I'm laughing as I read through this thread, seeing that the OP justifies his argument based on hearsay from Suvir Saran! Did anyone watch Suvir on Top Chef Masters? I did, and I've never seen someone so adeptly and simultaneously reach the heights of pretension, self-aggrandisement, ignorance, and hyperbole. After seeing Suvir spout his nonsense again and again (and then try to justify and promote himself in subsequent interviews), I don't see how one of his comments can be used as any sort of basis for a rational discussion.

And clearly how a person is portrayed on a reality TV show is more representative than an actual, real life conversation.

Khaopaat wrote:

kl1191 wrote:

Steve Plotnicki wrote:People keep couching this in terms of ethnicity, or price, but the real isssue is standardization of ingredients and techniques. It is invariably the case that a $2 hot dog is more likely to be something that is a standardized product than a $4 hot dog and it is logical to assume that an $8 hot dog is less standardized than a $4 one. THAT DOESN'T MEAN THAT HAVING THE $8 HOT DOG IS ALWAYS A BETTER EXPERIENCE. But what you will find is that it is almost always a higher quality product than the cheaper dogs. That's where the title of this thread comes in. The $4 dog comes with an invisible ceiling.

This may have once been true, but I'm not sure how universal this concept is anymore...as evinced by the rise of vodka, price has become more and more a part of marketing rather than a true reflection of quality or uniqueness. In this, more than anything, I think your general perspective on dining has a flaw.

This is exactly how I felt when I first read Steve's post in the Spoon thread. However, I think what Steve is trying to say (and Steve, please correct me if I'm wrong) is this:

- Cutting corners by buying commercial/pre-packaged products results in an inferior product
- Many (perhaps even a majority of) "cheap" restaurants cut corners
- Restaurants that make food from scratch tend to produce a superior product
- All things being equal (skill level, technique, recipe, etc.), better-quality ingredients will yield a better product
- Better-quality ingredients tend to cost more
- If a restaurant uses the best ingredients money can buy, then in order to recoup their costs & turn a profit, they will have to set their prices at a point where they're not considered "cheap" anymore

So say Khaopaat's Indian Café is a "cheap" Indian restaurant, where all of the dishes are in the $10 range. At that price point, I have to make sure I only spend $2-3 on its ingredients (the rest goes to payroll, rent, and keeping the lights on). I can only afford grocery store-quality ingredients, but I manage to turn out a nice chicken curry with them - it's literally the best thing I can make with those ingredients.

If I decide I want my chicken curry to be better than it currently is, or even the best it can possibly be, the only variable I can change is the quality of the ingredients. But to do so will most likely cost me more, and then I'll have to raise my prices, and Khaopaat's Indian Café will no longer be a "cheap" restaurant, because all of my entrées will cost $20 instead of the former $10.

If this is in fact what you mean, then we are fully in agreement.

I'm in agreement on this, too. Where I believe we disagree is to the extent that the causality between increased expense and increased quality is likely to go in both directions.

To take your cheap curry to the next level, you have very little choice but to spend more money and increase the cost. However, that does not in any way imply that a higher cost on the menu is any sort of objective indicator of the quality of the curry. You can say that a cheap curry cannot possibly be as good as the best expensive curry (assuming they aren't selling the cheap one as some sort of loss leader), but that statement is pretty toothless once you strip it down to real world application and try to draw any sort of guiding principles from it. And, you cannot say that expensive is proof of quality, because as the vodka wars proved, simply charging premium prices and applying appropriate marketing can efficiently substitute for providing an actual premium quality product.

Again, Steve's criteria for critiquing a "cheap" restaurant seems to be, 'could this have been better if it cost more?' And, his answer is always yes, because he prefers expensive ingredients, finds them subjectively superior. And, for him, that's all that matters because he happens to have plenty of money to throw around chasing those ingredients. However, we both agree that the more commonly accepted practice is to weigh the meal based on the price that was charged and to assess the value on those terms. If every time I ate chicken I was mentally comparing it to Bocuse's truffle-stuffed Volaille de Bresse en Vessie "Mere Fillioux", I'd find myself pretty continually disappointed. I would prefer to be able to occasionally revel in Khan BBQ's boti. It's pragmatically pointless to think how much better it would be if they'd smuggle a few birds in from Bresse.

kl1191 wrote:a few birds

Not just ANY birds will do for L'Ortolan à la Plotnicki!

