Rick is out on his bike ( again!), and I have a half hour or so to fill in before I take the dogs down below for their predinner exercise, so thought I'd write about this book, having just finally finished it.

It took awhile to read, becos as I mentioned in an earlier blog, the style is dense and the tone angry, and every so often I'd have to put it down and  mull over and digest what I'd read, before ploughing on.

The author was also the director for the movie that came out a few years ago, " Mondovino' and as a result of reading the book I've now bought the complete set of DVDs becos the original movie was about 2 hours long I think, so there was obviously a huge amount of material cut, becos in the DVD set, there's 10 hours of viewing. Will save that for the next rainy day, for which I probably won't have to wait long!

I loved it. But then I'm a naturally left leaning liberal who's a sucker for any business story about small and artisanal being better than big and international corporate. It just naturally fits into my world view, even as I did find some of the parellels that Mr Nossiter drew to be a little extreme even for me!

He was sounding a call to the barricades - implying that the end of the world of wine as we know it, is nigh, becos of the unethical machinations of a few, who would have us all drinking boring wine, undistinguishable from one country to the next.

I tend to be a little more pragmatic in my beliefs, and figure that this is all part of the pendulum swing - and currently as he states, the Robert Parkers, and Wine Spectators may have a disporportionate amount of clout, in dictating what wine styles are popular, but they too ( just like the Roman Empire!) will eventually fall, and the pendulum will swing back to more individual styles that speak of terroir and which have 'mysterious depths to their flavour'.

In fact I don't believe those wines have ever gone away - they've just been superseded by the noise in the marketplace about  the more modern, international style in prominance currently. Becos I know a number of wine makers who are not making wine to taste like everyone else, and who are allowing the grapes and yeasts to tell their own story, just as he describes so evocatively of the vignerons in Burgunday that he especially admired. Brian Bicknell who spoke at the Mahi dinner last week, is a classic example of such a winemaker, here in New Zealand, where we don't have centuries old tradition passed on in families, but we do have no less committement to quality.

In every field of endeavour there are always those who care more about the quality of what they do, then the bottom line. Needless to say, we are, none of us, sustainable if the bottom line doesn't feature positive figures periodically, and that is a consideration that has to be ever present, but it isn't necessarily always the defining factor. For some of us...

And then there are those who care more about money than they do anything else, and for those types Mr Nossiter reserves a very special degree of contempt, and his depiction of them is black beyond redemption.

His own wine palate is extraordinary - he has travelled extensively and drunk many wines over the years, and retains an enviable ability for recall. I made a note to myself that it was time to push out of my comfort zone with drinking - too easy to stay with what you know, and to start exploring further afield, becos in amongst the many gems of comments that he drops thru the book, was one I particullarly agreed with;

' the choice of wines is like the choice of friends - it reveals instantly character and taste'

Touche.

We live in a global world. The changes and possibilites wrought in the last 40 years by the speeding up and convenience of international transportion means that people and goods, can travel remarkably faster than has ever being known before. And naturally that is going to change things in ways that haven't been considered before, and not all those changes are on the dark side, although some of them doubtless will be. But I think thats life-theres no perfect resolution to any problem, only degrees of compromise.

I don't enjoy the glitziness of Wine Spectator, it just doesn't sit comfortably with me - and I don't pay much attention to Wine Competitions or what self appointed wine critics say about wine. I use what I read in the media as pointers only - and beyond that I go with my own palate, and those of people I know personally, who's palates I respect. Becos I do totally agree with Mr Nossiter when he states:

-" current fashion for creating spuriously authoritative hierarchies based solely on the taste of individuals, be they critics or sommeliers. These are systems of classification based solely on personal taste - and it is not the 'truth'".

No - truth is personal. What you like and what suits you, regardless of what the critics of this world may or may not decree.

I ordered this book thru Amazon a couple of weeks back, and while I waited for the parcel to duly arrive on my doorstep, I happened to read a number of reviews of it, in the various magazines that I get. Most of which were lukewarm at best, and all of which focused on the liberal sprinkling of swear words that Mr Bourdain brings to bear in his narrative.

And in doing so, having now read the book, I feel they somewhat missed the whole point.

Tony Bourdain is a complex character - previously a line cook at an average ( by his summation) bistro in New York, having followed a checqued and unspectacular career path, from one restaurant to another, while acquiring a heroin and cocaine habit, and some other less than pretty social habits along the way.

The publication of his previous book on that life ' Kitchen Confidential", catapulted him into the public eye, and onto TV. He is now well known as the chef who will travel anywhere and eat anything.

But again he is so much more than that. He has watched the evolution of the restaurant scene in the States, and his commentary on the star chefs, and the media commentators - people who he has actually got to know personally,  who thrive thru an almost unhealthy symbiosis with each other is truly, wickedly honest. Spectacularly so in fact. I have got used to the fact the in the blogshere, people seem willing to make vicous and inane comments, protected I guess, by a certain degree of anonymitiy. This man has no such privacy, and is still not at all deterred from calling things exactly the way he sees them.

Personal vendetta's will find much to fester over in this book - but if his chapter on what a particular restaurant critic wrote about the New Orleans restaurant a year on from them being devastated by the hurricane, is even only partially an unbiased account, then the man really is as much a douchebag as Tony claims.  Actually he calls him much worse...

His description of the evolution, and deterioration, of the Food Network, matches exactly my own mutterings, but he has more inside knowledge than I do as to why that has happened. And I love the way he hates anything that is pretenscious or false. Doesn't just hate it, but describes it in such devastating prose, as to completely and utterly demolish it all.

Food critics, wannabe chefs, food network bureaucrats, those types who like to tell as what we should and shouldn't be doing, anything and everything that is mediocre he slams. Totally and utterly annihilates actually.

And I loved it! I loved it becos I get so weary of the amount of selfdellusionment that is out there - the people who haven't done the hard yards, who think they are entitled to sit in judgement; the dangerous dependency that is created by the need for restaurant businesses to win awards to gain visibility. That process empowers the wrong sort of people - its creates a whole seperate universe of ego driven superficiality that I hate, loathe and detest, and to have this man pontificate at length about just why he finds it all abhorrant was indeed delightful for me to read.

He is angry, constantly, and about many things ( must be hell to live with!), but there is much about the approach to food in modern America that bothers him - and he acknowledges that fact saying that ' its more an affliction than the expression of any high minded ideals". But so much makes him angry becos he sees so much in the food world that is blatently wrong and dishonest.

And then he allocates a whole chapter to a man who spends 8 hours every day filleting the various fish ( 700kg ) a day, that come whole to Le Bernardin restaurant in New York. As one of the best restaurants in America, it means that the standards are incredibly high and Tony's description of standing watching this incredibly skilled chef slice and work his way thru all that fish, while ensuring that every single piece of fish will live up to the standard and reputation that the name of the restaurant demands.

That is what Tony Bourdain most respects. Someone with skill, and craft and discipline. Someone who wants to be the very best they can be everyday, and who cares about how, what they do fits with everyone else in the kitchen. Someone who's sense of pride in doing a job well, is more important than their ego. Someone who is real.

Alot of other people comment on the restaurant industry - not many of them have the credentials to do so, but Tony Bourdain most definitely does in my book. Even with all the opportunities that have come his way with the fame and the fortune, he has never forgotten, as Kenny Shopsin so wisely put it '...the pitfalls of loosing your self doubt". His ego has never taken over - and I think he's fabulous!!

It was interesting to read these books one after the other to get a feeling for the similarities and then the distinctions between two generations of restaurant royalty in England.

Michel Roux snr opened La Gavroche in London with his brother Albert in 1967. It garnered 3 Michelin stars early on - and has held onto them ever since, making it a true icon, in the correct sense of that word!

Both Michel and his brother learnt to become chefs in the time honoured fashion of that generation by doing the hard yards. Both of them started in patissiere - apprenticed at what seems the ridiculously young age of 14, to our more modern sensibilites. They then worked in private homes for the likes of the Rothschilds, learning to hone their understanding of luxery ingredients for employers who had no notion of budgetary restraints.

It was Albert who thought that there were exciting possibilites in England , becos at that stage it was considered devoid of seriously good food- and according to this memoir, from the day Le Gavroche opened it was busy, proving that the English were ready for a restaurant that took what it did very seriously.

His memoir is a delightful tale of a singular talent, honed and  expanded by the opportunities that came his way. They were clever businessmen who quickly expanded into other more casual style eateries and a charcuterie, but they never lost the inclination or desire to put in the hard yards themselves. Even if that meant getting up in the early hours of the morning to go to the markets themselves to do the shopping - having worked a 14 hour day on the preceding day.

As their reknown grew, they were flown to exotic places to do catering  for very wealthy people ( including the Kremlin - where the Russian chefs, showed their petulance at being upstaged by a French chef, by indulging in not so subtle sabotage!), and have lived life large.

Michel Roux snr is an egoist. He couldn't have achieved all that he has, without a healthy self regard, and this comes thru in all sorts of ways. The relationship between he and his brother broke down eventually, meaning that he went on to open his open restaurant 'Waterside Inn', which also became a 3 star restaurant. His nephew describes the relationship rather tactfully, as 'sibling rivalry'.

They have published cookbooks in tandem, the one on pastry is one we have referred too for years, and understanding now that his early training was in one of Paris' top patissieres of the time, I now get why it is such a tightly focused reference.

He is fiercly proud Frenchman who has lived most of his adult life in England, and who has been seminal, along with his brother in training at some point a whole host of the top chefs, who gain media dominance today. The likes of Gordon Ramsey,  Marcus Wareing and Pierre Koffman all started in those kitchens. Their influence on a whole generation of restaurateurs has been huge. A fascinating story.

Michel Roux Jnr, is the son of Albert, and named after his uncle - who has gone on to take over the running of Le Gavroche in the early 90s, on his fathers retirement.

This book describes his journey to become a master chef, while being simulaneously, hampered and assisted by having such a famous surname. There is no doubt that the contacts his father and uncle had, opened doors for him, - a simple phone call and request from them, made things possible- into some of the most important kitchens in France, but once there he had to prove he was worthy of the association, and obviously felt it to be a burden on occasion.

Again he started in pastry, then went on to work at the Elysee Palace, before going to Alain Chapels restaurant, and then home to England to start working in the family business. Some of his storys of the catering jobs they did, were fascinating - high end cooking for over a 1000 people, in an area with no commercial kitchen.

Eventually he took over the kitchen at La Gavroche and talks about how hard that was becos of the 3 generations of customers that had been coming since its inception , who were initially resistant to the idea of any change.

'Taking over was a huge responsibility because of the Le Gavroche name and becos of its history. Le Gavroche doesn't go in and out of fashion and many of our clients have been coming here for years.
So at first I changed absolutely nothing, not for the first couple of years anyway. That's why the comments about things not being the same rankled so much. Bloody idiots, They thought they were gourmets and they couldn't even taste the cheese properly. '

Ah yes! - the joys of dealing with complaints from uninformed customers who think they know, when in reality they're talking a load of tosh. Always somewhat reassuring for me to read that it happens even at that level of dining!

At the back of this book is a description of a day in the life of the restaurant - how the kitchen brigade of 22, and the front of house staff of 22 attend to matters with a total obsession on the perfection of detail. It is extraordinary.

I have half an hour before Holly arrives to accompany me to The Elms, where we'll by setting up champagne to serve to guests after a wedding ceremony. From there I shoot up to Ambiance, up Pyes Pa Rd, where all the other staff will be assembling, to serve the rest of the wedding dinner.
We know the bridal family very well, which always creates a nice level of familiarity, but doesn't detract from the fact that its the bride and grooms special day, and we want everything to go of without a hitch for them.

The one thing we can't control or organise is the weather, and I hope I'm not tempting fate by saying that is starting to look promising. What clouds that are around don't look like they're going to come to much, so hopefully, we will be lucky!

Friends in for dinner last nite were talking about relatives who also do catering in  another town, and who do over 60 weddings in a year. Sometimes 3/4  in one weekend. I can't begin to imagine the amount of emotional and physical energy that goes into that kind of volume - its simply massive. We have cut back on the number  we do - becos they involve so much, and maybe we're just getting older, but unloading the truck at 2am in the morning, when you started the previous day at about 9am - does kind of give rise to questions like, 'why do we do this again?!"

We do it, I know, becos the people involved matter to us, and its always a priviledge to be involved in the big occasions in someones life, but with that comes a very weighty responsibility to get it right, and that isn't something we carry lightly.

Cooked lunch for Rick so we both had something to eat before I headed off. Ironically even though you're surrounded by food, its easy to forget to eat on days like this, so I try and make a point of having something. Bulghar wheat today - tossed with some goat cheese, roasted eggplant, tomatoes and mint. Distinctly stodgy - but stomach filling, and will keep us going for the next little while.

Opened a bag that had arrived from one of the second hand book shops that I get linked to via Amazon to discover the autobiography of Michel Roux, one of the 2 Roux brothers who opened their first restaurant La Gavroche in London in 1967, and who with their sons, continue to be involved in that and other 3 star establishments to this day. A quite remarkable achievement I feel!  Looks very promising, but didn't want to delve in too deep, becos it would distract my thought process too much, so have reluctantly closed it, to come back to another day.

Did however finish last nite 'Lunch in Paris', a gentle delightful tale, of an American who falls in love with a Frenchman, and goes to Paris to live with him and eventually marry him. The book is a clever description of the process of her coming to grips with living in Paris, and with learning to meld the differences between the way Americans approach life to the European outlook.

I thought initially it was going to be all sweetness and light, but in fact it never descended into being cloying. Her take on people is genuine and real, and a pleasure to read.

Included with each chapter are recipes appropriate to what has been descriped in the preceding pages. Her love for food obviously growing as she familiarised herself with the french way. A number of the recipes looked practical and useable I thought, and will go back to them at a later date.

My desire to fall in love with a frenchman is zilch - that role is already amply filled, but I could definitely imagine myself slipping away to live in Paris for awhile. There is just something about that city that evokes a need, and books like this do nothing to quell the ambition, even though she is completely upfront about the downsides of trying to assimilate into a culture that goes about things differently to what I am used too.

Larry left these books for me when he was in NZ last year, and I've just finished the second one today. The author wasn't someone I was familiar with, but apparently he was wellknown in the States as a novelist.

Before he decided to be a writer he trained as a chef, and worked at some of the great hotels in Europe in the 40s and 50s, back at a time when those huge hotels, relics of the belle epoque era were falling out of fashion, and gradually disappearing.

These were hotels where ' the staff quarters were seven stories up under the slates of the roof, with two hundred staff in each wing, ( men east, women west) and room above the central block for two hundred more - the maids, the valets, and chauffeurs brought by the guests.'

A world that disappeared with the devastation wrought by the second world war.

His description of being trained in those kitchens - where there was a rigorous separation into different specialities, and a ghastly adherance to rules and regulations handed down from the time of Escoffier, paint a world that has long gone now.

But it makes for intriguing reading nonetheless.

And then in the "Cookbook", he describes in his leisurely prose how to cook a few dishes in a style more reminiscent of a novel than a cookbook. And that is deliberate becos he argues that most cookbooks don't teach people how to cook, they are more just a list of instructions that don't provide the right kind of information.
By contrast he doesn't even list ingredients, but instead explains to the reader the process of oldfashioned country cooking, that, had we all grown up in an idyllic country setting, we would have learnt from the knee of our grandmother. Regretfully most of us didn't get that  sort of start to our cooking career, but reading Mr Freeling is to absorb some of the instruction.

He is however, a somewhat cynical human being, and some of his asides about humans and life in general are barbed in the extreme.

    'The human being is such a creature of habit that he falls easily into laziness and monotony. He dislikes both the effort of altering his basic conceptions and the need for concentration in carrying out new or at least unaccustomed movements, and this applies to cooking and cooks as much as to musicians, politicians or physicians. The cooks falls easily into narrow and hidebound ways, and while the strength of regional cooking lies in doing the same thing over and over again until it is perfect, the weakness is that standards are blunted by repetition and rigidity. A country restaurant loses its reputation, often very quickly, when work on the three or four dishes in which it specializes becomes listless and mechanical.
Exactly the converse process takes over in 'international' restaurants, where the menu is far too big and varied, where there is a high turnover of staff, and where there is great pressure to allow vulgar, luxurious and ghastly presentation to compensate for lacklustre food cooked in a skipshod way."

Ouch!

Sat down to write this blog last nite when I'd come back over from the restaurant - but have just reread what I wrote then, and decided that I was much too grumpy - thrown off kilter by a table who refused to be satisfied with anything, and wanted to change everything - and I'd allowed them to have far too much an impact on my state of mind.

Kenny Shopsin in his book describes customers like that as being people who are insecure and to make a statement and be noted get awkward and demanding. Possibly he's right, but that sort of illogical queriness always has the reverse effect on me. Rather than trying to impress those sorts of people, I do the reverse and back off, becos I can see that no matter what we do, or how far we bend we ain't going to make them happy. By definition they thrive on not being happy.  So I refuse to put the energy into them. Right? Wrong? hmmm.. Call it a survival tactic. To my mind they are bullies, and if you bent over and did what bullies wanted all the time, you would never have a clear system in place for your business. You would be all over the show. And there are enough variables in what it is that we do, without that added complication.

So. Last nite I was grumpy, but have slept on it, and its dissipated, and I'm ready to go over to a cookschool shortly. Ricks headed over a little earlier becos his arm movement is limited, but he assures me he's in no pain. It looks however like I might be stirring a few pots in the class today...

Which in a funny kind of way brings me to this book - a book written about the changes wrought in France over the last few decades, which has meant that it has lost its supremacy in terms of the very best of restaurants. A mantle that the author says Spain has now claimed from the French.

Mort Rosenblum wrote a similarly themed book ' A Goose in Toulouse, And Other Culinary Adventures in France' which I've written about previously. But this book focuses more specifically on the demise of haute cuisine - the top end, Michelin starred restaurants on which France based its reputation for decades as being the most serious, and simply the best country in the world for serious dining experiences. ( I bet no-one asked any of those chefs to heat up a soup that is stated on the menu as being served chilled...)

Now however, France is in crisis. The pre-eminence of the wine industry has been upsurped by other countries; hundreds of artisinal cheeses have disappeared; thousands of bistros and brasseries close every year, and McDonalds has established itself so significantly, that France represents its second most profitable market in the world. ( Behind America, I'm guessing.)

So how could all this come to be in a country that has prided itself for so long on simply being the best when it comes to culinary matters.

The author takes a rather cirular route to explain what has happened, VAT taxes of 19.6%, a youthful population that simply aren't interested in food,  but it makes for fascinating reading. And in the end when I ponder it all, I'm left with the impression that what he says is correct, but it is not quite as dire as he predicts.

He himself, talks about classically trained young chefs, who are eschewing the tradition laden approach to cooking that they were brought up in, and are embracing a more casual, more relaxed approach, that is none the less totally serious, about the style of food they present. Everything is just broached in a much more casual manner.

Is that necessarily a bad thing? Definitely not, if they care about what they do, and are catering to a demand that is there in the market.

Fashions change. And food is caught by that just like most other aspects of desirable living. If, what you offer the public is no longer in demand, then you are not going to generate enough turnover to be profitable, and you are going to disappear, and just becos there is a certain degree of nostalgia generated by your brand, doesn't mean necessarily that you should be continuing to offer something, that people no longer want.

Any business, in what ever field it is in, needs to remain relevant, needs to provoke demand. Some do that by creating a constant blitz of publicity around them, that is forever drawing in new customers. And some prefer to do it, by calibrating what they offer to the sort of customers that they get to see alot off.  I know what camp I consider Somerset to be in!

There is no end point. There is no sense of satisfaction that you have possibly arrived where it is that you wanted to arrive. As a businesss we are constantly evolving and learning and adapting.  Thats just the way it is.

Some of the stuff we control - some of the publicity games we have decided a long time ago to have no part in, and the discussion in the book about the restaurateurs that have decided to eschew the Michelin system made for interesting reading, becos I have long been confused by people who would set such a store on what nameless inspectors would have to say about their business based on one visit.
Been a bit of a natural cynic I refuse to believe that politics and self aggrandisemnet doesn't come into play when it comes to the allocation of stars within the Michelin sytem. The world just simply ain't that simple.

And I've never understood why really good restaurateurs would set more store on that sort of qualification than they would on the nightly parade of customers, happy with what they provide.  Surely those people are more significant to their ongoing business sucess? Yes and no. The irony with Michelin is that it attracts publicity which in turn attracts customers I guess, and that is why the 3 stars is the holy grail for so many restaurant owners and chefs.

Its all very interesting - and in the end I think its as simple and yet as complex as saying that the world is constantly in a state of flux, and you have to acknowledge that in order to survive. If you put your head in the sand and refuse to allow any variation, then you will die by slow degrees, and that is an especially miserable way of living. So why would you?! A number of the top restaurants throughout France have gone into bankrupcy over the last 5 years - they had lost the volume of customers they needed.

We have spent time in both rural Italy and France in the last decade, and the profound impact on us, beyond all the cliches on how beautiful it was, was the lack of people. And an average age well into the 70's. Rural France has emptied out into the cities - there is no cachet attached to agricultural endeavour for the young. And if there isn't a generation coming thru prepared to raise the livestock and make the artisinal cheeses for the great restaurants to use - then where are those restaurants going to go to source the product they need?

I'm a big believer in the pendulum  - it swings backwards and forwards thru history, and it takes a certain momentum of events to change its direction. But I do think that is currently happening - and we are moving back to an appreciation of the land and a slower way of doing things. I get a magazine from America called Culture - which is full of ex professionals who've gone back to a few acres and some goats or sheep and are making cheeses and a more bucolic way of life. Funded however, it should be noted by their previous life in medicine or...

Ironically France is behind the US in that trend. The Slow Food movement that originated in Italy has gained no traction in France whereas its hugely popular in America. I suspect theres a bit of good old fashioned chauvanism behind that - the French really do think they are better than anyone else at this food and wine production, and what this book describes is the waking up that has occurred over the past few years, as those at the forefront realise that they actually do have to adapt and change becos they aren't actually that much better than anyone else, otherwise they will gradually fossilise and become irrelevant.

