June 30, 2009
My five fav tables
I said I would not write any restaurant reviews. That promise lasted only a few hours it may now seem. I will try to avoid making it into a bad habit.
Here are my five favorite restaurants. I will present them on this page and it is likely going to change depending on the mood I am in from time to time.
This list is presented in no order of preference. It is highly subjective and not only based on the food served in these restaurants but on total experience, originality, uniqueness, produce quality and culinary ability. So who are they?
Etxebarri, Axpe in Spain – After the first bite I had from master griller Victor, I fell in love. It is atypical as a restaurant. The produce is simply impeccable and Victor’s grilling remains the reference.
Manresa, Los Gatos in California – David Kinch is a chef that continues to impress me. Most chefs tend to stop developing and perhaps even to fade a bit when they reach 45 years old. David is the exception that confirms the rule. David seems to continue to evolve like a great wine from a great vintage. His relentless search for new produce, new preparations and excellence in conducting his business and his respect for the produce and cooking traditions is second to none. It is a pity he is so far away. Since he has now climbed the mountain, I expect him to earn his third Michelin star this year.
Mirazur, Menton in France – Mauro Collagreco is a friend of mine, like David Kinch and Rocco Iannone. I am not colored by that when I mention them as my current favorite places. Mauro is one of the most talented young chefs I have seen. What he has accomplished with very small means is nothing short of sensational. He gained a first Michelin star within a year of opening the restaurant and won the prestigious Gault Millau chef de l’année this year. Yes, he also entered the 50 best list this year, which means that he also knows how to pull the marketing strings.
L’Ami Louis, Paris in France – L’Ami Louis is perhaps the most popular restaurant to hate. There are myths about the restaurant being spread on food blogs, wine blogs e t c that it is overly expensive, that the service is snotty, that there are only billionaires eating there e t c. Funnily, many such myth have been nourished by claims from people who have never been there. I love it simply because of its no-fuss service, fantastic produce and a cooking that does not exist anymore. It tastes like the food my grandmother did. On top of it all it is reasonably priced. You disagree that 44 euros for a mutton dish is inexpensive? Well if you get 9 ribs, French fries and potato cake, it comes off as dirt cheap compared to other Parisian bistros where you can hardly get 3 ribs of lamb/mutton for half the price.
Pappacarbone, Cava de'Tirenni in Italy – Rocco Iannone is really a one of a kind chef. The produce at his restaurant, especially the seafood, beats just about any other restaurant in Europe and North America. There are no secrets. Rocco literally never receives any deliveries to his restaurant. He goes to fishermen, fish mongers, farmers or his garden and selects the best he can find at each place. His menu changes daily accordingly. Rocco has quite a bit to teach the other Italian chefs, many of which have fallen in the molecular gastronomy trap with an ignorance towards produce quality as a result.
Gastroville is back to life
After some time off blogging, I have revived Gastroville. Vedat continues to publish his thought provoking and thorough reviews at www.gastromondiale.com. I will continue food bloggning at Gastroville but there will be no restaurant reviews. Well at least probably none. Instead it will be about gastronomy, great produce, cooking, chefs and people who defend great gastronomy, health and random thoughts on food and food related topics. There is a lot in the pipeline for the coming weeks and months.
Posted at 12:56 PM | Comments (9276)Mission Statement - Updated
I am a passionate food and wine lover who believe that full enjoyment of the natural bounties of this world enhances everybody's joie de vivre. We have evolved over millions of years but the locus of dining is a relatively modern institution called the restaurant. As we all know, in recent years, those who are in charge of restaurant kitchens achieved the higher status of "chefs", as opposed to mere "cooks", and the buzz created by media is such that some of these chefs are regarded as the equivalent of cultural ambassadors for their respective countries and regions. This is not necessarily a bad development as higher prestige and promise of wealth is attracting and will continue to attract talented and intelligent individuals to this profession. As always there is another side of the coin. The media attention and the buzz required by a chef to become successful has meant that over the last 10-15 years, a new generation of chefs has come onto the scene who are focused on offering creativity and novelty as the means to capture the attention of the food media. In their search for novelty, chefs borrowed ideas from the food industry. Industrial jellifiers, stabilizers, and colorants and synthetic agents for improving tastes and synthetic starches and sugars became the norm for chefs who wanted to get attention. Produce became less and less important as large restaurant suppliers entered into the gastronomic scene and started making deliveries in anonymous trucks, to avoid revealing that Michelin-starred restaurants received deliveries from large industrial food suppliers. Restaurant critics stopped talking about how the food tasted. Some critics saw their chance to take their profession to a new level by intellectualizing food and the chefs were not late to applaud this development. The intellectual perception of a dish became more important than what was actually on the plate in terms of quality of ingredients, flavor pairings and execution.
