MARIANI’S
August 29, 2004
NEWSLETTER
Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont in "Duck Soup" (1935)
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EDITOR'S
NOTE: Readers may now access an Archive of
all past newsletters--each annotated--dating back to July, 2003, by
simply clicking on ARCHIVE .
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New York Corner: Deux Decasses by John Mariani
QUICK BYTES
A Lady's Guide to Dining Etiquette
Having
published "A Gentleman's Guide to Dining Etiquette" ( http://pages.prodigy.net/johnmariani/040726/
), I
called upon my readers to contribute what they considered good
etiquette for women out to dine. Here are the results, with
grateful
thanks to all those who contributed: Suzanne Wright, Melissa Libby,
Miriam Silverberg, Martha Tiller, McCall Mastroianni, Nicole Hunnicutt,
Marissa De Long, Marsha Palanci, Janet
Isabelli, Beth Flintoftand John Curtas.
A Lady . . .
1. . . . never applies lipstick at the table after eating. And never gets her lipstick all over
the glass.
2. . . . never undertips.
3.
. . . never
quibbles about the exact amount each of her dining
companions spent.
4. . . never orders the most expensive items on the menu.
6. . . .never discusses the details of her divorce. (Others' divorces
are all right.)
7. . . . always offers to pick up the tab--or at least the tip--on the
second
date.
8. . . . never replies "I dunno, where do you want to
go?" when
asked where she'd like to eat.
9. . . . may get a little
tipsy and act a little
flirtatious
with her
special someone at a restaurant, but knows the
difference between "sexy" and "sexual."
10.
. . . never takes more than 10 minutes to decide what to eat.
11.
. . . never gives her number to a bartender
in the middle of a date.
12.
. . . never goes to the powder room more than once during the meal, and
simply excuses herself from the table without explanations of where
she's headed.
13.
. . . knows her wine glass is on the right and bread plate on the left.
14. . . . always quietly settles the bill if she's paying without
studying it
minutely
15.
. . . never orders the most expensive item on the menu,
unless she's paying the bill.
16.
. . . never discusses her diet.
17. . . . never endlessly studies the menu then says, "I'll just
have a
salad."
18.
. . . never butters an entire slice of bread at once.
19..
. . never orders
first until she gets the prompt from her host inviting her to do
so.
20. . . . never wear shoes that are impossible
to walk to the rest room in.
21. . . never conducts conversations on her cell phone while at the table.
23. . . . does not hestitate to send food back if it is prepared incorrectly.
24. . . . . never carries a bag larger than the surface of a seat at the bar.
25. . . . is expected to show up 5 minutes late, but should never arrive more than 15 minutes after the appointed time.
26. . . . never puts her purse on
the table.
27. . . . never wears so much perfume
that it interferes with the food.
29.. . . . never feeds her date at the table.
30.. . . . never orders a Bloody Mary
after 4 PM.
31. . . . never puts her cigarettes and
lighter on the table.
32. . . . .doesn't go to the restroom in groups.
33. . . . eats like a
normal person and does not pick at her food.
34. . . . doesn't shake out the dinner napkin like a matador.
NEW
YORK CORNER
DEUX
DUCASSEs
by John Mariani
Alain
Ducasse is nothing if not indefatigable,
for he is currently owner or consultant or manager or in charge of more
than a dozen restaurants an enterprises, including his original
flagship, Louis XV in the
Hotel de Paris in Monaco, La Bastide de Moustiers in Provence, 59 Poincare, Spoon, Il Cortile, Aux Lyonnais Bistro, and Alain Ducasse at the Plaza-Athenee
(all in Paris), Spoon restaurants in London, Tokyo, St. Tropez, and
Mauritius, “bar
& boeuf” in Monte Carlo, Auberge
Iparla in the Basque country, L’Hostellerie
de l’Abbaye in
La Celle, Auberge L'Andana in
Tuscany, and at least one restaurant due to open in Las Vegas
next year.
I have commented often enough in the past of my
concerns when a
chef is so peripatetic and so rarely in any one kitchen, but the
talent--and resources--devoted to making Ducasse's enterprises
something quite out of the ordinary in most every case, and his
associates and minions are trained to maintain a level of excellence
few other culinary titans have been able to sustain.
