soupnancy

Ok, enough with my seasonal rant about eating local and fresh, enjoying the seasons in time, blablaba..

The reality is it is still winter, everyone is fed up, what to do? No choice but to suck it up, get out when the sun is shining, cook up a storm at home with imports or whatever will make you happy in the moment. Chez Nino helps.. The snow crab and nordic shrimp have begun; Another key address at Marché Jean Talon is Ferme René Lussier for great local tomatoes! 

But! Of course, I have to say something about eating well off season too, and that comes down to putting up. No one talks about it past Sept/October, but this is the time to convince any gourmand that it’s a good tool to have in your box, FTR utterly essential in my world for year round happiness. Now is the time to dream ahead and start planning for next year.

Eating seasonal food out of season is very cool too.  Local, fresh, put up at its peak. It’s our way at La Table des Jardins Sauvages, and we've been trying to convince people of this for years with our line of local & wild vegetables and mushrooms that are frozen sous-vide. It's beginning to catch on in winter, one customer at a time, from the market clientele to chefs.

At the restaurant, we have our roots stored for the winter, greens blanched and vaccum packed or dried, mushrooms, pickles, frozen berries, coulis, tomatoes, peas, corn, game, you name it ..  We have a fully stocked pantry and ten freezers. It’s a parallel approach - taking full advantage of the season, gorging on fresh while preserving the bounty for later.. It becomes normal to eat ramps, fiddleheads, corn and sea spinach in winter as if the seasons don't matter, but it means we have local and wild all year, our trademark. Like in the old days, it just makes sense, and its delicious..  So basically, we’re following the seasons, except for in winter when you eat the other seasons from the gardemanger.

Trust me, you will be less grouchy in winter when you have a freezer full of goodies and canned goods in the pantry.. The thing is, with a whack of preserves, no matter how brutal the weather, you don’t need much to be content, maybe a touch of green crunch and tomatoes from local greenhouses or a bunch of romaine from the store ..  Not to mention that if  there is a major catastrophe, you’re covered for a while (I’m waiting for the next ice storm, we will be wining and dining, weehah!).

So keep that in mind before the growing season starts! Think like a cook, MEP (prep) for the year.. Enjoy the moment first, but don’t forget that at the same time, you could also be preparing for next winter without too much effort. Clean or cook a bigger batch when making dinner, pop a few containers into the freezer. Take a few hours a week, or a day a month in summer/fall, make a party of it, and put up! A foodie stay-cation?! Canning is a good idea for tomato sauce and pickles, but most things are fine, even best just frozen, often blanched/cooked first as with vegetables. Of course, a sous-vide machine to vacuum pack is ideal but I find that most things for the home are fine in Tupperware style containers.  I do our soups and sauces that way and they keep well for months so you shouldn’t be afraid to freeze if you don’t have a sousvide machine.. A dehydrator is great for an array of things, from herbs to fruit to onions and mushrooms.  

These are my lifesavers, some ideas to get you psyched and ready..

Quebec Garlic/Ramps/Scapes:  With the bulb or root, mince and pasteurize by cooking slowly in oil (no colour). Freeze in small containers or sousvide. Pull one out every month for the fridge and every day cooking. Leaves can be transformed into raw pesto (frozen) as with scapes and used the same way. A knife tip/scant teaspoon goes into my salad daily. (Our ramps our picked sustainably on our own property for home use only).

Stinging nettle: Great dried (for tisane, soups, to grind as an herb/seasoning/food additive) or blanched and frozen for soup.. Or made into soup right away..

Most salad greens are best eaten fresh in season and that’s it. Sturdier ones like spinach/lamb’s quarters can be blanched and frozen. Which means you can’t make salad with them afterwards, but they make a nice veg accompaniement or added to soup, pasta, omelets, smoothies etc..

Herbs: Dried or Pesto. I dry some except the most delicate, and make pure pestos, say with sea parsley, sea rocket, crinkleroot leaf (minced with oil, salt) and freeze in small containers to use in cooking. For the market/home, I make a finished pesto (sea spinach, sea parsley, garlic, cheese..) which is ready for pasta, pizza or whatever.

Salted Herbs: I love this old-fashioned recipe which consists of mirepoix (onion, celery, carrot) minced with a ton of chopped herbs and summer greens (a dozen plus) and salt.  I use this magic potion to boost stews and soups, for quick sauces and marinades. I use less salt than a traditional recipe so I freeze it, but it could keep in the fridge for months)..

