I’m also not a fan of foie gras. It actually makes my teeth hurt it’s so bizarrely fatty. It’s not a texture I enjoy.
I see fine dining establishments as being the only places now to get a good meal. the reason: the mid-priced places are being killed-energy and food prices are making it impossible for them. So they have cheapened their offerings to the point where their food is something terrible. i’ve given up on my favorite italian place-twhat they serve you for veal is now inedible. i complained to the manager-he says that their clientele will not pay what it costs to provide decnt veal. So i guess we are stuck withjust the low end and the high end.
I came away from Alinea adequately fed but certainly not stuffed.
Just to clarify for people in this thread, Vue De Monde is a serious restaurant run by a talented chef. It’s definately worth the price they charge to people who enjoy that type of food.
The French Laundry is a great example of a place that the OP would enjoy. The emphasis there is far more on classical techniques and refinement rather than experimentation and boundary pushing.
Edit: It’s only $220 American because of the US dollar collapsing. It would only have been 160 - 170 just a year ago.
Down the street there’s a joint called Sloppy Sam’s where they’re barbecuing the rest of that pig. For ten bucks you can get a paper plateful of ribs with a side of coleslaw and fries and a cold beer.
Now that’s my kind of fine dining.
The best meat on the pig, and on many animals (including larger fish), is on the face. No kidding.
Feel free not to eat it. More for me.
You and me both!
Or they’re having fun. Some of the serious high-end dining is meant to be fun, mixing interesting combinations of ingredients together in an unexpected, but complementary way. It’s not “posing” in the least. I understand that some people may not be interested in pushing their culinary boundaries, but some of us are. Some of us want to be surprised by food and taste new things we’ve never dreamt of putting together. It doesn’t make the chef a poser.
And, like I said, if you don’t enjoy offal that’s your prerogative. I can afford meat whenever I want, but sometimes I want a nice tripe stew, deep fried chicken livers/gizzards, blood sausage, etc. They have different tastes than meat and sometimes I just get sick of having pork or chicken or beef every day. With such a large world of wonderful flavors, why would I want to limit myself? I understand you don’t like the flavors but, once again, many do and these chefs are appealing to them. What a boring restaurant world it would be if offal was stricken from the menus.
I guess I feel both ways. On the one hand, it’s interesting and fun to try unconventional foods, including offal. On the other hand there’s something a bit sad about supposed gourmands traipsing about in apparent delight after having just eaten a piece of meat that, until quite recently, had the honor of serving as some herbivore’s shitter. The condescending attitude that often comes from the “dahlink, you absolutely must try the braised asshole sauced in the giraffe snot” crowd gets so laughably pretentious that you wonder whether they remember what truly good food is. Culinary slumming has its charm but the line between the occasional sweetbread and the drunk chowing down on a pickled pig’s foot is one best not crossed too many times.
What was gutter food kitchen scraps then is gutter food kitchen scraps now, and if some effete ‘artiste’ wants to charge me an arm and a leg to feed me a bull’s left nut wrapped in a pig’s ear, he better have a very good reason. I find that typically he does not, except that he has mistaken me as having bourgeois ideas of what is ‘challenging’ and exotique, rather than favoring sincere technique or genuinely good flavor.
Several hundred dollars for offal and cast-offs is, in my experience, is not a good sign that I have found the latter.
What about food that was created from poverty but is now revered? Do you think I’m pretentious because I seek out the best quality haggis I can find and pay over the odds for what amounts to sheep inards stuffed into a stomach (I’m half Scottish btw and LOVE haggis)? I guess my argument is who are you to say what tastes nice? I find the more popular cuts of meat are actually very bland; fillet steak, chicken breast etc.
In the United States, tipping is expected at “sit down” restaurants. Now, it may not neccesarily be fair (the government taxes waiters for their “expected tip revenue”) but until they change the laws that’s simply the way things are done.
I think people are being pretentious when they pay over and above what could buy them a perfect steak for the supposed pleasure of dining on scraps that a butcher wouldn’t feed to his dog. If someone wants to jump on the offal wagon, fine, but paying top dollar to eat eyeballs or guts instead of steak is ridiculous. That said, I can consider haggis an exception, given a) the labor intensive pre-cooking preparation, b) that this prep isn’t necessarily to make it chewable or edible (as is so often the case w/ offal) but an essential part of the dish, and c) it’s Scottish.
