Yes, the guide is finished and should be on sale on Monday.
I can't even post anything celebratory right now, as proofing and editing dragged on through the holidays and pretty much took them over.
Fanfares next week, perhaps.
01/01/2011
12/10/2010
The Objectivity of Taste
I posted a piece from the 2010 guide on the subjectivity of taste earlier today, but I suppose it needs to be read with its companion piece on so-called objectivity.
If taste is not subjective, can it be objective? Many would say that the objectivity of taste is, for the most part at least, self-evident. Just as it is at some level idiotic to suppose that Andrew Lloyd-Webber writes finer orchestral music than Beethoven, so it could only be ignorance or some kind of aesthetic blindness which might lead someone to assert the superiority of William McGonagall’s poetry to that of William Shakespeare. It is equally clear, many gastronomes argue, that the achievements of a Robuchon or a Gagnaire in the kitchen outstrip the best efforts of Ronald McDonald.
Case closed, one might suppose, even allowing for many more closely contested cases (is Henry James a better novelist than Joseph Conrad, or is Wendy’s better than Burger King?). But diligence asks us to consider more closely what “objective” means here. In fact, it’s a rather vague tag. At the very least, it simply might refer to a matter which reasonable people can discuss in hope of agreement. This emphasizes the publicity of the “objective” as opposed to the privacy of the “subjective.” No-one, the thought is, can look inside my head and approve or disapprove my subjective reactions; but anyone can examine something which is publicly available. In other words, in the case of food, emphasis shifts from internal reactions to what is out there on the plate.
Fair enough, but does it mean something more? I think that for fervent objectivists (small “o”), it refers to the belief that questions of taste can be finally decided by examination of what is in the public realm. In other words, there are facts – tangible, publicly observable facts – which make it true (or false) to say that this is a great dish, here is excellent meat, I am drinking a superior wine. And so on. This is important to fervent objectivists, as it seems to provide the promise of a solid foundation to say to someone else, “You are just wrong about this.” It is more satisfying to them than just to be able to say, “I understand you like it, but shut up.”
Of course, belief in the objectivity of taste does not necessarily commit someone to believing that questions of taste can be finally and definitively decided. Although the supremacy of Shakespeare among English authors seems in little doubt, most questions of artistic taste seem hard conclusively to resolve. Indeed, opinions change – Melville was once derided as a novelist; he is now honored; and who knows if the cycle will turn again? But at the very least, the objectivist does seem to be bound to say that there are facts about food and drink – things you can point at – which are at least relevant to resolving a critical dispute. And here the objectivist runs splat into the unyielding obstacle of logic. As the philosopher David Hume argued some three centuries ago, an “ought” cannot be derived from an “is.” In other words, a value judgment cannot be validated by statements of fact. Many have tried, and none have succeeded, in erecting a bridge between the two. Take an example from moral philosophy. We might all agree that kicking puppies is wrong. But there is no fact – no observable feature of puppy kicking – which validates that conclusion. Yes, one can hear the puppy’s squeals, and point to the puppy’s evident pain – but it is always a leap beyond the facts to add that, by the way, it’s wrong for a puppy to suffer. The value judgement comes along afterwards, as it were, and adds something completely new to the picture.
Similarly with food. No matter how accurately and astutely one analyses the famous potatoes of chef Robuchon, there is no fact about them which makes them great (or good, or even bad). Praising the potatoes is a judgment supplementary to enumerating facts about the potatoes. Taste, then, cannot be reduced to what is purely objective. It’s almost as if, given the facts, a subjective “yay” or “boo” is added. But then, as we’ve seen, taste isn’t subjective either.
The Subjectivity of Taste
I can never resist lifting the lid on this hornet's nest. From last year's guide:
In all the years I’ve posted on food forums and discussed learned issues of gastronomy with my peers, and others, nothing has caused such ferocious debate as the question whether or not taste – in other words the evaluation of food and beverages – is subjective. Of course, few pause to consider what the word “subjective” itself might mean: everybody has an opinion, and will defend it to the death.