I guarantee that once they come out of the dumps - they will move forward, and its going to be exciting to watch. And provides yet another excuse to have to go back one day....

Well, well, well.

I dipped into this book almost reluctantly, becos I've never been taken by Heston Blumenthal when I've happened to catch him on TV. But John, one of our sous chefs,  had brought the book in to show us, and he was obviously impressed by it, so I thought I should at least have a quick flick.

A dip that became a riveting read - initially thru the front part which is his autobiography, and includes details of the life journey that saw him end up in a small restaurant in Bray in England, and come to be awarded 3 Michelin Stars, and world famous as one of those 'science based chefs'.

Next theres a series of recipes which I haven't gone near yet, and at the back is a number of essays written by the scientists that Heston does so much collaborative work with.  And like everything else in the book they are truly fascinating - even if I did have to refer to my dictionary occasionally, to interprete some of the more complex words, that haven't entered my lexicon before, not being a science orientated person!

So naturally I've had to order our own copy - becos this book is so loaded down with  interesting comments that its going to take a number of readings to extract all the information. And I'm sure John will be wanting to reclaim  his copy well before then.

Why so impressed?

Initially I was surprised by the degree to which I liked the man himself. He comes across as an obsessive certainly, but one who is achieving truly amazing things, and all, quite extraordinaryily,  without any formal training in either science or cooking.

In reading his background and how he was self taught and driven, it would be impossible not to have the most heartfelt respect for what he has achieved.

And it all started with a meal his parents took him on as a teenager to a 3 starred restaurant in Provence ' L'Oustau de Baumaniere - the whole experience excited him to the point where he decided owning a restaurant was his future. But unlike most of us who would then go of to apprentice ourselfs to learn how to become a great chef, he choose a uniquely radical path, that shouldn't have worked, but in his case did. In no small part becos of his extreme perserverance and focus.

As with everything that was to follow, he questioned the established ways, and looked for reasons and rationales as to why things happen. This has been a path he has trodden the whole way, and which makes his forays into the science of cooking seem almost a foregone conclusion.

He writes luminously and passionately, and must have a ferocious intelligence - all of which is captured in his prose.
On TV you sort of get the sparkle without the grunt and its always struck me superficially as being about dazzle, rather than about serious eating. This book has completely reversed that interpretation - and I'm not reknown for liking to change my mind! - and proves that serious is the one thing he very much is. Enormously so. And he gets so excited about what he is learning and the applications, that he possibly comes across like a kid in a candy shop, which to a degree is exactly what he is. He gets to play with all these applications, pick the finest scientific brains in the world for advice, and constantly expand  the realms of food knowledge.

You get the very distinct feeling that he is loving every step.

He is linked in my mind to Ferran Adri from el bulli in Spain, and Grant Archatz of Alinea in Chicago. They, and Heston are considered the pre- eminent exponents of the style of restaurant cooking that has come to be known as molecular gastronomy.
A label that they don't like apparently - but which was originally thought up to give a conference an aura of gravitas, back in the days when food science wasn't considered a subject worthy of research. How times have changed!

As the man himself says :' Until recently the preparation, cooking and eating of food was not generally considered worthy of sutained scientific study. Now things have changed. The efforts of a handful of scientists, writers and chefs have brought cluinary science into the public eye, and it has been acknowledged as a subject of enormous complexity and importance. Food is a basic human need, and our bodies and brains are designed to collect and consume it. Exploring the business of cooking and eating can tell us not only whats happening on the plate but whats happening inside our heads and how we process whats going on around us. Indeed, the subject is so vast and has so many fascinating potential practical aplications that it now draws on many scientific disciplines, and scientists often pursue highly specialised areas of research."

He has certainly made me a believer, and up until now,  I've approached the whole subject of molecular gastronomy with a jaundiced, slightly cynical perspective - wondering how much of the approach is generated by a 'look at me, aren't I clever, I'm doing something different to everyone else' reflex.

We bought the el bulli cookbook  years ago, and it did nothing to assuage that suspicion - I realise now that that is possibly becos Ferran Adri is Spanish not English, and wanted to use photos rather than words to convey his work .That just made it look all the more elitist in my eyes. I mellowed out a little when I read the book on a day in the life of the restaurant - that made more sense and made things more approachable, althought I confess to a snort of amazement at the sight of a restaurant with over 40 chefs  ( admittedly a significant proportion of which would be unpaid stagnaires),  in the kitchen and only 45 guests out front.

Grant Alchatz book furthered my warming up process as he described with passion what he was aiming to achieve, and this latest one has completely won me over.

In part becos it is a direction we are heading in anyway. Any chef interested in improving what they do, will naturally ask the question of why do certain things happen in the cooking process, and what can be done to control them, or work certain reactions to further the diners enjoyment.
Becos of the huge advances made in chemistry research over the last few decades, it makes sense that a lot of those questions are being answered by scientists now, rather than someones grandmother.

But one of the fundamental lessons I've taken from reading this book - is that the molecular way is not an eschewing of the cooking styles that have gone before - as it is sometimes contested to be in the media - but instead it is a process of continuation, of adding to and improving what already exists. It is not food constructed in a test tube, as  my somewhat limited understanding of it, tended to believe.

Just as much as the passionate, back to nature chefs like Darina Allen, this style of cooking is very much about quality of ingredients - about supporting artisinal farmers who practise good husbandry, becos the quality of meat will be so much better. The difference is that they can they explain in minute scientific reasoning why that is so. And I find that theory riveting.

In part I do so I suspect, becos of the need for research that the cookschools have created for us, becos people quite often ask questions, that beg a more involved answer than ' becos thats the way its always been'.
When we first started doing the classes I bought both Harold McGees "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen", and Alan Davidsons " The Oxford Companion to Food", and used them regularly for research.

There is no doubt that understanding why things happen make you a better cook - and our focus at the restaurant over all these years has been to improve and refine our technique, and to make changes as far as the market will allow us.( Becos as the person in the business who also happens to stress over the paying of the bills - I don't want to get too far ahead of what our local market percieves as being enjoyable. We need bums on seats to keep paying bills, and that always will be more important to us, then needing to be seen to be employing weirld and wonderful techniqes.)

But that doesn't mean that we can't learn and tweak as we go along - just in the same sense that the introduction of refridgeration into peoples homes changed home cooking, as did the canning process, and many other scientific discoveries.
What is unique about what is happening in the upper echolons of the food world at the moment is this wonderful convergence of food brains and science  - which is significantly pushing forward knowledge. And while a lot of that centers on restaurant food and manufactured food at the moment, the trickle down effect will inevitably occur, and I predict in the not too distant future that there will be equipment like the sous baths available to home cooks.
Just like bread makers...

Vacum packing fish right after butchering helps prevent oxidation of natural fats in th flesh by the removal of oxygen. Didn't know that.

Salting can be a good way to reduce the moisture loss in meat, becos it makes each cell swell. Didn't know that - in fact we thought the reverse - that salt drew out liquid.

Cooking meat at low temperatures ( think 56c) for a long time under moist conditions (think sousvide) always for gelatinisation  to occur. Gelatinisation is good becos the swelling allows for more moisture retension in the meat . Didn't know that.

Fat in icecream makes it melt slower and  makes the flavour release slower. Which explains why Italian gelatos which don't have the dairy fat component taste so much more strongly of fruit. Didn't know that.

Temperature to which water is frozen  depends on what is dissolved in it. The more it is dissolved, the lower the freezing point.Didn't know that

Glucose is only 80% as sweet as sucrose.

Stabilisers and emulsifiers inhibit flavour release.

Distingushing flavour in food is so much more complex than just what happens on the tongue. Thats taste.  Flavour happens through the olfactory bulb.

As a result of what we've discussed  from the book so far ,we are going to have a look at some of our meat cooking and also our icecream developement, becos we're excited by some of the points he makes. For us its all about making what we do better - certainly at this stage I don't see it as a wholesale change in direction of Somerset.

We are not about to become a multi course tasting menu restaurant - partially becos of the point raised above about the practicalities of paying bills, but also becos that is not the style of food that we would want to produce every day.
We make food that we ourselves love to sit down and eat. There is nothing on Somersets menu that I wouldn't eat with relish - and I hope that that is always the case. We don't feel a need to be at the cutting edge of culinary developments, but we are very keen to learn when others have something to teach.

To go to dinner at Alinea or The Fat Duck of el Bulli, is to have an experience that you would most probably ( for those of us without private jets) experience once a year at the maximum. By all accounts it is a fascinating experience, but one that is cerebal rather than emotive. By emotive I refer to that corner trattoria in Florence where the food wasn't even that special, but the whole package was just impossibly romantic and is tucked away in your memory banks as perfect.

The 2 types of restaurant experiences are polar opposites, and we sit somewhere in the middle between them both. We want the food at Somerset to  be thoughtfully and well cooked and presented, to the best of our current knowledge. But we also want it to be approachable to a wide range of people, so that they are comfortable coming regularly. We need that to be viable. If the public perception is of us being so different and out there that you only come on special occasions, then life would be pretty quiet around here.

( And as an aside on that topic - Heston talks about how he was flying to a Science conference at which he was a guest presenter, at a time when the future viability of his restaurant was on the line, becos while they were busy at the weekends, they really struggled to get double numbers during the week - and that week he was having to cover the staffs wages by credit card, so things really were dire; when he got a phone call saying they'd just been awarded the 3rd Michelin star. And the resulting avalanche of publicity put them firmly on the culinary map - which included being asked for the first time if they had a helicopter pad!- and numbers in the restaurant have no longer been an issue.)

Interspersed within the menu though we can bring in new techniques, where we percieve that they will improve the quality of what we produce. Sometimes we will clearly state on the menu what we're doing, and at other times like with some of the sous vide cooking it will be a background technique that people won't even be especially aware off, beyond that fact that they will ( hopefully!) be impressed by how tender the meat is.

I see that as really exciting - and my current missions are to find a supplier of frozen carbon dioxide, and one of those old fashioned whipping cream siphons.

But to go back to Heston, who now has a restaurant kitchen and another  kitchen purely for the experimenting work that he does, and both of which  resemble more a science lab than a conventional commercial kitchen-  the research he does now, is not so much on the molecular composition of food, becos the depth of knowledge that he's built up on that subject is huge,  but more to do with the understanding of the science behind what prompts our emotive responses to taste and to smell.

Why are some foods percieved as delicious and others not - how much of that is genetic and how much environmental?  And how can he as a chef, play around with those expectations and responses.

It really is all quite fascinating.....

The arrival of this book was impeccably timed, becos it made perfect reading for my here and now. Kenny Shopsin and his wife Eve started out with a corner grocery store in New York over 35 years ago, and when the landlord increased the rent, they decided to convert it to a restaurant so as to earn more money.

His philosophy to life and the restaurant business, along with a host of recipes, is captured in the most extroardinary manner, in this totally unique book.

He's a complicated, difficult, demanding man, - who is fully aware that he is all of those things, and who calls life exactly as he sees it, without any pretence of trying to be nice to others.

'One of the things that's happening to me as I'm getting older is I'm seeing my beliefs, the tenets of my existence, coming back to me through my children.  I cast my bread upon the waters, and it's flying back in my face, fully baked. My kids - I have 3 boys and twin girls - have taken everything I've given them and developed it to the point where they're superior to me when it comes to discussing and acting on a lot of my own ideas. My girls especially are more unyielding in my beliefs than I am.
All their lives my kids have known me to have a leave-me-alone attitude toward the media and the public eye. In running my restaurant, I've done everything I could to avoid articles and accolades of any kind. I have talked about  how the media was evil, about the dangers of celebrity, and about the pitfalls of losing your self-doubt... What they didn't know, becos how could they - I certainly never vocalised it - was that behind absolute statements, like those that I made on a regular basis, is a complex set of emotions. Inherent in those absolutes were compromises.  It's like there was a tug-of-war inside of me that, in an attempt to resolve itself, took sides.
For me, writing this book was one of those compromises. On the one hand, it was tremendously satisfying to my ego to have someone ask me to write a book. On the other hand, I know that in writing this book I would be allowing strangers a look into our private lives - something I have vehemently avoided since I started my business in 1973. Even worse, I knew that a book would encourage these strangers to come into my restaurant"

You see, simply put, he only wants people in his restaurant who he likes. A luxery that I suspect restaurant owners everywhere would love to indulge in, but most of whom doubt our ability to be commercially viable if we kicked people out of our establishments as regularly as Kenny does.

I started reading the book, the morning after I'd dealt with a particularly unpleasant couple, dining in the restaurant - who'd complained about pretty much everything, and who were intent on ensuring that they didn't have a good time. The degree of their agitation and abuse stunned me, becos I simply couldn't figure it.

I understand and even accept that what we do here at Somerset is not going to appeal to everyone, and in many ways the fact that we are now well established in the market works to our advantage, becos we tend to only attract those who like what we do. But every so often we get some who come, and are obviously out of their comfort zone from the minute they walk thru the door, and for reasons not immediately apparent, they remain determined not to enjoy themselves. Its an attitude that fascinates me, becos I just don't get it. Why would you bother going somewhere you don't want to enjoy? Time and money are too precious as commodities for me to want to waste them purely to make a point of being unhappy.

In terms of people being actually abusive, we probably get about 3/4 incidences in a year ( and I hope I'm not tempting fate, by stating that!), it just so happened that I copped a nasty lady pre Christmas, and then just after we'd reopened, this guy blew up in my face.

Becos we don't have to deal with it very often, we're not especially skilled at coping with it - and for that reason I read Kenny's blunt opinions on customers who don't fit with positive glee.

The restaurant he owns, is I guess, kind of like a diner only more complicated. His menu has over 900 items, and his modus operandi is somewhat riveting to read. He personally cooks for everyone, and if he has a nite off, the menu gets smaller becos his second in charge isn't as efficent as him!

I've currently got a pot of creamed corn bubbling away on the stove, and am going to puree it soon, to make it into a filling for some crepes. The creamed corn recipe came out of the latest Gourmet Traveller magazine, and the crepe idea is one of Kenny's, that I just had to try. He turns a tortilla into a crepe by dipping it in an egg and cream mix, and reckons it bets homemade crepes any day. Rick is distinctly sniffy about the technique, so, as they say, the proof will be in the pudding...

Before I go though, I'll pluck out a couple of Kennyism's from the book, becos he has a totally unique voice. He is so contrary in every sense, and yet has managed to find a state of grace and happiness  that I suspect elludes alot of people his age.

'Cooking for me, is a creative process, and I believe that people who are creative are creative for one of two reasons: Either they are going for truth and beauty, or they create as a way to dilute the venom produced by their subconscious minds. I cook for the second reason. When I cook, I am in a cathartic, recuperative process that calms me down and brings me from a neurotic state to a relaxed, functioning state."

'The art of staying small more or less sums up my feeling about running a restauratn - and about life. I know it goes against our capitalist system, but I have never been interested in the normal symptoms of success, such as higher profit margins and expansion of income. I never had a goal to make more money so that I could retire or so that I could hire a low- wage employee to do the cooking for me. I have no desire to open a second restaurant, to oversee a restaurant empire with my name on it, or to endorse a line of pots and pans.
Running a restaurant for me is about running a restaurant. It is not a means to get someplace else. I wake up every morning, and I work for a living like a farmer. Running a restaurant is a condition of life for me. And I like everything about this life. I like waking up in the morning knowing I am going to the restaurant to cook, that something unexpected will happen to me in the kitchen,  and that no matter what, I will learn something new. I like the actual process of cooking . I like shopping for the food that I cook, and I like my interactions with the people I meet while shopping. I like my customers and I like working with my kids. It is a simple existence, but for me the beauty is in that simplicity. These are the things that bring me pleasure - and they bring me great pleasure on an extremely regular basis.
Living this way, pursuing your own happiness, is addictive, and it's the way I have tried to conduct my life. What this means is doing what it takes to make yourself feel good each day, not to make yoruself feel less good today in the hope that your life will be good in ten years because you're working really hard now or because your property will be worth more money then. The way I figure it, if you make every day of your life as happy as you can, nobody can take that away from you. Its in the bank."

Very cool!

One of the long standing jokes in the cookschools are the slight tweaks and modifications that  Rick suggests people make to his recipes. Becos we repeat the classes a number of times, Rick sometimes evolves a slightly different way of doing things then what he originally wrote down in the recipes, and that is a process that will develope as the series goes along.

We don't have a problem with that - becos to us, that is what  cooking is all about. Its not fixed - it evolves and changes depending on so many variables, and one of the strongest messages we try to get across to attendees, is to not be inslaved to recipes. They are guidelines only. And good cooks to us,  are those who develope confidence in their own ability to understand the cooking process, and to react accordingly, rather than those who can report how they have cooked from a huge number of cookbooks.

Having said that, we do happen to have a large library of cookbooks, becos with our job we must. They are a source of inspiration and reference - and every 5 years or so, I go thru and cull out those that are no longer relevant, but the number of new ones, purchased in the intervening time always seems to outweigh those I remove.

Some we refer to regularly, and some we hardly even open, but we hold onto them for nostalgic or for their pertinance to one particular subject matter. ( Or becos they cost so damn much, and I can't bear to own up to the fact they were a waste of money!)

It was bearing all that in mind, that I read with curiosity what Nigel Slater had to say about the cookbooks that he considers to be the best ever published.

Nigel Slater is, in my humble opinion, one of the better food writers out there.  He  has complied in this list his opinion of the top cookbooks of all time.

I thought his description of Nigella Lawsons writing style fascinating, not only becos I totally agreed with him and had also found that first book of her's " How to Eat', to be a great read, but becos the familiar and easy style with which he credited her, is one that I found so endearing in his books. It is exactly like he is there in the kitchen with you, discussing all manner of things, in the easy style of a trusted friend.

He nails the point that we are always trying to make - that cookbooks should not be followed religiously, and good cookbooks don't attempt to be too prescriptive. I couldn't find anything to disagree with on his list.

In this current cookschool series, the various dishes that Rick is doing, include a reasonable quotient of butter. Thats not deliberate - he didn't set out to come up with a menu that incorporated lots of butter - but when you're doing celebratory style cooking, as this Christmas series is meant to represent, it makes sense, I guess that some of the dishes will include butter.

I mention this by way of introduing this book - becos if we had done a similar menu 10 years ago, we would have met a phalanx of negative comment from people affronted by the use of large knobs of butter. Fat was evil - we were supposed to be eliminating it from our diets, and we would be asked constantly if it was possible to replace the butter with magarine or something else.

 For awhile there, we tried to be polite, but eventually we just got a bit sick of what we deemed to be a rather unhealthy obsessiveness that some people seemed to have developed over fat in their diet. So we stopped pretending that yes, you could use something instead of butter. And now if people ask - Rick just sort of looks at them, and returns the question - why would you want too, becos nothing tastes as good, or finishes off a sauce, or makes pastry as light, as butter. And people kind of smile. Some I note don't look convinced, but most seem alot more relaxed and the tenor of the discussion is much more pleasant.

The movie Julie/Julia has given me a new weapon when that comes up in conversation, becos alot of people coming to the classes have seen it, and the cooking in it is a complete celebration of butter's uses in the kitchen. And Julia Child lived to the ripe old age of 91- so the clear line between premature death and consumption of butter, that some people seem so intent on drawing is perhaps not as clear cut as they would like....

The movie is wonderful. I'm a huge fan of Meryl Streep and had read the biography on Julia Child written by her nephew that her segment of the movie was based on, so the story was familiar. I didn't quite as much get the part about the blogger, but Rick thought Amy Adams, the actress who plays that part was lovely , and very easy to watch,  so I pretty much kept my thoughts to myself.

Larry left me with the book Julie and Julia this week, and I've just finished it. Now I get it. This is the story of what made her decide to cook her way thru Julia Childs orginal cookbook and blog about the experience, in the process becoming a bit of a media presence herself, and it makes for rather exhilirating reading!

The movie made her into a much nicer, sort of sweeter person than she comes across in the book. And I much preferred the person who emerged from the writing - someone sharp and acerbic, with a poignant and totally identifiable take on life and the people around her, warts and all.

Julia Childs become famous becos she showed 'servantless' homes in the 60's how to cook serious french food. Americans had been cajoaled over the preceding decades by a barrage of advertising,  into treating cooking as a waste of time, something that got in the way of living. There were lots of very large companies who could make your food for you - and who sold it in a dehydrated, canned or frozen state, so that the only time or skill level  required from you,  was to reheat. Or, you could go to one of the plethora of drive-in's, that were starting to pop up all over the place, and order hot food to go- be it hamburgers or pizza or fried chicken or...

Julia Child had a profound influence on a whole heap of people  who didn't want to live like that and who wanted guidance on how to cook from scratch. Having lived in France and trained at a Cordon Bleu school when she was in her late 30's, she came to cooking as she seemed to approach most things in her life, with a zest and a sense of enquiry that would keep her animated and learning, even when she had achieved iconic status in most people's eyes. She never stopped wanting to learn more.

Many of todays great chefs, quote her as a  strong influence in their earlier lifes.  Rick can't watch her on TV -she is too klutzy in the kitchen for him, but he has huge respect for her knowledge, and I think I understand the distinction. She didn't work for years in commercial kitchens, so never built up the technical skill base that professional chefs have. Instead she cooked and experimented at home, while she was writing her various books and filming her TV shows. But she made food approachable, and  was absolutely the right person at the right time - which is why she became so loved.

This 29 year old woman, Julie Powell, living in a ghastly sounding appartment in the outer boroughs of New York, with a lovely man for a husband, decides to cook her way thru the epic' Mastering the Art of French Cooking' written by Julia Childs,  over the course of a year and blog about the experience. She decides to do this, not becos she wants to become a professional chef, but more becos she is inherently dissatisfied with where her life is at, she hates her day job, and is looking to do something to instill some passion into her life.

