'm here. I will, because I've done my research and have extensively consulted current residents, eat well here.

But will I eat as well as I did in Donostia-San Sebastin? No. No, no, no. There's something to discover in that.
 
Dave, I ate at three "temples" (Arzak, Akelarre, Mugaritz), but I also ate at dozens of pintxos bars, and I ate at Elkano, and I ate at Etxebarri, and I also had some wildly diverse food in Bilbao (Guggenheim, but then Andra Mari). If I could get that here in France, I'd be giddy. I don't think I can. I hope that I'm wrong.

As a counterpoint to my entire argument, Domaine des Hautes de Loire (a two star in Onzain) was inventive and breathtaking. With no reason to be ground-breaking given the easy clientele, the restaurant pushed the boundaries. Kudos to French chefs, at least there. There's no lack of hope.
 
originally posted by Thor:


But will I eat as well as I did in Donostia-San Sebastin? No. No, no, no. There's something to discover in that.
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El Bulli and natural food

Fat Duck and healthy food

That's no San Sebastian, but I'll stick with my over rated, has been, preservative free, imaginationless, boudin de campagne.
Natural food anyone? Is there any Jules Chauvet for the art of cooking somewhere?
I bet we will find very soon camembert with cartoon-like labels, organically grown but not certified (certification is not for revolucionarios), and made without preservatives but boxed with a little bit to please US importers only...
 
originally posted by Thor:
Dave, I ate at three "temples" (Arzak, Akelarre, Mugaritz), but I also ate at dozens of pintxos bars, and I ate at Elkano, and I ate at Etxebarri, and I also had some wildly diverse food in Bilbao (Guggenheim, but then Andra Mari). If I could get that here in France, I'd be giddy. I don't think I can. I hope that I'm wrong.

As a counterpoint to my entire argument, Domaine des Hautes de Loire (a two star in Onzain) was inventive and breathtaking. With no reason to be ground-breaking given the easy clientele, the restaurant pushed the boundaries. Kudos to French chefs, at least there. There's no lack of hope.
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Ah now a restaurant that I recognise from 15 consecutive years of Loire visits.

Remy's food is the only Michelin starred food that I can eat for 9 consecutive days. Well 7 really because the restaurant closes on Monday and Tuesday but there are a few other good places like Jacky Dallais in Le Petit Pressigny as fill ins.

We love the hotel too and find Onzain ideally placed for visiting the Loire winemakers - although Muscadet and Pouilly/Sancerre require some effort even though the roads make it not too onerous. However the majority of our favourite producers are within easy reach.

I apologise for interrupting the philosophical debate on cuisine [genuinely fascinating] and regret that I cannot participate effectively since, although I have lived and eaten all over the world and certainly know what I like, I have not studied the history and culture of food and cooking in sufficient detail.

I can say we have many fewer long term favourite places in France than we used to. Les Crayeres in Reims is IMO not a patch on how it was with Gerard and Elyane Boyer at the helm and Thierry Voisin as Chef de Cuisine - although Didier Elena is a very good chef.

The place has lost its zing and its local clientele and the staff numbers appear to have been halved and they were clearly less motivated.

Roland Mazere couldn't take it anymore and walked away from his stars at le Centenaire at les Eyzies and one by one our favourites have faded. Jean Bardet in Tours, now a retirement complex, was great 15 years ago although that decline was connected with a personal tragedy.

I could still name a few in Paris that we love but the decline of the has made the whole business sooo much more expensive for UK visitors and I assume that the strength of the Euro and the financial situation generally have had their own direct and indirect parts to play in whatever 'malaise' is being discussed.
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Tom Blach:
Mark, I'm not making a qualitative judgement, merely an evolutionary one
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The Spanish are the other big cultural influence, having given India (and much of the rest of the world) the chili pepper, tomato and potato.

Mark Lipton
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The Spanish? Do they speak Mexican there?
 
originally posted by Brzme:
Natural food anyone? Is there any Jules Chauvet for the art of cooking somewhere?
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Alice Waters, the bte noir of Bourdain, whose cooking was famously dissed by several Michelin-anointed chefs as "she shops well."

Mark Lipton
 
A few comments from the forlorn southwestern corner of Europe (and from 28 years spent covering, in print, the rise of its restaurants from international nothingness to international stardom):

ric, forget Jrg Zipprick's asinine comments. The guy is a sensation-seeking culinary ignoramus who appears not to know that alginates, agar-agar and other emulsifying and gellifying ingredients Adri uses are all naturally-based, usually derived from seaweed, and that Spain's top bromatologists have deemed them to be perfectly safe (at least, as safe as salt or sugar). No one has been reported sick after eating at El Bulli. But are customers there perfectly satisfied? Well, that's another story, and some prefer another tack in modern cuisine, but then 'en la variedad est el gusto', as we say in Spanish - 'taste lies in diversity'.

