The end of fine dining and other food and drink news

At Thomas Keller’s Per Se, Slips and Stumbles - Dinner or lunch at this grand, hermetic, self-regarding, ungenerous restaurant brings a protracted march of many dishes. In 2004, the year Per Se opened, the price for nine courses was $150 before tax and tip; last week, it went up to $325, with service included. ...

The kitchen could improve the bacon-wrapped cylinder of quail simply by not placing it on top of a dismal green pulp of cooked romaine lettuce, crunchy and mushy at once. Draining off the gluey, oily liquid would have helped a mushroom potpie from turning into a swampy mess. I don’t know what could have saved limp, dispiriting yam dumplings, but it definitely wasn’t a lukewarm matsutake mushroom bouillon as murky and appealing as bong water.
It’s a bit of a mystery what pickled carrots, peanuts and a date wrapped in a soft crepe were supposed to do for a slab of Dorset cheese from Consider Bardwell Farm, but a good first step would have been allowing the washed-rind cow’s milk cheese to warm up to a buttery softness; served cold, it was rubbery and flavorless.
Even canonic dishes could be mangled. One time the sabayon in “oysters and pearls” had broken and separated, so fat pooled above the tapioca.

Mr. Keller wrote in “The French Laundry Cookbook” that poaching lobster in butter “cooks it so slowly and gently that the flesh remains exquisitely tender — so tender some people think it’s not completely cooked.” There was little danger of anyone’s making that mistake on two occasions when the lobster was intransigently chewy: gristle of the sea. The first time, it was served with a sugary Meyer lemon marmalade and a grainy chestnut purée that tasted like peanut butter to which something terrible had been done. Subsequently, it was paired with a slick of cold oatmeal.

The Times’ Brutal Per Se Review Is Another Nail in the Coffin of Fine Dining - People have spent years predicting the death of fine dining in New York.This week's unsparing review of Per Se in the Times, in which critic Pete Wells cut the restaurant down from four stars to two in unprecedented fashion, may have finally killed it. At the very least, the write-up will help to further convince people that a certain style of fine dining — extended, Michelin-geared tasting marathons in luxury rooms with an army of service staff constantly circling the tables — is a relic of the past.

From the UNESCO website

The wine legend who helped put Burgundy on the world map - Aubert de Villaine, the French winemaker whose prestigious Romanee-Conti is one of the world's most expensive wines has helped put the vineyards of his beloved Burgundy on the global map of cultural landmarks. De Villaine, a reserved 76-year-old, took up the mantle to get the Burgundy region's unique wine-growing tradition onto the UNESCO World Heritage list. That effort succeeded in July and led to his being named a 2016 "man of the year" by the monthly French Wine Review.

The Real Problem With Lunch - School meals reflect a society's true food culture, as well as its regard for its children.