HI,

For whatever it matters, Suvir was a speaker for Culinary Historians in 2009. A link to a podcast is available here: viewtopic.php?p=255494#p255494

Regards,

There's so much assumption and presumption on this thread - and misunderstanding - that it's tempting to just sit back and toss down popcorn.

However, for the fun of it I'm going to bring up Next's Thai menu, which had its share of detractors, many of whom (ironically, in this context?) considered its high-end, top-ingredient take on Thai street food inferior to the handful of favored Thai spots in Chicago whose ingredients and craft do not and likely cannot rise to the level of Next's.

And just for more fun, there were several defenses posted from Nick K. to the extent that what Next had to offer was first and foremost a much higher quality of ingredient, and the quality alone accorded a certain ... superiority. Or at least justified the luxury price.

OK, back to the popcorn ...

Vitesse98 wrote:OK, back to the popcorn ...

(tangent start)

I've been using this popcorn thread for inspiration when I sit down to read the fun here.

(tangent end)

Khaopaat you get an A+.

Vitesse98 wrote:However, for the fun of it I'm going to bring up Next's Thai menu [blah, blah, blah]

What a totally unexpected curveball. Yours in shock and awe, K_E

Vitesse98 wrote:However, for the fun of it I'm going to bring up Next's Thai menu, which had its share of detractors, many of whom (ironically, in this context?) considered its high-end, top-ingredient take on Thai street food inferior to the handful of favored Thai spots in Chicago whose ingredients and craft do not and likely cannot rise to the level of Next's.

And just for more fun, there were several defenses posted from Nick K. to the extent that what Next had to offer was first and foremost a much higher quality of ingredient, and the quality alone accorded a certain ... superiority. Or at least justified the luxury price.

And, incidentally, Steve P. (consistent with his views in this thread) seemed to be a fan of Next Thailand due to ingredient quality, technique, etc. -- things he is lamenting as being absent in the majority of ethnic restaurants in this thread. One's viewpoint on this will really depend on what you value most (cost-value ratio, authenticity, ingredients, technique, etc.); in that sense, once you get past the rhetoric and some of the sweeping generalizations and opinions masquerading as fact, there is no right or wrong position/answer.

If I may attempt to clarify, I suspect much of the outrage in this thread is the result of subtext that has not been clearly expressed, or perhaps it's been miscommunicated. If Steve would indulge a question, I think it would provide a great deal of clarity.

Steve, in your opinion, can a traditional Mexican mole, if expertly prepared from excellent ingredients, attain the culinary heights of the creative works of a French master chef, or is it limited simply by the nature of the cuisine? Put another way, to use your analogy, even if the version you had at Spoon the other day was not, is it possible for raw shrimp in spicy sauce to be the Porsche?

What a totally unexpected curveball. Yours in shock and awe, K_E

Guilty as charged! But for what it's worth:

Spoon thread: 111 posts since August 2007
Next thread: 611 since April 2011

And they ain't all me.

Dom you ask a good question (finally LOL). The answer is complicated. In theory, there is no reason why a mole can't be as complicated as any other dish in the world. But as a matter of practice there are two things that make it difficult to happen. First, Mexican culinary technique and theory is not as fleshed out as other more sophisticated cuisines. What makes French food and molecular gastronomy superior to other forms of cooking is the vantage point with which the chefs see the food. Look at how Grant and Dave reimagined Pad Thai as if Michel Bras were making it. The typical Mexican chef does not have that level of technique or culinary theory in their repetoire. The second thing is what French cuisine and Mexican cuisine are trying to accomplish. The goal of French cuisine is for the technique not to interfere with a proper expression of the ingredients. On the other hand, mole masks that expression.

Trying to sum that up into a single answer, I would say the answer is yes providing you could overcome the problems I set out above.

Khaopaat wrote:So say Khaopaat's Indian Café is a "cheap" Indian restaurant, where all of the dishes are in the $10 range. At that price point, I have to make sure I only spend $2-3 on its ingredients (the rest goes to payroll, rent, and keeping the lights on).
....
If I decide I want my chicken curry to be better than it currently is, or even the best it can possibly be, the only variable I can change is the quality of the ingredients. But to do so will most likely cost me more, and then I'll have to raise my prices, and Khaopaat's Indian Café will no longer be a "cheap" restaurant.

Ive been enjoying this thread with my (curried) popcorn too... but will chip in to (unlike KL) strongly disagree with this above bit.

