My pet theory is that the rise in the "Japanese" style of fine dining -- which to me is characterized by pristine ingredients and a sort of atomized style, where most dishes appear as a combination of elements -- is in part explained by a roughly concomitant growth in the weight of reviews in determining a restaurant's place in a hierarchy. Maybe I'm underrating the influence of professional reviews before the 60s, or overrating the influence of professional and amateur reviews now, but it does seem to me that "Japanese" style cooking is easier to justify intellectually, and for that reason more likely to earn the Michelin etc. plaudits that make these restaurants' names.
An audience can pretty easily grasp an account of the right grower/forager/fisher supply chains that produce really nice ingredients, and they're fun to write and read about too. And being able to discuss a dish as a sum of constituent parts (how many "nice" menus these days describe dishes as just a list of ingredients, one of which are unexpected?) makes the task even clearer. The built in diversity and, sometimes, narrative of a tasting menu also helps.
Compare this to the difficulty of explaining why a single curry or mole tastes good, where it's hard not to fall back on hand-waving terms like "complex", or "haunting" or something. These dishes are, at least to me, far harder to pick apart and analyze in a convincing way, and that sort of analysis seems necessary to justify "fine dining", from what I can tell. Last I checked this was reflected in the allocation of Michelin stars, for which there are close to zero Indian, African, or Mexican (to name a few huge cuisines) last I checked, (though I think Mexico may have made some headway recently.)
Topolobampo in Chicago is a Michelin starred restaurant by Rick Bayless. There is actually a ton of Mexican fine dining in Chicago, and tons of excellent standard-fare Mexican in Chicago.
I've had fine-dining Mexican in other cities, and I'm not surprised that it's hard to find Michelin-starred Mexican establishments. I'd describe the fine dining Mexican I've had elsewhere as overpriced garbage, and I personally think that is being generous. One of my friends brought me to a fine-dining Mexican place in NYC that was so obviously massacred for American tastes that I literally could burst out laughing merely by thinking about it for a month afterwards.
I think you are on to something though -- the 'bad' Mexican I've had is always fussed with too much, whereas Mexican I'd generally describe Mexican food as pretty straightforward. I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case across the board. I think the places that fuss with food too much stay in business because there is a certain segment of the population that judges value based on complexity and 'moreness'. That measure is kind of backwards in the same way that measuring productivity of a developer solely by lines of code written is backwards. The best code is often succinct.
As interesting as this is, Japanese kaiseki, while having some aspects in common and influencing some chefs, is not really the origin of modern fine dining.
French fine dining comes from the aristocratic courts of Europe, and if you go to one of the old temples of gastronomy in France, it's easier to see the influence. You start with hors d'œuvres, then move to entrées (appetizers), then typically you'll have fish and/or meats, often cooked on the bone then carved tableside. Then you move on to cheese/dessert carts. That's fine dining.
Anyhow, the more modern style of many plated courses is largely a result of the wave of fine dining that came out of Spain, where chefs started serving many tapas in succession. And when the Spanish and French influences mixed, voilà, you have where we are today.
However that's not to say there's nothing similar in other cultures. Kaiseki is of course similar (however also differs in many ways) to Western fine dining. Dim Sum is quite similar to tapas, yet different. Sushi is also similar to tapas in many ways.
Anyhow, while there are similarities between lots of cultures' dining styles, the origin of Western fine dining is without a doubt French fine dining + Spanish tapas.
In a less serious sense-- prime time on The Food Network is basically non stop competitive cooking shows--a genre invented in Japan, afaik. That is going to have to have an influence on up and coming chefs. It's certainly had an influence on how ordinary people perceive chefs.
From the article: "the predominant narrative for the genealogy of contemporary international fine dining is that its paternity is exclusively French."
Can't deny that's the dominant narrative and for the scope of the article, totally appropriate, but leaves out the answer to "why France?"
In the 1600s, Marie de' Medici shows up and, (allegedly) appalled by the local cuisine, sends for her Italian cook. Since her son was Louis XIII, that set the standard. Which makes it mystifying that Italian haute cuisine has been pretty much absent on the stage. It's not like you can't get a great meal there!
Haute Cusine is more than good food. It tends to be avante guard cooking with certain service standards. There tends to be a certain evolution and style to it. Marco Pierre White made some incredible food that was highly influential to Western haute cuisine but anyone serving food that way today would be considered passé even though it's simply astonishingly good, creative food.