And the process makes a rollicking story - there is nothing this lady won't discuss or share. I am somewhat in awe!

And by way of a postscript, this is a link that I've just found to the blog that Julie wrote when she heard of Julia Childs death.  She describes the impact that Julia had on peoples lifes more eloquently than I did above.

I'm waiting for the vege bed I've just dug over to get a solid 2 hour drenching, before I take down the tomato plants we bought at the market this morning on our way to the Mount, and plant them.

 Getting the watering system working has necessitated 2 spontaneous wanders down the road to Palmers, firstly to upgrade our sprinkler, and then again, to get the correct hose connection. All the time making very sure that I wasn't feeling too resentful of the fact my husband was out on the bike with Courteney and not handily around, specifically when I needed him.

Becos girls can do anything...Huh?...

Have finished the last chapter in this book as I've let the time pleasantly pass. Had ordered the book thru Amazon, not sure where I'd read the recommendation, and was expecting a discussion of life as a restaurant critic in New York. But that is not quite what I got. Frank Bruni is the current restaurant critic for the New York Times - and someone more hated or revered in New York would be hard to find.

Over the decades the various people who have held this role, have come to establish it as a position with formidable power and influence. What they do or don't say about a restaurant - how many stars they choose to allocate in a 4 star system - has a massive impact on whether the general public decide to visit the restaurant, and therefore on a business' financial viability.

So the clout that the published reviews carry, means that restaurants go out of their way to try and discover when Mr Bruni may be eating in their restaurant, and equal efforts are made by Mr Bruni to try to maintain his anonymity.  He would visit a restaurant a number of times over a month or so  to give depth to his analysis, and as in when he did a review of 'Per Se',  the Times paid for him to pop over to the Napa Valley to  have a meal at The French Laundry, the sister establishment owned by the same person, so he could build a complete picture  of what Thomas Keller was trying to achieve.

The money spent and the effort expended is quite extraordinary when read in context of  a country like ours where restaurant reviews are done as a parttime occupation by journalists with virtually no hospitality credibility. There are one or two honourable exceptions like David Burton who writes for the Dominion Post and who is one of the few NZ reviewers I can read without wincing. Most are appalling.

In Tauranga, the local paper periodically bestirs itself to decide it wants to do restaurant reviews, but they are usually done at the expense and full knowledge of the restaurant involved, and are invariably glowing in tone. So not really what I would class as criticism as such.

Which is possibly why I've long been fascinated by what I have read over the years, about the New York Times restaurant reviewers particularly, and the seriousness with which what they do is regarded both by those within the restaurant world and also the general public. Ruth Riechl wasn't Frank Bruni's predecessor,  I think there was someone else in between, but she has written a  book about the various disguises she used to indulge in, to try and get into restaurants without anyone knowing who she was, which made fascinating reading.

I expected this book to be more of the same, and maybe a rundown on the New York restaurants, including the famous names that I read about all the time, from someone who is paid to see behind all the branding and hype.

But the book was more a discussion on his life's battle with excessive eating, right from when he'd been a toddler in a highchair throwing a paddy becos his mother wouldn't give him a third hamburger.  A successful journalist, who'd covered a wide range of subjects including politics and been a Pulitzer prize finalist - the gluttony and resulting obsese body shape defined who he was to himself, more than anything  he had achieved in his working life.

His honesty is startling. Utterly startling. Especially given I think he continues as the Times restaurant critic, what ammunition he has given those who would dearly love to use it against him. But in a strange kind of way, I suspect that complete self disregard is what will also protect him. No one can say anything to him, that he hasn't already beaten himself up with many times - and in exposing it all and having nothing to hide from, he therefore has nothing to fear.

Food is an addiction for him - and the book describes his life long battle to control that addiction -  I admire his candor and his honesty enormously. And thought the story of how he had come to terms with himself and his food demons was immensely admirable and moving. And not at all what I expected!

I am not quite sure how I got to read about this book, but one of the food writers that I refer too would have recommended it, and as a result motivated me to buy it thru Amazon. The only problem with buying books that way, is that you're never quite sure what to expect, and it would be fair to say that this wasn't quite what I expected.

Published in 1973, it is a description of a way of cooking, and a way of life, that I suspect is all but gone now, and for that reason is more of a curiosity of a way life used to be, then a description of something I can readily identify with. But for all that I found it fascinating.

The author, Roy Andries de Groot, is a journalist who was in a small alpine village, La Grande Chartreuse, in the French Alps, seeking the story behind the remarkable and unique liquer, Chartreuse, when he discovered, quite by accident a small Auberge - an Auberge in France is a restaurant with rooms attached that people can stay in. Run by the same 2 women for a number of decades, The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, is a testamount to a level of care seldom seen today, and it makes for beautiful reading.

The menus  of the meals served at the Auberge, every night, are masterpieces - multiple in courses, and matched carefully with different wines, aperitifs to start and digestifs to finish. We just don't take the time to eat or drink, like that anymore, mores the pity.

3 cheeses are served between mains and desserts -one alone would seem miserly.

Everything comes from the surrounding area, not out of need to be fashionable and trendy, but simply becos that is the way it has always been done. The efforts made to source seasonal ingredient, and the desire to serve only the best, make sobering and humbling reading.

It is trendy in todays world to give lip service to using fresh ingredients, grown locally, with a minimum of carbon imprint ( how I am growing to detest that expression) - but we're really kidding ourselves, by comparison to this type of honest approach.

These women live by the principle of  ' first hunt your boar, then skin and hang it...', which puts the lie to the plastic wrapped, already individually portioned meat that gets delivered to most restaurant kitchens, these days.

Yes - some of us are starting to move back to a more old fashioned way of doing things- buying whole carcasses, and caring about the sources of our food,  but reading a book like this, has made me appreciate that we will never go back the whole way. Perceptions of food, of what is healthy, and appropriate - of time and of cost, have all changed too much now.

As the author himself says:

"When the ladies set their table with the animals and birds of their valley and its surrounding mountains, with the fish caught by their friends in the nearby lakes, with the cheeses carefully made and the fruits and vegtables laboriously grown by their farmer neighbors, with the wild mushrooms they pick themselves in the woods, with the wines from the nearby mountain vineyards, they are fulfilling the unity of that way of life, a unity which seems to me to be of the deepest value but which the world seems to be rejecting.'




'

I'm not quite sure what prompted me to buy this book, but I do distinctly remember reading a Sunday paper review of it, a year or so ago,  and thinking that it was one I'd like to read, and the next time I was in Books a Plenty I consciously sought it out - so something had made me feel a need.

It has then laid beside the bed in a pile with lots of food orientated books, waiting - and again, what prompted me to finally turn to it this wet, miserable weekend, when I've been feeling housebound and at a low ebb, I can't quite say, but it has been the perfect respite for me, and I didn't stop reading , once I'd come back over to the house last nite, until I'd finished.

It's beautiful. A paen from a son to a much loved and respected father - a heartfelt tribute to a distinguished legal mind and a principled, extraordinary man.

The writing is exquisite, and the profound sense of a life well lived is beautifully captured.

Justice Peter Mahon will be for ever associated with the phrase ' an orchestrated litany of lies', and it is his sense of true justice, unhampered by political and commercial associations, that led to his conclusions in the Erebus commission, and put him offside with the 'establishment'.

My sense of respect for those who have the courage of their convictions, to stand apart from generally accepted thinking, is enormous.

And this book is a tribute to such a man, written by his son, on an intensely personal, but somehow wonderfully uplifting level.

Personal titbits can be puerile and cheap and nasty - too much information, that sometimes we, the general public, don't really need to know. But this book is something quite different - a touching and gentle, exposure of the life events that built the man, and made him the complex person that he was.

Wonderful stuff!

I'm not sure what the acreage of the land we have here is - but by  comparison to what the lady who wrote this book lives in, in inner city Oakland, USA, it is substantial. Which makes me now feel incredibly lazy, becos we could/should be doing so much more with it, if what she has achieved is any sort of guideline.

She and her partner, started with a beehive, and a vegetable garden created from raised beds placed on the concrete pad on an empty lot next to the flat they were renting. They then got chickens for their eggs, and progressed onto 'meat' birds- birds intended to be dinner; chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys. Rabbits were next, and then 2 pigs, completed her progression into what she called being an 'Urban Farmer'.

Her ideas of living sustainably, make my occasional self pat on the back when I remember to take the green bag over to the supermarket, somewhat pathetic.

Our only foray into lifestock was a couple of years ago, when we bought 2 piglets from friends and kept them for a few months, always with the intention of getting them slaughtered for the meat. Owning a restaurant with a regular supply of food wastage, made feeding them easy - just a twice a day committment that we had to make. Novella's experience was far different as she describes her epic effort to keep the pigs fed in the middle of a city, without resorting to processed animal food. They 'dumpster dived' every couple of nites. That is, fossicked for food that had been thrown out from restaurants and bakeries, in the bins out the back, and when she decided the pigs needed more protein, from a fish shop.

Not something I could ever imagine myself doing, I'd be totally paralysed by the fear of what people would think,  but that doesn't mean I don't respect her for the choices she made. Quite extraordinary really.

What she did, and what she achieved, in an area better known for driveby shootings is nothing short of amazing, and it is impossible not to be inspired.
 
Rick's been building a raised garden down in the old pig pen, when we now also have the worm farm, becos its an enclosed space that we can keep the dogs out off, which is handy when you don't want vegetables trampled underfoot by overly energetic animals - but we've been pottering along on that without a real sense of urgency. Having read this book, I now feel embarassed at the amount of bare land that we could be using so much more productively, and I'll be going for a wander with the dogs in the morning to take stock...

The book is a delight - and I've just discovered her blog, so will be checking in with that for regular updates, just to help keep myself motivated. Hmm...

I've been working my way thru this book for over a year, its been over at the restaurant in amongst the stack of books in the bar, and is what I dip into, either early in the nite when we're waiting for customers, or, on the rare occasion these days, when I'm locking up, on those nites when tables are comfortably ensconsed and drawing out their departure.

It is a beautifully written, wonderfully descriptive selection of his personal top 102 restaurants in Paris. He covers all styles of eating, from the 3 star, thru to the corner bistros. It is his passion for good food  and a warm welcoming ambience that define what is a good restaurant. Not how fashionable it is.

It came as a shock to Rick and I, when we finally made it to Paris some years ago, that it was possible to eat badly in a city that we thought would never cede to average restaurants. But our first dinner out was awful, and we had all our illusions shattered, so after that we only ate at restaurants recommended in Patricia Wells " Good Eating in Paris". And even then my husband insisted on walking past the restaurants we were planning on going to that nite, just so he could do a visual check. Certain signs of seriousness reassured him, like white linen on the tables for example.

Ironically for all that,  probably the best meal we had was a lunch, when Rick dragged the girls and I into Guy Savoys 'Les Bookinistas", which we had stumbled upon quite by chance, and for which I didn't feel anywhere nearly dressed up enough. But the food was sublime and the service impeccible even though our clothes and walking shoes clearly denoted us as touristes!

We got caught by one of Patricias recommendations becos it had obviously changed hands since the book had been published, but we still fortunately had a very pleasant meal. I guess thats the problem with any of these books - there are no guarantees that when you get to go to the restaurants mentioned that the ownership is going to still be the same as when it was written about.

But this book is a rhapsody about eating out well - surrounded by an educated public who love good food, and understand how to behave in restaurants.  His descriptions of the other diners are delightful:

''The Japanese trio sitting next to us were, in fact, the most elegant people I'd seen in a long time, and studying them occasionally while we nibbled gougeres, and discussed the menu, I was reminded that elegance is the art of omission, something almost everyone else in the room appeared to understand, too. A handsome older southern woman in a simple but immaculately tailored black dress with a square neckline wore a simple choker of turquoise beads nearly the same color as her eyes, and her distinguished, rather leonine hsuband sat on the other side of Bruno. ...Together, our neighbours formed a quietly glamorous tableau that only heightened the implicit exclusivity of being seated in this cosseted dining room with caramel colored wood paneling and polite modern art on the walls.:'

Other customers, decor, wait staff, food and the ambience are all examined and described in fascinating detail, and his passion for the art of eating out and eating well, is beautifully captured. A perfect book to dip in and out off, as I've been doing, and I'm quite sorry its come to an end.

But something tells me it will be retrieved from the book shelf when our next trip to Paris becomes closer to reality, and a long list will be compiled, becos I share his enthusiasm totally!

This book arrived from Amazon yest morning, and by 6.30pm when I headed over to the restaurant I'd devoured it, while perched in an armchair nursing a snoozing puppy, with the afternoon sun streaming in on us both. All very pleasant. 

As was the book - although it made me cry ( which is easy to achieve - as my daughters regularly tell me somewhat disparingly ' you even cried when Bambi's mother was killed".  But of course!). And that meant I had swollen eyes when I went over to work, which meant I got one or two sideways looks...

The story of a cookschool held in a restaurant kitchen on the Monday nites that the restaurant is closed - and each chapter focuses on one of the class participants and their reasons for coming to the classes, which are run over consequtive Monday nites for a number of months, and what life changes they go thru.

Delicately written, in a light feminine style, it reminded me a little of "Like Water for Chocolate" , where an awakening appreciation of cooking and of food, is seen as something that can wrought other significant changes in peoples lifes. As fond as I am of flavour and food, I don't necessarily believe life  and relationships can be quite so easily  sorted thru a shared love of good food. That felt a little contrived, but the writing was sweet and the underlying premise was lovely, and I must have had some underlying emotion bubbling away that needed a release, cos I wept at the sad bits, and felt much better for it!

Sweet and lovely reading - and totally appropriate for what I needed yesterday!

Reading is something that I simply have to do. I pick up a book most nites before I sleep becos I must. And I've never really considered why that should be, but am just very thankful that access to a constant pile of books and magazines is never a problem for me.

This afternoon Rick and Courteney, who's home for the weekend have gone of to do one of the local cycling club races, and I'm about to head down to the worm farm below with a bucket of slops and the dogs for company, but prior to that I've had a quick flick thru my latest pickup of weekly magazines - with which I could quite nonchalantly while away an afternoon, regardless of how much housework should rightfully be requiring my attention.

The magazines I get are a mix, but for obvious reasons mostly food and wine related. I get something different from them all, on a whole host of levels, and usually come away  from a reading session with a renewed sense of satisfaction that our careers revolve around such an immensely satisfying field. We've been around a long time now and its not unusual to be reading about people we know or have met - and the trajectories that people take in their lives can make for interesting conjecture. Conversations between Rick and I, along the lines of ' wasn't he the guy who was at...? I wonder what happened there and why...'etc, happen quite regularly. Its amazing the amount of airbrushing that goes on, as people recount their lives for publication.  Not that we gossip of course!

There are however aspects to some of the magazines that catch and annoy - I've been quoting in the current cookschool series, my sense of irritation at the latest Metro, where it mentioned 'our' top 50 restaurants in Auckland for the year, and then proceeded to prattle on about what 'we' think restaurants should and shouldn't be concentrating on. All in a tone that I personally find smug and patronising. But I read it and I absorb, and move on. As you do.

The Australian magazines are very firmly into the cult of the chef as a celebrity - so many of the younger guys are working prodigiously hard to parlay their year or so of working with Jamie Oliver into a mega media career for themselves. It all feels so contrived and determined and branded. And like bloody hard work really. Simply to stay fashionable and in the public's eye. It is the complete anthithesis to what my husband considers important, and I respect him enormously for that sense of values.

Which may be in part why I have loved this book so very, very much. John Thorne is simply the best food writer I have ever read. I would put his eloquence and wit ahead of even Elizabeth David and MFK Fisher. I suspect it was the journal Art of Eating which led me to Mr Thorne in the first place becos he doesn't feature much in mainstream food media, mainly I suspect becos he is the complete opposite of fashionable and stylish.
Postively plodding in fact. But oh, what gloriously detailed minutiae of detail you gain from every small step that he takes.

This book is an exploration of cooking in America, which if I had have known that at the start would possibly have stopped me picking it up, becos good food and America seems to me to be a contradiction in terms, unless you're talking about Alice Waters or Thomas Keller.

How wrong I was.  And how thoroughly and critically John Thorne covers the subject of food from an anthropological and historical point of view. But also from the perspective of the very honest pleasures to be derived from pottering around in a simple kitchen, cooking food for the sole purpose of nourishment and satisfaction. Not to impress - to show off your access to rare or exotic ingredients. No,  simply for the love of creating something that is going to taste good. The ultimate of all food really, I would have thought.

He writes with an eloquence that makes me almost weep with envy - whole passages I've gone back and reread, becos the subtle, underlying humour sometimes needs a little cajoaling to come to the surface.
There is nothing slick or shallow in this style. It has demanded quite a committment from me to read thru all the essays - the print is tiny and the writing requires you to sit up and think about what you're reading. It demands a response - and I've thrived on that.

He has made me question a whole heap of my attitudes to what I cook and why, and I have found that process totally invigorating. A little bit like a spring clean, when you get to sweep away the debris and reestablish a core set of values, set by you, and not  by what you think others may expect of you.

He has totally altered my perception of food in America - I won't let myself get carried away with trite generalisations about fast food and massive agribusiness anymore. It has been a pleasure to be so informed. And the only thing that makes the fact I've finally come to the end of the book bearable, is the fact I had the foresight to order anything else written by him at the same stage, so I have 'Simple Cooking' sitting by the bed, waiting to be picked up. Bugger!  And I have also just discovered that he has a website, from which I've ordered his magazine. A girl can never get too many magazines I figure!

The wind has dropt a little and the sun's come out, so will take this load of slops down and see if we've managed to cajoale the worms to move from the original bed into the second one that Ricks just dug.

My brain is currently full of mundane matters, so to cheer myself up I've been sitting at the computor getting up to date on some of the food blogs that I most enjoy.

Not at all surprised to see that Dorie Greenspans latest blog is a beautifully written description of David Lebovitzs latest book. Both of them are Americans who live for a reasonable amount of the year in Paris, and they are both very respected food writers, both in the blogsphere and also with published cookbooks.

I had been planning on writing my own interpretation of the book, but having now read Dorie's, I've decided to take the easy option and instead link you to her eloquent description. She manages to say things so much more pertinently than I would manage in my current befogged state!

And have just read this latest blog from David Lebovitz himself, who talks about the questions he was asked at  a book signing session for the book. In it he describes the 15 things he'd most miss about Paris if he were to leave.

We head up to Auckland shortly to pick up Courteney from the airport. She doesn't get in until close to 11pm, so we'll use the time to have a catch up dinner with Hannah - Tabou I think. I've just taken a couple of sultana cakes out of the oven - one to take up to Hannah, and one to keep my husband going back here. While I've been waiting for them to cook, I've finally finished this fascinating book, and closed it with a distinct sense of reluctance.

It describes the lives of the inhabitants of France - whereever possible thru their own eyes, and the exploration and colonization of their land by foreigners and natives, from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth. Mr Robb is an historian who rode on a bike around France to collate information for this book, travelling something like 14,000 miles  in the process. He writes eloquently, and in fascinating detail, and I now have a much better grasp on the forces that shaped and reshaped the political landscape, and developed France into the modern state of today.
I found myself constantly reading out anecdotes to Rick - snippets of information that I found fascinating. Not something I tend to do as a normal rule, but so much of this was illuminating and a description of a world that I could barely comprehend.
 
The gruelling daily existance of so many is perhaps a useful reminder to those of us who wander around with naive visions of 'going back to the land'. As with  most things in life, its a question of degree, of where you choose to place yourself on the spectrum, or at least we, in our daily life have a choice about such matters. They didn't. The church, the state and village expectations mapped out life's  route for all, regardless of an individuals desires.  Rick and I have just being down below to the orchard with the dogs, and picked a wheelbarrow load of fallen avocados and walnuts, something that is hugely satisfying - and wandered back up the driveway feeling suitably impressed with ourselves.  We get to pick the nice bits in our life - but a rural existance back then, would have been hard, tough and unrelenting. In fact at 48 I would have most likely been dead - the expected lifespan was much shorter. Hmmm...

One of the reviewers described the book as a treasure trove, and I thought that was most apt. It is stacked with fascinating detail and written in a style that is a pleasure to read. We are both starting to murmur about going back to France - it won't happen in the immediate future, but it will happen, and the more body of knowledge I build up in the interim, the happier I will be. I probably should start working on my language fluency too, but that isn't as much fun as curling up with a good book!

Yet another single subject book that is truly fascinating in its scope and the degree  of detail that it covers, while written in an engaging and easy to read style.
As I understand it, Mort Rosenblum is an American journalist who has spent the last 20 or so years based in France. His journalistic instincts come to the fore in his ability to fossick out titbits of information from all over the world and from a hugely variable range of people.
He bought a rundown property in Provence ( as you do!), close to Patrica Wells, and discovering ancient olive trees on his land, set about reestablishing them, and in the process became obsessed with the history of olives.
I knew olives had been around for a long time but I didn't realise just how far back they went, and just how important they have been to all the cultures around the Mediterranean.

In New Zealand as in California of late, olive trees have been planted, often in symbiosis with new wine growing areas, and olive oil has become a substance of considerable catchet - with competitions held to determine the best, just as we do with wine.
The procession from a basic, essential food ingredient, revered for its fundamental importance, in old cultures, to the pursuit of the 'best' olive oil in the  Western world, as defined by trendy food magazines, has given rise to enormous fraud and misrepresentations. The Italians, thru some earlier Sicilian contacts ,cornered the American market in the mid 1900's and have never relinquished their position of dominance, shipping in vast quantities of 'Italian' olive oil, Effectively much more than is actually grown in Italy. The Italian conglomerates buy in oil from Greece, Tunisia Spain and Turkey, blend it and label it 'Product of Italy'. Worse, the fraud extends to cutting olive oil with cheaper seed oils - sometimes by up to as much as 90% . The politics behind how that situation has been allowed to evolve make for fascinating reading - and makes the Westerners look like dupes really. They will buy something becos it is packaged beautifully and becos they are told it is something that it often isn't. 'Lite' olive oil is a classic example of marketing that has nothing to do with reality.