You say you can spend $2-3 on ingredients..and the rest goes to payroll, rent etc - and yet if I want to use better-quality ingredients, Id have to raise prices. Why? Mathematically, logically, you can cut more easily out of the 70-80% that are *not* ingredients... the rent, the payroll etc. Ive eaten Indian food in India in spots where a meal cost 1200 - and at others where you could have 5-6 meals for that amount (cost about 200ish each).. and the 200ish spots were *far* superior. How did they do it? By being in areas where rent was substantially cheaper, by spending very very little on payroll (the "service" was laughably bad, the "ambience" nonexistant) etc - its just the food that was transcendant.

Anyone remember the "old" Khans? Where the place was crap (smoky and dark), there was no service to speak of, on a relatively (back then) quiet corner of Devon - and the chicken boti was awesome and cost 6 bucks? Think if they had been located, instead, somewhere on a particularly busy section of the Mag Mile, with excellent (and well-paid) servers (and actual smoke-scrubbers, or even a smoke-detector), and were serving the exact same outstanding chicken boti... that it would still have been 6 bucks?

Uncle John's serves (bar none) the best damn BBQ in the city, IMHO - and a monstrous quantity of jumbo tip-links for about 13 bucks. Places up north serve much worse BBQ (irrelevant).. but their price points are also much higher , 1.5-2 times higher sometimes (very relevant). Why? Maybe it has something to do with being on 69th and King (where the area is.. iffy - and rents are low); with have no white table-cloth dining (or much payroll overhead), with having no liquor license cost, and with simply charging what the market (ie the regular customers in the area) will bear? You can serve crappy BBQ at both low and high price points- places both SouthSide and NorthSide prove that on a regular basis. But you can also serve the best food (in this case BBQ) at a low price-point and Uncle John's proves that day in and day out, every single day. You just have to drive to a low-rent area for it


c8w

First, Mexican culinary technique and theory is not as fleshed out as other more sophisticated cuisines. What makes French food and molecular gastronomy superior to other forms of cooking is the vantage point with which the chefs see the food.

OK, now here is where you lose me. Words like "more sophisticated" and "superior" are dubious as best, even at their most literal and neutral. Like, debate quality all you want, but the aforementioned are firmly in the realm of subjective. Reminds me of some dude who claims that, I dunno, Yes' neo-classical prog aspirations lofts it above other music simply based on the particular tradition it references and borrows from.

So do you think that the technique used to paint by numbers is as sophisticated as cubism? Don't answer it was a rhetorical question.

Look, in art, music, film and food, quality is not a function of science but of judgement. Case in point, the reason that Spoon is considered the best Thai restaurant in Chicago is because that is the consensus among the LTH/Thai cognescenti. But once that judgement has been estabished, people use words like sophisticated to describe the difference between it and other Thai restaurant. So it is also fair to say that people are willing to pay $100 for a Thai meal at Next because the general consensus is that the food is more sophisticated than the food at Spoon.

Steve Plotnicki wrote:First, Mexican culinary technique and theory is not as fleshed out as other more sophisticated cuisines.

This is called Unilineal Evolution, and has been widely discredited for almost a century. I'm sure I would share your apotheosis of French cuisine much more were I not a post-Boasian.

We are talking about how people practice the hobby of dining. Not the theory of evolution. If you want to disagree that Pain Poilane is better than Wonder Bread, that might make you a good sociologist. But it would also mean you have a shit palate. That's because the standards of dining (or any hobby) are self serving and are unaffected by conventional academic theory.

Steve Plotnicki wrote: If you want to disagree that Pain Poilane is better than Wonder Bread, that might make you a good sociologist.

No one is saying that, but you apparently think that pain aux raisins has a stronger culinary heritage than pan de muerto, which is just not true. Your palate may be more steeped in one than the other, but that is neither here nor there.

c8w wrote:

Khaopaat wrote:So say Khaopaat's Indian Café is a "cheap" Indian restaurant, where all of the dishes are in the $10 range. At that price point, I have to make sure I only spend $2-3 on its ingredients (the rest goes to payroll, rent, and keeping the lights on).
....
If I decide I want my chicken curry to be better than it currently is, or even the best it can possibly be, the only variable I can change is the quality of the ingredients. But to do so will most likely cost me more, and then I'll have to raise my prices, and Khaopaat's Indian Café will no longer be a "cheap" restaurant.

Ive been enjoying this thread with my (curried) popcorn too... but will chip in to (unlike KL) strongly disagree with this above bit.

You say you can spend $2-3 on ingredients..and the rest goes to payroll, rent etc - and yet if I want to use better-quality ingredients, Id have to raise prices. Why? Mathematically, logically, you can cut more easily out of the 70-80% that are *not* ingredients... the rent, the payroll etc.