Hopefully, some of this fake pseudo intellectual molecular cooking is going to be a casualty of the current economic crisis. However, the trend of industrializing the gastronomic restaurants is sadly probably going to escalate for the same reason. Only fierce objections from customers will force chefs to change this trend.
One of my motivations when bringing this blog back to life is to provide a voice against the industrialization of gastronomy and to evangelize the great produce that nature has provided us with and how it should be prepared since there are important health aspects that are totally overlooked today. My second motivation is to try to provide a source of inspiration for people to find excellence in their cooking. Last but not least, I want to highlight and praise those Knights of Gastronomy, as I like to call them, who defy the dubious trends that have been around the last ten years and defend real food.
I find the excellence of raw materials and ingredients of all sorts to be one of the most important building blocks of good cooking and a fundamental heritage of Western cultural-gastronomic tradition which is necessary to safeguard. Unfortunately, few restaurant critics and chefs today pay sufficient attention to the quality of ingredients and are far too easily influenced by the use of the so-called luxury ingredients such as truffles and caviar even though they may be of poor quality or far too quick to enhance textural or flavor experiences with chemical agents.
Clearly, gastronomy in general is not an easy subject. It probably takes a lifetime to fully understand and appreciate good things and to develop a discriminating palette. The doctrine of ingredients, which is one of the fundamentals in understanding food, has never been documented with sufficient rigor. It would be preposterous to claim that one can learn all there is to learn about good food and ingredients and make absolute statements. On the other hand, I am in a constant search to seek out the best ingredients and hidden gems in gastronomy, and would like to share my discoveries with the readers. In short, with this blog, I want to:
--Document the discoveries made through my constant odyssey in the world of gastronomy where I search for what nature has intended us to eat.
--Share the knowledge and experience and receive feedback from the readers.
The process is all that counts, and hopefully interaction and communication will render this process mutually rewarding.
About Me - Updated version
About Gastroville - Update
I am Mikael Jonsson and I am behind this blog.
Gastroville was launched by Vedat Milor and me in 2005 with the aim to offer discriminating evaluations of restaurants in different categories/price points to maximize dining value for distinguishing and caring gourmets.We also aimed to develop reliable and rigorous criteria when evaluating restaurants. To cut a long story short, after some time I somewhat lacked the passion to continue writing about my eating experiences in restaurants, partly because I liked cooking better since it allowed me to make "made-to-measure" food incorporating the desired quality of raw material and preparation methods but also because I thought the world of gastronomy was about to become industrialized. Vedat, who is one of the most experienced palates I have encountered, continues to publish opinionated reviews on www.gastromondiale.com. Our old restaurant reviews can be found on this blog as well as our food rating standards. I still stand by our previously food rating standards and they are roughly still my view on the basis for what constitutes great food.
I will now after some time off from blogging take it up again but I will do so from a different perspective. I will not publish any restaurant reviews, or I should say only sparsely so since you should never say never.