Italy is steeped in a good tradition that is its own thing. Haute cusine exists there. Look no further than Osteria Francescana. That caused an outrage in the Italian press when opened but is now universally agreed upon that its one of the worlds best restaurants with progressive Italian cooking. A revolution of a restaurant to a place resistant to change from tradition.
Although I love fancy restaurants I prefer the warm, family style approach to food you see throughout Italy.
Which is why Spain is my favorite food place. A great acceptance of super experimental food with a love for the traditional regional cuisine. It's such an open minded but authentic and true to itself good culture.
It has been a long time since I have read the word authentic and not thought it was marketing speak. Thanks. It was a good word, now corrupted. I hope people realize the word is a signal that the thing being describe is inauthentic and stops being used in menus at least.
did Osteria Francescana actually cause genuine outrage?
There have been avantgarde cooks in Italy for decades, e.g. the "cyber egg" from Scabin dates to the '90s, and the "raviolo aperto" or "fish dripping" from Marchesi are from the '80s I think.
As an italian, the only time I remember real outrage about cooking, is when a tv-famous chef mentioned he puts garlic in the amatriciana, but I've been out of the country for a while.
EDIT: I correct myself, seems the "fish dripping" is from 2005.
I'm not Italian and have limited knowledge of the true traditions and broad relationship with food. The Netflix show "Chefs Table" featured this restaurant and spent some time exploring the local suspicion when the restaurant transformed.
>In the 1600s, Marie de' Medici shows up and, (allegedly) appalled by the local cuisine, sends for her Italian cook. Since her son was Louis XIII, that set the standard. Which makes it mystifying that Italian haute cuisine has been pretty much absent on the stage. It's not like you can't get a great meal there!
As noted in a parallel thread, searches of other related terms suggest otherwise.
If you've got specific evidence of a strong tradition of eating out at fine-service restaurants, I'd be interested. "Coulda been different" doesn't carry a whole lot of weight. Coulda not been different as well.
Maybe it's just that the phrase took off in the 80s rather than the practice itself. Nixons visit to China and the whole Peking food experience points to even Maoists appreciated what we call fine dining.
I followed up (though didn't post here) some additional searches. "Restaurant" itself is reassuringly stable over time, though "Michelin star" and "restaurant review" also show a 1970 - 1980 launch.
Investigations of this sort are somewhat fraught as language and tastes (both fashion and gastronomical) change. But this rather matches my own general awareness.
I would have put it just a bit earlier for the US. But not by much. Craig Claiborne became food editor for The New York Times in 1957. Julia Child's The French Chef in 1963. Of course, that's just the beginning and you leave behind a few urban locales with a food/restaurant tradition of some sort and it took a lot f time to diffuse elsewhere.
Ngrams aren't entirely reliable, but if you manage to corral a concept sufficiently, they can often turn up the timing of a phenomenon entering into general consciousness. Occasionally the specific point of origin.
I've run this on a number of concepts -- "democracy", "rugged individualism", various brand-name liquors, a whole slew of more recent political trends and concepts ("school prayer", "right to life" "anti-abortion", "creationism", "gun rights", etc. -- most are quite surprisingly recent), and more.
The most interesting finds to me are concepts which are generally treated as essentially eternal which are not. There are also concepts which I'd have thought more recent, which turn out to be long-lived. In general, though, there's a sharp inflection point where these concepts emerge or break out.
I spent quite a few years growing up in Japan back several decades ago, and my experience is that Japan is about efficiency. Most common foods were served in a bowl, not in smaller, highly decorate plates, and more of them. Food was always served prepared, meaning one did not need a knife or fork. One had to learn to use chopsticks, and for rice as well.
There were establishments that look close to the pictures if one searches the usual search engines, but I observed most food was eaten in the home, or packed in lunch boxes.
> Most common foods were served in a bowl, not in smaller, highly decorate plates
Kaiseki ryori is not 'common food' (a good kaiseki meal in a major city is easily 30-50,000 JPY or more) so what the article is writing about and what the average Japanese meal is are two very different things.
定食 is usually served in five or six small dishes, and that’s definitely everyday food in Japan. The tableware is not often special, though.
This article is backward to me. I’ve lived in New York and Japan long enough to know that the best food in NYC is average in Japan. NYC is stuck on a weird old-fashioned idea that French cuisine is the pinnacle of dining out. I’ll take any 4+ Tabelog rated kaiseki restaurant in Kyoto over Le Bernardin or any other Michelin-rated celebrity chef vanity room every single time.