Which is not the same thing as saying Ducasse's
enterprises are all
of a kind, or even of an identifiable style, as, say, the restaurants
of Wolfgang Puck or Emeril Lagasse are. Ducasse works in too many
genres for that to be the case.
Alain
Ducasse with actress Caroline Bouqet
and film director Sophia Coppola at his NYC restaurant, Mix.
What
they lacked was personality. This was very much the case when
Ducasse
opened this "ADNY" restaurant in the Essex House, and the food media
rightly pounced on the place for its extravagance, its prices, and the
absence of Ducasse himself. After months of major tweaking the
restaurant garnered better reports and glowing reviews, though the
initial bloom had worn off and it was still not easy to get people to
fill the dining room when the tab was easily going to go above $250 per
person. So, when Ducasse's last chef de cuisine, Didier
Elena, left a few months ago, it was time for careful re-assessment. In
a move packed with irony, Ducasse hired Christian Delouvrier, who had
been chef in the same space when it was called Les Celebrités,
which
had a pretty good run before Delouvrier left to become chef (following
Gray Kunz) at the St. Regis
Hotel's deluxe dining room, Lespinasse,
which was widely praised but closed last year for lack of
business.
Delouvrier soon afterwards announced he would open both a fine dining
room and a casual spot, but when plans fell through on both, Ducasse
approached his old friend to take over the stoves at Delouvrier's
former kitchen, although one mightily improved to state-of-the-art
status by Ducasse.
I have no idea what conversations
transpired between the two
masters over what the menus would be like, but I strongly suspect that
Delouvrier had little intention of merely adapting Ducassian recipes as
was the case in the past. And I further suspect that Ducasse told his
friend that the kitchen was his to run, and that has made a world of
difference, not only because Delouvrier is such a superb chef on his
own, but because ADNY was now truly imbued with a personality and a
chef who was always going to be on premises cooking. Indeed, I
can say
that my last meal at ADNY was not just the best I;ve had in that room
but also one of the finest French meals I've ever had in New York, and
even better than those I recall at Lespinasse. These two
Frenchmen
seem to bring out the best in each other.
As
luck would have it, I’d dined at Ducasse’s NY outpost (155 West 58th
Street; 212-265-7300) just a week or so before leaving for Paris,
which
gave me a good basis of comparison. Foodwise,
the menu in New York, under chef Didier Elena,
31, is somewhat
more exciting, drawing on fine American ingredients as much as
possible,
sometimes in the extreme—squab strangled a certain way, chickens
plucked in the
kitchen, foie gras laid in linen—and the pay off is in the flavors.
Except
for the initial period when curiosity seekers and rich foodies came to
dine and
in the weeks following the Times four-star review, the
reservation book
here has never been quite as full as management would have you believe. The night I visited, a Tuesday, the room
never filled up, and there were a couple of tables with single diners
who
looked as if they’d wandered down from their rooms at the Essex House. A $2 million rehab of what had previously
been Les Célébrites removed some of the funky celebrity
paintings and replaced
them with an elegant but somber décor of gilded wood and dark
rosewood
walls—not really a fun place to dine.
Service,
as in Paris, was exceptional, with one employee per guest (including
the
kitchen staff) in the 65-seat restaurant, never intrusive but always
there for
the guest in need of anything at all. (The
waitstaff was trained by a choreographer!) There
is a chef’s table called the Aquarium
in a kitchen of daunting modernity, with every imaginable culinary
gadget. Pieter Verhyde oversees a 1,400
label winelist,
with a 60-wine “hot list” that changes weekly. Women
are offered cashmere shawls from a 1930s
Hermès leather case, and—this
is getting scary—reading glasses are cleaned by ultrasound. I could go on—Lalique, Christofle,
Beàrd,
Reliance—you’ll recognize the names.
We
more or less left the menu up to Elena, choosing a few things we wanted
to try,
but we forgot what they were as extra delectables came to the table. If one of us had an extra course, everyone
else was brought something to eat. Verhyde
took control of the wine selections, every one a revelation, from a
Lieb Family
Cellars ’00 Pinot Blanc from Long Island to a sweet Henry of Pelham ’95
Baco
Noir from Ontario.