Tomatoes  - Sauce is the easiest. Whole tomatoes are nice to have too. I can both in mason jars, but it’s easier to freeze, less trouble and you don’t need to worry about ph (acidity). If you jar, make sure you know what you’re doing, add some lemon and boil the jars for 10min+.

Wild and cultivated vegetables, buds, corn, fava beans, peas.. Clean, blanch a few minutes and freeze sousvide or in ziplocs. Some vegetables are best roasted (say squash) before freezing. I pickle some buds and fiddleheads, but keep most natural for later use. For some, it’s a one time seasonal soup and that’s it (served fresh at the restaurant, or packaged and frozen). Forget about putting up asparagus, say.

Mushrooms: I put up 30+ varieties in a myriad of ways, it depends on the mushroom (Dried/Frozen/Pickled/Candied..). Some are best dried (those with a soft texture or with aromas that only develop upon dehydration as with boletes); some firm varieties can be frozen as is but not many as they often develop a bitterness, on top of a mushy texture; many I have found can be frozen well after a first cooking. We have a frozen, local ‘Melange Forestier’ (with first cooking) that we introduced last year, just starting to take off as customers/chefs realize that it’s a good deal, local quality variety that you just can’t get here in winter and if you buy fresh, imported and cook them up (losing half in water), it ends up costing you twice as much. Forget about wild mushrooms in winter otherwise beyond the dried for soup/sauce/stuffings.

Stew/Braised meat:  In hunting season, I make big batches of stew from moose, duck, partridge etc and freeze for the winter. When we slaughter whole deer, I keep all the tender muscles for roasting, make sausage and braise the rest, making stock with the bones – all gets frozen for future use.  I highly reccomend meat sharing (a carcass from a local farm, butchered in pieces, shared among 2-4 families) if you don't have a good butcher like Prince Noir nearby.

Fish/Seafood is best fresh, but still when you come across whole fish freshly caught, filet it up and freeze (this is best sousvide or if not cooked within a couple of months). Nordic shrimp and scallops IQF if fresh.

Berries, fruit: I make jams for the shelf and coulis (both canned, as well as some less sweet for the freezer); I like to freeze most berries whole (and rhubarb diced) IQF to cook with them year round.

Pickles:  Ok, pickles remain a condiment, not a main course to drown the winter blues, but how nice to have on hand to punch up a salad or accompany a charcuterie plate with sparkle, color and crunch. Besides the classic JS fiddleheads and mushrooms, I pickle a shitload of things, have a few traditions like hot sauce and ratatouille that aren’t wild at all, but necessary in my pantry, like my natural green bean pickle and peppers.

There are so many more possibilities on all fronts, from the cooked to the pickled, or natural fermentation (more tricky), to wines and alcohols, extracts.. I steep herbs in alcohol (thé des bois, foin d’odeur, juniper berries, elderberry) too.

Certain precious things should be kept seasonal, because they are best that way. But who’s to judge. Almost anything you love can be put up in some form or another. I like to eat ramps and sea spinach year round (a relatively new luxury habit of mine being with François des bois), which in fact only makes me more excited when the season starts, so I can stock up..

I hope I have you revved up for the growing season, and eating well off season too.. Don't despair, the greens are around the corner!

Happy Spring!

PS and BTW, many of these preserves, we sell at our kiosque Marché Jean Talon if you don't feel like doing it yourself..

 

Hot and cold

Regular chefs vs. Pastry chefs

I’m a regular ‘hot kitchen’ or ‘savoury’ chef who has worked alongside several pastry chefs from different backgrounds: Italian, French, Quebecois, some with classic training, others who were more home-baker types, young and old, medaled and not. I’ve admired them all, but still, I can’t help but notice the inherent fundamental difference between a true hot kitchen chef and a true pastry chef. I’m not talking about cooks who show up to punch their cards but the ones that live and breathe their vocation. Amongst these cooks, you see two groups: two callings, two people, two beasts. Between them, there is a contrast in temperament, in talent, in likes and dislikes.

I have long been intrigued by the difference between these two types of people and their intricate dynamic, having lived it, studied it and marvelled at it for so long up close. This is what I can say for now about what makes the hot and the cold sit at opposite ends of the food production spectrum.

Pastry chefs need to measure. Cooks hate to.

Pastry chefs operate in MEP mode. Cooks more often than not are under the gun.

Pastry chefs don’t like to have to move at a fast pace, or improvise too much, they do anything to not be ‘in the juice’. Cooks need to fly, are always ‘in the juice’ and get off on it.