> This article is backward to me. I’ve lived in New York and Japan long enough to know that the best food in NYC is average in Japan.
Not sure what you mean (as a former Tokyo, Paris and New York denizen myself). If you mean midrange and daily meals are better in Tokyo I'd tend to agree, though lukewarmly. Fast food? No way, a greasy katsu is as bad as a crummy slice of pizza,
But for the high end experiences described in this article (typically €1200/$1500/¥20,000 per person -- though Manresa is cheaper!) I'd say country has little to do with it. Though I find those experiences excessively fussy. If I'm going to spend five hours on a meal I'd rather the food and environment fade into the background so I can enjoy the company.
I much prefer Japanese fast food as it's significantly more delicious and healthier. Go into any convenience store and you can get a tasty and healthy onigiri for $1, or a little bento box style meal for maybe $3-4. Of course there's also ramen/udon/soba/yakisoba, curry, okonomiyaki, etc, and all can be had for $3-10 (no tip). Also Tokyo is more of a true 24/7 city, whereas in NYC your options after 11pm are generally limited to cheap pizza, hot dogs, and halal (unless of course you hit up some Japanese restaurants on St. Marks or go to Korea Town).
The thing NYC has going for it is variety. But overall, I still prefer Japanese food.
>I’ve lived in New York and Japan long enough to know that the best food in NYC is average in Japan.
It seems odd to deem the entire culinary culture of an international metropolis as being worth less than the mediocre fare of a country that puts corn and mayonnaise on pizza.
I'm not saying the best food in Japan isn't the best food in the world, but Japan's average is in no way better than the best in NYC. That's just silly.
As someone who's also lived in NYC and been to Japan extensively, Japan's fast food and mid-level cuisine is a hell of a lot tastier and healthier than America's. Wrote a bit about Japanese fast food in another comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=15209105
That's a pretty bold and inaccurate brush you painted on Japanese cuisine. Yes western cuisine in Japan isn't that great, but who's eating western food in Japan? Funny you mention mayonnaise also because white Americans are stereotyped with eating mayonnaise sandwiches.
I'd agree with you comparing junk food to junk food, but the claim being contested here is that Japan's average is better than the best available food in New York, which is just an insult.
>Funny you mention mayonnaise also because white Americans are stereotyped with eating mayonnaise sandwiches.
I'm not even going to pretend that I didn't grow up eating fried spam sandwiches with mayonnaise and government cheese, on white bread no less. But that's neither here nor there.
If you read more favourably you can interpret OP as saying that the 'average' haute cuisine restaurant in Japan is better than the best in NYC. Which to me seems believable - at least the Michelin guide seems to somewhat agree. But I'm aware that I'm running into a no true scotsman fallacy there. Personally I don't have enough experience to say anything about haute cuisine, but I can say with certainty that at the low to mid end, Japan is in a completely different ballgame from the US.
In the US I essentially have a severe discoverability problem - there is great food, but you have to really hunt for it and do research to find it - sites like yelp are no help to me at all, a 5 star rating in the US translates to about a 2 star in Japan on tabelog, i.e. there's not enough resolution. Btw. in Europe the problem is usually the same, so that's not purely an American problem, more like Japan being an exception. There you can condidently walk into any place and get great food with about 70% success rate, and the other 30% is usually still good enough to not bother or even endanger you. A 3 star rating is standard, everything above promises greatness. Also, the accuracy with which Japanese can replicate (and often improve ok) Western food is surprising.
The mid-tier is far more consistent in Japan. The tradeoff is it mainly only includes Japanese food. Which is vast and amazing. But in my experience I'd say a "typical" Japanese restaurant is of higher quality than a "typical" Western restaurant. The tradeoff is that you have more variety and acceptance (and embrace) in the West.
Tokyo is better if you have 2 weeks. NYC is better if you have a year. At least today.
I don't think mid-tier only includes Japanese. Since at least the 80s it has become common for Japanese to train as chefs, pastry makers, bakers and cheese makers in Europe and NYC. They usually return and open up their own small restaurants in Japan. Tokyo is full of micro restaurants with 12-30 seats that have been started this way and their quality is very often top notch, so much that it is now often cheaper and better to eat certain dishes in Japab rather their original place. For certain things Tokyo has developed enough that Japanese can now learn it there just as well - Napoli Pizza or French pastry are examples. This goes all the way back to Tempura, a Portuguese import.
What is missing is the more exotic stuff. Latin American, Middle Eastern and African cuisines are underrepresented compared to Western megacities.