He travels all over the the countries  with a deep history in growing olives, and describes the old ways of pressing oil, relative to the new centrifugal methods - and tastes oil everywhere, discussing in detail, the differences between producers, regions and countries.

The upshot of which is to confirm my strongly held conviction that competitions are a load of bollocks. The notion of ' best' is entirely and utterly personal, and what is one persons nirvana, someone else will say tastes like cats pee. So rather than needing to know what is best ( competitions are useful for marketing, period), becos that can never, nor should be defined, I think much more interesting is the range of flavours in olive oils, and what creates that variation: types of olives, climatic conditions, treatment of trees, and methods of pressing.  And how those differences in flavour should be celebrated rather than judged on some arbitary scale of taste.  It is truly fascinating.

We use two tiers of olive oil at the restaurant - New Zealand olive oil with our homemade bread, and for any dressings, and then large cans of Italian olive oil that say it is Extra Virgin, for most of our frying. Having  read this book I am no longer quite so sure that what it says on the can is actually what is in the can, and I tried some last nite out of curiosity, and found it pale and anemic by comparison to the New Zealand oils that I am more used too, and would be very surprised if it was in fact Extra Virgin. All interesing...

My parents planted a couple of olive trees on the land here probably 10 to 15 years ago, and Rick and I have effectively ignored them since we bought the property, but have just been for a wander down to feed the worms, and had a closer look at them. They're definitly in need of some tender loving care - but possibly not beyond help. Mr Rosenblum talks about trees that have been neglected for centuries but which  still produce, so we may have to turn to someone who knows about these things to advice us.

We use 2 types of New Zealand oil - both grown by people we know and love. The Ellsgrove is grown by Ricks Aunt and Uncle, Sue and Trevor Lowe, in the Hawkes Bay, and Onemata comes from Plummers Point , close by us here in the Bay of Plenty, on an idyllic property next to the inlet, owned by Vic and Judy Bryant. They are quite different oils,with different aromas and nuances in flavour, just as you get variation in different wines. All of which I think adds to the interest. (We sell bottles of both oils at the restaurant.)

And of course a book on olive oil wouldn't be complete without delving into the  documented health benefits of olive oil, which perhaps explains part of its surgence in popularity in mainstream Western countries over the last 20/30 years. And  I kind of figure that the significance of those health claims make it all the more important to be sure that what you are eating is actually the real thing. Don't trust the labels on imported cans.Rely on your palate to tell you whether it is actually olive oil, or buy New Zealand.
Olive oil doesn't last - there are no benefits to aging it, and I see that as another reason to buy New Zealand becos  that way we get the first of the new season pressing, come August, September, and its grassy herbeacuousness is quite a revelation for those of us more use to bland mass produced oils.
But as with everything else in life, it comes down to personal taste! 

And now I'm of to make myself something for lunch -( I'm home alone, Courteneys racing in Rotorua with her father in attendance, and I've stayed home on puppy alert - the litter is due any time now.)., and I will be splashing around the olive oil in the sure conviction that it is good for me!

We have had the good fortune to do 2 major trips to Europe in the last few years - each based around 2 weeks of cookschools. The first was in rural Tuscany at a gorgeous Podere outside the small village of Asciano. The second trip was to France, again to a rural aspect, this time about 10kms away from the town of Bergerac in the Dordogne.

Each time we've been lucky enough to have customers of ours from here in Tauranga join us. Each couple would have planned their own trip to Europe and would have fitted in the week with us around the various other aspects of their itinery. We would pick them up from the nearest airport or train station, or some would drive to the house, and we would spend the rest of the week on the other side of the world surrounded by people that we knew and liked. Pretty cool really.

Like us, most of those people were away for 4/5 weeks. Getting to Europe all the way from New Zealand involves such a mammoth amount of expense and time, that most who plan trips there aim to be there for awhile. They then fit as much travel into their itinery as they feel appropriate, and everyone does different things and goes to different places, and its always intriguing to hear the different comments about areas.

One of the things that lots of people do however, is barge - sometimes in the UK and sometimes in France - and I got used to hearing about how idyllic meandering down one of Frances watery byways was. Having watched Rick Stein in his TV series, I could conjur up a reasonable number of appropriate images...

All of which is a roundabout way of introducing this book by Mort Rosenblum - who's style of writing and love affair with France are all things I'm enjoying right now.
He lived for years in an old houseboat on the Seine, right in the middle of Paris, and that is what I thought the book was going to be about, but in fact I ended up with a whole heap more. The history of the Seine in fact - one of the major waterways in France.

 New Zealand is such a new country, relatively speaking, that we've never really developed rivers as a main method of transporting goods - whereas in Europe for centuries the canal system was used as a cost efficent way of moving stuff.
This book tracks that history and makes for fascinating reading. And then discusses how the old ways, the couples who spent their whole lives living on 'peniches' ( river barges), moving cargo thru France,  are now finding they can't compete with rail and road.
Its a dying breed, as trains and trucks and huge congomlorates take over from the individualistic approach of the river people, and gain the upper hand  - and much of the book focuses on the tragedy of a profession that is dying, but refusing to accept the inevitable, and raging at the dying of the light.

Tourism ( ie the barges that the people who were with us used) ironically, is viewed by many as the saviour of the waterways, and the cashcow that will encourage recalcitant local government to reinvest in their canals. But the old operators treat such endeavours with complete disdain - the old world doesn't want to be pragmatic and accomodate the new. And becos of that will probably disappear within a generation, which seems so sad.

Mr Rosenblum has a particular love for the Seine - he discusses often its profound beauty, and how it captivated many artists, who lived along its shores and tried to distill its essence onto canvas.
There are many charming facts thru the book, delving back to Roman times, but one of the loveliest legends is based perhaps, not on fact, but describes how the tidal ebbs and flows which occur in the Seine, and can make things interesting for boats,something that hydrologists have tried to tame over the years, relates to how the Seine was once a beautiful young nymphette in human form who turned into the watery  Seine to escape from the unwelcome advances of Neptune..

'Twice a day since, with great heaving and grunting, he thrusts himself after his lost love object. Each time, the Seine recoils. reversing the natural flow of a river, to keep her gentler green waters separate from his salty waves of blue.
Who knows? River people reject nothing out of hand."

This book is a delightful tour of the river, from its source to where it finally spills into the sea - full of captivating detail along the way...
I see we now have a house boat on the Waikato river, available for hire - we may not have quite  the same centuries of myth and history, but its neat to think that someone has taken the commercial risk to bring a European style of travel to NZ- I sincerely hope it works for them.

I've just finished compiling a stack of newsletters. We have some friends coming to help with the ' fold/put in envelopes/affix stamp' stage in the morning, so wanted to be organised.

We have a large outcatering wedding on Saturday and I'm sincerely hoping that this run of idyllic late, autumnual weather is going to last until that is over, becos the setting where it is to be held, is beautiful - provided the sun is shining...

But I won't dwell on that - instead I'll write about this latest book that I've just finished, by the American author Mort Rosenblum. One of the huge advantages of Amazon is that when I get excited about a certain author, I can go on the computor and order anything else by them that appeals, before that sense of enthusiasm abates. In this instance I've had a number of parcels arrive over the last week, with the subject matter ranging from olives to living in a houseboat on the Seine slapbang in  the middle of Paris,  to " A Goose in Toulouse', which is a loose commentary on the state of culinary matters in France at the turn of the 21st century. The common thread between all the books is that they discuss France with love and affection, and that feels totally appropriate for my here and now, as I become aware that I'm starting to get warm around the edges about gearing up to organise another big trip abroad.

Mort Rosenblum wrote the fascinating book on chocolate that I've previously blogged about, and I enjoyed his easy style of writing. He manages to impart a huge amount of information in an easy, engaging style.

"A Goose in Toulouse' is a series of essays about the state of eating and drinking in France, and how the growth in fast food, and the dreaded bureaucrats from Brussels are impacting on age old tradition.

"Over centuries, the dinner table has remained an anchor for families and friendships, the heart of what is finest about France. each course requires seperate effort, part of a whole. Children learn their values and their manner at mealtime. Nothing important gets signed, sealed or delivered without the clinking of glasses and the rattling of cutlery."

He wanders around France to all points north and south and pokes his nose into many aspects of food and wine production - cheese, Chateau d'Yquem, oysters, fois gras, snails, the Michelin  guide to restaurants, truffles, hunting of the wild boars - and in each instance discusses the changes that are happening and whether they are percieved to be good or bad for the future.

There is a deeply ingrained belief in France as espoused by Brillat- Savarin that 'the pleasure of the table reigns among other pleasure, and it is the last to console when others are lost."

Becos of what I do, I tend to subscribe to that theory wholeheartedly, and in my all too brief time in France so far, I've always felt completely at home surrounded by such a passion for good food. It is something I sincerely hope the French never loose, and I found some of the points raised in this book, in terms of the trends and the worries for the future quite fascinating.

A delightful, thought provoking read, which given it was written back in 2000, was considerably ahead of  its time.

A book about the chocolate trail - from where it is grown and harvested, in a band of countries around the equator, to the history of how the first cacao beans were taken back to Europe and its subsequent evolution to the sweet, rich addicitive substance of today.

Single subject books allow for a fascinating amount of focus and detail and in a subject as deep and rich as chocolate, this book is immensely satisfying. The author is a journalist who has previously written books about olives( and I've just been on Amazon to order that and another couple by him!), and who came to the subject of chocolate with no preconceived notions.

What he has uncovered and laid out in fascinating detail is a wonderful evocation of a substance that arouses intense passion in people.
Collosal family fortunes were made back in the 1800s, by the Mars and the Hersheys et al, from the production of cheap candy and chocolate. Generations of Americans have grown up believing those to be the quintessential flavours of chocolate. But hard on the heels of the 21st century has  come the growth in an artisinal industry where the focus is on quality - just as has happened with bread and coffee, wine and olives.
Now people talk about single estate chocolates, and describe nuances of flavour as they would wine.
This book traverses the globe and talks to people in Africa, mexico, the Carribean, France, Belgium, England and America.
He debunks some of the myths and snobbery that inevitably end up being attached  to any such in demand product, and differentiates between those who make 'bonbons' - ganache filled chocolates, that they make from bought in blocks of chocolate which they melt down, and then those who make the chocolate itself from the cacao beans shipped in from the Equator. The book comes alive with the passion and enthusiasm of those who quite literally have dedicated their lives to making the very best chocolate in the world

.
As Anthelme Brillat-Savarin is quoted as saying: 'Nine of every ten persons say they love chocolate. The tenth lies!"

I concede to having being guilty of stating somewhat snottily in cookschools that we now wouldn't stoop to using a chocolate with less than 70% cocoa fat, and spent years turning up my nose at the chocolate chips that the girls would bring home from the supermarket for their baking, becos our chocolate was too strong for them. But in our last series Rick made some chocolates which were dark chocolate cups filled with dulce de leche, and topped with melted milk chocolate, and even I had to climb down of my high horse and accept that milk chocolate has its place. Sometimes its a good idea not to paint yourself into too much of a corner by stating absolutes, and some of the snobbery surrounding dark chocolate is misplaced and silly.

I rather warmed to the concept of chocolate as a health food, it s an area in which a lot of research is currently going on - the idea of medicating my hypertension with a little dark chocolate every day and glass of red wine, has infinitely more appeal that beta blockers, I feel. Although I'm not sure I'll take the medical fraternity with me just yet!

The book is a delight, written in a light vein, but completely packed with information. I've gained a huge amount of perspective on t he subject and next time Rick places an order with Sabato, I'll be getting down their range of single estate Valrohna chocolate bars, so I can sit down and do a comparative tasting and satiate my curiosity on this notion of flavours of terroir coming thru in chocolate  as it does in wine.
We can but try!

Richard Olney was an American who spent most of his life living in France, and who became a reknown expert on both cooking and French wine. His autobiography, ' Reflexions', which I've written about previously, was a fascinating book.
During his writing career, he was asked to write books on the history and significance of two of the most famous of French wines - Romanee-Conti, a Burgundy, and Chateau d'Yquem, a Sauterne.
Most of the books that I buy are the result of reading recommendations from authors I respect, which send me to my computor and a diligent search thru Amazon. Sometimes some of the books I'm after are out of print, but one of the reasons I'm such a fan of Amazon, is that they will painlessly link me to booksellers who are selling second hand copies of something. It is not unusual for the cost of the freight to get the book to NZ to be considerably more than the price of the book itself. I mention that becos this copy of Yquem is an updated version, bookended by the commentaries of other people, who have edited and added to Richard Olneys original text, subsequent to his death. My copy of 'Romanee-Conti was an original edition, and had been a library book at some stage, so it was pure Richard. This one isn't, and that may or may not be significant.
 
Richard was personally close to the last generation of the Lur Saluces family who had owned the  Yquem estate for generations, prior to the buyout by the corporate group LMVH, and I suspect that this updated version, plays up the modern story, and pushes the historical information to the background, to portray a seamless transition from family owned, to corporate. However that could just be me being a bit picky, but I know from his autobiography that he was distraught at the manoevrings that led to his friend being pushed sideways at the winery, and he also had a very established ego that would have chaffed at sharing writing honours with anyone else- and a number of chapters in this book are headed; Richard Olney and Francis Mayeur. That, I suspect, indicates that some of his text has been altered.

None of which detracks really from the fact that it is a fascinating story about a complex wine, which is quite regularly called the 'king of wines'. I have been fortunate enough on a number of occasions to try sips of Yquem from different vintages,  when people have bought treasured bottles to the restaurant, and the expression 'liquid gold',  best encapsulates my sense of wonder at something that can taste so rich, and yet not be in any way cloying. The complexity in the wine is extraordinary, and this book describes that process as it has happened over hundreds of vintages, both in the vineyard and the winery.

It is made from grapes that have been attacked by the botrytis fungi, which leave them looking like dried out, quite disgusting raisins. By a miracle of science ( that I've read and don't profess to understand!), the process of the botrytis ( noble rot) alters the chemical balance in the grape, all of which, correctly handled, lead to an extraordinary 'unctuousness and complexity in the resulting wine.'

I would love to know what induced the very first winemaker, wherever it was in the world ( and this book references sweet wines made back in Ancient Egyptian times), to press the first bunch of botrytis affected grapes - becos they look truly disgusting, and a very far cry from grapes usually used to make wine. Coincidence or calculated trial? I guess we'll never know for sure cos its buried too far back in the mists of time. But at Yquem that process of ensuring that the grapes are attacked by the fungi, and picked in their optimum condition ( ie withered to the 'roasted' stage) means a huge amount of work - and the efforts made to ensure ongoing standards are maintained, seamlessly are quite extraordinary.
The average life of a vine is 45 years - so there is constant pulling out of sections of the vineyard - having it lie fallow and then replanting going on. The unique flavour of Yquem comes, the experts say, from the 'terrior' the soil and climatic conditions, particular to the 400 odd acres that make up the estate. So the vines may come and go under careful management over decades, but the wine continues to sparkle as something uniquely special becos of the land where they grow.
And that is a point underscored ever so subtely in the book - winemaking techniques may have been upgraded, and lots of capital spent on the Chateau since LMVH took over, but never to the detriment of the flavour of the wine.

I have always loved dessert wines, and we feature a number of them at Somerset,( but regretfully no Yquem... yet!) becos I believe them to be a wonderful way of finishing a meal. However,  I also remember my sense of amazement the first time I got to try a rich liver pate with a noble rot wine, ( It was niether Yquem or fois gras - a combination, much touted in this book), but something that I initially thought was going to be far too rich, was in fact a sublime combination. And that is a line of enquiry that the book discusses further - the thought that Yquem doesn't have to just be a dessert accompainment. Becos of the complexity in its flavours it goes with a whole range of meats and fish, and Olney presents a range of extraordinary menus for dinners dating back to 1926, that have centered around Chateau d'Yquem.
Hmmm...
It has always seemed the height of extravagance to me to cook with a fantastic wine, rather than just sipping it - but maybe real extravagance, is to cook with the wine, and then open another bottle to drink while eating the dish.
Must try it sometime!

Have woken to intense blue skies,  much to my considerable relief. We are catering a large wedding in a marquee tonite, and as organised as you can aim to be, everything, but everything in these marquee weddings centers on the weather. Today is at a fabulous spot - the brides fathers home, and I'm so pleased for everyone,( including me!) that the weather is going to allow things to flow smoothly.
As an aside, some of the most memorable weddings we have done, have been under atrocious weather conditions - there is just something about the added complexity that rain and wind can bring, that makes people go that extra distance  and creates some special laughes as you battle the elements. But there is no doubt, that there is quite enough pressure involved in getting mains to 110 people as quickly as practical, without the added stress of worrying about how we are going to get the plates from the kitchen to the marquee without the food being rained on, or blown off!

I am about to start the packing that I do, to load up the car, before Wendy and I head out to set up the tables, and deal with any last minute instruction. I've just strained the mango star tea thats been infusing overnite, which we use to make a beautifully cheerful pink hued iced tea. That goes out in huge jars and will be mixed onsite. I've also got to grind coffee, and assemble all the bar paraphenalia ( forgetting wine knives is never a good look - although in todays world our life has been made incredibly easier by the advent of screw caps!), aprons, and a few other bits and pieces on my list. Rick and the kitchen staff will come out in the truck a bit later, and then the rest of the front staff will arrive, before the guests turn up for that first glass of bubbly. And I must remember teabags, becos someone always wants a cup of tea, and teabags are something that I am notorious for forgetting. Which is why they're top of my list...

Finished this book last nite, with some regret, becos its written in a series of essays, that I've taken much pleasure in dipping into over the last little while. We spent 5 days in Paris at the end of our Italian cookschool trip a few years back - we flew from Venice to Paris, expressly becos I was concerned that we might never get back to Europe, and I didn't want to die not having been to Paris. Its a city I've read much about, and one I really wanted to visit. And now of course having being, I am far from satiated. Quite the reverse in fact. I hope one day to go and spend some months there - just living and absorbing. And I know from my reading that I am far from alone in that fascination. This book is written by an American journalist, who with his wife and toddler son decided to go and live in Paris for 5 years.

He writes about different facets of French life, as he comes to understand what makes the French pysche so paradoxical, in a deeply satisfying style that was a pure pleasure to read. His story about one of the great Parisian brassieres been bought out by a corporate chain, Brasserie Balzar, and the regulars deciding to stage a sit in in protest,  becos something that was so familiar and precious to their daily life was under threat of losing its personal idiosyncrasies, could only have happened in France.  That people care so much about tradition...

    'I was so overtaken by the excitement of the strike, and the action, and then I was so happily filled with a sense of moral indignation, and self-righteous pleasure, that I kept away from the Balzar, and for a while I didn't miss it at all. As generations of French revolutionaries have discovered, moral self-righteousness is a very good short-term substitute for pleasure, but it wears out. Now I realize that the Balzar still exists on the rue des Ecoles and that I have lost if for good, and I think about the light coming in on a spring night, and the way the waiters took the food from the oval plates, and the simple poulet roti, and how good it all was, and I miss it all the time."

In other words they fought for a romantic notion - they didn't want change, but change happened anyway, as it has a habit of doing.

Its a beautiful book - the french are interpreted by a  sensitive man, who watches and muses, and who more than anything, cares.
Needless to say, it has just intensified my conviction that one day, I am going to have to go...

Denis Cotter owns a vegetarian restaurant in the city of Cork in Southern Ireland called, Cafe Paradiso. We have met him and his ex wife on a number of occasions when they were back in Tauranga visiting Bridgets relatives. I have his previous 2 cookbooks, both of which are inspiring visions of what vegetarian cooking can be. Forget the lentils and  drab pottery! His food is vibrant and flavoursome, and he pulls on inspiration from all round the world to come up with new ideas.
This book while containing recipes, is more a treatise on his approach to vegetables and his relationship with Ultan Welsh, a local grower who supplies most of the produce for the restaurant, and who is constantly experimenting with what else can be grown. Unlike the more staid conservatism that we encountered in both rural France and Italy, where they stick with what it is that they've been growing for the last few centuries, these guys are constantly on the prowl to see what else they can come up with. An approach that is very similar to how we view things in NZ, I felt.

The book had a personal dimension for me, becos not only had we met Denis on a couple of occasions here at Somerset, we also stayed at Ultan and his partner's B&B,  Gort na nain that they run on the same land which they market garden. We had headed up to Cork at the end of our French cookschools in 07, and knowing that Paradiso was somewhere close to Ballymaloe Cookschool, which was the main reason for us going, I'd been on the restaurant website trying to calculate distances, and in doing so ended up with a link to Ultan and Lucy, and we decided to stay there for our first nite in Cork with friends who had come with us.
Lucy and Ultan are also vegetarians, and cooked us a beautiful meal from Denis' 2nd cookbook, and we drank wine from the Bordeaux  region in France where we'd just been, and argued over whether Richie McCaw was a cheat - as you do! A wonderful nite.
The next morning Lucy found gumboots for us ( Ireland is wet!), and we wandered over the land, with her explaining what they were doing in the various tunnel houses, and what they were hoping to achieve.