Pastry chefs find finicky, monotonous tasks satisfying and soothing. Cooks find them a boring bother.

Pastry chefs like early mornings. Cooks don’t.

Pastry chefs hate yelling. Cooks are used to it. (But you never really need to raise your voice in a pastry kitchen because the bulk of the work is done before hand, where as in the hot kitchen, it is all about à la minute.)

Pastry cooks are soft and fuzzy. Cooks are hard and gritty.

Pastry chefs are polite. Cooks are brutes.

Pastry chefs strive to be Zen. Cooks should, but they’re off the hook and they like it that way.

Pastry chefs show restraint. Cooks tend to excess.

Pastry cooks are always organized and meticulous. Cooks need to be, but it’s more of a stretch, hence they need more discipline.

Pastry chefs are more esthetical, they tend to think more about the look than the taste. So often, they are thinner. And their homes don’t look like cooks’ homes (designer decorated vs. student apartment).

Cooks taste. Pastry chefs don’t.

Cooks smell like veal stock, grease and garlic. Pastry chefs smell sweet.

Pastry chefs have more evenings off. Cooks are jealous of that.

Pastry chefs think they are superior beings. Cooks think they are superior beings.

Tied at the hip in a love-hate relationship, with a lot of mutual respect for each other deep down, they/we still live in separate worlds. We both know a little about the other, having learnt the basics about the adjacent school, and are vaguely interested in the other if only to taste each other’s offerings. We work side by side, share and joke around, occasionally party together, but often get on each other’s nerves. There’s a rivalry between cooks and bakers, just a notch lower than that between waiters and kitchen staff. In face of the other side, we stick together, but amongst ourselves, there are two camps, continually badgering the other, more for amusement’s sake than anything. We swap veal cheeks for donuts; we jump in to help each other out, but laugh at the other’s gaffes over staff meal.

Of course, a good pastry chef can be a good cook and vice versa, if the interest is there. But, in my experience, most often this isn’t the case, especially if a person is really good at one or the other. I find that the better the pastry chef, the least likely they are to be the chef type and vice versa. Understandably, the top guns aren’t usually interested in the other side and they don’t have the time if they’re busy climbing one ladder or the other. Those that are good at both are most valuable to a small kitchen, but we don’t hear about them often. In the upper echelons of the profession, in a high end kitchen or a big operation, Pastry and Hot are necessarily two very different fields.

However different, with modern trends blurring the lines between sweet and savoury, it seems that more than ever, the two should be working together, even outside the small restaurant scenario. The dessert, no longer just a finale, is morphing, multiplying and encroaching into savoury territory on tasting menus, salt and pepper and carrots and balsamic vinegar are showing up in desserts, while chocolate and gingerbread are now common in entrées. We’re more intertwined then ever, and it seems insensible to ignore the other. I suspect that the in-between type might flourish in the upcoming years.

Personally no longer part of a big brigade, I have no choice but to pay attention to and nurture my sweet side. As a savoury cook first, I sometimes find pastry to be a chore, especially if I’m swamped and feel like I could be doing ten other things while I painstakingly roll out butter dough. But at the same time, I think it is important to keep my fingers in the flour. It would go against every molecule in me to order them from the outside, and besides, it’s an endless source of challenge, not to mention humility. I think that a really good cook should be able to bake something, and I think that a person should struggle every once and a while. My pastry dabbling also means that I am not ultimately dependent on anyone, as dessert is an important part of the meal to most. On the other hand, I am more than happy to let a real pastry chef take over when it’s time, say for a wedding, a buffet centerpiece or when I need technical help in transforming a new idea into a plated dessert that doesn’t look like a kid made it . I now collaborate often with a queen (Isabelle Sauriol), who gives me the odd tip, and is big enough to serve my homemade desserts without scorn, making them look better then I ever could. Ironically, she is also one of the few real pastry chefs that can also cook, probably because she has an unbridled curiosity and passion for food. Patrice Demers, Montreal’s hottest young pastry chef (at Laloux, formerly of Les Chèvres) knows how to cook too. Funny enough, he fell into pastry first because the cooking class was full the year he tried to enroll. Maybe some things were meant to be after all.

Generally though, I do think we cooks and pastry people are two different personalities yet cut from the same cloth, like non-identical twins. We love each other but love to assert our individuality and we love to scrap. But we’re definitely two different animals. And like a good balance of girls and guys makes for a better kitchen dynamic, a good balance of hot and cold chef types can make a food team work magic. Here’s to them and to us, to salty and sweet, to hot and cold, to contrasts and extremes, to balance and harmony.. We need eachother and we can do so much together in the name of good taste and good fun.. Cheers.