I had thought you were saying that American food is better than Japanese food, my mistake. Yea as much as I love Japanese food, I wouldn't agree with the statement that NYC's best is superior to Japan's average.
I'm not quite sure what the OP meant, but I think that your rephrasing is not necessarily the same statement. It seems to me that "is average in Japan" is indicating that the eater would not consider it special. It doesn't imply that "average" food in Japan would be considered special either.
From my perspective, I think Japanese people would be impressed by the very, very top restaurants in NY. After all, Masaharu Morimoto (Iron Chef Japan -- as people were talking about Iron Chef...) was head chef at Nobu in Manhattan.
Having said that, restaurants in Japan (especially izakayas) have shockingly good food -- even (especially?) out in the countryside. It's pretty hard for me to think of a (non Michelin star) restaurant in a major North American city that has food as good as the local izakaya in my town (admittedly it is famous in the area). It would cost me a month's salary to eat the same quality of food in a fancy restaurant in the west. But there are factory workers who eat (and mostly drink...) there every day, without going broke.
I think that's probably true of a lot countries, though. I mean, is there a paella restaurant in Valencia that will not blow your mind? Or if you walk into any hole in the wall in Marseille, of course you are expecting one of the best seafood experiences of your life. Maltashen and sauerkraut in any random inn in Bavaria; Fish and chips in an authentic "chippy" on the coast of the UK. And let's face it: coal fired (don't hate me, gas lovers!) pizza shop in Manhattan.
I'll be honest, I don't think this is much to do with Japan. I think its more to do with the move towards glizty chain restaurants with mediocre food - dumbed down both for the audience and the preparers. To open a viable restaurant these days you need $2 million in capital and the risks are enormous. Especially in big centres like NY, London, etc, the costs of running a restaurant are so huge that you can't afford to run just a ridiculously good local pub, filled with local cuisine.
Why are there so many great izakayas and restaurants in Tokyo and (especially) Osaka, then? Because they are 3-4 generations old and the children of the owners are expected to (and groomed to) take over the shop. The shop is the entire life of a family for multiple generations -- no franchises, no sunny holidays in Okinawa, no merchandising, no fancy-pants buildings. Just making amazing yakitori (or whatever) every single day from the time you are 18 until you die. You are a fixture in your community and the people who live and work in that community love you. They visit you for dinner, for special occasions, or even just to chat. If the shop closes down, people practically have a funeral for it.
I think modern day western culture frowns on this kind of life. While I can understand that perspective, it's one the things I like about living in rural Japan. Like I said, though, I don't think it's just Japan. It exists everywhere in every culture -- it's just more obvious in some places than others.
OP here. It’s funny that you mentioned Morimoto. I’ve been to two of his restaurants in NYC—Morimoto and the ramen one. They were both just OK in terms of food by Japanese standards, and the service was atrocious by Japanese standards. Our waiter at Morimoto complained to us that he had to leave so we should close out our bill. If something like this happened in any restaurant in Japan, it would be eye-popping, jaw-dropping embarrassing. It kind of proves my point that what New Yorkers fawn over as their best restaurants are, by Japanese standards, maybe a begrudging C+.
I’ve eaten in so many “Emperor has no clothes” michelin-starred restaurants at this point that I would pass for something truly brilliant but not hyped at all. For example, udon at Kendon in Fushimi Inari, or tanmen at New Tamaya in Nagoya, hanbagu from Tsumugi Kitchen in Nagoya, gyuniku from Kuroushi in Handa, or even Italian from Pepe Rosso in Sancha, Tokyo. These places will melt your brain and I doubt any of them rates above 4 on Tabelog.
In Japan, you have to go out of your way to eat bad food and get bad service. In New York, it’s an effort to find both good food and passing service, even in the Michelin ranks.
I’ll throw a bone to NYC: Marc Forgione has a damn good restaurant in Tribeca, and Sole di Capri (also Tribeca) is amazing and under the radar.
It's almost certainly personal taste, but I found kaiseki to be rather unappetizing when I visited. The presentation was absolutely wonderful, most of the food didn't align with my palette.
It turns out some simple, wholesome curry really does the trick.
>It turns out some simple, wholesome curry really does the trick.
Japanese or Indian curry? :) I was reading about Japanese cuisine recently, and saw that they have some dishes they call curry. But IIRC it was somewhat different from Indian "curries" [1], which are again very different from what passes for "curry" in the West (generally, though I'm sure there are places that do not use that term generically like that).