France's technical influence over chefs worldwide, and its influence in the launch of Spain's culinary boom, has been huge, and it's unfair to suddenly ignore those facts just because France is less fashionable these days and has its own problems. Particularly, the great chef Michel Bras, through the cooking masterclasses he gave for years at the Vitoria and San Sebastin culinary shindigs (we have a few of those in Spain, with Madrid Fusin probably at the top today), was a decisive seminal influence on the current Spanish Basque cuisine. His influence is still most apparent in the cuisine of the three-star chef Martn Berasategui, IMHO.

But then reducing Spain's boom to the status of a derivative of French cuisine would be totally erroneous. First of all, most chefs (not just Basque and Catalan - the movement has spread nationwide, even though Anthony Bourdain hasn't found out yet) base their work on the highly original regional traditions of Spain, which bear no resemblance to French traditions. And then, technique-wise, the element of freedom and transgression is very powerful in Spain. (Boy, is that judgment that great cooking is the product of sexual repression ever wrong! Spain's cooking became really interesting at the same time this country freed itself from the moral shackles of the Franco dictatorship.)

Christian Parra explained it best almost 20 years ago, when France was beginning to pay a sliver of attention to what was happening in Spain. He had a great little restaurant, L'Auberge de la Galupe, at Urt in the French Basque country. (He retired in 2002.) He used to make the best 'boudin noir' I've ever eaten, and had this standing agreement with Juan Mari Arzak in San Sebastin: he sent Juan Mari 'boudin' in exchange for bootleg Ibrico ham (illegal in France until Spain entered the European Union in 1986), and also for legal but hard-to-find Joselito ham in more recent times. Well, Parra showed a Gault-Millau magazine reporter a well-worn copy of the Escoffier cookbook which he kept in his kitchen, and told him: "You know why they are better than we are, over there on the other side of the border? Because here we all keep those recipes close at hand, and there none of them have copies of the Escoffier in their kitchens. Heck, they don't even know or care who Escoffier was."

BTW - the culinary boom in Spain has had some unexpected side effects, such as that of making customers less provincial and more open to different cuisines - a rare occurrence in Latin countries, usually fiercely nationalistic in culinary terms. As a result, Madrid might now the top hub for exotic cuisines, from Peruvian to Vietnamese (not to mention fusion), on the European continent, and second only to London overall in Europe, as a surprised Ken Hom remarked in the Financial Times some time back.
 
originally posted by VS:
No one has been reported sick after eating at El Bulli.
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Here's an interesting first-person account, written by Franois Audouze and posted to the forum La passion du vin in June 2007:

Le service est exemplaire, sobre et efficace, intervenant quand cela se justifie.
La soire fut malheureusement assombrie par un vnement fcheux. Lorsque nous gotions un dlicieux maquereau, ma femme me fit part dun got fort dsagrable que je ne sentais pas. Peu de temps aprs, prise de malaise, elle prit lair, ne finissant pas son repas. Sa nuit fut commande par une forte intoxication alimentaire avec vomissements. Au-del de cet incident, je fus surpris, quand tout lhtel sut le lendemain matin que la dame du 115 tait malade, car lon me dit : vous tiez El Bulli, a ne nous tonne pas, car cest assez frquent . Je prfre imaginer que ceci na pas t dit. Le malaise de ma femme se prolongea la nuit suivante, ce qui est fort long. Mon tonnement se fit plus fort lorsque la masseuse de lhtel me dit : il marrive souvent de masser des gens qui sont alls El Bulli et qui ont vomi la nuit .

Laissons ce dsagrment le statut daccident, qui dmontre quen cuisine, mme les gnies sont des hommes. Je tiens conserver le souvenir de lexcellence absolue. Sur les trente services il ny a que deux plats auxquels je nai pas adhr ce qui nest pas important. Jaurais aim que lon donne chaque plat une petite fiche qui explique la volont du Matre et les saveurs quil veut faire apparatre et jaurais aim que lon fasse des commentaires finaux sur lordre choisi dans la succession des plats, car cest un aspect fascinant de son gnie. Alors que ma femme repose, mise sur le flanc par un vilain poisson ou une vilaine algue, cest elle que je donnerai le mot de la fin. Elle me dit : si notre taxi avait t en retard, cela ne justifierait pas que nous critiquions El Bulli. Jai eu un accident qui ne remet pas en cause le gnie de ce cuisinier . Je lui dis : si je te propose de revenir trs vite en ce lieu, le souhaites-tu ? . Sa rponse fut : jattendrai quand mme un peu .
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:


Here's an interesting first-person account...
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It is often very difficult to attribute gastroenteritis to a particular cause without doing real epidemiology, since the incubation periods of various common pathogens vary from 30 minutes to a couple of days.

The fastest, though, and one of the most severe is staph. You can get it from fish that's off. I have friends who got it once at a dinner, and they were tossing their meal in the parking lot before they reached their cars.
 
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