Nah. Confit byaldi is ludicrously haute-cuisine, needs three-star levels of manual prep work. The tag line is “Not everyone can be a great cook – but a great cook can come from anywhere”. And so can a good recipe or idea, that wasn’t ever new in French cuisine it’s been riffing off peasant recipes for ages, Escoffier did plenty of that.
Good food isn’t special in the sense that everyone so inclined, with enough obsession, can learn to combine aroma, to cook things to point, all that stuff, which is how excellent home cooks are made. What sets haute cuisine apart is the time and labour invested in every dish for increasingly diminishing returns.
Because of the health inspector, yes. The restaurant critic, now disgraced for having talked up an “unsanitary” restaurant, is eating at the new place, happy as a clam.
The social status and renown that comes with haute cuisine indeed is unimportant, it’s the food that’s important.
Social status and exclusivity plays into it in practice, for sure, in a right-out fetishistic sense: Like there’s chefs who have onions chopped so fine, using a special technique (not the usual chef technique you see) that they melt in the sauce, very labour-intensive. Now, having the onions melt into the sauce is a nice and valid thing, however, why in the everloving fuck aren’t you using a blender. Even if there’s a difference, which all my experience tells me there isn’t, it’s going to have such a minimal return on investment it’s utterly pointless but as an exercise in exclusivity.
Also I like my potato mash chunky but that’s another topic.
Nah. Confit byaldi is ludicrously haute-cuisine, needs three-star levels of manual prep work. The tag line is “Not everyone can be a great cook – but a great cook can come from anywhere”. And so can a good recipe or idea, that wasn’t ever new in French cuisine it’s been riffing off peasant recipes for ages, Escoffier did plenty of that.
Good food isn’t special in the sense that everyone so inclined, with enough obsession, can learn to combine aroma, to cook things to point, all that stuff, which is how excellent home cooks are made. What sets haute cuisine apart is the time and labour invested in every dish for increasingly diminishing returns.
But the restaurant closed. The movie ends with Remy in a bistro.
Because of the health inspector, yes. The restaurant critic, now disgraced for having talked up an “unsanitary” restaurant, is eating at the new place, happy as a clam.
The social status and renown that comes with haute cuisine indeed is unimportant, it’s the food that’s important.
In my mind, that was haute cuisine. I never thought of that distinction between social status and all that diminishing returns stuff.
Social status and exclusivity plays into it in practice, for sure, in a right-out fetishistic sense: Like there’s chefs who have onions chopped so fine, using a special technique (not the usual chef technique you see) that they melt in the sauce, very labour-intensive. Now, having the onions melt into the sauce is a nice and valid thing, however, why in the everloving fuck aren’t you using a blender. Even if there’s a difference, which all my experience tells me there isn’t, it’s going to have such a minimal return on investment it’s utterly pointless but as an exercise in exclusivity.
Also I like my potato mash chunky but that’s another topic.