 

At the Mercy of Nature

Wild mushrooms drive the point home

September 17, 2007

 

shaggy mane

lepiote lisse

lepiote élevée

larch boletus

 

In this era of climate change, more of us are starting to wake up to the notion that we are at the mercy of nature. This is something that farmers, winemakers and foragers have always intimately known, and so the best have learnt to respect nature and work with it the best they can. With every season, they find new optimism and pick up a few new tricks, never quite knowing exactly what’s in store. I admire them.

These days, my life as a chef with a set of principles relies increasingly on the bounty in our backyard. With the growing season peaking, this has not been a problem for some time. Now however, the thermometer is dropping and we have a menu event featuring 20 odd kinds of wild mushrooms just weeks away, and so my anxiety with regards to what nature will provide in the last breaths of summer is climbing.

Mushrooms are more unpredictable than anything. I reckon therein lies the spell they hold on foragers and mushroom lovers alike. They are so beautiful, delicious and impossibly difficult to get to know well, always playing hard to get. And no matter how many books you read, or how much time you spend in the forest, you are always one careless step away from being a goner.

That is, if you can find them. This has been a dreadful year for most wild mushroom varieties in and around Montreal . Further north in the Laurentians and in the Mauricie, they seem to have had marginally better luck. Pickers in the Charelevoix and the Gaspesie on the other hand, can’t keep up.

I have plenty of chanterelles and pine mushrooms, a good amount of lobster mushrooms, and assorted boletus. But I’m still waiting for substantial quantities of hedgehog, porcini, puffball and fairy ring.. The oysters, the blue-foots, among others have yet to come into season.. Will they? Will we find them? If anyone can locate them, my François can, but he can’t be everywhere at once and the clock is ticking.. He seems confident that nature will cooperate, but I can’t help but wonder, having witnessed by now how magic mushrooms can be indeed.

 

I hear people ‘in the know’ speculate about it having been too hot, not humid enough, the winter too harsh, but that all we need is one good rain and then some nice weather, blah, blah, blah.. It seems to me that no one really knows much. Seasoned pickers tell stories about their hits and conquests in big, but if you listen long enough, the tales of disappointment and puzzling misses inevitably follow. How year after year, they had a fruitful fairy ring or porcini patch in a particular spot that they carefully checked, and then poof, no more. How the common varieties are coming out in the wrong order, novel unfamiliar species being spotted here and there, reports of a certain beloved mushroom now on the skull and crossbones list.. Just look at the books: they all say something different about a particular mushroom, if you can even identify anything at all amidst the multiple styles of classification, the complex jargon and poor photography. Against my bookish ways, I’ve found the surest backbone in anecdotal knowledge, knowing that generations of the same family have picked and eaten a certain variety growing in a certain place for years without malaise. And when it comes to my customers, I play it safe. But still, the wild mushroom remains elusive.

 

So to me, the wild mushroom seems to be the perfect metaphor for the mysterious ways of nature as we live them. It’s a food we can hardly understand, that we can barely cultivate. We’re seduced by it, but scared of it. It’s one of the last examples of nature exercising its power over us. We’ve dabbled just about everywhere we could in our natural landscape, but just when we think we understand something, we try and exert control, at which point nature eventually surprises us. For example, super bugs and antibiotic resistant bacteria, global warming and climate change, industrial food and obesity, to name a few..

Being in mushroom desperation mode, I am in my own personal face-off with Mother Nature and I must bow down and acknowledge the fact that I can’t control the outcome too much. Being so involved with planet earth and the unknown makes me feel like I’m living life in its essence, but it’s exhausting for a worry-wart like me. It would be so much easier to tone down my menu and just order up what I need from miles away.  All I can do is be organized so that I’m ready for anything, and I need to do what I can to liberate François, the real forager, so that he can go out and gather whatever Nature has decided to give us. I need to change my menu according to the finds. But mainly in the mean time, I need to have faith.

There is still a thread of the city girl in me that wants what I want now, nice and conveniently clean and ready to use, but it's wearing thin. Going on eight years in the country now, cooking with the seasons and frequenting grounded types, I've changed into someone who values everything but, and chooses to be at the mercy of nature; it's almost a religion.  My tie to nature, my new reverence for it, and associated requirement for faith all remind me of exactly that. I think this is the closest to feeling ‘God’ that an agnostic can muster. Not unlike what I sensed studying the upper echelons of calculus and biochemistry. To be wowed by a beauty you have the slightest grasp on, to sense a governing omnipresence that you deem in your best interest to worship, to feel like a small part of something much larger and more magnificent, to feel the need to have faith, and to feel better for it.