[1] There is no such thing as an Indian "curry", though many Westerners seem to think so (being misinformed by whoever, from West or East). It is an umbrella term that means a variety of dishes that are usually somewhat wet or with gravy, that is the only common point. Other than that, a curry can contain anything, be hot or not, veg or non-veg, etc.
That article says something a bit different from what I said above, i.e. that "Curry was adopted and anglicised from the Tamil word kari meaning "sauce", which is usually understood to mean vegetables and/or meat cooked with spices with or without a gravy."
So the article emphasizes the spices, rather than the gravy, as I did. Could be. But the biggest thing to understand about India is that a lot of words / terms (not just in the area of food) are used quite loosely and with sometimes widely different meanings.
And then you get into differing meanings of 'gravy.' When I was on the Subcontinent, it meant what we in America would call a sauce; we use 'gravy' to mean a particular kind of sauce made from meat drippings.
Very weird at first for a Westerner to see vegetarian food described as having a gravy!
Ha ha, good one. And it emphasizes the point in my last paragraph, about the meaning of words. Yes, though curries are basically dishes in some sort of sauce, the word gravy is used here for that instead of sauce. It's probably only in a few high-end restaurants that they will call it a dish in a sauce (of some kind), on the menu, and when explaining it to customers. But another difference between Western sauces and gravy in India (the kind I said, used in curries), is that (as I understand it - not familiar with the details of Western cooking) the Western sauce is poured on the dish, or used from a saucer on the side, but in curries, the dish is cooked in the gravy - so the gravy is an integral part of the dish, not an add-on or pour-on.
As someone who likes good French food a lot, I'd agree with the other comment that holding classic French cuisine as the ultimate dining experience feels a bit old fashioned. If someone handed me a wad of money in NYC and told me to go out and have a good meal, I might pick a more classically French restaurant but I'd probably be more likely to pick some more modern style of "farm to table" or whatever.
When I have French eating out, it's more likely to be a bistro-style restaurant. (Of course, that's partly because I rarely have really high-end meals in restaurants.
My original comment wasn’t very well written but spawned a lot of responses. I meant old fashioned in the Julia Child, two-sticks-of-butter-to-taste sense of French cuisine. Of course, real French food is as varied and worthy as any other food!
That's true--although I'd argue that there's still more of a set of specific rules, recipes, and techniques associated with most French cooking than with modern high-end cooking overall. In fact, I've heard it argued that one of the reasons that it's hard to replicate the best of French food outside of France is that such a specific supply chain exists for that particular cuisine.
We're probably splitting hairs at this point though. Once you go beyond classic French and bistro food (which do tend to have a fairly specific repertoire), the lines between where French ends and modern European or American begins gets pretty blurry.
I'd agree it's not weird, but it definitely is old fashioned. The French invented haute cuisine (which is French for 'high cuisine') in the 17th century. In the west (and many places in the east) French food is considered fancy. I believe that's changing now, with the proliferation of well known chefs that come from all over the world. But, it's hard to shake tradition.
Compared to other foods, I've found it's bland and expensive. Personally, if it's not hot, spicy, or savory, I probably don't care much for it. I find the same opionion in my 20-30 year old peers in NYC.
I remember reading an article on how the Italian fascist period under Mussolini invented a lot of minimalist and modern dining traditions, however try as I might I can't find it again.
There was Italian Futurist cooking, outlined by Marinetti and Fillia. It was very modernist in the 20th-century sense. But, considering Futurism's uneasy relationship with Mussolini, I don't know how much influence it had on the Mussolini era. I imagine he would've had a weird "traditional Italian" and Roman Empire centric idea of cooking, but that's just me hypothesizing.
An audience can pretty easily grasp an account of the right grower/forager/fisher supply chains that produce really nice ingredients, and they're fun to write and read about too. And being able to discuss a dish as a sum of constituent parts (how many "nice" menus these days describe dishes as just a list of ingredients, one of which are unexpected?) makes the task even clearer. The built in diversity and, sometimes, narrative of a tasting menu also helps.
Compare this to the difficulty of explaining why a single curry or mole tastes good, where it's hard not to fall back on hand-waving terms like "complex", or "haunting" or something. These dishes are, at least to me, far harder to pick apart and analyze in a convincing way, and that sort of analysis seems necessary to justify "fine dining", from what I can tell. Last I checked this was reflected in the allocation of Michelin stars, for which there are close to zero Indian, African, or Mexican (to name a few huge cuisines) last I checked, (though I think Mexico may have made some headway recently.)