Ultan in the meantime had done a delivery to Cafe Paradiso and made a lunchtime booking for us, which he reported back gleefully had caused some consternation becos of my surname ' Butcher".
What Ultan and Lucy do is hard, repetitive work - but immensely satisfying I would imagine. This book is a description in large part of the symbiosis between Denis as the chef, and Ultan as the grower, and how they are constantly looking at new vegetables or varieties. The mutual respect for what the other does is pallible, and the photos are lovely.
I remember an awkward conversation with Denis at Somerset a number of years ago now, when he quizzed me about the provenance of some of our produce, and made me uncomfortable with how little I knew. He has a rather long nose - and I definitly felt that I had being looked down it, at! At the time I thought he was being unreasonably picky, becos buying direct from growers just wasn't feasible back in the mid 90s. But times have changed, and over the last few years, things like Farmers Markets have sprung up all over; and people are increasingly expressing concern over how far the produce in Supermarkets may have travelled. We are embracing the concept of seasonality in our food to an increasing degree, and it is a natural procession from there to get to know the people who grow our food.
This summer season we've had the great pleasure of getting our berries direct from the Somerfield family at the top of Oropi. That has involved a car trip for Rick 2 or 3 times a week, that may be a little inconvenient, when compared to having things brought to us at the restaurant - but that slight inconvenience was more than compensated for by the freshness of the berries. They were truly magnificent.
Along a similar vein we have a keen young boy in Te Puna who has been supplying us with green beans since the start of this year, and who with the encouragement of his parents wants to grow other things for us. We are simply delighted to support him.
And then this morning we drove miles out to rural Papamoa ( I hadn't realised that those 2 words together wasn't yet an oxymoron!) to talk to a melon grower who can also supply us with tomatoes.
So - by what feels like natural steps, I guess we are heading in that direction that Denis articulates so eloquently in this book, and from the conversations I have with people in the cookschools, I know that we are not alone in that.

It is my personal belief, that we are going to see an increasing trend in years to come, of the reduction in the importance of a hunk of protein as the main  constituent in a lot of our food. Not becos we've all become squeemish over the fact that an animal must die so we can eat meat, although that doubtless influences some of us - but I suspect the most abiding influence will be the proportional rise in the cost of that piece of meat, and we will all start looking at ways we can make a little go further. Nothing like economic necessity to change thinking!
Some of the great food cultures in the world, have, since time began, been frugal in their use of meat, so its nothing new, but it is an adjustment for those of us who grew up on a daily diet of beef and mutton. My children eat a very different  diet to what I did growing up, and I suspect that is a process of evolution that will continue for their children - and it is not something I see in anyway as a negative. Far from it in fact. When you read the wonderful recipes in this book, you understand fully that good vegetarian cooking isn't about finding a substitute for meat, but all about celebrating produce in its on right.

Richard Olney is one of my foodwriting heros. I read his autobiography last year with a sense of umtrammeled delight, and in  response to that, tracked down the 2 books he'd written on 2 of the worlds greatest wines - Romanee-Conti, and Chateau d'yquem.
I haven't as yet had the opportunity to try Romanee-Conti. No-one I know has conveniently turned up at the restaurant with a bottle tucked under their arm unfortunetly, but I have been given sips of Chateau d'yquem, and I remember that as one of lifes more momentous taste experiences.
Romanee-Conti is a burgundy, and burgundy equals pinot noir in our parlance. Domaine de la romanee-conti is considered the most prestigous of them all. This book explores the history of the vineyard, which extraordinaryly, goes back 11 centuries ( or at least that seems specatacular to someone immersed in NZ wine culture which only goes back a few decades, rather than centuries..), and discusses how both viticulture and the wine making methods have evolved, but also still stayed true to tradition. Sounds dry, but its anything but.

'Romanee-Conti has been collecting adjectives, analogies and hyperboles for two centuries. Ever since M.de Cussy,back in 1784, described a bottle of Romanee, as bottled velvet and satin, velvet and satin have become part of the repertoire. As the vocabulary of wine has become more sophisticated, these textures have been joined by the scents of violets, wild cherries, raspberries, strawberries, plums, spices, licorice, truffles, game, undergrowth and other essences.
There is always a sense of drama as one approaches Romanee-Conti. It is as if all the stops have been pulled on a great cathedral organ, not in the sense that the wine is overpowering, for it is all delicacy and nuance, it is the infinite complexity which makes one catch ones breath."

To be honest, I  am quite often  left feeling distinctly intimidated in the company of wine experts, who discuss wine using language that leaves me befuddled and confused. My personal wine analysis tends to form more along the lines of whether I like it or not, although one of my new years resolutions is to exercise a little more discernment.
But my problem is that I've got cynical over the years observing too many people treat great wines as a kind of trophy, and seeming to feel that they should be treated with special deference becos they have had the foresight ( and deep pockets ) to invest in something considered the best. It has occasionally seemed to me to be more about their egos, and less to do with the actual flavours of the wine, which is what I thought wine was all about. But no. For some people, if Robert Parker or Wine Spectator rank a wine highly then they will buy it, becos if they say its good then it must be good, and to them, an exhorbitant price tag, just underscores that validity. Hmm...

Richard Olney, by contrast had a superbly critical, and fiercly independant palate ( even though, curiously, he was a life long smoker), and this book is a paean sung to the background and history of a wine that is held in such high esteem. Its fascinating.

One of the New Zealand pinots, Wild Earth, from central Otago has recently won the accolade in an international wine competition ( London I think, but I could be wrong), of the top red in the world. A heavy mantle to carry I would imagine, for a relatively new winery. I get twitchy about competitions - wine, food and restaurant ones, becos the concept of 'best' is so...., I don't know, so ...ephemeral. How the hell do you rank and define the notion of best? It must surely vary, so much, depending on individual preferences.

Romanee-Conti has centuries of tradition and expectation that has built up the culture of mystique and creates the demand that allows it to be sold for thousands of dollars a bottle. Wild Earth by contrast is less than 10 years old as a winery. It sells for conspicuously less money. But does that make it a lesser wine?!
Don't get me wrong. I think its fantastic that NZ pinots are finally getting some recognition on the world stage after years of being ever so politely denigrated by Jancis Robinson and Robert Parker. I've just taken delivery of some cases of Wild Earth ( becos I can afford them, unlike Romanee-Conti!), and I await the ensuing conversations that I'm sure I will have with a number of people, who will want to decide whether they feel it is worthy of the label its been given. Thats the cool thing about wine - everyones an expert!

As I write this, I'm sipping a glass of Delta Pinot Noir from Malborough -  a pinot noir that no less than Robert Parker gave a score of 90/100, and one that I've ordered in for a function we're doing this weekend for an extremely good client, who also happens to be a wine buff. He's left the wine choices to me, beyond stating a preference for the bubbly becos of nostalgic connatations, and I've ranged wide, trying to come up with an appropriate mix. Conspicuous quantities were delivered today, and I opened a bottle of the pinot in a mild panic over whether it will live up to its promise. Rick and I have decided we really like it, and I can but hope our client shares our sentiments.
But thats the thing about wine - it is such a personal expression, so we will just have to wait and see!

This is an old cookbook by a classicist French chef who died in the 1950's which has been republished, becos I suspect, some of the more reknown chefs in these current times, claim it as a seminal book in their learning to be where they are now. Thomas Keller says in his introduction:

'I believe that Fernand Point is one of the last true gourmands of the twentieth century. His ruminations are extraordinary and thought-provoking - he has been an inspiration for legions of chefs. Ma Gastronomie was the first cookbook that opened my eyes and made me more consicious of the entire dining experience. It made me think of the guest, and the culture surrounding food and restaurants.'

M. Point owned a restaurant in Lyons called La Pyramide, and it became the most famous restaurant in France, and in doing so broke with tradition. Up until then chefs had stayed in the kitchen, but M.Point was a larger than life personality  who liked to come into the restaurant and talk to his customers. And as word got around that something special was happening in a restaurant in Lyon, people flooded in from all over. 

He believed that dining out was a total experience, everything had to be designed to ensure the guests comfort, and no detail was too small to be overlooked. It was a totally consuming way of living and working - and his legacy has lived on thru a number of his apprentices, who in their turn have gone onto be some of the greatest chefs working in France. People like Paul Bocuse, and the Troisgros brothers. Of the 18 restaurants in France that had 3 Michelin stars ( the highest possible culinary ranking), 7 were run by chefs who had trained under M. Point.

His significance was that he broke thru the traditions that had enveloped the culinary world since Careme and  Escoffier, and came up with new ways of looking at food. Back in the 30s and 40s, those ideas were considered revolutionary, but ironically when I read thru his menus now I find them remarkably old fashioned,  and heavy. Lots and lots of fois gras and cream and truffles.

So I read the book more for his philosophy on what  makes a restaurant great,  and what makes a chef inspiring, and found all sorts of bon mots tucked away. However even there, so much of his approach wouldn't survive in the modern world - becos things have changed so much. He used to have a barber came and shave him on the deck of the restaurant every morning and during that preformance would discuss with his sous chef the days proceedings, and while that was happening  they would drink a magnum ( ie 1500ml!! ) of champagne.  The prodiguous consumption  and the generosity that he extended to people was just extraordinary.

Our world is too fast and too tough to ever dream of replicating that kind of lifestyle, but it makes for wonderful reading. He died in his 50s, and his wife toughed it out and continued to run the restaurant while retaining the 3 stars, and staying true to his vision, in the face of a wide spread conviction that she wouldn't be able to do it.

Among his well known sayings is one that made me smile:

'When I stop in a restaurant I don't know, I always ask to shake hands with the chef. I know if he is thin, I'll probably eat poorly. And if he is thin and sad, the only hope is in flight.'

The photos of M.Point reveal a girth that in todays world would be discribed as morbidly obese. He obviously never deprived himself of any indulgence, and regarded anyone in the culinary world who did, as somehow being suspicious. To be a great chef, you had to love food. To love food, you had to eat it, and in doing so you would not be thin. Times have changed, alot of great chefs I know, including the one I'm married too, stay thin  by exercise.  Rick loves to eat, but he will never put on weight becos of the amount of running and cycling that he does.  A form of excertion that M.Point would have regarded with total distain!

All interesting...

Marcella Hazan was the first Italian food writer whose cookbooks we used back in the mid 80's when we started here at Somerset, and although our library has extended considerably since those days, it is still her books that we turn too when we want to answer a query we may have about something to do with Italian food.

This book is the story of the journey of her life( not a recipe book), and how it began in a small rural Italian village prior to the Second World War, and has gone thru a number of gyrations ending up in its final stages in an appartment in Florida. How anyone could leave glorious Venice to go and live in Florida bewilders me, but my bones aren't as old as hers, and I do recall the unedifying vision of an elderly, obviously unwell lady being wheeled past us in a hellishly uncomfortable looking wooden cart thru the uneven flagstones of Venetian alleyways to the nearest boat. The Venetian version of an ambulance I guess - all that the narrow streets would allow. So perhaps I can sort of understand her reasoning. But Florida?!!

She started doing cookschools by chance - small ones in her home in New York for 6 people. Her background wasn't food, it was science.  Craig Clairbourne, a then famous food writer for the New York Times, wrote a spiel about them effectively putting her on the map, and book offers followed, as did the desire to decamp back to Italy to do classes in situ, where she could duplicate the experience of taking people to the food markets. They started in Bologna, where the city itself paid for them to set up a commercial kitchen, recognising the tourism potential that would flow. And it certainly did - people came from all around the world - both ordinary and seriously famous people came. People from all sorts of occupations - medical, legal as well as culinary et al. And her descriptions of some of those attendees and the problems she had making squeemish modern sensibilites accept the realities that food doesn't come in plastic bags, but as whole squid that needs to be cleaned, or fish that has eyes in heads that need to be removed or...  Reactions that we  regularly observe in our classes. Some people prefer to be in complete denial that the meat they eat was once a sentient being, and I find that a form of convenient hypocrasy. So was intrigued to see that even those who paid astronomical sums to go and live in Italy and cook from the local markets wouldn't have considered in advance the possibility that they would be going back to literal basics! She did describe one attendee who was anorexic, and who's idea of eating was to cut a tube of macaroni into 4, and eat one quarter and then declare themselves full. And there was someone else who ate very little, and when she enquired as to why, he said he didn't like the taste of olive oil. You do wonder about what goes on in peoples heads sometimes, and why they would bother going to all the trouble and expense to attend.

She ended up in Venice, doing cookschools at The Cipriano, and then later in an appartment that they bought. Venice was a city her husband had always wanted to live in - and I've just tried to go on Amazon to get a copy of the book they wrote there," Marcella Cucina", which apparently includes magnificent photos of a city that I think is truly extraordinary, but the only one currently available is thru a second hand dealer who doesn't ship internationally - so will have to think of another approach...  Once she got too frail to negotiate the streets, they moved to Florida. When we went to Cork at the end of our French trip, we stayed with Darina Allen at Ballymaloe, and when she and Tim joined us for dinner at Ballymaloe House, they were late, becos they'd missed a connecting flight coming back from Venice, when they'd been invited to be part of the Hazans farewell celebrations to that city. I was so impressed by such connections that I was temporarily overawed and struck dumb. It passed however! Marzella mentions Darina in the book and going to Cork - and how Darina came to her classes. Thats one of the things that did impress me, is the degree to which food people travel around attending classes that other food people do, all part of the assumption that you always have something to learn, I guess.

As with some of the other memoirs that I have read, it is a fascinating insight into what propelled people to achieve what they did in their lives, and always interesting to note what is the result of serendipity and what comes down to careful planning. Interesting too, is the descriptions of people that I've read about previously, sometimes complimentary and sometimes not so. Relationships come and go in life, and true friends are a real and special commodity. We all  have to learn  at some stage, that not everyone operates from the same book as us - and that incompatibility can sometimes take awhile to work its way to the surface. At other times it can be immediately apparent that someone is trying to climb onto your coat tails, and use your brand, knowledge or connections to their advantage. She is very upfront about such people. I have previously written about Judith Jones book, The Tenth Muse, a book I loved. She was the first book editor to see the potential in Julia Childs and was instrumental in her being published in the 60's, and thru Julia was introduced to Marcella, but their relationship turned acriminious, and I've now read two quite different versions of why things went sour. Richard Olney was another who met all the famous food people - James Beard and Julia and Craig Clairborne, and managed to puncture one or two obviously overinflated pictures I had built up about these people. 

 When we were going thru a particularly difficult period with my parents who were our business partners in the early years of Somerset, it used to stagger me how the 4 of us could have a meeting and becos of the degree of conflict amongst us, take away quite contrary interpretations of what was meant to have been said during that meeting. Happens everywhere I guess. Where there is conflict, there is always going to be different selfserving interpretations. Some of it can sound quite bitchy and I do wonder why it has to go on the record, becos it doesn't achieve anything after all these years, I would have thought. I amaze myself sometimes by reading back over certain periods in my diaries and realising that the memories I carry have taken on quite a different hue to the tone I was writing in back whenever. We edit stuff for our own purposes, which is why you can end up with one set of facts but two different interpretations of what happened. 

She truly is an icon however - and represents so much the very best in cooking. The background, the history, the knowledge  and the realness of her life experiences, all of which can be a little chavinistic in interpretation,  in the sense of  a very literal, 'I'm right and therefore you are wrong!', stance of anyone who dared to query her interpretation of Italian cooking,  but I've never really had a problem with people who have passionate viewpoints, and for her it all comes down to how the food should taste. The Italians used lots of fat, and just becos that may have jarred with American sensibilities in the 70's she wasn't going to change to accomodate what she saw as a ridiculous pandering to nonsense. There should be no shortcuts in the creation of good food, and with that I agree wholeheartedly.

I always find books like this somewhat fascinating, becos even though I think I am reasonably savy about the restaurant world, I have to concede there are a lot of fundamental differences between what we do here in Tauranga, New Zealand, and what happens day to day in one of New Yorks top restaurants, Le Bernardin.

Turnover to start with - I calculate on what they say about actual food costs, that their annual turnover is in the vicinity of $US18 -25m. That is significantly more than ours. They have 40 chefs for 100 covers, but typically of the fashionable American restaurants, they do more than one seating, and will do 200-250 covers in a service. Most of the kitchen staff are there to do 'stages' ie for a short time frame to learn as much as they can, and to add another famous name to their resume. They work atrociously long hours and are paid a pittance, but they do it for what they learn.

Everything about the restaurant is substantial - monthly flower bills are $12,000 for godsakes! - and I guess to stay at the top in a fiercely competitive environment, such things matter. The story behind the setting up, the sister and brother team who came from Paris to take on New York, and their subsequent success makes interesting reading. They were obviously substantially ahead of their time - moving to open restaurants in Las Vegas, well before the now common trend of well known restaurateurs opening up in the various casinos - but all that expansion ended when the brother died suddenly in his late 40's. His sister continues on as the owner of Le Bernardin, and has sensibly extended part ownership to the chef Eric Rupert, who has become a media figure in his own right.

The detail of kitchen service is fascinating for us, as we try to get our heads around how 40 chefs function in a small space. By comparison we have 4 chefs to do 65 covers. I'd love to see their wage bill!

And I had to smile when I read the list of 'Cardinal Sins' - the 129 things that new front of house employees are given and reminded to keep in mind at all times, in an ongoing effort to keep service constant and at a high standard. There was nothing on that list that I didn't agree with - meaning I guess that good service is good service, regardless of where you work!

A book I've meant to read for years, having heard so much about it. Based in Mexico is tells the story of one womans life as woven around her ability to cook. Mystical and magical, but with the very modern thread of people taking responsibility for their own lives running through it. I thought it was beautiful, and cried as you do ( or at least I do!) when you read something that plucks at the heart strings.

A friend had dropt her copy into me, becos we'd been discussing it in a cookschool, and I wasn't at all surprised to see the inscription written in the book by whoever had given it to her saying that it was very appropriate for her becos she understood the power and passion of good food. I couldn't have put it more aptly myself.

We were to go on a trip to Mexico earlier this year, which didn't get underway, and at the time I felt reasonably OK about that becos we had so much else going on in our lives, that I took the fact the trip didn't happen as a sign that it wasn't meant to be.

However, reading this book and the intricacies of the food descriptions has certainly got me to pondering about how great it would be to go and experience some of these amazing flavours. We have good contacts there- people who've lived in the region for many years, so I haven't given away the idea entirely. Its an idea who's time will come.

An extraordinary book. I've just finished it, reluctantly - becos I didn't want it to come to an end. But Rick and Courteney were out on their bikes; we'd done a cookschool today, and my head wasn't really in the right space to sit down with all the typing I need to face for some catering quotes, so instead I retreated to the bed with the dogs to keep me company, and finally finished this immensely satisfying account of an extraordinary life, dedicated to the pursuit and enjoyment of good food and wine.

Richard Olney doesn't enjoy the same widespread familiarity of someone like Julia Childs, but he has a strong following for all that. He was an American, who ended up living in France from his early twenties. He began as a struggling artist in Paris, but his palate and love of good food and wine, and the personal contacts made, led to a life spent based in the South of France from where he entertained a huge range of food, wine and restaurant people, and gradually become more famous from his writing.

 As the picture shows we already have a stack of his books, having first encountered mention of him in the cookbooks from Chez Panisse, but I've subsequently ordered the 2 wine books, on Chateau Yquem and Romanee-Conti, becos I wanted to absorb his knowledge and love for the history behind these fabled wines. Alice Waters and he were very close and he had a huge impact on the evolution of her restaurant. As she says in her introduction to the book, having recieved a glowing recommendation from Richard for a luncheon cooked at Chez Panisse ' readers of this book will have some sense of what it must be like to recieve a tribute from someone whose discrimination is so artful and whose enthusiasms are so passionate;and, above all, they will learn something of what it means to lead a life so honest, so pure in taste, and so fine in judgement."

His life was fascinating. Everyone who was anyone in the food or wine world at some point during the second half of last century beat a path to his door, and his recounting of what ensued is sometimes deliciously ascerbic. Just becos they were famous didn't mean he had to like or respect them!
But its served to give me a different take on a whole host of people who I've previously read about like Julia Childs and Elizabeth David, and James Beard. Not to mention a whole heap of other people, quite a few of whom I had no idea as to who they were.

He ended up being as admired and feted by the French gastronomic community, both food and wine, as he did the international one, and given their propensity for chavinism, that is no mean feat, and a true reflection of the depth of his knowledge.

I pulled his cookbooks of the shelf for this photo, and am going to spend some time going thru them over the next few days, so as to be inspired to head into my own kitchen. It will be interesting to see if his recipe writing speaks to me as eloquently as his account of his life has done.

An insight into the ideas, methods and creativity of Ferran Adria, who is the chef at elBulli, a restaurant that is constantly touted as THE BEST RESTAURANT IN THE WORLD.

This is my third attempt to get the blog about this book written - my previous two disappeared into cyber space, and I had to start again from scratch. But in some ways that was an appropriate sympton of my feelings about this restaurant, becos I swing backwards and forwards in terms of how I regard it. Since my previous effort  ( which I did have the foresight to save this time), I've been over at the restaurant for lunch service, and flicked thru the book again, and decided that I didn't like what I'd previously written, becos it would come across as being flippant, and that is not the impression I wanted to convey. So. I will start again.
This book is a photographic display of all that happens in a day in the world of elBulli. As is typical of anything about that restaurant though, it ends up being so much more than just a series of photos. Ferran Adria is considered by the world food media to be the best chef in the world. He is acknowledged by his famous peers as been singularly more original than anyone else in the food world, and people from all over the globe beat a path to his door to eat his food. Which is one of the first points of incongruity that I find so intriguing. Adria was doing what he is now, well before the world media got hold of the fact - but after an symposium about the direction of food, chaired by Harold McGee, back in the early nineties, during which this unassuming Catalan chef stood up and spoke about what he was trying to achieve in his quiet part of the world,  some in the media took note, decided to go and investigate, and came back raving about the experience. In doing so they created a malestorm of publicity for the restaurant, which has shown no sign of abating to this day. And in doing so,  they have make it into  a temple, a place of gastronomic reverence that anyone who takes their dining out seriously, must venture too so they can say they have been to the best. So much so, that figures quoted in the book say that they seat 50 covers a nite, and  have 8000 seats available in any one year ( becos they only open for 6 months; the remaining 6 months the chefs work in a laboratory in Barcelona working on the creative development of the 30 courses for the menu for the next 6 months), and get 2 million enquiries for those seats. There is one week in a year when you are able to book for the next season. Extraordinary. And yet for all that it remains housed in a totally unpretenscious building in a rural part of Spain - a beautiful bay. They don't charge anything like they could given basic laws of supply and demand. A number of other 3 star restaurants are conspicuously more expensive. So you are left wrestling with the contradiction - of a restaurant that has become so famous that it could charge whatever it likes, but choses not too; could open much more often and have a huge increase in turnover, but chooses to value the time spent on creativety as being more important; and which embraces the business opportunities that its fame creates, by releasing a number of products that other chefs can use to simulate their creations ( imported into NZ by Simon Gaults company Sous Chef), but which remains at core unimpressed by all the hyperbole and adulation that surrounds it.
They do what they do, becos they love what they do - and in todays world which seems to be so full of people wanting their 15 mins of fame, just for the sheer fabulousness of it all, the craft and intellect and dedication that instead appear to underpin elBulli, creates an impressive contrast. I had previously thought that such a restaurant would be too famous to have any sort of relationship with repeat customers, - they would have a constant sea of new faces coming thru the door every service - but according to the book they work hard to balance bookings  each nite between those coming for the first time and those that have been before. And photos of the owner greeting people he knew at the door, indicates that like any good  restaurant he has build up personal relationships with his customers over the years.So my suspicions were wrong.

