Adrian

Okay, slight pivot. MSC now reserved for Saturday. Compere Lapin or LPG for Friday?

Thoughts on Compere Lapin vs. St. John? Have La Petite Grocery and Arnaud's lined up (wanted somewhere traditional and Commander's Palace was booked). Need one more spot and Mosquita Supper Club is booked.

Right. So Isabel is still fun and good and worth a visit. Book it. Dreyfus is usually quite good - I’ve had some excellent meals there - and if it’s that plus Isabel you’ve don’t just fine But it’s very much that kind of food so you have to want that. A walk in at Quetzal is quite possible if you don’t mind bar-ish seating, especially late. Sunny’s usually has availability very early. I haven’t been yet but people talk highly about Henry’s, which is a new restaurant/wine bar run by one of our better wine agencies.

Please don't flatter. I thought you'd want to check out our vast array of Michelin starred Japanese restaurants. Canoe was never good in a way that would make it interesting for you to go there, and it is not good now. Isabel is still very fun, but it was hit harder by the pandemic than a lot of places. Haven't been since the fall, but it's worth a visit. Your assessment of Dreyfus is correct. I'll send more detailed thoughts later, but Quetzal, 20 Victoria, Edulis, Giulia, Mimi's Chinese, Sunny's, Actinolite and Alo are where I would go now.

Though I’m probably discounting the tourist support a bit as well - there is a ton of American and Canadian money that comes to montreal with a desire to eat. I’m not sure how many other North American cities have that kind of tourist demand to backstop restaurants.

All of this seems right? Ob Yeah, this is a bunch of it. Probably don't discount the cultural stuff too. As Sneak points out, the deep attachment to regional and traditional cuisine made what Picard and McMillan did in the mid-2000s just much more compelling than what was happening in other places (where many farm-to-table, New American restaurants were anodyne fig-on-a-plate restaurants), or why Laprise was doing foraging five-to-ten years before it was trendy in the Anglosphere (even if Toque! is a different kind of restaurant altogether). The media/travel/language nexus with France

how was amarante? what did you drink at l'ambo? didn't know they were giving kitchen tours now.

Or is it just a matter of the cultural debate around hotels? One can analogize grand amenity heavy palace hotels (trad three stars), equivalent hotels in a more modern style (modern three stars), ultra lux small hotels with fewer overall amenities (multi star tasting counters), modern boutique hotels (bitronomic/new paradigm restaurants), small inns (trad bistros), etc., etc. It seems to broadly parallel the kind of cultural splintering we've seen with restaurants. Thing is, no one pretends that they are need to be rated using a single cohesive critical review system (as opposed to the ki

What surprises me is that institutions haven't expanded the star system given it's popularity. It would be very easy to say "The Times star system was built to evaluate a certain kind of restaurant - traditional, formal and, historically, European. While we think the star system is important for evaluating those restaurants, and we think that the star system has proven to us to have great utility for evaluating other cuisines that follow a "fine dining" model, we recognize that not every restaurant in New York falls into that framework, and such a framework is not useful for evaluating the vas

Though it is very common for someone to say "I know restaurant X is two stars and restaurant Y is four stars, but I just like restaurant X better". Which is framed in the language of personal preference vs. objective assessment, but it's a certainly adjacent to this.

It's all so muddy. There was a silly Eater thing they used to do every time a new guide dropped by pointing out that all the restaurants that got stars were French. But then they started having to say "Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc." and the whole thing got very silly. In reality, the system seems to be pretty flexible in that it captures highly technical, ritualized, formal kinds of dining across all nationalities. Obviously international wealth disparities are something (but not everything - see e.g. the absence of indigenous German three-star cooking). As I'm sure you're getting at, the pa

Yes and no. Where there is a somewhat objective set of criteria, ratings can be very effective without subverting criticism itself. An idealized Michelin that is rigorously about French fine dining - or, really, expanded to other cuisines that have a hierarchical system of formal dining - is very functional, and doesn't in any way impeded critical discussion of L'Arpege vs. Noma. In some ways, it frees those kinds of restaurants from critical discussion about whether they are "good" and allows for more discussion about what those restaurants do or represent. Whether you think that's good is an

Granite looks intriguing. How are Neige d'ete, ES, and Yamtcha these days? And is Neso any good?

Added benefit of being open for Sunday lunch and right near the Bastille opera.

LOL man, I was asking for myself! Glad we have independently planned the same trip...