Category: Food and Drink

For the last five months [Michelin] gastronomic undercover agents have been working on the Michelin Guide to New York City, the company’s first hotel and restaurant ratings outside Europe. Michelin’s green sightseeing guides have covered the United States since 1968.

Édouard Michelin, the chairman of the French tire company that bears his name, is expected to announce plans for the 2006 New York guide. The book, to go on sale Nov. 15, will rate 500 restaurants in the five boroughs and 50 Manhattan hotels.

Here is The New York Times story.

How will this matter?  Zagat’s guides, the main U.S. competitor, are sold to make profit.  Furthermore they rely on unpaid reader evaluations, which tend to be low-brow or middle-brow.  Michelin Red Guides hire quality inspectors but typically lose money.  They are viewed by the parent company as loss leaders for the company name.  Whether or not this loss leader logic will apply to the U.S., the Michelin inspectors have accumulated expertise in "tony" (some would say snobby) evaluations. 

So use the Michelin guide if you are rich, using an expense account, or have especially good taste in food.  (I put myself only in the latter category.)  The median buyer, just out for fun, can stick with Zagat.

It is well known that Michelin "carries" the Lyon restaurant of Paul Bocuse at the exalted three-star status, even though the place no longer merits such high marks.  Bocuse remains a well-connected French culinary institution.  How much will the guide have to pander to and flatter Americans?  If New York has no three-star restaurants, will U.S. customers view the guide as French culinary snobbery?

…the sushi made by Mr. Cantu, the 28-year-old executive chef at Moto in Chicago, often contains no fish. It is prepared on a Canon i560 inkjet printer rather than a cutting board. He prints images of maki on pieces of edible paper made of soybeans and cornstarch, using organic, food-based inks of his own concoction. He then flavors the back of the paper, which is ordinarily used to put images onto birthday cakes, with powdered soy and seaweed seasonings.

At least two or three food items made of paper are likely to be included in a meal at Moto, which might include 10 or more tasting courses. Even the menu is edible; diners crunch it up into a bowl of gazpacho, creating Mr. Cantu’s version of alphabet soup.

Sometimes he seasons the menus to taste like the main courses. Recently, he used dehydrated squash and sour cream powders to match a soup entree. He also prepares edible photographs flavored to fit a theme: an image of a cow, for example, might taste like filet mignon.

"We can create any sort of flavor on a printed image that we set our minds to," Mr. Cantu said. The connections need not stop with things ordinarily thought of as food. "What does M. C. Escher’s ‘Relativity’ painting taste like? That’s where we go next."

Here is The New York Times story.  Thanks to Matt Dreyer for the pointer.

I have been to France many times, but I have mixed feelings about so much eating in Paris.  Yes so many items are wonderful but could not UNESCO have a few branches in Colmar, Avignon, or the Southwest?

Paris has more fine restaurants than ever before, but cheap food in Paris continues to decline in quality.  Why do we observe this apparent paradox?

Think of two differing ways of supporting quality cuisine.  The first relies on external benefits from a tightly knit network of quality food suppliers.  Restaurants, for instance, might have close links to slaughterhouses, fishing boats, and very wise grandmas.  The second method relies on made-to-order directed artisanal production.  These more expensive food outputs are purely professional in nature and are often funded by tourist demand.  The relevant ingredients are often flown in or otherwise hurried in by expensive methods of transport.  The global replaces the local.

As Parisian real estate continues to rise in value, Parisian food moves out of the first category and into the second.  Food supplies and markets get pushed out to the fringes or out of Paris altogether.  Restaurants no longer can locate in the meat-packing district to receive prime fresh cuts of offal at low cost.  Grandmas are less important as a source of food ideas.

As food markets get crowded out to more distant locales, wealthy tourists arrive in greater numbers.  Neighborhood restaurants become less important and no longer attract the best cooking talent.  Culinary knowledge is bought and sold to greater degree, and is less "in the air."  Labor costs rise with the general increase in prosperity and with French labor law.  In sum, more quality can be afforded than ever before, but the marginal cost of quality rises as well.  Quality, on average, shifts into the wealthier sector of the market.

