What is a "nice" restaurant?

Cafe Society
141

I think DC is actually a top five (behind NYC, Chicago, SF, LA) food city even if I may be local-biased a bit. A lot of people are just genuinely unaware of the massive infusion of high-quality restaurants that have happened in the District in the past 10-15 years. If you ever check out Tom Sietsema’s DC food articles in the Washington Post, he’s spoken about it at length. DC has become almost as hot as NYC or Chicago for the focus it’s getting from people looking to do interesting and high-quality cuisine.

I don’t think this is the “bible” because there are reasons it isn’t entirely definitive, but while Michelin does do a “restaurant guide” for the United States, it doesn’t have enough of its certified Michelin Inspectors based in the U.S., or enough infrastructure built out, to do its famous 1-2-3 star rating system nationwide in America. Instead, when it first brought its start ratings to the United States, it began only reviewing/inspecting restaurants in New York City in 2005. That expanded to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago the next year. The next city to get added to its star rating system was…Washington, D.C., within the last couple of years.

Note that these guides don’t exactly follow municipal boundaries but are more “regional.” The Los Angeles star ratings go out to restaurants as far away as San Diego, and the San Francisco star ratings go out to basically any restaurants in the Bay Area, and even ones in Napa Valley.

142

I’ve dined in a few of the top DC restaurants listed in this article. Little Inn at Washington was particularly memorable, as was Plume. Fiola and Sfoglia have been on the list but haven’t got around to them yet. But I admit to not having been aware of a number of the others. Hasn’t exactly been the ideal time to visit them recently.

As a fellow local, what are your thoughts - if you’ve been - on RPM, Equinox, Filomena, 2941 and Clarity (little gem in Vienna)?

143

Michelin doesn’t do Las Vegas any more because the guide sold so poorly. But places they gave stars to are still rocking the town. A sample:

Joël Robuchon 3 stars

Picasso 2 stars

Guy Savoy 2 stars

Aureole 1 star

Le Cirque 1 star

Michael Mina 1 star

Wing Lei 1 star (The first Chinese restaurant in North America to win a star)

L’Atelier De Joël Robuchon 1 star

Than add restaurants by Pierre Gagnaire, Thomas Keller, David Chang, Gordon Ramsey, Jose Andres, Roy Choi, Bobby Flay (OK, that one’s for fun), Giada, Scott Conant, and more.

Personally, my new favorite is Cipriani.

Match that, DC!

144

It sounds like Las Vegas has branches of well-known restaurants from elsewhere. I would think a real foodie town would be one in which top restaurants develop organically.

145

That’s why I listed them separately. The Starred places are all unique, or were originally. Besides, like any other food city the best places are totally unknown outside the area. I could eat the best food in the country and never leave Downtown Vegas these days, forget the Strip or Summerlin. And let us not forget the aforementioned Lotus of Siam, the recognized Best Thai Restaurant in America.

146

Guy Savoy is originally a restaurant in Paris. Joël Robuchon was another Parisian restauranteur. Le Cirque was of course originally a Manhattan restaurant. Michael Mina’s restaurant is the second, with the original in San Francisco. And so on.

147

I actually read a very interesting article about that, and the contention of the article is that Las Vegas’ food scene is overlooked, because people think celebrity chef restaurants/outposts of other famous restaurants, if they’re not thinking casino buffets.

Meanwhile, the trusted lieutenant chefs detailed to run these celebrity restaurants actually realize that Vegas is an affordable and pleasant place to live on their salaries, and that they’ve steadily been branching out into their own restaurants in Las Vegas as time goes on. Which is a phenomenon that I never actually considered, but that makes a lot of sense.

148

If you ever find yourself in St Martin, the little town of Grand Case on the French side consists of a street lined with excellent restaurants. One of our favorites is L’Auberge Gourmande. It helps if you can speak a little French, but even I get by( I’ve requested “Vin Blanc, porfavor” and no problemo!).

For a nice restaurant, family style, there’s Chez Yvette in the Quartier-d’Orleans where you can eat a gourmet meal family style in shorts and flipflops. The wine list is “Red, White, or Rose $4 a bottle, served with chipped ice on the side”.

149

Just to note that, while “4 star”, as a casual term for an excellent restaurant (or anything else that’s very good) is a common term, it can be a bit of a misnomer in this case.

Michelin publishes what many people consider to be the definitive ratings and guides to dining, and their top rating is actually only 3 stars. That said, Michelin only assigns star ratings to the best of the best, and thus, getting even a single Michelin star is a huge deal for a restaurant.

150

Other ratings, though, like The New York Times, do go to four stars.

151

Fair enough, and a follow-up question: does “one star” in a rating system like the Times indicate poor quality?