As for who I am, I’m the guy that gets insulted when a chef tries to pass off lips and assholes as actual food. Oscar Meyer wraps it in plastic and charges 25 cents, foodies turn their noses up. Oh, how dreadful. Cosentino does it and charges fifty bucks and he’s suddenly a visionary. Someone pinch me, please. Next jaded foodie trend: dumpster diving. Mmmm, mmmm, have you tried lapping the 3 day old chocolate milkshake off the side of this dumpster?! Mmm, oh and it’s sun-dried, and the rust completely enhances the flavor profile, MMMMM. Ha.
Ha.
Never mind, thought better of it.
Honestly, I can’t think of a time where offal is more expensive than steak on a menu. That said, I could justify it somewhat if it ever is the case, because preparing offal well usually takes much more finesse and skill than preparing a steak well, which basically boils down to salt, pepper, throw on fire, flip, remove, serve.
To me, no. Cracker Barrel, Pizza Hut, or Chilis are fine with me. A meal shouldn’t cost as much as a car payment.
Tipping is expected in the US, but GreedySmurf (an Australian) was responding to the OP (also an Australian, judging by their location tag).
AFAIK, tipping is not absolutely expected in Australia, or at least not to the extent practiced in the US.
True, but it shouldn’t taste like a car’s dashboard either.
Seconding Cervaise’s praise of facemeat. Speaking of taquerias, for my money there’s no better taco than some slow-cooked beef cheek barbacoa. Except maybe some lengua. (Haven’t worked up the courage to try sesos yet, which I can at least blame on fear of Mad Cow Disease.)
Dunno about the OP’s question, though, not having experienced much in the way of truly fine dining. Not for fear of the food so much as the potential disappointment. If I pay $20 for a meal and it sucks, I’ll be pissed; if it costs me $200+ and it blows, I’ll be sputtering a blue streak for days.
For the record, this past Saturday, I went to a higher-end place here in Seattle and spent $100 on a dinner for one. This was somewhere I’d not been, but that had something of a rep among Northwest foodies, so I’d been interested in trying it for a while.
$100 was too much. It was pretty much what the nay-sayers in this thread have been knocking “fine dining” for being: tiny portions, over-fancy presentation, middling ingredients, not much “there” there. It wasn’t hugely overpriced; I’d say it was a $60-70 meal. But it wasn’t worth $100.
We aren’t totally blinded by the price tag, is all I’m sayin’. 
I can understand where you are coming from but still disagree, you are aware that some people like offal? Sweetbreads are a delicacy, geese liver (fois gras) is a delicacy, lambs brains are a delicacy, bone marrow is a delicacy, pigs trotters are a delicacy. I think that the reason they are seen as such is that they are very hard to get hold of and often very hard to prepare so when going to a restaurant to have a new food experience do I eat the steak that I could prepare exactly the same at home or do I try something that I probably couldn’t get hold of and probably couldn’t cook the same at home? There aren’t that many fine dining restaurants that only sell offal btw, they always serve ‘crowd pleaser’ dishes such as steak (usually the most expensive dish I might add) and chicken because they know that not everyone will want to try something different but there is no reason to assume it is simply pretension that drives a diners desire to something like offal, I think it’s a desire to try the new and unusual and with a top end restaurant you know that when you try something that could easily be ruined by an amateur chef it’s going to definitely be good then you don’t have to worry about it being a disappointment or being poisoned or something!
Sorry, just realised that I’d totally ignored GreedySmurf’s question. I normally leave any change under $5 as the tip, but my understanding is that at nicer restaurants tipping is more common. My fiance normally leaves 10% which he learned from his parents, but I balk at the idea of tipping $50 in Australia.
I’m so cheap that I’m still steaming about the $20 a head place that served crappy seafood pasta with one clam and maybe half a mussel, and it’s been over a year. If I were disappointed in a $500+ meal I would probably still be cursing it on my deathbed.
For my own part, the thing that prompted me to start trying the more “out-there” foods (tongue, marrow, etc) was a recognition that that’s what the chefs themselves were eating. If there’s anybody at all who knows the best parts of the animal, it’s the guy who has to deal with cutting up and cooking the thing. These guys can eat pretty much whatever they want; at the end of the night, they can pull something out of their own walk-in, or they can go to their pal’s joint a block away. And almost universally, chefs turn up their noses at the filet mignon; if they have a steak at all, it’s ribeye or maybe hanger. More likely, it’s a slow-braised short rib, which tastes so much better than filet mignon it’s ridiculous. Short ribs used to be cheap, because of lack of demand, but folks have caught on, so the price is rising fast. Me, I’m hoping the general public doesn’t realize the wonders of marrow and sweetbreads, because I like being able to get a plate of the most delicious stuff for half the price of the less-tasty but more popular cuts. Anyway, the point is, you want to eat well, you should look at the plates of the people who know the most about eating.