Heh, well what can I say, I don’t make any attempt to remember the names of restaurants I don’t like.
My brother interned at Postrio in the 90s, so I remember Wolfgang. Louis XV was the most expensive meal I’ve had, and La Chaumière was just supremely stupid in that you could clearly see that they were doing nothing that a person couldn’t do at home, and yet because it looked like a 17th century peasant hut, you paid several hundred dollars a person.
The only other places I can recall off-hand is the fancy teppanyaki place in Roppongi, Tokyo, and the Chinese restaurant with the 100 year old, sulfurous eggs.
…the place where the langoustine attacked my mom.
Umm… The one place near Seattle that grows all their own herbs…
Four/four and a half star hotel restaurants all around the world. I’m pretty sure I’ve only been to one five star (going by zagat’s ratings I assume. I don’t pay much attention.)
The place in Paris with 200 different types of cheese (this wasn’t bland, admitted. But it stunk. And there was nothing else to eat but cheese…)
Side note: My favorite food in Hong Kong while we were there was Cafe Deco at the top of the mountain. Does anyone know if it is still good? (I was there in July 1994.)
Maybe you’re just picking the wrong restaurants, Sage Rat, or maybe your taste buds aren’t the same as most people’s. Or maybe you’re killing your taste buds with cocktails or other strong flavored drinks before the meal? Who knows.
I don’t have the Restaurant Resume that you have, but I’ve been to my share of high end places (Joel Rubuchon in Paris (among other highly rated restaurants around Paris/Burgundy/Champagne), Flagstaff House & Frasca in Boulder, CO (started and staffed by ex-French Laundry people), a couple places in Washington DC that were highly rated at the time (7-8 years ago) that I can’t remember the name of at the moment) and although I haven’t always been blown away by the food, the last thing I would describe it as is lacking flavor.
Maybe you’re mistaking subtle flavor with lack of flavor? Granted, the sauce on a super-high-end filet of elk is not as in-your-face as a gooey sugary BBQ sauce. But that doesn’t mean it’s bland, either.
What I notice most about the flavors at high end places (if it’s GOOD high end) is that the flavors are complex and don’t come through all at once. It doesn’t assault you on the first bite, but it comes through, assuming you don’t just shovel it in or wash it down with a strong flavored drink. You pick up hints of different herbs or spices or other ingredients that play around in your mouth.
Sure, you’d get more FLAVOR if you stuck a spoonful ketchup in your mouth. But MORE flavor isn’t necessarily GOOD flavor.
I went to a place called Moto in Chicago that’s in the el Bulli style and, quite frankly, it was worth every penny. All 140,000 of 'em (glad I didn’t have to foot THAT bill…).
Highlights:
Crunchy mac ‘n’ cheese - the macaroni had been cooked, partially dehydrated, and cooked in with the cheese. Tasted as good as anything I’ve made homemade and the crunchy macaroni just added to it.
Cheese snow - soft goat cheese “cooked” in liquid nitrogen. Literally melted in the mouth. It made me want to go out and buy nitro when I got home.
A slab of fish (forget what kind) “cooked” tableside on a 4" square grill that had been soaked in nitro. Cold pancakes cooked tableside in the same manner, served with the most incredible lychee-based syrup/cream sauce.
Dehydrated orange peel torched with a laser (laser = no smoke residue, just orange essence) into an upside-down wine glass, to which wine was later added so you smell the orange along with the wine.
Not everything was a hit. The “pizza soup” was a neat idea but, in practice, reminded me of … well, pizza sauce (but the ceasar salad soup with which it was served was freakin’ awesome). The largest main course - BBQ rabbit with scarlet runner beans - had a great presentation (including sage stuffed into the cork-screw fork handles to inhale while eating) but wasn’t much better than something I could have made at home in a crock pot.
I enjoyed it simply because it didn’t even resemble home cooking. I like IHOP as much as the next guy but the idea of turning something as simple as a slab of tuna into real, honest-to-goodness art is just too much fun. The presentation and and class of service in a joint like that is simply stellar - and the food is amazing as well.
I think that this statement kind of proves he must be doing something right as he has been around for ages and has been voted the best chef in the world - they don’t just hand those awards out to anyone I’m sure!