Molecular gastronomy is a generic term used to describe the type of cooking that Ferran Adria has made famous, and which is used in a number of restaurants around the world. Some like The Fat Duck in England, and Alinea in America - design a set, multi course menu in the same manner as elBulli. As a customer, you are presented with a multiple number of tiny courses, 30 in the case of elBulli, which lead you on a gastronomic journey unlike anything you will have experienced before becos Adria is at the forefront of a whole new level of ingenuity in terms of cooking. Nothing is ever as it seems. Ingredients are deconstructed and then reconstructed in ways that are original and brilliant - and there appears to be a constant theme of humour running thru the cleverness.
And that in a nutshell is the root of my confusion about this restaurant. We work hard at Somerset to create an experience that people are going to enjoy enough to want to come back regularly. To become friends of the business. We don't dumb down our food, but we do the sort of food that appeals to people, flavours and ideas that satisfy rather than challenge. We are a local eatery, rather than an international destination. And I say that without a hint of chagrin, becos we're very comfortable with the concept.
A restaurant like elBulli is somewhere people go to pay homage - to be wowed and excited. They travel from all over the world to experience it, and the food therefore is truly unique and original. The pressure to constantly keep coming up with new ideas must be enormous. An egullet thread shows how picky people can be about the experience, and makes me question the motives of some people that go. Their mind set is more ' just becos everyone says you're good, doesn't mean I have to enjoy it" . But you get that with the public!
We have people that eat at Somerset every week - but if we served a 30 course menu of highly contrived and constructed food, I'm not sure we would see people that often, becos that is not the style of dining people necessarily  choose to endulge in that often. It is special occasion stuff. That said however, the body of work and experimenting that Adria and his team has created over the last 20 years or so, has created a number of novel ideas that all chefs can incorporate to a greater or lesser extent if they are so inclined. In quickly flicking thru the Alinea cookbook which arrived in the same parcel from Amazon as this elBulli book, I noted a number of ideas that peeked my interest and which I want to play around with, and which may eventually find their way on to the menu at Somerset in some guise. But that is us playing around within the framework of what we do, rather than embracing a whole new concept. I see a distinction and I think I'm comfortable with it. Just as we learn more each year about other cultures and their food history, so too, do we benefit from learning where brilliant chefs like Adria are going. All of it is gist for the mill.
However. That aspect aside, I confess I tend to always get a bit contrarian when something starts get enormous publicity. My instincts are always to pull against the tide, becos I just find the attendant hype becomes suffocating. So it was with considerable interest that I noted in the latest Australian Gourmet Traveller, that my all time favourite restaurant reviewer AA Gill had written a feature on elBUlli. ( Would have like to have been able to give you a link to the article, but unlike Vanity Fair, Gourmet doesn't appear to post its articles on line. The edition is dated October 2008).
AA Gill writes supremely well - he is a pleasure to read, as much for his command of language as for his ascerbic wit which always cuts thru any pretension.
If anyone could burst thru the bubble surrounding elBulli, I figured he was the guy, and I turned to the article fully expecting to have some of my feelings of the overdoness of it all, confirmed. He approaches the restaurant very warily, saying he has made a point of staying away precisely becos he finds all the hype intolerable, and believes that it is impossible to define the'best' restaurant. But he ends up being completely disarmed by how modest and genuine Adria comes accross in the interview.Adria tells him to come back in an hour to eat at the restaurant, but only after he has gone away, so that when he returns to dine, he is in the headspace of a customer not a journalist. AA Gill meekly does as instructed, and this is what he has to say about the subsequent meal:
'Now, I could tell you a lot about the dishes. About the combinations and the quality, the ingenuity and the twinning of emotion and intellect, of skill and imagination. But theres been quite enough written about dinner at elBulli, and thats part of the problem. There is a moment when actually its just better not to pour praise onto the fire of encomium. Like extreme beauty, elBullis success is as much a curse as a blessing. I will, though, say just one thing. Get on the phone. Do it now. And don't take no for an answer. Or whatever they say in Catalan."

I gather from that that he wasn't only impressed, he was actually blown away - and that means that Rick and I are going to have to go one day, so that we can eat and make up our own minds. Damn! ( That makes me part of the crowd that I so abhor!!)
 

This is described on the cover blurb as a 'biography about the fish that changed the world', which sounds somewhat grandiose, especially to us in NZ for whom cod has never featured as part of our diet; but it makes for fascinating reading, believe it or not. The sweep of history that it covers , from when the Basques discovered great masses of fish off the Americas, well before Christopher Columbus' time, thru to Iceland, post the second world war, having to fight off Great Britains conviction that it had a god given right to fish whereever it so chose, ( back in the days when imperial might, made acquisition of anything seem right), even within Icelands declared national waters. Sea voyaging of great duration was made possible thru salting of cod; the slave trade was fed on salted cod - nations went in search of the fisheries and plundered with impudence believing that nature would always replenish.

But human cleverness in developing new, and more efficent methods of fishing, has lead to stocks being reduced to levels that are unsustainable, and where once thriving industries revolved around the daily catch, now whole communities are being irrevocably changed.

The politics involved, as always leaves a considerably bad taste in the mouth - but for all that it makes for a timely and fascinating read.

There is something about these single subject books - and this is the second that I have read by this author - that make for a particularly interesting read, and I'm not sure why that is. Maybe it is to do with the fact that I find the way something has been used down thru the ages to be especially illuminating,  because what has happened centuries ago, can colour our perceptions today, without us even necessarily being aware of the link.

Or as H. Thomas Henry Huxley is quoted at the start of the book:

'The questions of questions for mankind - the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other - is the ascertainment of the place which man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things'

An apt question in todays world, for a whole host of reasons...

'

I have found a new food writing lodestar - and I'm not even sure who lead me to this book. I ordered it thru Amazon, which means I will have read a review somewhere - possibly in the latest edition of Art of Eating( the best food magazine there is!),  becos I usually sit up and take notice of their recommendations.

John Thorne writes exquisitely - a series of essays, that I've dipped in and out of over the last month or so, and just loved having to read last thing at nite before I turn out the light. He is completely unique. I can think of no other food writer who I have read and enjoyed quite so much - but then the list of food writers that I actually respect is rather small - and John Thorne in everything he discusses, highlights what I find distasteful in so much other writing. There is nothing trendy or fashionable in what he describes - quite the reverse in fact. He reminds me to a degree of Lois Daish, who wrote for the Listener for many years, and who always made simple everyday ingredients and simple accessible recipes seem especially appealing. Mr Thorne has that same knack. He doesn't need to dial up memories of quaint villages in Tuscany to give his writing gravitas - he is content with research and contemplative analysis, and pottering around in the kitchen. The result is quietly assured, honest and enormously satisfying.

He eschews anything trendy, and instead through his beautiful prose captures a life where the cooking of food is savoured and ruminated over, in the attempt to derive pleasure. In doing so, he betrays an honest, sometimes biting portrayal of himself and those around him - and I loved the window that it opened up.

Needless to say I have been back on Amazon ordering more of his writing and also some of the authors that he has recommended - just for those afternoons when my husband and daughter head over the Kaimais to race, and I'm left home alone, you understand!

This is an article, not a book, in the latest Vanity Fair, a magazine I love for its pastiche of articles on all sorts of subjects. Quite often I get to read fascinating detail about one of the great restaurants somewhere in the world, in lots of glorious detail, and this article on La Grenuoille, is a classic example.

A restaurant that was opened in New York in the sixties, and which continues to be run by the son of the  people who set it up. A much loved institution, the article tries to explain why it has survived when so many others haven't,  and gives a delightful discription of what it is that makes it so special.

The story that enchanted me  the most, was when they discovered that the particular lightbulbs that they used in the restaurant were being discontinued, they made a direct plea via contacts to acquire some for future use, and were told that that wouldn't be a problem as long as they were prepared to buy 10,000! So important to the owner was the ambience that the right tone of lightbulb created, ( and something I understand totally as we currently grapple with the white light from the 'eco friendly' bulbs that we should be using, but whose light I just don't like), that he agreed to buy that quantity, and had to hire out a warehouse to store them in. That was back  in the early seventies, and the supply only ran out last year!

There are other delicious nuggets of taste and caring, that for me define what makes a restaurant truly great, and I love that it endures becos enough people understand its specialness to want to go there. It hasn't ossified, it has just got better and better.

An inspiring story....

Have just come back over to the house from a cookschool, and am luxeriating in the warm glow that classes tend to impart. Lots of laughs in this class. A nice mix of some of my favourite long term attendees, together with a group of 6 women who have got into the habit of coming to classes en masse, and then at a later point producing the meal as a dinner party for each other and their husbands. Sounds like an excuse for much hilarity! Rick uses an icecream machine, a deep fryer and a mandolin in this class - none of which are mandatory, and we'd hate people to think they have to rush and buy all the equipment, but I think we have convinced most people that if they want to get a really good brulee on top of their creme brulees, then a blow torch ( in a small manageable version from a Camping and Outdoor type shop, or a Kitchen shop like Table Pride) is a worthwhile investment. I'd like to be a fly on the wall when these guys  start bruleeing however! Hopefully they won't have imbibed too much alcolholic beverages prior!!

So much of what Rick does in these classes can be prepped in advance, in true ' mise en place' style, that operates in every professional kitchen. All the prep is done in advance of customers arriving, becos people simply wouldn't want to wait for the time it would take to  prepare food from scratch. We have 4 staff over in the restaurant kitchen now, working thru the afternoon, prepping for dinner service tonite. And what I think the discussion in the cookschools helps people grasp, is that that concept can be transplanted to a home kitchen quite easily - and so much of the prep can be done in advance, meaning that when your friends and family are there, you don't have to be secreted away in the kitchen for the duration. Something I've become increasingly conscious of, becos I'm relatively selfish, and hate missing out on all the chat and the gossip.

However I digress! This blog is about the biography on the Mondavi family - the more famous wine producers from the Napa Valley. Its been a wild and woolly few days weather wise - so a book, comfy chair and peace and quiet has been my idea of heaven!

All I knew about the Mondavis prior to reading this book was that they were considered royalty amongst the American wine industry, having been at the fore front of that  industrys surgence into global awareness. I knew the company had grown from humble beginnings into a massive corporate empire, and that there had been some sort of corporate raid at the end, that had seen all family members removed from the board, but I wasn't aware of the personal detail.

Talk about epic! And after reading  and absorbing it all, I put it down feeling sad - sad that so much achievement , so much dreaming and striving can end up been cast into the dustbin in the face of hubris and the bitterness of inner family rivalry. We can do so much damage to our own - the scars of which cast a very long shadow over peoples lifes. Sad and profound.

It isn't really a book about wine - not perhaps in the sense I was expecting. It does however place American wine growth in context of the times,  and how the public palate moved from sweeter styles back in the '40s and '50s to a growing sophistication as the decades went past.

But more than anything the book described for me how family enmity can create wounds that never heal, and which damage in a way that money - no amount of money, will ever make right.

In the end ,this billion dollar business was the subject of a corporate raid by Constellation Brands Inc, a huge conglomeration focused on profit and not at all interested in fine wine. And somewhat perversely owned by 2 brothers, who seemed to have a far more workable relationship than those that existed between the Mondavi siblings.

So Robert Mondavi Wines Inc ends up subsumed into being only another brand in the lineup owned by a massive liquor distributor. Within 60 years it goes from simple beginnings, and a family feud between that set of brothers, to a split and the set up of another winery, to exponential growth thru the '70s and '80s, and feuds amongst the next generation of brothers. That in turn leads to bringing in outside experts ( including interestingly - and I can't help but wonder if it was typical of corporate America at the time - a lot of pyschologists) to run the company. That leads to an IPO which will allow family members to realise some of their wealth ( not that they were exactly living as paupers),  and then almost inevitably in the light of the family hubris and the need to preform to share value demands rather than treating the company as their personal fiefdom, a hostile takeover bid, that means no family is left on the Board. The legendary winery has gone.

And I can't help but wonder if they're happy...

So far, in my life's work of tasting and learning to understand wines, I have experienced very little of the wines from California - in fact most of my focus on that area revolves more around the hope that Rick and I will one day get the opportunity to eat at The French Laundry a restaurant that is regularly ranked at the top in the world.

I'm not too sure then, what induced me to order this book from Amazon - but I must have been following some thread at the time, especially since ' The House of Mondavi', a book describing the rise and fall of the family wine dynasty from California arrived today, also. But I haven't read that yet, so remains another story, and will be all the more so, since there were some fascinating references to the Mondavi's in 'The Judgement of Paris".

Essentially this book is about the growth in the California wine industry, from the late 1800s when grapes where first planted in the region, thru the changes wrought by fashion and calamatious intervention of 14 years of Prohibition, thru to the happy synergy that European emigres and the rising faith in science and an analytical approach to winemaking could bring to bear on land in the  New World that bore 'terroir'similarities with Burgundy and Bordeaux in France.

The French wine industry is centuries old, and laden with preconceptions of its pre-eminance in the world. A position that had always been seen as unassaliable - in no small part becos the French believed very firmly that the brillance of their Grande Cru wines came down to the very earth it was grown in - the 'terroir'so to speak-  and that is something that could never be transplanted to some upstart, other part of the world.

The French were smug, poised and totally confident in their superiority. So it was considered of no special interest when an Englishman who owned a wine shop in Paris decided to put together a blind wine tasting, in Paris, in 1976, to see how the up and coming California wines ( some from vineyards that had only produced 3 or 4 vintages at that stage), would compare with the best out of the 2 most heavily lauded french wine growing regions.

No-one anticipated the outcome - and what makes me smile is that some of the judges ( who were all French wine experts), to this day, 30 years later, refuse to discuss the tasting, so profound was the drama caused by the unintended discovery that these Californian wines actually tasted as good as the French, and in fact outclassed them by taking top place for both the Chardonnay and the Bordeau style red.

It created a huge furore - but my interest is not in seeing smugness and arrogance getting its comeuppance( although I do rather like it when that happens!), but rather in the significance that the discovery made to the growth of wine production throughout the rest of the world, including of course New Zealand.

Wine was been grown in other countries by the Seventies, but struggled to be taken seriously by the wine importing markets since top French wines held such a stranglehold on the publics perception of quality. What this tasting did - was to completely undermine that dominance and to create doubt thru which whole new markets opened up to careful, talented vintners, whether they lived in California, Australia, New Zealand, South America, Italy or Spain.

To a degree, the French have had to play catch up ever since. Their Grande Crus still command ridiculous amounts of money on the international market, becos there will always be the trophy buyers, portrayed rather too graphically for me sometimes in the American "Wine Spectator",  who need to be in ownership of the top Chateau, becos the magazine or Robert Parker has decreed it as the best.  But increasingly, those Chateau don't have to be centuries old buildings in Burgundy or around Saint Emilion - they may in fact be much more modern fixtures  in the Napa Valley, or the Barossa. Becos the wine purchasing public have understood, and accepted the idea that it doesn't have to be French to be the best.  That is a huge mindset change that has happened in a remarkably short time. And it was that simple myth that this tasting dispelled - with the reverberations been felt around the wine world still.

The book was a really interesting study of the type of people who get passionate about making wine - and having got to know a few wine makers over the years, I could identify easily with the personality types. I also found fascinating the description of how even in France the cachet that is attached to really good wine, always attracts the kind of people who want to 'enoblier' themselves by association. In other words use the money earned in some other occupation to buy into the instant credibility that owning a respected wine producer would give them. That concept has transformed the Napa Valley in the past 20 years - a feeling that is captured in Wine Spectator quite regularly.

That leads on to a discussion of the globilisation of wine brands, as bigger and bigger liquor companies start dominating the landscape, and producing increasingly generic wines, that are defined by the wine making process, rather than by the terroir that the French are so passionate about. But wine writers with the kind of clout of Robert Parker have created a market for that kind of wine, so its hard to be critical of people wanting to provide the market with what it wants to purchase. This book draws gentler conclusions about the issue than the movie 'Mondo vino' which I watched a couple of years back, which decried the growth in the clout of 'flying winemakers', who travel all over the world as consultants making the kind of wine that people want to drink, whether the grapes are grown in Argentina, Montalcino, or France.

All told, a really fascinating discussion of world wide trends in wine over the last 50 years.

28 October 2008

As an postcsript related directly to the NZ wine industry, a tasting has just been held at Scenic Cellars where top Gimblett Gravel style reds were tasted and compared to top Bordeaux chateaux. The results are in this article. It will be interesting to see how much attention the tasting gets over the next little while...

Am going to cheat a little with this post - but have just been following a series of foodblog links and ended up quite by chance on a website with a rave review of this book, which I have quite coincidently finished reading today.

The book is a joy - written about the process of farming produce ( fruit and vegetables), and moving it from farm to table.

I've learnt huge amounts in the process of reading it, and have enjoyed the non extreme style of writing.  In other words, he conveys a lot of really interesting information, but never does it in that sort of puritanical  style,  that a number of environmentalists seem to feel the need to embark on today- as if we all need to be called to see the error of our ways.  And which always leaves me feeling castigated and patronised too. Mr Parsons obviously loves good food - and good food to him, is food with flavour, and this book is a description of how that is maxiimised and developed in various types of fruits and vegetables, and he manages to make what could be rather a dry subject, end up distinctly interesting.

There are a number of recipes that I've marked also with the intention of going back to try them, becos he has the happy ability to make food sound pleasureable. I just want to get into the kitchen and start experimenting...

I remember reading reviews of this book when it first came out in 2003 and  meaning to buy, but somehow never getting quite round to doing so. Was very pleased therefore to discover it in a friends bookcase after yet another wonderful lunch chez Byant. Monday was wet and miserable and my mood matched, so took myself off to  a  quiet corner and absorbed this stunning book.

It really is a world history, becos salt has been integral to the progression of mankind thru the ages, and this fascinating book describes how we have extracted it from the earth, moved around the globe in search of it, and traded and fought over it.

I love history - in fact there was a period during my college years when  I carried around a somewhat romantic notion of being an archaelogist, but fortunetely I grew out of that inclination, becos I'm in no way tempermentally suited to that sort of dogged nitty gritty focus. This book is much more the sort of history that appeals, in that it discusses in broad strokes the various civilisations back thru the ages, and the way in which their dependency on this ubiquitous commodity shaped their developement. It makes for intriguing reading on a whole series of levels - not simply in terms of food.

We need salt in our diet - sometimes a fact overlooked in the hysteria of some of the ' Don't touch fat and salt becos they'll kill  you brigade' - its crucial to our ability to digest. And for millenia it was also crucial as the sole means of preserving foodstuffs - especially fish. It was only in the early 19th century that canning and then later refridgeration took away our dependency on salting foodstuffs. Now the majority of salt is used for desluicing roads, which I see as a rather ironic sign of the times.

I've read other single subject books, one on oranges and another on coffee spring to mind, and I love the amount of detail that can be amassed around a single object. From a food perspective a book like this helps explain why certain cultures have certain foods as integral to their diet - salt cod, salt preserved meats and sausages - alot of these  go back to pre Roman times, which kind of helps give an angle on the significance of it all. And for someone who comes from a culture like NZ, that doesn't track back food habits by centuries or millenia, it helps explain  alot.

It really is a memorable tale.

Danny Meyer is a political science graduate who made the decision in his late 20s to follow his heart and open his first restaurant, the Union Square Cafe, which over the last 20 years has become one of the most famous restaurants in New York. He has grown from that one restaurant into now being the CEO of one of the most respected restaurant organisations in the world, based in New York, and this book is a description of the lessons learnt on that journey. It is fascinating stuff. So fascinating in fact that I've been back on Amazon to order another few copies becos I want some of the people around me to also read it and be as inspired as I was - but I don't want to let my copy out of my sight!

I've been thru it again and jotted down notes - little points that I thought were particularly apt. For example:

-a great restaurant is one in which good food is served with thoughtful care and consistency

or:

-'to go thru the motions in a perfunctary or self-absorbed manner, no matter how expertly rendered, diminishes the beauty. Its about soul- and service without soul, no matter how elegant is quickly forgotten by the guest.

or;

-'we want as many of our guests as possible to be proud to identify themselves with our restaurants. Our job is to give people a story worth telling"

I could go on. The book is littered with fantastic advice and commentary. He is a man totally passionate about good service, who had the happy serendipity to be in the right place in the late 80's, just as American society was prepared to finally regard restaurants as a legitimate career path and something worthy of entrepeneurial pursuit. I well remember a waitress we had working for us in the early years - a mother, who had a toddler at home the same age as Hannah, and who wanted to get out of the house for a bit of stimulation. Her husband however, regarded waitressing as something beneath her,  and in doing so he was very typical of general societal attitudes to our industry.

I note when I go to the Dept of Statistics to get data on pay rates, that restaurants and cafes do not pay well relative to other industries, and I ponder how much that creates a self fulfilling prophecy. To attract skilled people with the right kind of attitude to grow and enhance businesses, you need to be able to offer competitive pay rates and an attractive career path. For much too long in NZ, waitering has been viewed as something you did on your way to something else. You waitressed as you worked your way thru varsity ( as I did), or you did it to fill in while you waited for a 'proper' job to come along.It wasn't seen as a career choice in itself. I like to think that perspective is slowly shifting, and there is a certain cachet attached to the food industry, that just simply wasn't there 20 odd years ago.

