Adrian

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...

Great minds Bonner? Similar weekend trip planned to Paris in May. Right now, have Comice for night one, L'Ambo for night two, and a lunch a Amarante before the opera on Sunday afternoon. Questions: 1. For night one, is Comice the right choice for a civilized one star meal (also the Canadian angle)? Sota is appealing but looks closed, and, although it's obviously less white table cloth, Septime still has appeal. But then there's a litany from AT, L'Archeste, Pages, etc. and it's hard to find a reliable way to differentiate between them, as there is an absolute paucity of reliable fe

What I am saying is that if you do a search the restaurant does get a fair bit of coverage, especially for a rural restaurant. Outside of the documentary, a quick google search (https://www.google.com/search?q=inn+at+little+washington+reviews&rlz=1C1GGRV_enCA769CA769&oq=inn+at+little+washington+review&aqs=chrome.0.0j46j0j69i57j0l3.15393j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) shows that in the last three years it's been reviewed by Eater, Washington Post, and Forbes, plus articles in Washingtonian and WSJ on the first page of hits. Site specific hits yield a fair bit more coverage in

Not to be a pedant, but why do you say that? They just got 3 Michelin stars and the attendant press, there was a documentary released last year, and quick website scan of eater, Washintonian and WaPo reveals plenty of recent mentions (including a new rave review by Sietsema). Lots of coverage over their COVID response. If anything, it's probably more prominent now than it has been in years. It's not going to get "hot new restaurant" press, but it's not a hot new restaurant.

Other than the documentary? It gets lots of local, regional attention, but, nationally, it does not. Poke around Eater DC and the Washingtonian and WaPo. Pugnacious me would say it's the kind of restaurant that people here say they want but don't actually patronize. More fairly, it's probably not a restaurant that should get a lot of national attention. It's "interesting" as historical artifact, it excellent in its style, it's got a full dining room bolstered by three Michelin stars, but in what way should it command national attention beyond the occasional appreciation? I

Yes man, I was agreeing with you and adding on.

Inn at Little Washington current menu: https://theinnatlittlewashington.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IALW_Sample_Dinner_Menu_20237.pdf I don't think it's ever been "traditional" low country cooking, but he's sort of the master of traditional American haute cuisine, which is a lot of European and mixture of some American traditions, as you said. He's not making "hoppin' johns" an acceptable bistro dish. It's a different thing. What Brock did is that he made those vernacular dishes acceptable for dressed up people in good bistros and fancy spaces. Which also put some of those trad places

There are a couple distinctive strains of restaurant cooking as I argued a few pages back. Related and unrelated, there is also a PBS-NPR-Alice Walters-Farmer's Market-New American strain that is absolutely it's own kind of cuisine. Part of what Brock did was that he married "exotic" low country cooking with this familiar bourgeois American aesthetic. Or as Sneak says, he "Brooklynized" it.

I don't think so. But, also, it has to start somewhere. Also, I think this comes of of an article on Brock (maybe the New Yorker one), there is a history of products like Kentucky hams being widely known and well regarded internationally in the 19th century that faded in the 20th. There are a lot of politics (both class and race) circling this discussion, of course.

This is not "politics" as I have always interpreted the rule. People are discussing a general (apolitical) principle: the extent to which the personal politics of a business owner should influence your decision to patronize a business. This has nothing to do with the poster's political persuasion.

I mean yes, but that wasn't the point of the ultimately hypothetical analogy.

Yes, I agree with this. But a principled objection to both on cultural grounds is possible. As is a principled objection to one over the other on aesthetic grounds. Sutton confuses the latter for the former.

I am not so sure about that. (It's boycotting Haydn performances in 1765)

Yes but we don't have a time machine to dine in the antebellum south and object. So people object to restsaurants that celebrate what is objectionable now. There are people here who boycott Keller and Jean Georges. I understand why and I understand why some may find TAK unsavory.

Yes but if the restaurant was celebrating the political institution of slavery then the restaurant is a bit gross. No one is objecting to Horcher.

I raise you one broken record but I find this critique a bit unfair. First, there are deeply embedded American foodways, but not in New York, and often they are non-white. Also, to restate my critique, is that there always seemed to be a resistance here to trying to develop this culture. The post-Savoy/Chez Panisses/Blue Hill/NBC style of New American cooking created this kind of bistro - predictable in style an menu (oysters, salads, charcuterie, pork, chicken), that was highly seasonal in nature and, best of all, not-significant or interesting. There was a lot of hostility to this kind of re

He dislikes them, but he doesn't dislike the way they eat: https://ny.eater.com/2019/10/15/20913008/sushi-noda-noz-review-nyc-restaurant-omakase The review of Gabriel Kreuther maybe fills in the story - https://ny.eater.com/2015/11/18/9752834/gabriel-kreuther-restaurant-review/. Culturally, it seems directionally correct - chef with one restaurant serving ambitious food on his own in a fairly classic style - but Sutton objects to the style of the restaurant, despite conceding that it's well done ("generous"). He wants to say it's "snooty" but he can't, because he doesn't actually assess i