Even if it’s all about ‘fancy’ food here, living this dance with nature feels important and necessary as a human bean in the grand scheme of things. I also can’t help but feel closer to our ancestors who devoted most of their waking hours to securing their food at the mercy of nature.  And I feel like I've shed a childish or superficial layer or two. 

I lose that connected feeling when in the city too long. I love the city - the people, the stimuli, the freedom, but it can also be decadent and unhealthy. Besides having too many places to go and too many indulgences at my fingertips, it’s more about how easy it is to lapse into a detached state, where I feel grateful and awed less often, more impatient and preoccupied with things that don’t really matter, like traffic. I know it’s time to get back to the country when I forget to stop and smell the flowers, when it makes equal sense to eat a mango as it does an apple in September, or to use a small tree’s worth of firewood without seeing that empty space.. Or when I’m too far to know if Nature is giving me a bounty of mushrooms to cook up..

 

puffballs!

cèpes (porcini)

François et les chanterelles en tubes

lactaires delicieux

pieds de mouton (hedge hog)

armillaire (pine mushroom)

Stéphanie et les lobsters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are interested in our wild mushroom dinner event at La Table des Jardins Sauvages starting October 18th, please visit www.jardinssauvages.com, or view the menu here  http://soupnancy.squarespace.com/recipes-/ and call 450-588-5125.

Enclosure

What Leonard taught me about food

September 3, 2007

Leonard Cohen taught me this about cooking:  Do not judge.  Just do your thing.  Try and please the person on the receiving end, the consumer of your art, whoever he or she is without any expectations of appreciation.

I think I do this naturally most of the time, but I needed to be reminded that this is the way it should be all the time.  It struck me as I was driving home listening to Leonard after a night of cooking for a bunch of yahoos, feeling exhausted and less than satisfied. As I cruised down the empty country roads, I got to rehashing the night and analysing the food, the customers, my performance and feelings. I pondered the importance of the target audience. Is there such a thing as cooking over people’s heads? And should I really care who I’m cooking for - if they’re doctors, farmers, hairdressers, foodies or among the food challenged? Don’t I just love to cook? Don’t I just love to make people happy? Which is most essential? And when it comes to experts, do they really know better anyway?

As I hummed along to ‘Everybody knows..’ and let all these ideas half consciously swirl around in my head, a certain clarity soon emerged about why I cook, and about the relationship between artist and audience, between host and guest in general. As usual, a few minutes with Leonard made me feel much better.

In the restaurant business, it is commonly accepted that most of the time, we are really cooking for a small segment of the population with our flourishes and fancy ingredients. Let’s say that 5 or 10% of your customers really know food and can tell the difference between Quebec lamb and New Zealand lamb, between consommé and a broth. Even fewer can understand the inspiration, the time involved or detect any complicated technique you pulled out of your hat..

Most chefs worth their salt naturally aim high anyway, wanting to select top notch ingredients and try new things regardless.. Like true artists, they worship beauty, are forever doing their best to push personal limits, and like true nurturers, they want to please no matter what. And it usually pays off if they’re good. Others cut corners and cook to the lowest common denominator, figuring it is a waste to spend resources cooking over the guests’ heads.

Cooks cuss clueless customers all the time. I don’t like to, and I feel like I’ve grown out of that, maybe thanks to the fact that I’ve largely been graced with good customers. But when cooking for a gang of country bumpkins on a bender like tonight, I too get the feeling I may be wasting my time and energy getting too elaborate with primo ingredients and all that extra TLC and professionalism. I couldn’t help but think that I could have served them slop and still gotten all those sloppy kisses as departing thank you’s.

Then again, my relationship with Leonard Cohen’s music made me realize that it is still possible to be touched profoundly by something without understanding every nuance. If I can listen and feel so much in his music despite my musical handicap, then there’s a good chance that some of the culinary inept crowd can thoroughly appreciate a gourmet meal without verbalizing it just so. (Not that I think I’m a Chef like Leonard is a poet by any means btw..)

They might not appreciate it exactly like someone in the business, or like a foodie might, understanding all the little details, but differently - based more on an overall impression, a more sensory or emotive response. ‘Is it yummy or not, did it move me or not?’ When I think of it, there can even be more magic that way.

