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June 30, 2009
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.