Naturally, I've always looked on the restaurant as a very valid career option for myself - and I very seldom need to let slip in conversation now that I have a qualification in another field, as I used to in the early days of Somerset, becos I am proud of what I do, and don't feel the need to validate myself in any other way. Danny Meyer has built up a business conglomeration of major proportions based on the simple precept that good food served with care and attention will bring return business that will make your business viable and allow it to grow. And he is totally passionate about the notion of the way service in all its various forms generates an enlightened cycle of business success. Thats a somewhat succinct synopsis of what he does say - but in essence is what the book is really about. Care about what you do - care about your staff, your customers, your community, your suppliers and your investors,  and you will create enduring restaurants that have a soul, and as a result enduring financial success.

He talks throughout the book about decency and integrity, and I have found a real resonance in that. In part becos I totally agree with all his premises, but what he has done for me also is to make me stop and  analyse and give meaning and shape to ideas that I've carried around in my head for years, more as a vague kind of notion, and now I'm able to look at them from a new angle and with a more analytical approach, and I'm really enjoying that process.

He's a much nicer person than I am. His efforts with difficult customers go far and beyond the kind of slack that I would cut to obnoxious people, but I can't argue with his basic premise that you need to turn negative situations to your advantage by creating a positive out of them- and you want people around you who will endeavour to achieve that end. Businesses succeed in the end, not by avoiding mistakes, because mistakes are an inevitable part of the human condition, but by the successful handling of those mistakes.

I hope I'm not starting to make the book sound like one of those ghastly bullet point editions on how to improve your profits in 100 days, becos it is in fact the total anthesis of that type of approach. He presents thoughtful ideas that have stood the test of time and of significant business growth, from a completly personal perspective.

Reading the book hasn't changed the way I look at our business, but it has certain helped underline key factors for me that I think are especially important going forward, and it has actually confirmed in a nice way, that alot of those things that we've done instinctively becos they've felt like the right thing to do, can be defined within a business context as being correct.

As I believe I've stated elsewhere, I'm a huge fan of Gordon Ramsay -believing that there had to be so much more to him than came accross initially in the early TV shows that he did.  The later ones, 'Kitchen Nightmares" and the "F word" have confirmed for me, that he is someone with compassion, knowledge and enthusiam, who simply has no time for people he considers to be idiots. Oh, that we could all be so black and white in our approach to life!!

This book is a great read - a description this time, of how he build the business side of his empire, how he went from owning one restaurant to now being a director in The Gordon Ramsay Group which owns restaurants all around the world.

He is disarmingly honest about what has worked along the way and what hasn't. And I suspect he is able to be so frank, becos he really isn't burdened by selfdoubts and fears about what people will think.

He is enormously successful in a corporate sense, primarily becos he has the good sense to know what he doesn't know and to pay good people to do that for him. Serendipity also played a major part, in the arrival on the scene of his father in law, who as a successful businessman in his own right, saw the potential in the Gordon Ramsay brand, and has worked with Gordon since the inception to build the phenomenal company. They are a formidable team. And then the introduction to the equity group Blackstone, has opened up almost limitless opportunities for them in the availability of hotels, who's restaurants need an overhaul, and in terms of the capital to throw at those projects, and help make them the best they can possibly be. Money alone doesn't make for a sucessful restaurant - I can think of any number of heavily financed projects  that we have watched go belly up over the years, becos the focus was on the 'look' and not on the tedium of day to day operations. Gordon discusses in fascinating detail how his company has grown to deal with all the angles and aspects of restaurant and hotel catering, as the operation has got larger.  No detail is ever too small to be ignored - they have a centralised management structure that takes up 6 floors in a building in London, and the capital cost in running that proves how incredibly serious they are about running everything very, very well.

These guys are the best - and they are driven to be the best, becos it is a fundamental need of Gordons. He freely concedes that no matter what he is doing, he needs to be better than anyone else - and even though he has reached the rarified strata of a global brand, you can't help but get the feeling that that drive pushes him still. Does he ever relax?!

I read nasty little comments in the papers sometimes from the English media, on how now that Gordon has 10 restaurants he's stretched himself too thin, and cracks are starting to show, and I wonder to myself what it is that motivates people to make those sorts of comments. It has to be a form of jealousy - becos he has achieved so much in a relatively short time frame, some people can't help themselves but take potshots at him. How dare he think he can do it all? Becos he's stepped outside the previously established framework  of what a chef is 'allowed' to achieve, people feel vindicated in trying to pull him down to size. The glorious thing about Gordon Ramsay is that you get the feeling that reading such mealy mouthed commentary from people who've never made a single business decision in their own lives, only serves to spur him on. He doesn't let anyone put limits on him.

He does however understand that to grow, you need good people alongside you - and one of his most endearing aspects is the credit he is so very quick to give the chefs that have allowed him to expand his empire. He never pretends to be at all his restaurants, so has the good sense to allow the chefs in charge to develope their own personalities and strengths. That tells me that he isn't driven by his own ego - theres room for other people to shine in his world and I admire him for that.

I found the book completley inspirational on a business level. Not becos I have any desire to emulate - we are simply not about building a global brand - but becos I love the concept of someone who doesn't accept limits, who believes that anything is achievable and who gives it the best shot they can. Sometimes it doesn't work, and you learn from those experiences for the next time.  We have been involved in other businesses in the past, to varied success - all of which I've always put down to a useful learning experience. There are always  other business ideas floating around,  and I have no doubt that in the future as our children move on to a more independant stage in their lives, our  core business will start to send out shoots in a number of ways.

Amongst the many things that I've picked up from this book is the thought, that anything is achieveable if you want it to be so, and are prepared to put in the hard yards to make it happen.  Thats an approach I can definitley live with!

And added as a postscript a couple of weeks after I wrote the above, I've just read an article on Gordon Ramsay in the New York Times. written by Bill Burford, who wrote the excellant 'Heat", and I found that contained a fascinating perspective on the realitites of opening his New York restaurant. I've come over to the house  tonite in disgust after we had a table for 8 not turn up- something that happens to us very rarely, and which hurts on a nite like tonite when we've turned away lots of people becos we thought we were full. It mentions in this article however that they were loosing $22,000 from no-shows, so suddenly I don't feel  so bad anymore...

Anyway had better head back over to the restaurant, cos last nite before we close for Christmas and some people arriving for drinks. Think my sense of composure has been restored!!

A description of discovering mid life that you aren't happy in your corporate life ( being made redundant tends to cast a negative pall over things), and seeking to retrain and follow your dreams.

I'm lucky. Apart from a couple of years working as an accountant, I have always lived and worked my dream - the restaurant is my passion, and I can't understand people who wait until they're in their 40s, before they make life affirming decisions to radically change the direction of their careers.

But I digress. This lady had always wanted to train to be a chef at Cordon Bleu in Paris - in no small part becos it was where her hero Julia Childs had trained decades previously. So when her corporate life came unstuck, she seized the opportunity to go and train in Paris, and the book describes that process.

Interesting on any number of levels for me - Rick and I toy with the idea of one day running an independant chefs training school along the lines of what Darina and Tim Allen have established at Ballymaloe, becos we see it as a possible future income stream to the business, and a natural extension to the cookschools that we already run.So interesting to see how the classes are run at this long established school - that now has franchises all around the world ( including one trying to get established in Martinborough, and which is being sytmied by some staunch local opposition which seems to be based on the prinicipal of " I'm here, but I don't want you here, so I'm going to appeal and appeal any decision that allows you to open...").

Having read Julia Childs biograhpy some time ago, I'd thought that the Cordon Bleu schools were caught in a time warp of classic french cooking, but it would appear from the description of the classes at the higher grades, that this is  not in fact the case in todays world, where they take a more global approach to good food.

People from all over the world come to study, and it seems to me that most of them are there becos their parents can afford to pay for it, or becos they're following a dream . There is no doubt they would learn alot about food preparation , but it doesn't in any way seem to emulate the realites of a professional kitchen.

Its a brand that people pay to come too becos of the cachet associated with the name- what I have read in some of Michael Ruhlmans books about training at the Culinary Institute in America, would seem to me to be a less romantic but definitly more pragmatic approach to the realities of working at the coalface of the hospitality industry. But most of the people that go to the Cordon Bleu cookschool are looking ahead to a life time of dinner parties I suspect - not churning out hundreds of meals a week in a hot, pressure cooker environment.

Not intended as a criticism of the book however - its a nice affirming tale, of one womans decision to chase her dream, to work hard to achieve it, and to accomplish what she set out to do, with style and panach, and passion.

I wrote in my diary when I finished this book the other day, that it was a life story that I could strongly identify with, and was a story that I didn't want to end.

Judith Jones is the legendary editor who worked with Julia Childs and her 2 french co writers to publish their ground breaking food on french cooking for the American market, back in the 60s, when the whole notion was seen as not commercially viable. As if that wasn't enough, she then went on to work with a  series of trailblazing and now seriously famous food writers, who, when they started with Judith, were not known at all. People like Marcella Hazan, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, Irene Kuo.

She spent her early working life living in Paris ( just like Julia Childs), met her husband there, and eventually came back to America having had her attitude to food and wine radically changed by the french approach, and also with some serious credentials amongst the publishing world, for  being the editor who first spotted the significance in the manuscript written by Anne Franks father.

The America she came back to, was  one in which food and its preparation was seen as incidental to the things that were really important in life. The food industry had actively  created an environment in which people were told that food preparation was too much trouble and they were much better off buying prepackaged, prepared foodstuffs. Worse, the pace of life encouraged people to look on food as something you treated as a pitstop - grab it at a drivethru and eat on the run.The complete anthesis to the leisurely, intense approach that the French( in general) have to food and meals.

Julia Childs, MFK Fisher and James Beard were  all there - all trying to stem the flow of  the inexorable industrialization of the food chain. But cooking had been marginalised - treated in a patronising fashion as something irrelevant and best left to the back pages of the cheap womens magazines.

The cumulative impact then, that someone like Judith Jones has had, in helping to move society's attitude forward is almost impossible to quantify. Julia Childs was very definitly the right person at the right time - and no one predicted the storm of interest created by her first tentative TV cooking show. She led the way, and helped create an environment in which people were keen to learn and keen to rediscover the joys that can by had by pottering in the kitchen.

What Judith Jones appeared to be especially adept at doing was in encouraging people to tell their stories and their food histories - America is full of immigrants keen to keep alive their food customs and heritage -is a way that maintained their integrity, without having to modify things dramatically to meet presumed American tastes. Its hard for us to imagine now, but this was very radical stuff back then. Revolutionally in fact. And it would appear that there were no limits to her interest in food and its history and its signficance in peoples lifes. Even on her own in the later part of her life, she continues to travel and to quest and to be open to new ideas and tastes. I have such respect for someone who is forever interested and prepared to learn.

Needless to say what she helped start trigger is now a booming market - a massive interest  worldwide, that has, as with all things created some monsters of its own. Read a fascinating article the other day on the cultural phenomenon, that swirls around the Food Network, filled with all those people who desperately want to be 'star's', and who see being a TV chef, as their path to fame and riches. The inescapable fact is  that so many of them haven't done the hard yards in any shape or form,  but that doesn't seem to thwart them in their focus. ( But does make a huge amount of what is on the Food Network, unwatchable from my perspective.)

The people that Judith Jones brought into our worlds remain icons to this day, becos they were masters at what they did, and that sort of knowledge never dates. I hear Rick say quite often ' I'll check in Julia Childs" - when someone asks about something, that he can't immediately answer. I suspect that there are a huge number of modern foodwriters and presenters who will disappear into the nether, in years to come, becos they have contributed nothing new or groundbreaking.

This book was a pleasure to read of a life well lived - in the pursuit of food and its cultural significance and the simple untrammeled pleasure that can be derived from cooking for those you love.

A gentle book - made all the more poignant on discovering a publishing footnote right at the end, to say that the author died before the book was published.  A shock, and reminder that none of us know what the immediate future holds..

A lady, who lives by herself, and decides to buy a house in a rural part of the South West of France - to which she retreats every year, and gradually establishes herself as 'l'Americaine'. The chapters describe her progress to being accepted within the area, and  the discoveries she makes enroute.

Like us, she finds that not everything is superb in France - you can be on the recieving end of shoddy workmanship, just like anywhere else in the world. We had a couple of very average dining out experiences, when we were there - actually one would be better described as god awful, -a somewhat rude awakening to that beguiling notion we carry around in our heads of how fabulous everything is in France. Not necessarily so.

In a book like this, a whole lot is revealed about the author herself - an interesting notion, becos she comes accross as someone who values her privacy, and sense of self. Theres lots of books in this genre - people who in middle age  who decide to make a dramatic change in their lifes, so as to create some vitality and change to normal routine. I've read my fair share of them, starting with the granddaddy of the genre, Peter Mayle - and some I've loved and some, needless to say I haven't been quite so stuck on.

This is one of the better ones where you get a feel for the village and the people, in tones that leave no residual taste of condenscion. And the full stop at the end - the sudden realisation that she won't be sitting down to write any follow ups, kind of rocks you back on your heels, and makes you reassess where you are at the moment, becos there are no guarantees in life, that things will continue as we may expect...

The title is a red herring. This book is not about what the waitress overhears at tables, but more about the process of becoming a professional  waiter at Per Se, the restaurant that Thomas Keller of The French Laundry fame, opened in the Time Warner Centre in New York in 2005, amidst huge hype and mind boggling extents of expenditure.

Thomas Keller is one of the worlds most pre- eminent chefs. The French Laundry in the Napa Valley is regularly lauded as one of the top restaurants in the world. We have never been, but people we know have, and it is most definitley on that list of things I want to do before I die, list.

The Time Warner centre in New York opened with the biggest concentration of top eateries in America, and the amount of money spent on the fit out of these places is simply boggling. One oven in the massive kitchen at Per Se was worth $250,000 - and that is in American dollars. She makes the comment that gossip had it that Thomas Keller himself put up $12 million, and he had financial backers as well. So what the total cost of the operation was, I can only marvel at.

But the money spent wasn't just on the capital fitout - staff were brought on board a month before opening, and trained for that time. Trained to absorb all the myriad detail that the food served at that level requires, to be able to be responsive to each and every request from customers, used to getting exactly what they want when they want it. The running costs of a restaurant  like that are something I can only marvel at - the waiting staff are given Mont Blanc pens to use to take orders; the tablecloths are ironed before being placed on the tables; there is an army of staff - each section has a maitr d', a captain, a backserver and a sommalier. There would also be restaurant managers and cashiers and phone staff - not to mention office staff on top of that. Boy would I like to sit down and analyse a Profit and Loss from that style of operation.

The French Laundry became famous partly becos Chef Keller instigated a style of eating that was relatively unknown back in the early 90s. He believed in the law of diminishing returns - that with eating more is in effect, less. The more you eat of a dish, no matter how delicious the first few mouth fulls may have been, you always reach a point where the taste buds become satiated and then bored. So he decided to titivate people with a series of tasting plates, each with a tiny portion of exquisite food, that would fire up the enthusiasm and leave people wanting more. We have tryed a similar philosophy at the magnificent restaurant Tetsuyas, in Sydney, who also serves dinner in the form of a succesion of delicate and exquisitely presented tiny courses. Its a wonderful way to eat for a special occasion, but as someone in the industry I just can't quite get my head around the logistics of serving up to 17 courses to a table - with different dishes going out to people. At Tetsuyas, as a table of 4, we all had the same food, but she says in this book that at Per Se, people are served different combinations at the same table, so as to keep things 'interesting'!

For me personally, the jury is still out on whether I like that idea, or find it overkill. I mean by that, that the human brain only really has the ability to absorb so much data within a dining period, especially when the effects of alcohol are added to the mix, and I wonder how many people actually get to fully appreciate each and every taste and combination thru to the very end of the menu. These are special occasion restaurants - I doubt they would have regulars who would come weekly - people organise world trips around when they can book into these restaurants, so in part these tasting menus have grown out of a need to impress those sorts of people. But what the book discusses in some detail is where that crosses the line between luxery and excess, and I thought she covered the point rather well, without actually being critical of the restaurant and its philosophy.

I struggle at Somerset sometimes with people who take themselves just that bit too much importantly, and who want to prattle on about each and every component part of the meal, and the philosophy behind it. While I am well versed in what we do and why - I can't help but feel like responding to some of these people ( and restaurant critics are absolutley the worst culprits of these type of behaviour - wanting to know the 'source' of the pork, or whether its this seasons spring lamb, or... a veritable bombardment of queries and questions), with the request that they chill out instead, sit back, relax, and just enjoy the flavours. They don't have to turn it into an intellectual, earnest experience - they can just be.

I have observed over the years that the wine industry tends to attract its share of pretenscious snobs, who like nothing better than beating you round the ears with whatever latest bit of escoteric knowledge they may have - and  its only recently that I've noticed a similar trend starting to dominant in food and restaurant discussions, and I found her comments on what she encounted in one of the top restaurants in America absolutely fascinating.

She blames it on the excesses of society - where the obsessive attention to dining is a reflection of the fact we have too much time and money, and live in a time that is status obsessed. If the papers say a restaurant is good - then we need to go becos it must be good.  We don't want to appear to be ignorant by not doing what everyone else is doing...

I kind of agree with her to a point, and then I don't. My belief is that what we are currently experiencing in the Western world is a resurgence of awareness of the importance of good food, after a couple of generations where we've been fed the line that we should be buying pre packaged food ( made and advertised by huge companies),  becos of the convenience of time. But slowly, slowly, we've been questioning the flavour, the health impacts and most recently the environmental impact of that style of eating - and theres an ever growing group of people who are making a point of going back to an oldfashioned notion of eating food that has come from sources we are comfortable with.

A restaurant like Per Se, takes that notion to an extreme, and trains their front staff to know about every drop of barrel aged vinegar, and the heirloom duck, and what type of cows and from what farm the milk for a particular cheese comes .  Does that type of approach run into the danger of sounding  too self important?  Possibly - but I guess your interpretation of that will depend where on the spectrum you sit in terms of the importance of the quality of food that you are eating.  I'm pretty passionate about food - but I don't think I'm obsessive.  I would find dining at a restaurant that takes food that importantly a wonderful experience and one that would become one of those special memory imprints. ( I can still recall most of the 14 courses we had at Tetsuyas, and that was about 10 years ago, but the food was so memorable.) But even for someone like me, its not the style of eating that I'd want to do every week. It would be too intense for that kind of frequency.

I think its great that we are starting to care about where our food comes from again- how its been farmed and treated. I see all of that as a positive. And if theres enough people out there prepared to pay a premium to source artisanally grown foodstuffs, which allows the producer to eschew cost cutting methods, then even better. But can that process move  along the spectrum into excessive self importance and focus, on the where and the hows - and forget that in the end it really is all about food and the table and company and enjoying yourself ? Yes , I think it can. And yes I think some people do become fixated, but that is human nature - there will always be extremes.

Some of her wittiest comments relate to customers, and their foibles. What she defines as 'high maintenance adults" .I chortled, known exactly what she was eluding too, and exactly how irritating those kinds of people can be. And how you have to very literally remind yourself that it is their problem, and not actually a reflection on you. They carry that dysfunctional approach to food and life in general everywhere - but you don't have too.

She gives a series of tips on how to behave in a restaurant - most of which I thought were iminently practical.

And then she finishes with a description of the 17 course meal that she and her partner had at the restaurant, after she'd finished working there - 17 courses over 6 hours. (You see, the accountant in me, kicks in straight away, becos I know from reading books by top New York chefs, that they work hard to turn tables, twice sometimes 3 times in an evening so as to maximise the possible return they can get from each chair in the restaurant, becos they have too, becos of the costs of keeping the whole operation afloat. And I wonder how Chef Keller can therefore afford to serve a style of food that means that people occupy the same seat for 6 hours, when he has the kind of overheads that he must have. I think I better go and do a google search and see if I can track down a menu and have a look at the prices.)

Its all fascinating. I love reading it becos its gist for the mill for me to chew over and discuss with Rick. We are comfortable at the moment with our positioning on the spectrum - we question it periodically, ie do we want to get more exclusive or move in the other direction so as to attract bigger numbers? But I think thats a healthy sign of a business that doesn't feel its arrived at its end point yet. There is always room for improvement and change, and reading what happens in other restaurants always provides some interesting points to ponder.

This book certainly provided that for me.

PS Just found this link http://www.observer.com/2007/thomas-keller

The French Cafe is one of New Zealands top restaurants, and we've been going for years, thru 3 changes of owners.  We've always liked it - always found that it pushes the barrow just enough to make it interesting and provocative, and certainly under the current owners, Simon Wright and Creghan Molloy, it has developed into a world class restaurant.  Very, very serious about what they do, and incredibly clever, but somehow still managing to have a New Zealand feel.

The chef, Simon Wright has written a beautiful cookbook, showcasing the intricate food he serves in the restaurant. One of our staff brought in Gordon Ramseys latest cookbook 'Chef' today, and flicking thru it briefly just now, Rick and I have commented on the distinct similarities between the exquisite attention paid to the food and its presentation.

He describes his journey to getting to the point they are now with the restaurant. We have heard various things over the years as you do when you work in the industry, but I hadn't realised that he knew Gordon in London and had actually worked with him at Marco Pierre Whites trialblazing restaurant  'Harvey's".

He spoke about the evolution of the restaurant - how as they have been able too afford too, they have made changes, and improved the overall ambience, in line with where they want to be. We haven't been since the latest changes that they made earlier this year, but I was intrigued to read about his need to improve work flows in the kitchen, because its something that we have incorporated in the plans we hope to do here next year, when we finally get the land next door rezoned.

