Not always. The best meal I ever had was at a two Michelin star restaurant. Superb service. Excellent food. Nice presentation – creative but not kRe8iVe. We were there for three hours, but it didn’t feel like much more than an hour. Years later we still rave about that meal.
ETA: I did love the “waiting for Gateau” line.
They kinda sorta look like my favorite cinnamon rolls that my mom used to make, but hers were made with left over pie dough, a LOT more cinnamon, and none of that icky icing. Ambrosia!
Rayner is good reading, although maybe not too much at once. Those sentences are pure gold.
A response to criticisms of the original blog post:
It’s actually a thoughtful and serious reply, discussing food and art.
“Does art have to be beautiful? Not necessarily. It has to challenge you to understand. If it’s beautiful, that’s even better.”
And, that’s true. I can’t argue with that statement. …
But a restaurant is not a museum, or an art gallery. If anything, the stakes are even higher, because you aren’t simply creating, you are creating something for someone. …
… it’s a baffling sort of gatekeeping, to tell someone that the reason they didn’t enjoy a meal is that they didn’t understand art. That the reason the meal was awful was because we don’t appreciate the avant garde. It’s a sort of culinary gaslighting.
You’re not still hungry. You’re just hoi polloi. …
If food is a type of art, it is one that cannot exist without taking into account the relationship between the artist (the chef) and the consumer of their art (the client). Cooking, if done properly, is inherently an empathetic act. It’s an act of love. And if I am to reflect on all of the best meals that I’ve had – whether they were roadside stands or Michelin-starred restaurants, they shared one common theme: the person preparing the food cared about the people around them. They cared about their customers, and they cared about their staff. …
The whole article is worth reading.
Requoted from an article posted by @GreenWyvern:
Beautifully expressed, and exactly right.
On the rare occasions when I prepare elaborate meals for guests, my intention is that they fully enjoy them, not that I impress them.
Colbert mentioned the review on his show tonight, with a large picture of the Mouth O’ Foam.
This quote was just nuts:
I’ve had readers hypothesize that my inability to appreciate this meal is due to me not understanding Italian culture or speaking the language fluently. This strikes a particularly deep nerve. Growing up, I was teased for my mother’s accent. I was ridiculed for speaking a weird language and talking with my hands, for having a strange (i.e., foreign) family with odd traditions. And now the criticism leveled against me is that I am too American, and not Italian enough, to appreciate what was served to me.
Not Italian enough? If you tried to serve that meal to my Italian grandmother, by the 3rd course she would have stormed into the kitchen, chased all the “chefs” out by force of will, and possibly at knifepoint, and then made the kind of meatballs that the Bros chefs would donate their left nuts to be able to make.
I’ve been to a couple restaurants that have/had Michelin stars that were wonderful (Longman and Eagle, Courtright’s) and one that was probably the worst dinner I’ve ever had considering the price (Bresca). None of the dining experiences were alike so I don’t really have expectations on wait staff, portions, experimentalism, etc based on a Michelin star.
Good to see that Wolf is still in business.
VERY funny review. Loved it.
And see: MSN
Is there text at that link, or is it just an intro to a video? If video, can you summarize for me?
I avoid these types of restaurants at all costs. There are some here in Portland like that and they will never see a dollar from me. Scratch that: I did go to one because a friend had opened it. After the bone marrow course, I cancelled the rest of the meal. Others at the table were more polite and slogged through whatever the hell was on their plates. It was unidentifiable to me.
I watched it, puzzlegal. Basically, it’s a brief item from NBC’s Today Show. The food blogger makes a few comments, mostly what she said in her post about the restaurant. Then they interviewed the restaurant’s co-owner and co-head chef. “They don’t understand art,” she said. “We have lots of guests who love what we do,” or something like that. She sidestepped the question that asked about the plaster cast of the chef’s mouth by replying, “Oh, we have casts of the mouths of everybody who works here.” Not very helpful.
My brother has eaten at Alinea three times – and he’s about as unpretentious with blue-collar sensibility as it gets – and he loved it (well, obviously, as he went there three times.) Alinea is a restaurant in Chicago headed by Grant Achatz, and is famous for showing up on these “best restaurants in the world” lists. They do a molecular gastronomy menu with many small courses, are very playful with their food, and, while putting forward a very modernist aesthetic in their food, they are decidedly un-snooty and fun in their demeanor, according to him. I would love to go to Alinea, but I just can’t bring myself to spend $700 on a dinner for two with drinks and tip, but he saves up because he finds the experience completely worth it. It’s a style of food that is extremely easy to lampoon, especially if you’re coming from a traditional steakhouse type of background. But he did find it filling, despite the small courses, and worth every penny.
I’ve eaten at Bern’s Steak House, in Tampa, which usually makes “Best Steakhouses in America” lists. It’s high-end; they claim the largest wine cellar in the country, and grow their vegetables on their own farm (where prospective servers work for a year, before waiting tables in the restaurant proper). It’s the sort of place where waiters can, as mine did, explain the difference between a filet mignon and a Chateaubriand (same cut of meat, but one is cut with the grain, and one is cut against the grain), and how it affects the flavor. They take their food very seriously, but display no condescension or scorn whatsoever to the guests, and work hard to make each one feel welcomed and valued. I’ve had a similar experience at Bones, another high-end steakhouse in Atlanta.
Comparing a steakhouse to a Michelin-starred restaurant is a bit apples-to-oranges, I grant, but the principle seems to be that if the food is good enough - and at Bern’s and Bones, it very much is - you don’t need to be a pretentious dick to show how talented you are in the kitchen. You might feel poorer when you walk out of Bern’s, but you won’t feel cheated.
I am now imagining the reaction of someone applying for a job cleaning the place on being told ‘OK, now as part of the job requirements we’re going to take a plaster cast of your mouth.’
“…in case we need to identify the remains…”
Now that’s a chef who really puts himself into his cooking.
Revised punchline to an old joke:
“A great chef like him, you don’t serve him all at once”.
The chef who backed into a meat grinder got behind in his work.
L&O Criminal Intent Death Roe
Chef killed his chef son in law, ground him up, and served him to the staff as a “new dish”. They were too scared for their jobs to say it tasted bad. The show didn’t say if the police ever told them what, I mean, who, was in it,
Also he was incesting his daughter.