Can't get a good steak in France or Italy

Epicurean Exploits - Food and Recipes
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Bill Klapp you are espousing a philosophy about life. You are not making a coherent argument about cuisine. The fact that a restaurant like Villa Crespi or Da Vittorio spends more time making a bowl of pasta than a local trattoria is not a matter of opinion. I assure you that if one were to catalog what they do at each one, you will be able to quantify the difference as a matter of man hours, both in terms of how much training the chefs preparing the pasta have, and the effort that went in to achieving perfection in that instance. What I have said to you, and others here, is that when I go to a place like Da Vittorio, I can taste that effort. And the reason I can taste the effort is not because I am in pursuit of status, It is because I have enough tasting experience to be able to do it. And compiling knowledge on what makes cuisine tick is a topic I am interested in. It is not any different than wanting to understand what makes Lafitte a First Growth, Pichon Lalande a Second Growth, and Haut Batailley a Fifth Growth.

So whether a fish that was just pulled from a body of water and thrown in a sauté pan with some lemon can be delicious is not at issue. I agree with you that it can. But the better chef (read craftsman) will make the better end product. That is true if the subject of their efforts it a truffle, or a mere potato. It has to do with skill. Home cooks and trattoria cooks simply lack the skills that you find in top restaurant chefs. And if you do not agree with that what you are really saying is that you can’t taste the difference. You can not deflect the fact that you can’t taste the difference by trying to say I practice this hobby to seek status. Why I practice the hobby is not at issue. The real issue is why you can’t taste the difference? I must know 1000 people who can taste the difference. Why can’t you?

How this applies to France v Italy is as follows. When I dine in France, the indicia that I described above about refinement is typically present. That is true at both haute cuisine restaurants and simple bistros. It is part of their culinary culture. But when I visit restaurants in Italy, or the UK, or in Germany or in Spain, that element is not present to the same extent as what I find in France. As a result the food is not as refined. That isn’t to say the food is not delicious. But it is missing a certain element in terms of how it is crafted that adds something that is intangible.

Now whether that element should be present in order to enjoy one’s food is a completely different question. Bill claims that it isn’t. But I know very few people who have learned a skill and who are happy evaluating things in a more primitive way. That holds true for wine collectors, cineophiles, opera buffs fashionistas and diners. Craftsmanship is unavoidable, and things are either well crafted or they lack craft. And while personal enjoyment of a dining experience based on location, mood or any other external or romantic influence that Bill can think of can be highly satisfying, it is in no way a substitute for phenomenal craftsmanship.