We might say the following.  More people eat well than ever before, due largely to growing wealth.  But for a given income class, good food is more expensive than ever before as well.

So at the mid-level, quality food can become more expensive and harder to find.  Food networks are now selling their knowledge rather than giving it away for free.  Of course you can still go to the provinces, where land remains much cheaper than in Paris.  A $40 meal in Nice or Elsass is much better than along the Right Bank or next to Notre Dame.

Mexican food stalls are an example of a supply chain that still fits the model of neighborhood production.  But even here the best stalls are now in the suburbs of Oaxaca, not in the city itself.

It is wrong to blame McDonalds for the decline of quality in Parisian bistros.  The spread of McDonalds is in fact the result of a broader syndrome, driven by French economic growth and the compact nature of Paris, which exacerbates land value issues.

So is Paris the best place to eat in France?  Is Manhattan the best place to eat in the United States?  The answer is maybe, depending on how much money you wish to spend.

Mostafa Sabet, a reader, writes:

I agree with your point [TC: my link] about raw ingredients and wonder why the richest nation in the world has such crappy raw ingredients?  We can afford it and obviously people can tell the difference.  Sure it won’t affect the McDonalds’ and freezer section food, but why does it go all the way downstream unless you pay exorbitant amounts of money for it?  When I was in Egypt, not exactly first world, the raw ingredients were far superior to the ones here.  Any ideas? 

A tough question, I see a few major hypotheses:

1. Things are changing rapidly, just visit Wegmans.  OK, but why has it taken so long?  And of course the revolution remains far from complete.

2. It is an exogenous demand-side question.  Americans have bad taste in food, just as the Chinese have bad taste in lounge music.  Why, for that matter, do the Japanese like karaoke so much?  Why do the Scots serve deep-fried Mars candy bars?  Note that more detailed versions of this hypothesis blame the British connection, Protestantism, and possibly the rule of law as well.

3. Food transportation in the U.S. exhibits economies of scale to an unprecedented degree.  The relative price of canned and frozen and mass-branded goods is thus especially low here.  This discriminates against both quality and freshness.

4. U.S. agricultural is so efficient that large farms replace small farms.  At the margin this raises the marginal cost of "artisanal production" of gourmet items.  The more heavily subsidized European agriculture has preserved many more small farms, which favors quality artisanal production.

5. It can take hours to make a really good mole sauce.  America has high wages, nighttime shopping, plus the best TV shows in the world.  The opportunity cost of good cooking and fine, slow dining is very high here. 

Here is the seventeenth edition.  Even if you don’t live near Washington D.C., here are  a few general tips for eating out:

         1. Avoid dishes that are "ingredients-intensive."  Raw
ingredients in America –  vegetables, butter, bread, meats, etc. – are below
world standards.  Even most underdeveloped countries have better raw
ingredients than we do, at least if you have a U.S. income to spend there, and
often even if one doesn’t.  Ordering the plain steak in Latin America may
be a great idea, but it is usually a mistake in Northern Virginia.  Opt
for dishes with sauces and complex mixes of ingredients.  Go for dishes
that are "composition-intensive."

          2. Appetizers often are better than main courses.  Meals composed of
appetizers and side dishes alone can be very satisfying.  Thai and
Lebanese restaurants provide the classic examples of this principle.

          3. Avoid desserts.  Most ethnic restaurants in America, no matter how
good, usually fall flat with the desserts.  Especially if the restaurant
is Asian.

          4. Order more than you plan to eat. 

Eric Husman writes to me:

I have a personal theory I call the Alphabet Diet.  I always begin with the fact that everyone who is eating anything is "on" a diet, and that when people do what is considered to be "going on" a diet, they are really *changing* their diet.  I think the reason that most diets work at first is that they require you to change your eating habits.  Since you are unfamiliar with the new rules, you basically cut back on the number of calories because you don’t know what’s "legal" and are confined to collections of suggested recipes based on a best-selling author’s preferences.  As you discover foods within the diet that you like, you gradually get back to your previous calorie intake, i.e. you learn to "game" the diet.  So I suggest that if you picked five letters at random from the alphabet and confine your diet to foods whose name does not contain those letters, you will see the same initial effects as the Atkins or any other diet.  If the diet ceases to be effective, pick 5 new letters.  It’s hard to write a best-selling book based on a principle that simple because there is no pseudo-scientific justification for random letters that will dazzle your would-be readership.