I always loved music intensely because it elicited such an unexplainable, joyous response in me, precisely because I didn’t understand much about it and never had any musical talent. It was elusive and magical, beyond my reach, and thus so powerful. But a calibre musician would probably think that I could not fully appreciate his or her music, as an experienced chef might feel dismayed by an ignorant guest who doesn’t understand his or her food. I certainly don’t catch every little clever riff or innovation in a tune, but I couldn’t feel more pleasure or enjoy live music more than I do. Likewise, I know plenty of people (I can think of ex-boyfriends here) who love to eat but couldn’t care less if they taste the provenance of the olives or the perfect balance of flavours; they just know that it tastes great, and couldn’t be happier with their food.

Extra knowledge can heighten the experience no doubt, adding layers of appreciation, but it can also take away from the emotional response in the intellectual processing of it, which is why a connoisseur can be so much fussier and more difficult than a neophyte.

Whether it’s music or soufflé on the menu, I think that it all comes down to genuine interest and openness on the part of the recipient, and then skill and generosity on the part of the artist/giver for a successful communion. If you are attentive, eager and grateful of the offering as a taker, you are validating the product, which matters most to the giver. If he/she delivers and you like it, pleasure ensues. But you can like it intensely in a singular way, or the intensity can come from many levels of stimulation, all adding up to something equivalent. No matter how much you know, it’s all about how much you can have fun.

That’s really what it’s all about right. We all know that the best customers are the ones who are having fun no matter how damn smart or cultivated they are. But because fun is so different for everybody, obviously, we should refrain from underestimating the customer, and just be happy when they’re happy, and bothered if they’re not. Even if some ungrateful or uneducated eater thinks you just pulled the dish out of a drawer, they are still entitled to enjoy it however they like. They can ask for it well done or eat it with Baby Duck, while the couple at the next table is doing wine pairing with the finest from their cellar.

My own experience with snooty waiters dismissing me because I look young or perhaps poor, at least not like any kind of a connoisseur, just reinforces the notion of how crucial it is to be non-judgmental for me. And I can be a worthy Leonard Cohen fan too, like Joe Shmoe can be a worthy Ducasse fan. I will strive to do my best as a cook no matter who is at my table, as long as I hear laughter and mmm’s and ahh’s. Anything more is just bonus.

Critics and The Star System

The Challenge of Quantifying Quality

by Nancy Hinton, April 16, 2007

 

When scoring wines, rating restaurants, or even ranking lovers, the question is whether a standard barometer for sensory pleasure makes sense, and if so, how do we fairly accomplish this? With a number, a letter, or words, and according to what rules? How effective is this anyway? And do we need it?

I got thinking about all this for a number of converging reasons, from the whole Jeffrey Chodorow affair last month (when a restaurateur with a zero star review took out a rebuttal ad in the NY Times) to the Parker effect in the wine world around me, as well as the ongoing arguments among friends over newspaper restaurant ratings.

Words or numbers?

Thanks to Wine Spectator and the Parker Phenomenon, number scores for wine are now common. This is a very American construct by the way, in opposition to the entrenched European style long on romanticism and short on numbers.

In Montreal, we see this difference in approach in our city’s restaurant reviews, with La Presse, which uses a descriptive, critical blurb and no grade, whereas in the Gazette, like in New York Times, we see a bold star rating followed by a supporting critique; the emphasis on measuring performance just above delivering qualitative information.

The New York Times restaurant review, the mother of all ratings of this kind in NA in terms of clout, is considered by many as the ultimate reference in NYC and regularly causes much uproar. The French have the Michelin guide, which is a historic three star system, but a different creature altogether, only judging the cream of the crop. A mere star is an honour, with 70 or so two-stars and only twenty six three-star restaurants.. On this side of the Atlantic , one star would be a lacklustre grade. Here, we’re more generous with our stars, but then take them away to determine the score. The guides with authority in Quebec besides local newspapers, are the CAA, the Voir, the Guide Debeur, all with slightly different criteria and scales of their own. The Zagat consumer based guide, hasn’t made significant inroads here, mostly because it’s in English only.

No matter the format of the rating system, in our evaluation of the arts, selecting a number or a making a global statement is an especially difficult, controversial process. Think about it, even words don’t mean the same thing to everyone. Unlike in math or a bicycle race, there aren’t many absolutes in the subjective world of taste and a good time out.