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Steve, I am writing to Food Network to see if they are interested in a new project starring you, tentative title “The Food Bigot”, or maybe “The Culinary Racist”. You could not be more wrong, more ignorant nor more short-sighted than to believe that craft applied to something that has no need of it results in a better product. I am at a total loss to explain how you would come up with such a half-assed notion. Here is what you miss in your myopic view: I have eaten at all of Villa Crespi, Da Vittorio and Da Renzo (mentioned in an earlier post). All are very good, but two of the three, Villa Crespi and Da Renzo, are overrated. They are better suited to the palates of Michelin judges than those who know the best Italian cuisine. The important point, however, is this: I can show you two family-run places here that produce pasta dishes that eclipse anything that the other three grand ristoranti can deliver. You cannot eat or taste the process, Steve, nor is experience any guarantee of quality. You cannot consistently buy excellence, either. This much is true: if I pay a thousand dollars for sushi at Masa, I am reasonably confident that I will be getting some of the finest ingredients on earth, flown to New York at absurd effort and expense. I will also get a snootful of craft. However, dining at Masa is only one approach to experiencing great food. I could no doubt find identical ingredients in Japan and elsewhere for a fraction of the cost. I may find better ingredients and preparations elsewhere for a fraction of the cost because Masa knows what he knows, but cannot know everything. And I might well go to a beer joint called Lakeview on Lake Ponchartrain in New Orleans and eat a hollowed-out loaf of white bread, toasted and slathered with butter, and then filled with unimaginably fresh fried shrimp and oysters. You can tell me that Masa’s craft is vastly more developed to the local woman frying the shrimp and oysters, and I can agree. You can tell me that France has over 60 types, sizes and shapes of oysters,mall of which are superior to American Gulf oysters for most purposes, and I can agree. What you cannot do, not now, not ever, not with 17 trainloads of subjective culinary bullshitting being passed off as objectivity regarding taste, which is a completely subjective and personal phenomenon (and in this, your tasting committee may be more reliable than Robert Parker at times, but that is a bar so slow that you cannot limbo under it), is tell me that the Masa meal is in any way better, or more satisfying, or the product of a higher art, than my oyster-shrimp loaf. In a perfect life, one will experience both and appreciate each for what it is. If you miss the oyster loaf, though, Steve, you will have pissed away sackfuls of money and eaten a lot of mediocre food along the way in your quest for supreme expressions of culinary genius. It is your money and your life, and I am not here to tell you what to do with either. I am here to tell you that if culinary temples were the be-all, end-all, they would not have the brief shelf lives that they do, and they would not lose investors the fortunes that they lose. Mine is a thoroughly coherent argument about cuisine, Steve, and unlike yours, it is comprehensive, open-minded and inclusive. It is not about bald assertions about my palate and tasting experience as yours is. It is not about your assurances backed by nothing but your own biases and speculations. It comes from real-world, on-the-ground, no-holds-barred love of food in all of its incarnations. I can taste the difference between Masa sushi and fried oysters, Steve, just as well as you and your 1,000 can. However, I am bright and perceptive enough to realize that the two are, in the words of a member here, Bill Boykin, merely two equally beautiful facets of the same perfect diamond, and making bogus and unsupportable quality judgments about them may satisfy your ego, but will not impact the equally satisfactory and pleasurable experiences at all. Context will trump craft every time in human experience…

And of course, more to come. I am not warmed up yet! It could even be that you have sad something above with which I can agree!

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Steve, I took the liberty of copying the text of several of your posts from the Walker Barolo thread here. While now out of sequence, I felt that it is important to have the collected works of Steve Plotnicki in one place!

Ray Walker does Barolo
Post #189 Post by Steve Plotnicki » 12 Jan 2014 21:08
Gee I haven’t been involved in the French versus Italian debate in years. In fact, I don’t think there is anyone in my current circle of online friends who would take the position that Italian is better. That debate sort of became subsumed in the debate between French restaurants that are ingredient intensive, and who use traditional culinary technique, and those who are technique driven. It’s funny it’s the exact same debate except it revolves around black truffles and turbot rather than pasta! Anyway, my allergy to wheat was really an intolerance, and it turned out to be a function of a genetic heart condition that was discovered when I had thyroid surgery about three and a half years ago. That condition was corrected, and I am now able to (once again) eat all sort of breads and pastas like I did before the condition began in 1990. These days my favorite thing about visiting France is eating bread and butter. I could probably go for days with just bread and butter and skip the rest of the food. Anyway, back in the day, the pasta argument was really about the following issue. The fact that Italian cuisine had a course that was dedicated to starch was evidence of an inherent weakness. The pasta course is born from the cuisine not being Bourgoise enough to develop the way French cuisine developed. The French were wealthy and they could afford to invent a cuisine that was based on large hunks of protein and vegetables. Italians were less wealthy (in fact they weren’t even a country until 1874) , and they created a cuisine based around pairing a starch with small amounts of cheaper cuts of proteins and vegetables whose taste was camouflaged by some type of sauce. Now is that scientific proof that one is better than the other? Well it’s not like 1 + 1 = 2. But when the goal of one cuisine is to create lamb en croute, and the other is to create a lamb sugo that you intend to spoon over a paste of water and flour, it is easy to draw inferences about superiority/ Let’s face it, it is rare for lower aspirations to have more success than loftier aspirations. I mean show me an instance where steak tidbits are valued as much as an entire steak? Having said all of that, since my ban on wheat has been lifted, I have taken a number of trips to Italy to eat. And I can tell you that the best way to describe what Italy excels at is home-style cooking that is based on micro-regionality. In fact the ingredients are so location intensive that you can cross the border from Lombardy into Emilia Romana and have a difficult time finding high quality ingredients from the Lombardy region. And while I had some great meals featuring regional cooking - Coccchi in Parma, Cavallino Bianco in Polesine Parmense, Lorenzo in Forte dei Marmi and Romano in Viareggio, which is where Michael White of Marea trained, to name a few, the level of excellence they strive for does not match what you will find at the very best restaurants. The really good fine dining restaurants I have visited in Italy, though somewhat regional in nature, have little or nothing to do with Italian cooking and cuisine as we all know it. Rather they practice a style of cooking that is transient, and which can be practiced anywhere. It’s just that they happen to be using it to prepare ingredients raised in Italy, along with certain
dishes that diners would immediately recognize as being Italian. Now if you can excuse me I am going to have some burratta for lunch,