This is simple to graph with indifference curves.  If you deny a person her ideal point, given previous income and prices, that person will then eat less.  Over time, learning effects can counteract this tendency to some degree.

Here is my previous post on why the diet you choose does not seem to matter much.

Here from Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook is the glossary entry for foie gras.

Foie Gras: The fattened liver of a goose or duck.  Unfortunately, an endangered menu item with the advent of angry, twisted, humorless, anti-cruelty activists who’ve never had any kind of good sex or laughed heartily at a joke in their whole miserable lives and who are currently threatening and terrorizing chefs and their families to get the stuff banned.  Likely to disappear from tables outside France in our lifetimes.

Here is my side of the conversation:

"Alex, will you come to lunch with us?

Busy? (scornfully).  Doing what?

You write articles so that people will read them, no?

How many people read one of your articles?

That’s not bad.  But how much time does it take to write the article?

If it is so good that articles are read, why not read another article instead of writing one? Surely not only your articles are worthy of being read. 

Reading a good article is so much easier and quicker than writing one.

So you admit my point.  You oversupply the writing of articles, relative to a general  undersupply of the reading of articles.  The same might be said of academia in general.

And surely, Glaucon, we should correct institutional failures, no?

Now let me ask you — going to lunch, and talking with us — is it more like writing an article or reading an article?

That’s what I thought."

The chicken tikka was delicious.

Cereal appears to be the new trend.  Cereality is the name of the place and here is the menu.  And if you don’t think that Daniel Drezner can "food blog," read his post on goat meat.

Addendum: Now it is peanut butter sandwiches as well, thanks to an anonymous reader for the tip.

16 mulato chiles

5 ancho chiles

6 pasilla chiles (all the chiles should be dried, of course)

one white onion, chopped

two cloves garlic, chopped

one cinnamon stick

one teaspoon coriander seeds

one third cup raisins

one stale tortilla, and perhaps some crumbs of stale white bread

one tomato, chopped

one teaspoon anise seed

four cloves

two ounces unsweetened chocolate

Now toast the chiles over medium heat for a few minutes, and soak them in water for an hour.  Pull off the stems and deseed them.  Puree them in a blender.  Toast the rest of the stuff, except the chocolate, over medium heat for a few minutes, puree as well.  You can do all the pureeing together, if your blender is big and strong enough.  Mix the whole thing together, and let it simmer over low heat for fifteen minutes.  Add water (or very mild stock) to thin as needed.  During the simmering, stir in the chocolate so it melts evenly. 

Set it aside, preferably for a day, but even an hour will do.  The flavor will change as the spices blend and settle.  Reheat as needed.  This is best with turkey (today!) or chicken on the bone.

Why stop at voluntary tipping? Why not run the entire restaurant this way?

The current edition of Restaurant Magazine has an article on a restaurant in the suburbs of London where there are no prices on the menu. Customers pay what they think the meal was worth. It is called Just Around the Corner and has been around for 17 years. From what I saw when I went to help photograph it for the magazine, it serves old fashioned French food of an average standard (soup, chicken supreme, profiteroles…).

Here are some interesting quotes from the owner:

“In a cheaper area the restaurant wouldn’t survive because people wouldn’t pay the money I expect and in a busier, more central area, we couldn’t build up the trust.

When people don’t pay what the owner thinks appropriate (about £20 a head) We just thank them nicely and give them their money back. These people know they don’t belong here, they try you out and by giving them their money back nicely, you ensure that they never return.”

That’s from Peter Rossi, libertarian chef in London.

Why has mustard in the United States improved so much, but ketchup has stayed largely the same? Why are some sectors more prone to innovation than others? What constrains innovation from the consumer side?

Here is Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent account from The New Yorker. Here is an archive of his writings for the magazine; he is also author of the best-selling The Tipping Point. Check out Gladwell’s work if you don’t already know it.

Number of restaurants in Guizhou, China, closed in April for adding opium to their dishes: 215

That is from Harper’s Index, November issue, p.11; here is a related link.