At first blush, the claim that taste is subjective is persuasive. “De gustibus, non est disputandum,” as a Roman once said; there’s just no disputing the fact that you like ice cream and I hate it, that you prefer Scotch and I prefer Bourbon, that this dish is too salty for me and not seasoned enough for you. And so on.
Of course, the more you think about the “de gustibus” phrase, the emptier it seems. Because, of course, we do dispute judgments of taste all the time. We expend much breath and countless thousands of typed words doing so. Critics explain why one painter is more accomplished than other, why one director makes better movies than another. And of course food writing is all about whether this restaurant or that dish is any good – and often whether it’s better or worse than the last restaurant or dish experienced.
Now if taste was truly subjective, such disputes could take place, but their content would be entirely vacuous. For all the trouble someone might take to point out reasons why Robuchon’s mashed potatoes are better than KFC’s, personal palate is the ultimate arbiter. All one is really saying in such a debate is “Yay, I like it,” or “Boo, I hate it,” and the rest is smoke and mirrors. Plausible?
Not really, once one introduces the idea of training or education. Anyone who goes to culinary school will be taught not just how to make things – from stocks to soups to pastries and jellies – but also how to make them right. He or she will taste the tutor’s example, compare it with their own effort, and say “Okay, I see why that’s better,” or “Hey, mine is pretty good too.” Step outside culinary school, and surely we all go through an educational process once we start tasting food, not to mention wine, with some purpose and seriousness. How many of us started out drinking the fresh table wines we could afford, and only gradually learned how much more there is to appreciate in wines made to age? I sometimes think that if the first champagne I had tasted had been an older vintage – golden, unbubbly, almost sherry-like – it might have put me off the stuff for life. You see, if taste is truly subjective, then the idea of learning to appreciate cuisine, wines, liquor, and so on, really makes no sense. A “boo” might change to a “yay” and back again, but no reason could consistently be given for the change.
If that doesn’t convince, consider the coincidence of tastes. Almost everyone thinks that putting maple syrup on fried sardines would be a bad idea (oh, I am sure some chef has done it, but you get my drift). If a woman in her first trimester of pregnancy expresses a craving for sardines and syrup, we instinctively regard it as an aberration (and an explicable one too). If taste was truly subjective, one would expect such preferences and dislikes to occur more randomly in the population. Similarly, one should be surprised that fondness for blue cheese and an appetite for mung beans are not evenly distributed among groups of French and Chinese diners. Why should they not be, if taste is spontaneously personal?
Ah, but, surely there are hardwire reasons why some tastes are appealing and some aversive; and in the cases of stinky cheese and sticky beans, custom and familiarity is at work. Fine: but let’s just point out that neither nature nor nurture are subjective. And nor is taste.
12/01/2010
Who was G. Selmer Fougner?
In Eating the Apple 2010, I wrote a piece which referenced the critic G. Selmer Fougner. A pioneer of New York food and wine journalism, he's long forgotten - swept aside by Craig Claiborne, much as Mencken swept aside Huneker. But in some ways he'll be the presiding genius over Eating the Apple 2011. Or in other words, I'll be stealing some of his ideas.
Meanwhile, here's that piece excerpted from the 2010 guide:
When a Tasting Menu is a Table d’Hôte
I recently found myself thumbing through a worn copy of G. Selmer Fougner’s 1939 masterpiece “Dining Out In New York (And What To Order).” As it happens, I wasn’t seeking restaurant advice – for that I go, of course, to the Michelin guide, and learn that Shalizar and The Spotted Pig are better restaurants than Craft – although a number of Fougner’s 1939 picks still prosper. Barbetta in the Theater District, for example; Jack and Charlie’s, better known as the 21 Club; Keens; Gallagher’s; Sardi’s.