Grey matter

Being a diplomatic, ‘nothing is black and white’ kind of girl, absolute scores like restaurant stars have always made me uneasy. Nevertheless, I do secretly kind of like them. I consume year-end reviews and top-ten lists with glee, I eagerly flip to the dining review in the Saturday paper, all the while feeling a little trashy deep down.

Why do I like the stars, even though I don’t really believe in them? I am drawn to stars and ratings probably because like most of my generation, I grew up on them. Mine was an era of percentage scores, contests with definite winners and losers, and gold stars that I sought to get stamped on my work. I am indeed competitive by nature. But more importantly, I believe in honest opinions, I honour truth and value quality. I accept that some are better than others at a given task, and I like to see those that manage to rise above mediocrity get pats on the pack. I think laziness and poor work should be nailed as such. There is also that natural inclination of mine towards order and classification that surely has roots in my scientific background. Although life has taught me otherwise, the desire to quantify reality is deeply ingrained in me. And like most people, although I know I should hold back from being judgemental, I can’t help it.

Apples and oranges

The thing is, as Nathalie Maclean states in ‘White, red, and read all over’ (a great breezy wine book), “An emotional response can’t be quantified mathematically”. She includes an amusing Adam Gopnik quote in the New Yorker about a man and his harem that makes the point..

‘A man who makes love to fifty some women and then publishes a list in which each one gets a numerical grade, would not be called a lady’s man; he would be called a cad..’

Scaling restaurants is problematic because like women, wines and restaurants are unique; there are personality quirks, and a non-tangible, fleeting, and sometimes magical element to the relationship or experience. Just like you can’t compare apples and oranges, you can’t accurately compare a no-fuss bistro serving tried and true classics with a formal, innovative place; they’re just different.. How do you compare a new Asian restaurant that has beautiful food with chintzy décor and a poor wine list with an ‘haut de gamme’ French restaurant with history, ultra professional service, Riedel glasses and acceptable, by the book food? How do you justly gage a tapas joint or a wine bar against a BYOB? You can compare them on price point or on service, on décor or on authenticity, but overall, it is impossible to do so without nuance; the stars cannot stand alone. Even a few qualifying paragraphs hardly suffice. Restaurant critics try to deal with this dilemma by judging a restaurant according to its raison d’être, what it is trying to be. Talk about obscure guidelines, regardless of how noble the idea is. Add to that the fact the restaurant product, and to a lesser extent any wine, is in flux, constantly evolving, any one experience a singular, unique snapshot in a reel of thousands.

So given all this, how much value should these ratings be given, and who do you trust? The democratization of criticism and art today means that anyone can put out a music video (or a blog); everyone’s opinion matters, anyone can claim to be an expert.. Overall, I think this is a good thing. Dialogue and multiple views offer perspective. But like with the internet, it also means wading through a bunch of crap on a daily basis on any given subject to uncover any truth.

Short cuts

The major problem is we don’t have time for it. (For that reason, I’m sure most haven’t made it this far down my post..) Our attention spans are shorter; we’re in a rush, we’re multi-taskers and skim readers. We want the reader’s digest version of everything; there is no time for details and real complexity. Hence, we rely on such tools as top-ten lists, stars and ‘so and so’’s pick’s to tell us what to consume. We need oversimplification in our fast paced lives.

It allows us to have the overwhelming excess of information around us to be boxed and filed away for easy retrieval. We also like to feel like we know more about all the things of which we know very little, so that we can feel like we’re really living, or at least have some interesting dinner conversation. Mainly, we appreciate convenient short cuts to the good stuff because they save us time. Shouldn’t we be able to trust the experts anyway? Whoever they are..

Five stars says who?

I enjoy having access to lists, ratings and expert opinions, being keenly aware of their limitations. I know who I like and who I don’t (I still read them). But that’s the key, context. Who. We should know that a review is just one person’s opinion, one slice of a story. We should pick our guides and pay attention to who wrote an article or who backed a certain study or produced a show, etc., so we know how to take it. Like when doing research, you try to consult many sources, and check credentials, before accepting anything as currency. Wikipedia offers a quick fix, a few hints, not a basis for a thesis. Most critics, like artisans, have their personal agendas and prejudices.

More than ever, in this age of sound-bites, people make unchecked statements all the time, and it seems acceptable. I get so annoyed with quotes that such and such a place is a 5 star hotel or restaurant, for example. Five stars says who? What are their criteria, what does it mean? If there is no source, it means nothing to me. I also cringe at newspaper headlines making a big claim, citing one vague ‘scientific’ study or some anecdotal evidence, knowing that many readers will take it as law without finishing the article, and decide that butter is bad or that MSG is a plague.