You're right of course. However, I was operating under the assumption that Khaopaat's Indian Café already has an established location, staff, and decor. Just because I decide I want to up the quality of the food I serve doesn't necessarily mean I'm prepared to fire my staff, sell my batik wall hangings, and break my lease in order to offer food made with better ingredients while maintaining my $10 price point. So my only option is to increase the price I charge in order to pay for the better ingredients and my existing overhead.

Needless to say, my example was very hypothetical, intended to understand what Steve was trying to say, which was that Spoon Thai is great for what it is, but if they decided to strive to make the best Thai possible (without picking up stakes and moving to Englewood), they would have to increase their prices. I personally feel that Spoon is exactly what it needs to be and what I want it to be (assuming reported consistency issues are resolved), but I don't disagree with the gist of his argument.

Steve Plotnicki wrote:First, Mexican culinary technique and theory is not as fleshed out as other more sophisticated cuisines. What makes French food and molecular gastronomy superior to other forms of cooking is the vantage point with which the chefs see the food.

That right there. That's the part that I believe inspires the ire, not the rest.

Thanks for clarifying.

kl1191 wrote:No one is saying that, but you apparently think that pain aux raisins has a stronger culinary heritage than pan de muerto, which is just not true. Your palate may be more steeped in one than the other, but that is neither here nor there.

Culinary heritage is not a measure of quality. It's not even a quality that makes something good. My mother used to make lots of Jewish-style dishes that were steeped in culinary heritage. But that didn't prevent a good portion of them from tasting like crap. In fact if anything, the culinary heritage weighed the dishes down because they necessarily imposed outoded ideals and techniques.

Enjoying eating my imaginary popcorn while reading this thread here.

I don't really have anything to add to this discussion that has not already been said. However, I do have a question for the OP. In your rant of homogeneous ethnic foods, why hasn't any South and Eastern European countries been included? One can just as easily assume that 99.9999999% of all Italian, Greek, Polish, Yugoslavian restaurants cook the same dishes and use the same ingredients, etc. I am not saying any of these are because they are not, but it can be just as easy to assume as easily as it is to assume all Chinese, Thai, Indian places use the same mass produced products. (I can say they do not. I know my differences in quality at "cheap" Asian places.) I am just curious if you think those cuisines fit under this thread as well. I have recently been to Beograd Cafe which serves a damn good $7 burek like the kind you would get back in Serbia and Montenegro. Since I have been to and dined in both countries several times, I can attest to how close it is to the real thing and back in the old country a burek does not cost anywhere near seven bucks. More like a lot less. It's still that damn good. Are they using cheap ingredients or mass produced mixes at the same burek place? Who knows, who cares? I am not one to ask about high quality, sophisticated ingredients. I don't care as long as it is done right and it tastes good.

Now let me get back to my imaginery popcorn!

It has nothing to do with ethnic. It has to do with cheap and most ethnic restaurants are cheap. In order for food to be special it has to be made with care. That means using ingredients that have been raised with care, and then handling them with care to make a finished product. If that can be done for $7, then I agree with you.

There is a place in Arthur Avenue in the Bronx called Tony & Tina's. It's a pizzeria run by Albanians and they make really good boureks. Cheese, spinach & pumpkin if I recall correctly. They cost $4 and are especially good if you manage to catch a batch as they come out of the oven. But as much as I enjoy them, they are not made with artisanal ingredients. My liking to eat them does not change the fact that I would prefer to have access to a more expensive bourek that is made with a higher degree of care.

So let me ask you a question: If you were to find boureks that were made the way I am describing, and they were so delicious that you were willing to create a new bourek paradigm, how would you feel about that?

I shouldn't wade into this, because my food knowledge is not on a level with that of others here, but an analogy occurs to me.

If I listen to one particular piece of music that was created using synthesizers and automation, and it happens to move me more than another particular piece of music that was created purely acoustically, should I care that the latter piece of music is more artisanal? I can embrace "artisanalness" as a concept, and yet find my senses being more pleased by the less artisanal product, depending on other factors. So, when it comes to food, why should artisanalness matter more than how much a mouthful of food makes me go "wow"?

Steve Plotnicki wrote:It has nothing to do with ethnic. It has to do with cheap and most ethnic restaurants are cheap. In order for food to be special it has to be made with care. That means using ingredients that have been raised with care, and then handling them with care to make a finished product. If that can be done for $7, then I agree with you.