Ray Walker does Barolo
Post #213 Post by Steve Plotnicki » 13 Jan 2014 18:03
How many pieces of evidence would you like me to post showing that pasta is at a lower level than whole protein dishes? I mean let’s start out with what a box of pasta costs compared to what even good hamburger meat costs. Then let’s go on to note that while every culture makes flour, and has a water supply, hardly any of them have a mandatory course based around starch. And as you unpeel the onion, you will find that cultures that have a starch course as part of their meal, did so as a matter of need and not preference. I can go on and on. Now of course that isn’t the same as saying that pasta is not delicious. It clearly is. But the issue isn’t whether it tastes good, the issue is, how can a cuisine be considered so great, when the confines of what chefs could create were so limited by cost? The French had no such limitation, and their cuisine reflects it. Same with the Chinese and Japanese. I love Chinese food and I eat it all of the time. But the cuisine doesn’t have the same quest for excellence that you find in Japanese food. The Japanese were far wealthier than the Chinese, did not have the types of population problems that they had in China so there were less mouths to feed, which allowed their cuisine to be shaped by an upper middle class that could afford to demand excellence. I can’t tell you how many top sushi chefs have discussed the various qualities of rice with me, how they polish it themselves etc. Have you ever heard of a single Chinese chef caring about the rice they use? The same level of particularity is just not there. So to me, not only is it not logical to claim that a cuisine with less particularity is superior to one where the chefs have spent countless hours trying to make something more perfect, you can see those differences in the food if you are trained to taste them. I mean isn’t it the same for wine?

Ray Walker does Barolo
Post #218 Post by Steve Plotnicki » 13 Jan 2014 18:18
I have a busy morning and I am flying up to New York City later today so I am not sure how much time I have to post. But let me say the following. I have found that most people compare things objectively, until their level of understanding is reached. Then remarkably, once that threshold is reached, they claim that taste is subjective. I can show you thousands of posts on discussion forums where people wax poetic about wines based on the various qualities (objective) they have discerned. But as soon as they can’t taste the differences between Wine A and Wine B, because their level of experience or knowledge has been reached, they switch the standard they use and they claim it is a matter of subjective taste.

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Honestly, i have been to france once and italy zero, but if i wanted a great “steak” this is not where i would be looking. Im sure there might be some places that do a good steak but i would bet most, not so much. These two countries do other food much better. When in Rome, the saying goes.

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It is hard, probably impossible, to beat the best U.S. beef. The IDEA of Kobe beef appeals to me, and I can appreciate the attraction, but I find it to be insipid and bland. If I am going to eat beef, I want it to taste like beef and to deliver texture appropriate to the cut

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Some of us raised on the best England, Scotland and Ireland have to offer prefer ‘meaty’ flavour over sweeter fat, and prefer a more stern texture.

Not better or worse but different.

I agree on Kobe and the best Japanese beef, better for Shabu Shabi than steak IMHO (and that of a couple of chefs I asked in Tokyo and Kyoto).

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Bill who are you to tell me, and all the other people who care, that ingredients should not be prepared to the level of perfection that we seek? That’s the part I can’t understand about your silly argument. It’s like telling people who play golf, and who enjoy playing at Championship courses, that they can enjoy themselves just as much by playing at their local municipal course. If they could they wouldn’t bother flying to Scotland or Pebble Beach to play and they could just drive over to their local course in New Jersey.