Fougner was the author of a New York Sun column, “Along the Wine Trail,” and reigned from the post-Prohibition ‘30s for almost a decade as the city’s arbiter of wine and fine dining. As the little book’s subtitle implies, he tells you not only where to go, but what to eat when you get there. At Barbetta he recommends the veal chop Parmigiana and the sweetbreads with an “excellent brand of Chianti.” There is, he tells the reader, no table d’hôte. This is rare. Almost every restaurant listed offers a table d’hôte, from the grand (Louis Sherry on Park Avenue) to the humble (Reuben’s) and all the way down to Chinatown (China Clipper on Doyers), the table d’hôte – price based on choice of main dish – was the way to go. Even Billy the Oysterman’s two buck shore dinner is a table d’hôte in all but name.
Fougner’s examples make it clear that the table d’hôte was always a multi-course meal. Diners expected soup, salad or hors d’oeuvres, an entrée often followed by a roast, dessert and coffee. Reading through these listings, and trying not to worry about the 1928 Montrachet at $4.50 a bottle, it occurred to me that this is the way we eat today.
Few notable Manhattan restaurants today fail to offer what is almost universally called a “tasting menu.” Some menus are exclusively prix fixe, offering options priced according to number of courses. The “tasting menu” label, of course, is of French derivation: from “menu degustation” – although French restaurants also commonly call this long, show-off meal a “menu gourmand” or – if the courses are not listed but selected by the chef – “menu surprise.”
There is a difference in practice, however. Typically, the French tasting menu features not only extra courses, but dishes of unusual ambition and luxury not featured on the lesser prix fixe or the carte. Not so the typical tasting menu in Manhattan today. There are exceptions, of course – Per Se is an obvious one – but many restaurants offering a “tasting,” or even a “chef’s tasting,” really offer just an edited selection from their carte – and sometimes featuring the carte’s more mundane items. There are more courses, but of smaller size.
In other words, what we usually get when we grandly order the tasting menu is an old-fashioned table d’hôte. And something tells me they didn’t skimp on the portions back in 1939.
11/22/2010
The State of Offal
For those misguided souls who failed to purhcase the soon-to-be-priceless first edition of Eating the Apple, here's the first in a series of extracts.
***
Wise reader, you do not need me to tell you that one of the phenomena of the “noughts,” as we must apparently call the decade expiring, is the renaissance of offal as a fine dining ingredient. In New York, and not only here, we regale ourselves with oxtail and tripe, and assume a menu misprinted if sweetbreads and a pig’s foot are not to be found. This is quite a turnaround. There was a day, believe me, when hardly a restaurant in town served a cheeseboard, and many New York diners thought tripe a kind of fish.
Funnily enough, that latter whimsy rears its head in a recent New York Observer review of the phenomenon, “We’re Gaga for Guts!” by Meredith Bryan. As Ms Bryan points out, “offal—the animal parts that fall off the butcher table, like the entrails, head and feet—has progressed from a rare delicacy at risk-taking restaurants like Babbo, Prune and Michael White’s now-defunct Fiamma to a ubiquity of near–pork-belly proportions.” Among the exotica which have caught the imagination of the city – trotters, liver, and even kidneys. As an Englishman, raised by a cockney mother, I have to heave a sigh. Liver and bacon was a weekly dish in my childhood and kidneys were often breakfast. By no means unusual, not just for an Englishman of my generation, but for other Europeans – and, interestingly, for quite a few Americans too, if one extends one’s purview beyond a narrow segment of the population. Of course, even in terms of white tablecloth dining, what we are seeing is a regression not an evolution. Brains and sweetbreads – delicate fare and stalwarts of “la cuisine classique” – were fixtures on swanky menus until at least the nineteen sixties. Kidneys too, as “rognons de veau.” Pig’s feet, stuffed with foie gras and truffles admittedly, persisted on top London menus through the nineteen eighties. But why this sudden reversion to eating the bits butchers throw away?
The answer is to be found, not in the fickle palates of New York trend-setters, but in the even more precarious trajectory of the New York economy. Chefs honestly like offal. They have always wanted to sneak a bit onto the menu. They now have a reason to do so. Restaurant overheads, especially leases, have climbed steadily year by year. The price of ingredients, thanks in particular to the cost of transportation, has risen too. But when it’s hard to fill seats, one thing which cannot be permitted to rise is the cost of an entrée. Think about it. If you were eating out in this city ten years ago, what did you pay for a main course? Twenty bucks in an averagely decent restaurant maybe, rising steadily through the thirties as you went upmarket, peaking around forty-eight or fifty dollars at Lespinasse or for a big hunk of dry-aged beef at a good steakhouse.