There is a place in Arthur Avenue in the Bronx called Tony & Tina's. It's a pizzeria run by Albanians and they make really good boureks. Cheese, spinach & pumpkin if I recall correctly. They cost $4 and are especially good if you manage to catch a batch as they come out of the oven. But as much as I enjoy them, they are not made with artisanal ingredients. My liking to eat them does not change the fact that I would prefer to have access to a more expensive bourek that is made with a higher degree of care.

So let me ask you a question: If you were to find boureks that were made the way I am describing, and they were so delicious that you were willing to create a new bourek paradigm, how would you feel about that?

Let's just talk ingredients: more expensive, artisanal ingredients do not necessarily lead to a more flavorful, better tasting product or one with a better texture, and all of these considerations need to be taken into consideration. You may prefer more expensive cheeses to taste on their own, but how are they when baked, both in terms of flavor and texture? Does that better tasting and more expensive cheese clash with the spinach or pumpkin flavor when combined. Does a less expensive (and perhaps lesser quality) cheese melt better, wheras the higher quality cheese leads to an unpleasant, grainy texture? Does the artisanal cheese just have too high a fat ratio for the finished dish? It's not all about the individual cost/taste of each single ingredient and in my opinion you're approaching your food analysis with tunnel vision.

But Steve, it has everything to do with "ethnic" - you practically said so yourself when discussing your views on Mexican and French cuisine.

The best thing I've ever eaten was falafel from a hole in the wall in Ramallah, Palestine. It was brown and long, looking something like an Arabic turd. It was likely made from cheap, dried chickpeas imported from Turkey. Three cost me about 25 cents U.S., which is actually quite expensive (blame it on an "occupation tax").

But it was the best thing I've ever eaten, not only because it was expertly spiced and fried, served fresh, but also because it distilled generations of historical memory, blood, spit, occupation and resistance, and indeed, my own experience with my heritage, into a single bite. It was built upon a whole lot more than mere culinary expertise.

It was certainly better, in my view, than anything I ate at Alinea last year.

BR wrote:Let's just talk ingredients: more expensive, artisanal ingredients do not necessarily lead to a more flavorful, better tasting product or one with a better texture, and all of these considerations need to be taken into consideration. You may prefer more expensive cheeses to taste on their own, but how are they when baked, both in terms of flavor and texture? Does that better tasting and more expensive cheese clash with the spinach or pumpkin flavor when combined. Does a less expensive (and perhaps lesser quality) cheese melt better, wheras the higher quality cheese leads to an unpleasant, grainy texture? Does the artisanal cheese just have too high a fat ratio for the finished dish? It's not all about the individual cost/taste of each single ingredient and in my opinion you're approaching your food analysis with tunnel vision.

Recall how this whole thing started: why are many restaurants bad? One answer is because they use low-quality ingredients.

As much as you'd like to "prove him wrong," you can't do it by turning around the logic by saying that all low-quality ingredients are bad.

A implies B does not mean B implies A.

Huh? Darren, I'm not sure who your post is directed to or exactly what you are saying, but your quotations are incorrect and you're attributing the quotes to the wrong people. See my post above.

You guys keep trying to come up with examples that are exceptions to the rule. And you put them forward in a general way and claim they disprove the rule. But you haven't offered an example that is relevant to what we are talking about because you only want to point to the evidence that disproves the theory and are purposely ignoring the evidence that proves it. Let me put it to you this way: Say I served you 10 boureks made with artisanal flour and 9 of them tasted worse than your favorite bourek made with mass-produced flour and 1 tasted better. That wouldn't matter because the standard would be set by the single successful example which tasted better, not the failures, and you would have to calibrate your palate accordingly.

Look this really isn't a hard concept to understand. Mole made from scratch is better than mole from a package. Sure, some people are bad cooks and their handmade mole is lousy. But I don't see how that disproves the proffer that handmade mole has the potential, and is likely to be better than, mass-produced mole. And I don't see how once a person tastes the handmade, why they can't understand the limitations of the packaged stuff.

Once again, you guys seem to be conflating the limitations of something, with your ability to enjoy it. I am trying to tease those things apart by saying that knowledge doesn't necessarily have to ruin your dining experience. In fact if anything it will allow you to become a better diner because you are in a better position to recalibrate your ideals.

Habibi - I believe you about that falafal. But what you are offering is simply not empirical evidence. There are dozens of reasons why you loved that falafal that range from they used the best chickpeas in the world to make it to you were exceptionally hungry and in a really good mood that date. In order to offer meaningfull proof, you would have to go behind you own taste buds and offers objective reasons why it was the best thing you ever ate.