I think that anything that pushes the boundaries of an art form can only be a good thing, without innovators you get stagnation. I think it’s the inaccessibility of the food that puts a lot of people off because it’s just so alien but just like Haute Couture fashion a lot of the techniques filter through to everyday life, I only clarify my stock using Heston’s ‘filtration’ method now and am truly considering tenderising a steak for 24 hours in the oven to see if his method works.
Places like this are important unless they are emulating the molecular gastronomy style without really thinking about it, i.e. making wacky sounding combinations without actually thinking about how it tastes, that’s why I love Heston - he always explains why he came up with the flavour combinations and it always makes sense, being a lowly commoner I can only imagine as a free table at ‘The Fat duck’ is as rare as rocking horse shit.
I expect so - it is just a personal opinion, after all. Possibly half or more of my ennui was to do with the plating - unusual food item - OK - unusual food item nestled in a slot in a thick slate tile - Ummm - *O… K… *, but then when the next one was equally weird, and the next one, and so on, it stopped being so special and started feeling silly.
Of course the next logical step has been to find ways to use (or modify) these techniques for use in the home, for more everyday foods. I recommend In Search of Perfection by Heston Blumenthal, or the TV show of the same name should you get the chance.
I’m always a little bothered by fussy presentation of food. Reminds me of when I was a kid and I played with my food to make little huts and villages of potatoes and corn and stuff. That’s kind of what it always looks like to me–like someone’s been playing with my food. Ick.
Bourdain was famous for first dissing Adria as “the foam guy” and then subsequently changing his mind after having ate there.
No, that’s absolutely wrong. High quality food is not bland, it’s intense. The art of fine cooking is to be able to manipulate the ingredients so that they taste more of themselves. To purify and concentrate the flavor so they shine out. That’s been the basis for every great cuisine in history.
This is not something that necessarily requires a sophisticated palate to understand, good food can be a revelation for even a novice diner because it’s simply the realization that food can taste that good.
The trick is that Bourdain has convinced his audience that he is somehow unpretentious.
When in fact he’s a French Chef and part of a New York cabal from way back, that invented haute pretention in the 80’s. That’s some jade.
I believe it was actually “foam dude.”
I’ve had some of Adria’s creations – I teach at a culinary school and one of our chefs is an admirer of Adria and learned to make some things.
I was unimpressed; it was interesting, but so were Pop Rocks the first time. It wasn’t nearly as good at some of the more straightforwardly excellent food I’ve had.
All I can say is the results of a “14 year taste test” wherein a child, as yet unsullied by the common views of mankind, was given for absolute free food of any degree of quality, and his personal result. Really cheap food does tend to not be as good, but otherwise really most food these days is pretty well made. Kitchens are clean and the produce is fresh thanks to modern refrigeration and shipping, which already cuts out two of the three things that will get you, the third being whether the chef has a good sense of taste and is fanatical of getting it. But if that chef happens to make barbecue and corn bread and doesn’t care about interior decoration, he’s never going to think that he can charge $100 for his meal. Barbecue and cornbread isn’t commonly felt to be food that can be perfected, for whatever reason, nor is food which isn’t at least 80% presentation (i.e. making it look cool and interesting on the plate) a candidate for high prices. Neither of those has anything to do with flavor and yet it automatically disqualifies 90% of all food from being “quality food” until popular thought changes.
(And I meant 1997 before when asking about Cafe Deco.)
You’re changing your tune. You said previously that high-end food wasn’t flavorful, and that’s what everyone is calling you on.
You’re right on the idea that the chef that’s making plain ol’ BBQ and corn bread is going to have a hard time charging $100/plate for it. But I don’t agree with you that BBQ and corn bread can’t be perfected, or that food has to have presentation to be “quality food.” I’ve had very high quality food that was served on paper plates and cost less than $10.
IMO, a child or teenager’s food preferences are typically less reliable than an adult’s. Most people’s palates expand greatly once they get out of their teenage years, and tend to find things intolerably sweet/bland/whatever that they loved when young.
OK, technical question now. How would one actually go about making a spring out of olive oil? What has been done to it to turn what is normally a liquid into a filamentous solid that melts at body temperature?