Er, wait a minute. That’s what we pay today, even though just about every cost involved in running a restaurant has gone up. Restaurateurs are not dumb; those seats must be filled. The difference is that, by and large, we are paying those prices for beef shin rather than filet mignon, veal breast rather than escalopes, pork belly rather than loin, lamb neck rather than rack. Not to mention that we are paying quite a lot for hamburger, chicken and anything barbecued. The genius of the restaurant community lays in successfully persuading customers that this is what, or how, they want to eat. Of course, widening our focus, there are many New Yorkers who are entirely accustomed to eating these delicacies. Even Ms Bryan of the Observer acknowledges that the city’s Chinese, Dominican and other communities traditionally consume these inexpensive cuts. I wonder why? Of course, both closer to home and metaphorically more distant, there is something called “soul food.” Yes, Americans too – some Americans – cherish a tradition of pig’s feet and chitterlings and oxtail and tripe, a tradition born from, yes, poverty.
Whenever someone tells you we are eating more exotically because our tastes have changed, remind them of James Carville (or was it Karl Marx?): “It’s the economy, stupid.”
02/18/2010
02/12/2010
02/07/2010
01/31/2010
Eating The Apple 2010: Wilfrid's New York Dining Almanack
At last, there's a new guide in town.
An A-Z guide to over four hundred New York restaurants, from A&C Kitchen to Zum Schneider, from Nathan's Coney Island to Per Se. One voice, one critical view. Plus some of the highlights from the Pink Pig 2009 - reviews of Maialino, MinettaTavern, DBGB and more - and previously unpublished pieces on everything from offal to the subjectivity of taste.
Two hundred pages, original illustrations. Buy now and make a pig happy. Go to the next post for information about special savings on digital donwload.
From the pages of Eating The Apple:
On the Objectivity of Taste
If taste is not subjective, can it be objective? Many would say that the objectivity of taste is, for the most part at least, self-evident. Just as it is at some level idiotic to suppose that Andrew Lloyd-Webber writes finer orchestral music than Beethoven, so it could only be ignorance or some kind of aesthetic blindness which might lead someone to asset the superiority of William McGonagall’s poetry to that of William Shakespeare. It is equally clear, many gastronomes argue, that the achievements of a Robuchon or a Gagnaire in the kitchen outstrip the best efforts of Ronald McDonald. Case closed, one might suppose, even allowing for many more closely contested cases (is Henry James a better novelist than Joseph Conrad, or is Wendy’s better than Burger King?).
But diligence asks us to consider more closely what “objective” means here. In fact, it’s a rather vague tag. At the very least, it simply might refer to a matter which reasonable people can discuss in hope of agreement. This emphasizes the publicity of the “objective” as opposed to the privacy of the “subjective.” No-one, the thought is, can look inside my head and approve or disapprove my subjective reactions; but anyone can examine something which is publicly available. In other words, in the case of food, emphasis shifts from internal reactions to what is out there on the plate. Fair enough, but does it mean something more? I think that for fervent objectivists (small “o”), it refers to the belief that questions of taste can be finally decided by examination of what is in the public realm. In other words, there are facts – tangible, publicly observable facts – which make it true (or false) to say that this is a great dish, here is excellent meat, I am drinking a superior wine. And so on.
This is important to fervent objectivists, as it seems to provide the promise of a solid foundation to say to someone else, “You are just wrong about this.” It is more satisfying to them than just to be able to say, “I understand you like it, but shut up.” (excerpt)
01/30/2010
Special Savings On Digital Download
Eating the Apple is available not only in a paperback edition, but also as a digital download at half price.
$8.00 and available immediately.
Not much more than the price of a craft beer. How can you resist?