That is the issue here. You say that a perfect ingredient does not need a skilled chef to prepare it be enjoyable. But in my experience, I usually do not enjoy it unless it is. There can only be two explanations for that. I taste something that you can’t taste and that difference matters to me, or I am fooling myself. But that would mean that everyone else who feels the same way I do, which is probably a few million people, are fooling themselves which is a statistical impossibility.

I have had this discussion hundreds of time and it always ends the same way. And not only about food. The person with a lesser understanding of the topic insists that his level of understanding is sufficient to create a standard that everyone else should live by. He then comes up with a whole series of ways to show the other person wrong, which are mostly directed at the other person’s character, of why he is espousing the correct standard. And as I said earlier, that is the main reason I stopped posting on discussion forums: I was tired of arguing with people who ignored all of the salient facts surrounding the topic, and insisted that their opinion, should be the standard everyone lives by.

Having said all of that, and having proved that your characterization of my motivation is a statistical impossibility, there is only one issue left to deal with. Do you reject superior craftsmanship because of an ideological reason, or is it that you do not have the ability to appreciate it? Because I don’t think I ever met anyone who had the ability to appreciate something in a sophisticated way, who rejected it for a more primitive analysis. But go ahead, Convince me that you have adopted that position as matter of choice and not ignorance.

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And why should it be so? better than the best Danish beef, than the best French beef, than the best Spanish beef, I, D, NOR, …
You just don’t know and can’t say.
You are taking your acquired taste and make it absolute, not so different in logic with what Steve is doing with cooking…

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And of course,you will be the decider of this,yes?
It’s really very simple.
Steve,all your blather,all your jive just,in the end …comes down to this…when pressed,when you find yourself becoming more than a little uncomfortable that your schtick isn’t going over so well,you take refuge and run with that tired old gambit of," I know more than you,I really do.Why?Because I said so…and it must be true,yes,I’m sure of it…and so we can’t discuss it any further,because your level of understanding is just not up to mine.
You can’t even recognize the salient facts surrounding the topic…haarumph,and do you know why?Because I haven’t told you what they are yet…"

So convenient.
So lame.
So silly.

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Bill Baykin - I am certainly not the decider. I am espousing a standard that is used by multiple sources including Michelin, Veronelli, Gault Millau etc. Bill Klapp is the one who has decided that there is no need to impose the high standard they use. And my question to Bill is, what right does he have to be the person who decides that? I am just practicing the hobby of dining in a way that is widely accepted. It is Bill that is arguing for a different standard. On what basis does he claim that the standard that they use is wrong, and the standard he is arguing for is the correct standard to use?

Andreadago - American steakhouses are filled with Europeans who are seeking out high quality US beef, and giant lobsters. I can tell you this is true from personal experience as many people, including some three star chefs, write me to ask where to eat steak in the U.S. But you will not find that Americans are searching out the best beef in Europe in the same way. Any guess why that is?

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It’s because good corn fed beef is very scarce in the UK and high end steakhouses are a new phenomenon in the UK at least.

But Goodman and Hawksmoor amongst others are filled with Americans too.

Though there’s no question that Scottish lobsters trounce those from North America, as do those from Brittany and Cornwall.

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Who says?I see no referrals to any of these sources in your writings,just your opinions and your sorry simplistic attempts to relegate all who disagree with your “opinions” as less intelligent,experienced,sophisticated…and to protect all these self espoused “standards” as those being practiced in a widely accepted manner.Hogwash.
By who?
Who says?
You?

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You know in many way this discussion reminds me of the silly discussions I used to have with Bob Parker and Rovani about the way they evaluated red Burgundy. Their position was that because they had come up with a way of evaluating Bordeaux that had worked, that the correct way to evaluate Burgundy, and all other wines for that matter, was to use the same standard. Problem was, there was not a single serious Burgundy drinker who thought they used the correct standard. I noticed this FACT, so I probed them on line, incessantly and over a series of years, to try and get them to explain why they were right. Eventually I wore them down and they answered. You know what their basis was? Since their thesis worked for Bordeaux, IT WAS ONLY LOGICAL that it applies to wines of all regions. Which in reality means that they had no basis. They merely had a hunch based on a theory and they had no specific evidence to offer that they were right. They couldn’t even point to a single other reviewer or authority who agreed with their methodology.

