“What’s irreplaceable — what you should ideally be paying for — are the chef’s judgment and palate; the difference between good and great may be a half teaspoon of lemon juice. The point of having a chef in situ is that a brilliant one isn’t going to allow a dish to be sent out unless that half teaspoon of lemon juice is there. Not everyone can do that; only a few can. And even fewer great chefs can afford to hire other great chefs to work for them, and when they do, most of those No. 2s will go off on their own before long. In 95 percent of the world’s restaurants, where dishes are standardized and even corporatized, this doesn’t matter. But it does matter at the very narrow top.”
Tag Archives: dining
shared content
“
A shift at Darden, which calls itself the world’s largest full-service restaurant owner, encapsulates the trend. Foot traffic at midtier, casual dining properties like Red Lobster and Olive Garden has dropped in every quarter but one since 2005, according to John Glass, a restaurant industry analyst at Morgan Stanley.
With diners paying an average tab of $16.50 a person at Olive Garden, Mr. Glass said, “The customers are middle class. They’re not rich. They’re not poor.” With income growth stagnant and prices for necessities like health care and education on the rise, he said, “They are cutting back.” On the other hand, at the Capital Grille, an upscale Darden chain where the average check per person is about $71, spending is up by an average of 5 percent annually over the last three years.
LongHorn Steakhouse, another Darden chain, has been reworked to target a slightly more affluent crowd than Olive Garden, with décor intended to evoke a cattleman’s ranch instead of an Old West theme.
”
shared content
“What Villard Michel Richard’s $28 fried chicken does to Southern cooking, its $40 veal cheek blanquette does to French. A classic blanquette is a gentle, reassuring white stew of sublimely tender veal. In this version, the veal cheeks had the dense, rubbery consistency of overcooked liver. Slithering around the meat was a terrifying sauce the color of jarred turkey gravy mixed with cigar ashes. If soldiers had killed Escoffier’s family in front of him and then forced him to make dinner, this is what he would have cooked.”
shared content
“
Of course, certain tasting-menu restaurants such as Blanca, at $195 per person, or Brooklyn Fare, at $255, prohibit cellphone use and photography altogether. It’s a policy that makes enough sense if you believe that food is a fully encompassing performance art at the same level as theater or cinema. After all, you wouldn’t take out your Samsung (005930:KS) Galaxy and start texting in the middle of Captain Phillips, would you? You surely wouldn’t take photos or video of the film and post it all on YouTube.
Then again, you’ll be able to buy a copy of the Tom Hanks flick on iTunes in a few months, whereas reliving a Blanca experience can require $700 or more for two.
”
– http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-04/idining-the-highs-and-lows-of-tablets-on-the-table
shared content
“Farmers and laborers ate earlier because they were up really early, and the elite were eating later in the day because they could sleep in. Breakfast and supper were kind of like glorified snacks, often leftovers or cornmeal mush, and there was not a lot of emphasis placed on these meals. Dinner, the main meal, at which people did tend to sit down together and eat, was really not the kind of social event that it has become. People did not emphasize manners, they did not emphasize conversation, and if conversation did take place it wasn’t very formal: it was really about eating and refueling. That’s the time where there are very blurry lines between what is and what isn’t a meal, and very blurry lines between what is breakfast, dinner and lunch.
Then, with the Industrial Revolution, everything changed, because people’s work schedules changed drastically. People were moving from the agrarian lifestyle to an urban, factory-driven lifestyle, and weren’t able to go home in the middle of the day. Instead, they could all come home and have dinner together, so that meal becomes special. And that’s when manners become very important, and protocol and formality. It’s really around then that people start to associate specific foods with certain meals.”