We have a huge range of eateries in New Zealand now - and I think its a real growing up sign, when we can have establishments with the level of sophistication of The French Cafe, that may be inspired by what happens in France,( his description of a weeks experience in Guy Savoys restaurant in Paris, was fascinating), but which have the confidence to be grounded right here.  Given their level of commitment as articulated in the book, it is my sincere hope that we will get to have alot more meals there over the years.

( I got my copy of the book from Books a Plenty in Grey St, becos they are a wonderful bookshop- and you can also order it direct from the restaurant via their website.)

To be perfectly correct, I've just read this book for the second time. An American friend who has a great love of travel and eating well, regularly updates me on  his experiences, and prompts me in the direction of things he thinks I might find interesting. This book was one such treat, which he told me about after he'd been to France and eaten at the restaurant that the book is primarily about, a few years ago. Similarly now, we've been to France, and were taken to the restaurant - friends of ours were staying very close to where it is situated, and had gone a number of times. We got to meet the owners and have a chat, after a beautiful lunch - and I found it very interesting to borrow Kays copy of the book and to reread it over our subsequent time  in France.

Found it fascinating on a number of levels. Always interesting for me to read about how other restaurant owners approach their businesses - what they have to say about the daily trials and tribulations, and what it is that fires them up and keeps them passionate. And contained within the book are lots of those sorts of details, honestly portrayed. But it ends up being so much more than that, as the journalist, who'd decided to move to this small village in rural France with his wife and daughter explores over a year, what it is that makes the restaurant tick, and how it sits in the wider community.

Le Recreation, is in the village Les Arques, which in driving time is probably about 3 hours away frow where we situated in France for our cookschools. But the  traditions of food in the area  - the fois gras and truffles are very similar to what we experienced, so I found the background detail into these subjects to be really interesting.

The owners, Noelle and Jacques Ratier were delightful people - they work incredibly hard for 8 months of the year, when the surrounding villages are full of Parisians and overseas tourists, and then close the restaurant down, when winter approaches and the flock of customers dissappears.  They are full for lunch and dinner every day over that busy period - and from what we could observe at the lunch we were there, most of the other customers appeared to be like us, tourists, and probably, like us, had first heard of the restaurant via the book.

Lunch was a set price ( or 'formulae' as the french call it ) of 30 euros for  3 course menu, with a choice of about 7 options in each course,  and included in that price in typically french style was a constant supply of bread, a small plate of olives placed on the table at the same time as the aperitifs were brought out, a complimentary gazpacho, and then between main and dessert, we each got a serving of cabacou the local soft goats cheese, that everyone who says  they don't like goats cheese should try becos its sublime. The food was lovely, light and interesting  with a confidence of touch that we really admired. Likewise the service out front,  was relaxed and notably cheerful. These people are very good at what they do, and enjoy the process - and that made for a thoroughly enjoyable lunch.

There are worse ways to spend a leisurely Friday afternoon!

The book describes the lives of the people involved in the restaurant, together with those who supply them, and from that a fascinating story is woven about the reality of living in rural France, all done in a manner that eschews sentimentality and instead describes things as they really are. I found that honestly to be very refreshing..

Jacques is obsessed about rugby and planning on coming out to NZ for the World Cup - so there may be an opportunity for us to bring them to Tauranga to showcase some of that French charisma. Trevor and Kay were certainly tilting in that direction, and its certainly something we'd love to be part off. We shall see!

A book that has been sitting beside my bed for months - the pomposity of the title acting as  a disencentive for me to start reading. I'd bought it becos Brillat-Savarin is oft-quoted by food writers, and his pithy and sage little bon-mots had often caught my eye. The previous food book I'd read, Heat, contained a number of references, so I finally made the call it was time to get over my prejudice, and on one especially wet, miserable afternoon curled up on the couch ( as you do!) and proceeded to be absolutely delighted.

Brillat-Savarin was a magistrate, not a chef or a writer - who lived during the tumultuous times of the french revolution and the upheaval of the years that followed.  The book, which consisted of a number of meditations that he'd written over the years, and was published just before he died in 1825, is best described as a treatise on  a life well lived in the appreciation of gastronomy. He roams accross a wide ranging number of reference points, interchanging a study of food related history and personal anecdote with a scientific understanding of digestion and the impact of diet on health ' in the present state  of our knowledge'.

His comments belie a witty, shrewd personality, and the sort of enquiring mind for which I have so much respect. His cornerstone thesis is that we must eat to live, and therefore it behoves us to make the most of that process.

"Animals feed: man eats: only the man of intellect knows how to eat"

and: "gourmandism is an act of judgement, by which we give preference to things which are agreeable to our taste over those which are not"

Naturally for someone like me, for whom food and its preparation is such a huge part of my daily life, a book that extolls the virtue of taking time to value and appreciate the food that we eat is going to find a ready and receptive audience, especially when it is written in such a remarkably delightful style.

"the manner in which meals are conducted is an important ingredient in the happiness of life"

Is that why there is so much laughter at c/school lunches - we've watched the food we're eating be skillfully prepared, smelt the aromas and seen the transformation of ingredients into beautiful dishes, stimulating the appetite and by natural extension, creating a sense of well-being and happiness? I like to think that connection makes sense.

The book was written almost 200 years ago, and while some of the meal descriptions belong to another time, so much else of the detail is in fact, remarkeably relevant to how we should approach food in todays world.

His observations of the world around him, and the people who inhabit it, belie a keen intellect and delightfully piecing honesty. I laughed out loud on reading the following, and could think of a number of modern applications  where it would be most appropriate.

"here let me remark that those who are never satisfied with anything are almost always ignoramuses who only criticise so loudly in the hope that their boldness will gain them credit for accomplishments they lack the courage to acquire"

Sage words indeed! The book is full of such head nodding comments, and was an absolute delight. As far removed from the ponderous treatise that I was expecting to have to diligently work my way thru, as it's possible to imagine.

The restaurant has been very quiet over the last 2 weeks - to be expected this time of year, but never a fact that I actually embrace, becos the number of bills that require paying never seem to diminish by quite the same proportionate amount as the turnover. Gordon Ramsey said in his autobiography that they closed their up market restaurant in Scotland becos it was only ever busy 2 nites a week, and that wasn't enough to be profitable. And he's quite right - consistency of numbers is crucial to profitability in an operation like ours, so when our numbers drop below 20 for a night, you can be sure that I ain't thrilled about it.My usual mode of coping is to find a book to curl up with, so as to loose myself in someone elses world, and remove myself from too much pontificating about the lack of customers!

So when boxes arrive from Amazon - quite often with something I'd forgotten I'd ordered - the timing is always most fortuitous. Usually I've hopped on the computor to order a book that I've read a review off, or someone I respect has recommended, and then proceeded on with what ever I was doing, and forgotten about it, until the parcel arrives, much to my glee. The second one to arrive in as many weeks was " Heat" by Bill Buford, which I'd ordered on a whim, even though I thought that maybe I'd had a surfeat of the style of book where a journalist goes into a commercial kitchen to get a feel for what its all about and then repeats ad nauseum the process of cooking under intense pressure.  I'm incredibly glad however, that I followed my instincts and ordered the book, becos its made for fascinating reading on a number of levels. The author is a superb writer, which always helps elevate the reading process - and his selfdeprecating personality belies the amount that he achieved in the process of learning to be a chef in one of New Yorks top Italian restaurants, and then going on to Italy to learn to make pasta in a small restaurant  there, and on to do butchers training in Tuscany from the man considered to be the best butcher in Italy.

He has a happy knack of bringing alive the environments within which he works, and the people that he encounters. There is no malice, or need to promote himself - you suspect a genuine fascination with the process of learning and upskilling, but done in a collaborative and respectful way with people he considers to be experts in their fields. One of the reviews I had read about the book, implied that he had decimated Mario Butolli - the owner of Babbo, the Italian restaurant in New York, by depicting him in less then complimentary terms. Isn't it interesting how people interprete things in different ways? - becos I got a sense of deepseated respect and liking for each other, and an honest account of running a busy restaurant in the hot house environment of New York. I've encountered Mario a few times on the Food Network, when I've got on the wind trainer in front of the TV, and he's one of the few network presenters that I can watch without any cringe factor. Him and Rick Stein!  He does have a larger than life personality, and is full of exhurberance  and energy, and describing him as such in the book in no way diminished him in my eyes. If anything reading the book served to help me understand where the knowledge and the skill in the TV presenter came from. ( As a complete bye the bye I've just read an article that Bill Buford wrote for the New Yorker on the Food Network .)

Bill Buford was a writer and and editor before he went off on the cooking tangent - and part of the appeal of this book is his historical perspective, the  research that he does to understands the whys. If people tell him something is done a certain way, becos that is the way it has been done for centuries - he will go off to establish reasons why that should be , and in the process paints a more detailed picture that made for fascinating reading. I was going to use the word ' intellectual' but that makes it sound dry, which his writing is anything but.

Having worked in small rural, artisinal food businesses in Italy, he had got to compare food that was still being farmed and made in centuries old style, small and slow, with the vast modern manufactured and profit driven modern approach, and he was very clear about which he preferred. In fact he states in  the clearest fashion I've yet read what he percieves to be the problem. Let me quote:

'The  metaphor is usually one of speed: fast food has ruined our culture;slow food will save it...But it obscures  a fundamental problem which has little to do with speed and everything to do with size. Fast food did not ruin our culture. The problem was already in place, systemic in fact, and began the moment food was treated like an inanimate object -like any other commodity- that could be manufactured in increasing numbers to satisfy a market. In effect, the two essential players in the food chain ( those who make the food and those who buy it) swapped roles. One moment the producer ( the guy who knew his cows or the woman who prepared culatello only in January or the old young man who picks his olives in September) determined  what was available and how it was made. The next moment it was the consumer. The Maestro blames the supermarkets, but the supermarkets are just a sympton. ( Or, to invoke a familiar piece of retail philosophy: the world changed when the food business agreed that the customer was right, when, as we all know, the customer is actually - well, not always right.) What happened in the food business has occurred in every aspect of modern life, and the change has produced many benefits. I like island holidays and flat-screen telvevisions and have no argument with global economies, except in this respect - in what it has done to food."

He raises issues that are been discussed by many people at the moment - but there is nothing polemic or didactic about his comments. I could read, agree and enjoy the process, becos it dovetailed very comfortably with where my beliefs happen to be positioned. I didn't realise until I'd started the book that he'd bought a whole pig carcass from a local farmer, after his first work experience at the Tuscany butchery, and proceeded to break it down  - butcher it according to the principles he'd learnt. He got 450 servings of food from the one pig! - although he said that the lesson 'wasn't in the pigs economy but in its variety and abundance"

We currently have 2 pig carcasses in our freezer - from our lifestock experiment, of earlier this year. And tonite Rick is firing up the Weber to cook one of the joints. I haven't made too many enquiries as to what to expect, but I noticed he was reading Jane Grigsons ' Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery" this morning, so I await proceedings with interest. Unfortunatley for us, our reality is that we can't disappear off to Tuscany to work for a few months at the feet of a master butcher, and until we can entice an expert to come here to give us some training, we will rely on the written word for inspiration.

There's a lot of pig to go!

I've long been a fan of Gordon Ramsey - an opinion that seems to run counter to the majority of people whenever he comes up in conversation. Peoples aversion seems to be centered on his expletive driven language, and what they percieve to be his bullying tactics. Becos my ear doesn't tend to be offended by swear words, the language has never bothered me, and I always figured there had to be more to his A type personality, then necessarily comes over on TV - otherwise he wouldn't have engendered the formidable staff loyalty that he has. If the guy really was a jerk, then he wouldn't still have a number of staff working with him, who started out in his first restaurant.

The book ' Humble Pie' is his autobiography, and it is written exactly as he speaks, so flows along very easily, even with the graphic language!  Having read it,  I don't actually feel that there is any sarcasm attached to the title either. He comes from a truly horrific background, encountered major setbacks in his soccer career, which he then had to set aside to aim for a new career in cooking. And he didn't just want to be a cook - he aimed to be a chef, and not just a good one, but the best of them all. And that is something that drives him still. Even with all the extraordinary amounts that he has achieved, he is acutely aware that Alain Ducasse and Thomas Keller have more Michelin stars than him, on an international scale - and you sense that that eats at him. He won't actually be satisfied until he can claim N0.1 status.

All of which, needless to say, I find very curious, becos I can't imagine being quite that driven. But then I didn't have the kinds of obstacles placed in my way that he did, from a very young age.

For years I've read books and cookbooks and articles on various chefs and restauranteurs from around the world, and being a natural cynic, have always pondered how much of it to believe. Like most people in the hospitality industry, we were very impressed by the raw new energy of Marco Pierre White back in the late 80s when he burst on the London restaurant scene. He seemed so young and individual , compared to the rigidity and formality of the French restaurant training, but reading Ramsay, who worked with him, shows that he actually ran his kitchen along equally draconian lines, with staff expected to work absurd hours in ridiculous conditions. White's subsequent treatment of people is  heavily criticised by Ramsay, and likewise, anyone else who in any way abused him, gets their comeuppance.  But usually that is done by him simply describing what took place and what was said. As quick as he is to put the boot in, he doesn't appear to shy away from the people to whom he feels gratitude, and its that aspect that  I found almost the most redeeming. People say hes arrogant, and he probably has to have a significant amount of self believe to have achieved what he has done, and I guess in some peoples eyes that amounts to arrogance, but I just don't have a problem with it.

Look at what he's achieved, I say. He doesn't suffer fools to any degree, and I can't say I have a problem with that either. Watching some of the extraodinary scenarios in the TV series where he goes in to try to help  restaurants that are floundering, I thought he almost always invariably came out looking practical and sensible, whereas some of the human beings involved in the projects defied  any logic. They were frighteningly ignorant  of even a reasonable sense of what is to be expected.

Likewise, I used to get incredibly uncomfortable watching the antics of the young guys that Jamie Oliver had got together to offer an opportunity to work in the new restaurant he was setting up, as a training opportunity for those underpriviledged. So many of the original group thought that the glory and stardom should all be theirs, without them having to expend any energy to acquire it. Actually work for it? - don't be ridiculous!! Their sense of being 'owed' everything, truly mortified me. ( I am conscious however, that certain aspects of that may have been overdramatised for the TV cameras - something Ramsay indicates they don't hesitate to do.) And I think Gordon Ramsey makes very clear that working in a commercial kitchen is hard work, that can take a significant toll - there is very little that is glamourous about it, and people that percieve it in that light are bound to come unstuck. The fact that he has a really large percentage of staff who have stayed with him and gone on to thrive in his extended empire speaks volumes, and suggests to me that he doesn't have any ego problems, becos hes quite happy to let other people do really well  and burnish their own stars. Unlike the picture painted of Marco Pierre White, who didn't seem able to cope with competition from someone he considered an underling. That man really is a jerk.

Found some of the business aspects fascinating also - thru a very business savy father-in-law, and fortuituous meeting with a private equity company, he has been bankrolled into a significant number of food business', that operate at a number of different levels of the market. His top restaurant turns over 3 million pounds a year and has a profit of between 500,000 to 750,000 pounds a year. Thats 17-25%, and  I happen to know that the industry average in NZ is quoted as being 3.87%, so I'm impressed, very impressed! Its open Monday to Fridays lunch and dinner - has 12 tables, 40 seats. They don't turn the tables - one seating, thats it. So they can do 360 covers in a week - and yet they get 500 phone calls a day for reservations ( and I tried to imagine how it would be to have the phone ringing that often!) To have a net profit that high, the prices must be correspondingly high, but what he is saying is that for any one night they will have 30 tables trying to get in - so there is obviously a huge market quite comfortable with paying what he charges.

But he doesn't just operate at that level - he has the skill and business acumen to run successful restaurants right accross the board, and I think thats an amazing achievement.

The chapter on his TV experiences was extremely illuminating, especially in terms of the amount of money that competing channels were prepared to pay him to get his services. He made 500,000 pounds for 2 weeks work ( 25,000 pounds an hour), which as he says is what it would have taken one of the restaurants a year to clear as a net profit. The high profile without doubt, would have also brought lots of people to his restaurant doors, so its been a major win for him. He details without rancour, some of the more bizarre antics of the tabloid press, who treat him as fodder becos of that same high public profile - its a cost that seems to affect some people, but he appears to have the knack of treating it all with the distain that it deserves.

When we do our kitchen alterations ( hopefully next year), we are looking at putting in a kitchen table - we had a meal at the kitchen table at Bracu this week to celebrate 21 years in business and to get a feel for how they do it -and I've just been on the Gordon Ramsay website to have a look at how he sets them up in his various kitchens. A customer who'd been to one of our cookschools earlier this year, had just eaten at the kitchen table at the Connaught, and described the experience in depth, which is what got us intrigued by the concept. He says in his book at one point that they mean one million pounds in annual turnover. Not a figure to be sneezed at exactly. All interesting gist for the mill....

He appears to be driven to keep moving forward - standing still and smelling the roses just isn't an option for his personality, but I can't help but deeply admire the chutzpuh that has allowed him to create what he has. And probably what I respect most of all is the immutable fact that the man really can cook - he knows and is passionate about food, and his skill level is extraordinay. I like that.

Amazon has been a major influence on me. I buy a number of books thru its website every month - partly becos they are books I want and go looking for, and sometimes becos Amazon sends me an alert about a book that they think I might be interested in, based on my previous purchasing history.

That means that we have an extensive library, which I fail to see as a bad thing. A source of inspiration is never far away, and I like that.

It was an email from them that advised me that a biography on Alice Waters, and her important restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California had just been released. Seeing as how we had been heavily influenced by the cookbooks from that restaurant, I decided that that was a must read, and promptly ordered it ,as you do. The title: Alice Waters and Chez Panisse - the romantic, impractical, often eccentric, ultimately brillant making of a food revolution. By Thomas Mc Namee.

It made for fascinating reading. The restaurant opened in 1971, and has occupied a seminal place in restaurant accolades ever since. This book looks behind what has made it tick, what has driven the principal personality involved, namely Alice Waters. Ive read other books that allude to the restaurant, like Jeremiah Towers distinctly egocentric take in' California Dish', but this was the first opportunity to get to grips with what  it was that drove the reasons for the restaurant in the first place, and that has seen it survive thru a somewhat turbulent history.

Needless to say I found it fascinating. Longeivety in the restaurant industry in Anglo Saxon countries is not the norm, so Chez Panisse has become famous as much for the fact that it is still there, as for all the other precedents that it has set, and I was intrigued by the wheres and whyfores. They'd try to sell it a couple of times,but had never managed to do so, and it continues on as an icon of focusing on the very best of ingredients.

When we were in Venice  3 years ago, I wanted to go to Harrys Bar, becos the mystic of the place had always intrigued me. We peered into the interior but didn't venture in, becos it was one of those places where I didn't feel wealthy enough or skinny enough to go in. ( I get intimidated like that sometimes!) And that made me curious - becos what I had read about Harrys Bar was that it had started off as very much a neighbourhood venue where the locals came on a regular basis,  to eat the same thing day in and day out. Chez Panisse was the same. Intended as a local for people to come and relax. But it gained a form of noteriety that lifted it above just the locals and made it a destination for 'foodies'- just as has also happened with Harrys Bar. And what had made it special ceased to be what it was, becos of the constant flood of curious tourists, who arrive with an attitiude of ' ok, so I hear that you're supposed to be good, so prove it too me!"I find that curious. Becos that constant flow of people who are there, purely becos they're heard they should be, provide an income stream to the restaurant, that must be very nice, but at the same time it undermines what it is that made the restaurant special in the first place.

Their focus when they first opened was heavily influenced by the French, and by people like Richard Olney, who were living and writing in France at the time. Then when Paul Bertolli started cooking there as head chef, the pendulum started swinging towards Italy - with the food becoming more representative of the cooking in that country.

I have just coincidently finished reading Paul Bertollis book'Cooking by Hand" a book hes written based on his experiences in the restaurant he runs on his own, now that he's left Chez Panisse, called Olivetto. A densely written but absolutely captivating treatise on the importance of good ingredients, and going back to simple, expressive styles of cooking.  We are about to have our pigs killed, and are therefore reading up on charcuterie, which is why I'd turned to Pauls book, becos he has a substantial chapter on that subject, and is recognised as an expert in the field.

Most of Alice Waters energies these days are expended in food areas outside of the restaurant - but what she has created is proof that the principals of serving good food from the very best local ingredients that can be sourced, will find a willing and receptive market, even somewhere like America where the trends tend to be constantly  on whatever is new and therefore fashionable.

I like that notion of consistency, and not needing to titivate purely for the sake of titivation. Rather creating something that tastes good, becos its been made from quality ingredients, with care and attention. That is a concept I can most defintily adhere too.

So its made me drag out all the old Chez Panisse cookbooks to have another read thru - although 2 of them had their covers destroyed by our Doberman years ago, when we left him at home on his own for too long. Quite why he selected the only 2 Chez Panisse books ( which weren't side by side in the book case) that we owned at that stage, and destroyed their covers, is something I've never been able to figure.

Its all interesting, and all gist for the mill, as I write in my diary quite often!  I remember the first time I read one of Nico Ladenis' books back in the dark early days of us being at Somerset, when we were really questioning what we were doing and why. I remember that sense of relief that I had on reading that even a top restaurant in the UK has customers who come and question and don't like what is on offer. I remember that it made me feel better, that some of the negative crap that we'd had to deal with here, was not actually unique to us, but was in fact something experienced by restaurants everywhere. Maybe thats part of what I've liked about this book - even though I've drawn few parellels with it , there is still stuff that I can identify with and which is unique to the hospitality industry.

She has a missionary zeal that I admire and respect, but have no desire to emulate. My focus in much more on my immediate surroundings, be that in terms of people, and environment. But then I've never been motivated by a desire to rush out and change other people. I prefer to concentrate on that which is close to me.

We do however need the prophets, and those who are prepared to put the time and the personal energy into creating change on a grand scale, and I have nothing but respect for those who opt for that road.

Read the book. Its fascinating!