What I always found amazing about Bob and Pierre was not that they reached such a boneheaded conclusion - one could easily conclude that they didn’t really understand what made Burgundy tick -, but that they dismissed any evidence that they were not assessing it correctly out of hand. And no matter how many other serious Burgundy collectors and reviewers you could point to, they refused to acknowledge that doing it any other way was legitimate. Not only that, if you did not agree with them you were a crackpot who knew nothing about wine.

It’s the same thing here. It is one thing to say to someone they are using the wrong standard to reach a conclusion. But I don’t understand how you say that when the conclusion was reached using a generally accepted standard. So just like Bob & Pierre, the issue is why does Bill Klapp not accept the standard that is generally accepted in the dining community, and who the hell is he to tell us we are wrong?

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Bill Boykin does not want to accept my bona fides. Well then just click the link below. If you can’t figure it out, I am neither the Asian male or woman. Nor do I have a British accent or am I a fashion model from Lithuania.

http://www.b-reel.com/projects/feature-films/case/489/foodies/

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This is a joke,right?
Tell me it’s just a joke.
Please.
Otherwise it is just a poor example of fatuous fluff that speaks of nothing other than an ego searching for sustenance…

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Joke? It’s a 90 minute to two hour documentary made by the Swedish version of the BBC that is being released as a feature film in the spring. They followed five well known food bloggers around the world filming them eating in restaurants, and interviewing the chefs at the restaurants they ate in. They interview something like 20 different chefs, and they did an hour with Albert Adria when they filmed me. They came to Barcelona to film my lunch at El Quim and my dinner at 41 Degrees. They also filmed the press lunch I hosted at Saturne in Paris when I released the results of my 2013 European dining survey, as well as at Aska and WD-50 in NYC. And they filmed me having lunch at Katz’s Delicatessen which included an entertaining interview I did with the owner. They also filmed me cooking lunch at my home in the Hamptons with the chefs John Shields and Karen Urie. In the U.S. the film has been picked up by the same distributor who distributed Supersize Me and Jiro Sushi of Dreams.

I have not seen the final cut of the film, but it is about whether the group of hard core and dedicated foodies who travel all over the world to eat add something to the dining culture, and what they might add if so. Of course, Bill Klapp would dismiss the group of people that constitute the subject matter of the film as being in it for some untoward reason. But those people look like they are pretty dedicated diners to me, ones who have an actual interest in the subject matter they are interested in, and who probably have a hell of a lot more knowledge about food than Bill does. The part I like best is when Katie picks up that piece of fish on her fork and smells it. It is no different than what someone would do when smelling their glass of wine don’t you think?

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Congratulations.

And yet you don’t even know how fish are sold at Tsukiji or the basic economic and political history of Asia over thousands of years.

Guess that’s what happens in scientific endeavors and other pursuits of knowledge when we trade breadth for depth.

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Faulkner - As someone who recently enjoyed a 7 pound specimen at Burger & Lobster in Mayfair (among other large lobsters I have had in Europe over the year,) I can tell you that Scottish lobster is not as good as what we have in the U.S. The Canadian lobster (the species which is found in the NE of the US) is the best tasting of the lobsters that develop into large creatures. I am not sure why that is the case because in almost every other instance I can think of, the fish and seafood that comes from European waters is superior to those from American waters.

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I feel like I’m in Bizzaro World…
So this is what you think will buttress your ramblings,your opinions about anything?
Really?
This I, me, mine boasting is your …“bona fides?”

OK

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Hey, easy! I may never eat another U.S. steak! You are right. There is beef from many places that I have not tasted. And nothing is ever the best because simply it comes from America, sayeth the ex-pat. (Well, nothing but worldwide economic collapse caused by greedy, irresponsible bankers. There are some contenders here, in France and in Great Britain, but they are amateurs compared to Wall Street’s own!) But seriously…Americans are among the top per capita beef consumers on earth, and have devoted a lot of energy to producing the best beef that they can. But we need to add the top two beef-eating countries, Uruguay and Argentina, to the list…