– http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2013/10/why-do-we-eat-cereal-for-breakfast-and-other-questions-about-american-meals-answered/
shared content
The five food stations, staffed by six cooks (two on fish) and one floating chef (a chef de tournant) are arranged perpendicular to the pass, which is where the food is handed off to the food runners (seen at the bottom of the page), all under the scrutiny of another chef, who runs the line.
shared content
“
Everyone with Internet access is a critic, but some forms of amateur criticism have higher standing than others. Amateur literary critics, like Dylan Lucia, an Amazon reviewer who gave one star to “Fahrenheit 451” (“Bradbury is a good writer [I’ll give him that], but I HATE his writing style”), may lack a nuanced understanding of the English language; some amateur film critics, like the IMDB reviewer who gave 10 stars to “Wrath of the Titans” (“i never saw a movie this good before in my life”), may have never seen another movie before in their lives. But all of us with a tongue and a functioning digestive tract are authorities on food. After all, we have a commanding range of experience to draw from: we eat, according to one study, an average of 4.9 times a day. When it comes to food, everyone is not just a critic — everyone is a connoisseur.
In such a competitive field, how does the amateur food critic distinguish himself? There are popular review sites like Urbanspoon and Yelp, but they can be egalitarian to a fault. In New Orleans, for instance, Urbanspoon ranks Café du Monde as the city’s top restaurant; it may have the best beignets and chicory coffee (many natives will scoff even at this), but it serves little else. Yelp lists Joe’s Falafel in Studio City as Los Angeles’s best restaurant. (“Pita bread and Gyro is the way to go!!! Well done Joe’s” — Calvin K. from Marina del Rey.) The true culinary obsessives go elsewhere. They go to Chowhound.
”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/magazine/los-angeles-goat-stew-city-usa.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper
shared content
“
Should tipping for large parties be left solely to the customer or should the restaurant tack it on to the bill?
The new IRS ruling that takes effect in January will treat automatic gratuities as service charges, rather than tips. The switch means servers will no longer be responsible for reporting those automatic tips as income. And it also means automatic gratuities will be considered a part of a server’s wages, making that money subject to payroll tax withholding and delaying receipt of those automatic tips until an employee’s next paycheck.
”
– http://www.indystar.com/article/20131011/BUSINESS/310110015/Automatic-tipping-IRS-rules-change-could-taxing-hospitality-industry?nclick_check=1
shared content
“
What you have with a restaurant that you visit once or twice is a transaction. What you have with a restaurant that you visit over and over is a relationship.
The fashionable script for today’s food maven doesn’t encourage that sort of bonding, especially not in a city with New York’s ambition and inexhaustible variety. Here you’re supposed to dash to the new Andrew Carmellini brasserie before anybody else gets there; be the first to taste ABC Cocina’s guacamole; advertise an opinion about the Massaman curry at Uncle Boons while others are still puzzling over the fugitive apostrophe. Snap a photo. Tweet it. Then move on. There’s always something else. Always virgin ground.
”
shared content
“
It is not tipping that most needs to end, however. What needs to change is the federal law that sets the minimum wage for tipped workers at $2.13 an hour, compared with an already measly hourly minimum of $7.25 for other workers. Under the law, as long as $2.13 an hour plus tips works out to at least $7.25 an hour, an employer is in compliance with national labor standards. In effect, a tip for the waitress is a wage subsidy for her employer.
In recent decades, the situation has become increasingly unfair. The sub-minimum “tipped” wage was first instituted in 1966, when it was set at 50 percent of the minimum wage. At the time, that was an improvement. Until then, the restaurant industry had successfully lobbied Congress to deny tipped workers any minimum-wage protection, leaving them to live on tips alone. Over the next 30 years, the tipped wage sometimes rose as high as 60 percent of the minimum wage, but it never fell below 50 percent, reaching its current level of $2.13 an hour in 1991.
Then, in 1996, the Republican-led Congress agreed to raise the minimum wage, but on the condition that the tipped wage remain frozen. It has not budged since, and today it is 29 percent of the minimum wage.
”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/tips-and-poverty.html?ref=todayspaper
shaun james bockert 