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January 28, 2005
Mission Statement
We are two passionate food and wine lovers who believe that full enjoyment of the natural bounties of this world enhances everybody's joie de vivre. For good or for worse, in our times, 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.
The good news is that, the dining scene today in Continental Europe and the States is more exciting than ever. The bad news, on the other hand, is the absence of clear-cut criteria to distinguish true excellence from mediocre performance and nobody feels good when paying small fortunes for the latter. For better or for worse, in the rapidly changing environment of the restaurant scene, the relationship between "price" and "quality" is tenuous at best.
Our driving motivation in creating this blog is to provide a discriminating evaluation of restaurants in different categories/price points to maximize dining value for distinguishing and caring gourmets. Our own serious dining out experiences go back about 20 years, and although we have been privileged to have had countless meals at the very pinnacle of gastronomic temples, we also constantly search out the informal places that excel in simple preparation of high quality ingredients. In addition, one of us has a very deep and far reaching interest in cooking.
We both find the excellence of raw materials and ingredients of all sorts to be one of the most important building blocs of good cooking and a fundamental heritage of Western cultural-gastronomic tradition which is necessary to safeguard. Unfortunately few restaurant critics 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. In contrast, one purpose of this site is to be evangelical about the quality of raw materials when evaluating individual dishes and to emphasize the essential role of fresh ingredients in cooking.
Clearly gastronomy in general and, restaurant criticism in particular, is not an easy subject. It 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, as both of us are in a constant and often rewarding search to seek out best ingredients and hidden gems in the world of restaurants, we would like to share our discoveries with the reader. In short, by creating this blog, we want to:
--Document the discoveries made through our constant odyssey in the world of gastronomy.
--Share the knowledge and experience and receive feedback from the readers.
--Adopt a fully independent approach and attempt to develop reliable and rigorous criteria when evaluating restaurants. That is to say that, we will not shy away from criticizing any underperforming star chef or a celebrated restaurant. Conversely, we will extol the virtues of those who labor hard and seek perfection in ingredients and search for their own styles rather than copying other people's creations.
Both of us are excited about the journey on which we are about to embark, and this is a journey without a final destination. It is an odyssey where the process is all that counts, and hopefully interaction and communication will render this process mutually rewarding.
Comments
Nice work, gentlemen. Regarding your mission to "[s]hare the knowledge and experience and receive feedback from the readers," do you intend this blog to become an interactive discussion site for the restaurants you review, or would you prefer that this take place elsewhere?
Posted by: zorbo at March 26, 2005 07:23 PM