152

The New York Times rates restaurants as

Poor
Fair
Satisfactory
1 star Good
2 stars Very Good
3 stars Excellent
4 stars Extraordinary

153

Those are different roles, though most restaurants would have one person in both. It’s more a matter of size of operation than fanciness or “niceness” that would cause them to have them seperate.

It depends. Do you make your own pasta at home, your own sauce and meatballs? Do you make your own bread to go along with it?

The ingredient sourcing is a bit different than it used to be. You aren’t going to see chefs wandering farmer’s markets or at the docks when the fish come in, not very often anyway. Commissaries work very closely with chefs to make sure that they are providing the quality that the chefs demand, and they do a pretty good job of it. You may actually be getting produce from your local farmer’s market, which was purchased by your commissary that morning, but you aren’t the one actually spending the time picking through produce.

But as far as dish and menu development, sure. A “nice” restaurant if going to have a unique menu developed by the chef. That doesn’t mean that every item is a unique creation, but the menu itself is not just copied and pasted. It may have chicken picatta on it, but it will have its own description of the dish, even if it is pretty much the standard recipe. There will usually be at least one or two actually unique creations from the chef, or at least signature dishes.

Anyway, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in various levels of nice restaurants.

I’ve worked some pretty nice and well designed places that had a kitchen manager and a bunch of line cooks, and I’ve worked at some pretty shitty places with a Chef de Cuisine and all the Chef de Parties are culinary graduates. The latter certainly charged more, but you weren’t getting anything other than a steaming load of pretentiousness for your money.

There certainly is a quality difference between a place that prepares its food fresh in house every day, vs one that gets it soups from bags, but honestly, you don’t have to go to culinary school to follow a recipe. The first place I worked, the owner/manager was an engineer who wanted a career change, hadn’t ever been to culinary school, hadn’t even spent all that much time in restaurants other than a few summers as a teenager, but he could follow a recipe. And that was what that restuarant was based on, a bunch of recipes that were either stolen from other restaurants or cribbed from cook books. But it was fantastic food, well executed, and a reasonable price.

154

If I was eating in a restaurant in which the pasta and sauce were really fresh made from scratch, I might appreciate restaurant spaghetti. But I’ve never been in such a restaurant. (And still I can usually find something else more appealing on the menu.)

155

Fair enough, but speaking as one who makes my own sauce, meatballs, bread, and sometimes even the pasta from scratch, I have to say, there actually is quite the quality difference that may be worth the experience.

156

While the Michelin guide is highly regarded, it does have its limitations. It started as a French motorists guide to encourage people to drive around France and visit new places (and wear out their tires, and need to buy new ones, as well), over time it’s developed into the best regarded restaurant review outlet there is. But because of its origins and its scale, it can sometimes be a little deceptive.

For example the country with the most Michelin starred restaurants by a huge margin is France, with over 600. However while France is legitimately a food mecca, that doesn’t necessarily mean France really does have an order of magnitude more high quality restaurants than say, the United States or Japan. It’s more a function that the company started in France and its inspector group is much more built up in France. It branched out to other trendy European locations first, and only later started to get into major food cities in Asia and North America. There’s a lot of extremely high quality restaurants, because they fall out of the geographic predispositions of Michelin, that simply aren’t rated at all.

157

Right- if you were to look at the list of Michelin starred US restaurants, you’d get the impression that NYC, California, Chicago and DC are the only real food areas in the country, and the rest is a howling wasteland consisting solely of Olive Gardens and McDonalds.

Which isn’t true; they just haven’t actually expanded their guides to cover other parts of the country, so places in say… Kansas City haven’t even had the opportunity yet.

158

How biased are the Michelin Guides towards French restaurants or restaurants of that type? How would they evaluate a barbecue restaurant in Austin, Texas or a pizza restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut?

159

Cincinnati used to be one of the top places for fine dining in the US, sporting several “five star” restaurants according to the Mobile Travel guide, including the Maisonette, one of the highest rated in the US.

Michelene never reviewed any of them.

But the Mobile Travel Guide, now the Forbes Travel Guide, is probably a better measure for US centric restaurants anyway.

160

Yeah, this was a little sushi place with an open kitchen and 4 staff in there on an average night. My point is it doesn’t depend on anything here, because anyone can use the title ‘head chef’ if they want to- that place used promotions as a way to keep people on, so kept adding extra ‘layers’ to make people feel like they were getting somewhere- not that it worked.

I even worked in a crappy pub with a ‘head chef’; the entire kitchen staff consisted of him, a KP who did evenings, and one other cook who helped out on weekend evenings when it was busy, and ran the kitchen Mondays and Tuesdays, when she mainly heated stuff up and did chips. Maybe in the US ‘head chef’ has a meaning that actually tells you something, but here, not so much.