My conclusion is that amidst this sea of opinions, we need the critics with credentials more than ever. I like to read, and so personally prefer an article with substance full of grey, over a black and white star rating. But the star ratings can be fun, like icing on a cake. We must all just take it for what it is…not the holy grail, but some info, a possible lead, or merely some entertainment..

When it comes to entertainment, Beware

Before getting so caught up in criticism as sport though, we mustn’t forget about the real effects it has in real people’s lives. A restaurant is someone’s business, their livelihood, years of blood, sweat and tears, and home to a family of employees and regular customers… A wine is the same thing, usually decades of hard work, investment, patience and love, with troops of earnest faces behind. A bad review necessarily hurts all of these people.

On the flip side, any artist, producer or chef has to answer for what he/she puts out there. They must be thick-skinned, able to take some criticism, and accept that ‘you can’t please everyone’. To survive, they must stay focused on their art, their product, their customers, and not what too many outsiders think. Criticism is a part of doing business and making art.

Too much influence, the uniformity of taste

Besides some potentially hard feelings, the danger of any critic or guide gaining too much influence is that it can start to alter the art, the kind of wine being made or the food being cooked. A trend towards uniformity in taste is never a good thing because not only does it mean a loss of diversity on the landscape of taste, it often results in a ‘dumbing down’ to the lowest common denominator and a lower quality product overall. Big business lobbies and marketing strategies are surely guiltier of this, but a variety of independent critics can balance this effect, in a sense protecting us, all the while challenging the purveyors of our pleasure to perform their best.

The critic, our friend

Critics often claim that they are working for the average diner or customer, that they are a defender of the public, guiding the innocent to sure hits, and away from bad meals and rip-offs. But, really, the only establishments I don’t mind seeing criticized are the frauds, those out to make a dime by fooling people, those who deal in poor quality and charge far too much. I’m all for the outing of a hoax, but cheer far louder at the celebration of an underdog. And in fact, nothing does either like a no star or a full star rating. As long as there is something to back it up, a real person you can know and trust.

Sometimes though, we must agree to disagree, and take it all with a grain of salt.

April 6, 2007

Easter eggs evoke much more than the fun, 'yum factor' and children’s glee if you stop for a second; a host of issues hide behind, including the dominance of factory farming in our egg supply, and the exploitation associated with chocolate. I feel cheap in ignoring these as we party, but in the spirit of not pissing people off on this festive weekend, I’ll leave the politics for another time and focus on the good stuff. I guess I am shamefully more of a hedonist than an activist, but I AM grateful, so there.

EASTER

My ode to the egg

It is Easter.. Time to PAY HOMMAGE TO THE EGG, I say. That's what Easter means most to me, sorry Dad. It’s EGG APPRECIATION DAY". Afterall, there should be one measly day in the year when you stop and say, "Wow, eggs are great, and oh my God, am I ever thankful for eggs!"

Let me remind you how great eggs are. They are nice to look at and hold, even without the painted colors of the day. They are always extremely nutritious and delicious. But most of all, they are incredibly quick, useful and versatile, a cook's best friend.

They emulsify and bind, they leaven and thicken, they seal and coat, they add color and gloss. They add flavour, mouth-feel, richness or lightness to preparations, both hot and cold. Think mayonaisse, hollandaise, and the many egg based sauces like carbonara, Alfredo, avgolomo. Eggs are key in stratiatella, flans, royales, custards, cakes, quickbreads, brioche, cream puffs, ice cream, froths, foams and meringues, crispy cookies, macarons, crabcakes, stuffings, and mousses.... They are fabulous pickled - yah, that tavern favourite rocks!  And we mustn’t forget about just plain (but never so plain) old scrambled eggs, the ultimate comfort food. They can also be made into the fanciest, most elegant fare when snazzed up with some wild mushroom or sea urchin. I could keep going you know.

Easter weekend is a time of rejoicing and celebrating for most of us, whatever our background. For some it’s just a long weekend, but for most it’s about rebirth in someway, and eggs symbolize that perfectly. Be it to mark the rebirth of Jesus and the break from the fasting of lent, or at the very least the advent of spring, with the longer days and the promise of new and exciting things, it’s a time for ‘la fete...’ For the kids, it’s all about chocolate. For me, it’s all about eggs. In your weekend feasts which will surely feature an egg or two at some point, take a moment to raise your glass to the glorious egg!  Cheers and Happy Spring to all!