The newly found interest in blogging will instead focus on my search for ingredients and how took cook them based from the perspective of what nature has intended us to eat. Over the last year and a half a new dimension to gastronomy has been added for me as I have discovered that the conventional wisdom of what constitutes healthy eating is very far from the truth and that much of the diseases of civilization - diabetes, heart disease, many forms of cancer, MS, Alzheimer e t c - are to at least a great extent the result of our changed dietary patterns compared to what we have eaten during most of our evolution. I will come back in a post at some point in the near future with what I exactly mean in this respect. I have always had a desire to search for the core of gastronomy and have now come to the belief that we must search for this from the perspective of what nature has intended it to be. I already a few years ago thought that gastronomy - on not only the haute cuisine restaurant scene - was more or less dead mainly as a consequence of the molecular gastronomy movement coupled with the media and publicity hunger of today's chefs. The realization of the detrimental health impacts of industrial refined foods packed with high glycemic index ingredients, industrially processed oils and chemical additives further cemented my beliefs that gastronomy in the restaurant environment will die unless a reversal takes place of recent years' practices to add chemicals and using questionable cooking methods to add novelty in flavors and textural effects. At the same time the importance of the quality of the produce has more or less lost interest amongst many starred chefs as has the importance of tastes. Fortunately, there are signs that the tide might be turning as there are some chefs who do put high emphasis on produce sourcing. These chefs will be highlighted in this blog.
More about Mikael
I have always had an obsession in produce and produce quality and still never stop turning any stones in my search for understanding produce and how to let it shine in different ways. According to my mother this obsessive food interest started about the same time as I could walk. I started cooking very early in life and cooked dinners in people's homes when I was a young teenager. Obviously destined to become a chef, I did some basic training in professional kitchens but due to allergy I had to give up plans to work professionally as a chef. I was fortunate enough to at an early age be intoxicated by haute cuisine and have for a long time studied fine dining at various dining temples. I am never impressed by prestige, stars or luxury settings or by prestigious or expensive produce. Only the quality of what is served matters, based on expensive or inexpensive raw materials, and I could enjoy exceptional food even if it was served on a cardboard.
As stated above, a year and a half ago I realized that the conventional wisdom of what constitutes a healthy diet, in other words that a diet should be low in fat and high in fibers, that saturated fats were bad and that poly-unsaturated vegetable fats good, totally lacked scientific evidence. I changed my eating habits and as a consequence lost 30 kilos and have now a weight below that I had in my late teens when I was active in various sports, with the difference that I am fitter and stronger and have gained a health I have never experienced. What was the recipe? It is simple. I try to as much as possible emulate the food humans were designed to eat. This means that I am not afraid of eating a lot of saturated fats. I avoid omega-6 fats as much as it is possible. They are inflammatory and possibly one of the main culprits of many of the diseases of civilization. I eat very little refined carbohydrates and sugar and when I eat bread I only eat 100% sour dough fermented bread made with stone milled flour, but even then I eat it sparsely. I try to prepare ingredients with techniques that as much as possible remove anti-nutrients from them yet at the same time preserve the nutrients.
I will not with this blog try to convince people to eat exactly like I do. I think that humans are very adaptive and can thrive and stay healthy on a range of different diets but it is clear to me that certain foods for example create inflammatory responses and can be detrimental to our immune system. What I will try to convince my readers is that certain foods and preparations should be avoided and certain foods should be prepared in certain ways to minimize the dangers they otherwise pose. I think we should demand gastronomic restaurants to not serve unhealthy food. I also want to be a source of inspiration in exploring and approaching ingredients as well as in how to find culinary excellence in a domestic kitchen.
My preferred hunting ground for ingredients is the Mediterranean Basin, currently mainly in Malta where I search for some of the best sea food that can be found in the Mediterranean sea due to the relatively clean Maltese waters.
I like to eat most great produce the planet has to offer but I am especially fond of gamberis from San Remo, tuna belly, sea urchins, Gaulois chicken, telinnes from Camargue, Chianina, Salers and Simmental beef, pré-salé lamb, Pauillac lamb, black and white truffles, courgettes nicois, asparagus from Vaucluse and Valbenga, morels and ceps. I like to drink wine from Burgundy and I will never say no to a well matured cheese.
June 15, 2009
Gastroville is being updated
Gastroville is being updated and will soon come back in a new shape. Please stay tuned.
Posted at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