We
were four at the table and each had a different meal—probably a total
of 20-25
different things to taste, from rich man’s comfort food like osietra
caviar
atop baked potatoes with sour cream and a layered confit of foie gras
with
black truffles and celery to a fine velouté of Maine lobster
with an infusion
of wild mushrooms and lightly whipped chervil cream (superb) and
“leaves” of
cod rubbed with Espelette pepper and basil in a squid ink sauce (not so
terrific). Swirling in among those dishes were a roast chicken with
butternut
squash, marmalade and gnocchi in a cooking jus with drops of
Amaretto;
duck foie gras cooked in a pot with white truffles; chestnut flour farfalle
pasta with those Parisian chicken nuggets (surprise!) and white
truffles; a
glorious venison chop that had been marinated then roasted with juniper
berries;
and a reprieve of that turbot with comté-walnut in Paris, this
time done with
sole (not any more interesting).
The
cheese selection was excellent, and then came the parade of desserts
from
Pierre Gatel, from a luscious pear-caramel soufflé and
fig-and-almond pithiviers
with crème fraîche to sweet-salty iced praliné,
hazelnut and—surprise again!--puffed
rice, with the eventual appearance of the famous babà au rhum,
followed
by candies and cookies and cakes and marshmallows and those
lollipops—any and
all for take-home.
By
comparison with Paris, Alain Ducasse NY’s prices are about even-steven,
that
is, you pay $145-$160, but without service and tax included, so it
comes out
about the same.
Is
it worth it? If you can afford it, why
not? It’s
wonderful food and quite an evening. Can
you eat as well or better elsewhere in
New York or Paris. Yes you can, though perhaps not quite as lavishly. Will you ever see Alain Ducasse passing
through the dining room. Hmmmm .
. . I doubt it.
Ducasse
is a special case, well deserving of praise for all he has achieved
under the
corporate name Groupe Alain Ducasse, but also an object of concern,
even
frustration, to those who believe that by becoming such a colossus of
world
cuisine he has forsaken some of those simple tenets of what being a
good cook
and host once dictated. I, for one, wish
he would reconsider his own self-directed destiny and return to grow
fat behind
his stove.
LARBS
WILL DO THAT
"Renu
Nakorn’s food is spicy, but what makes it wonderful is the fresh play
of
tastes, 
a fugue of herbs, meatiness and citrus that is quite
unlike
anything at
your corner Thai café. There’s a blistering larb of finely
ground catfish; the
thinnest sour strands of shredded bamboo; great Thai beef jerky; and an
extraordinary version of steak tartare that is so delicious it could
sear the
hairs out of your nostrils."
--Jonathan Gold, Review of
In
QUICK
BYTES
* On Sept. 13 Renee
and Colin Alevras of NYC’s The
Tasting Room have teamed with
* From Sept. 22-26 the Santa Fe Wine & Chile Fiesta will be held, with appearances by chefs including Suzanne Goin (AOC, L.A.); Cory Schreiber (Cascadia, Seattle); Eric di Stefano (Geronimo, Santa Fe), et al. A Grand Food & Wine Tasting will take place with 60 of Santa Fe's restaurants and 90 wineries. Call 505-438-8060; www. santafewinedandchile.org.
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EDITOR'S NOTE: This newsletter is
also available on the very
comprehensive food site www.sautewednesday.com
which has dozens of other links to food articles
from
around the world, and also at www.Gayot.com.
New York Corner reviews are also available at
www.nycvisit.com/johnmariani
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MARIANI'S VIRTUAL
GOURMET NEWSLETTER is
published weekly. Editor/Publisher: John
Mariani.
Contributing Writers: Robert Mariani,
Naomi
Kooker, Kirsten Skogerson, Edward Brivio,
Mort Hochstein, Lucy Gordan, Suzanne Wright. Contributing
Photographers: Galina
Stepanoff-Dargery,
Bobby Pirillo. Technical Advisor: Gerry
McLoughlin.
copyright John Mariani 2004