Originally Posted by
MaxBuck
The more comments I read about "best restaurants in the world," the less I want to eat in one.
I love great food, but "molecular cuisine" and "avante-garde techniques" involving supercritical fluids and apparati better-suited to a chemical engineering unit-operations lab than to a kitchen do not appeal to me in the least. Maison Rhodes in Troyes; the Ralph Lauren restaurant in Chicago; Pittsburgh's Mallorca - these are the places that appeal to me most. Nothing particularly complicated, but everything that's served is cooked extremely, extremely well.
At the end of the day, for me, it's about how good the food tasted, not how far the envelope was stretched.
Agree completely with you and
bhrubin on this one - it isn't about molecular gastronomy or science; it's simply about finding food that tastes great. More often than not, I find that the best restaurants not only provide that - they also inspire me to improve upon my everyday cooking by taking those ideas home.
I couldn't begin to list how many foods I used to not eat (and now do), until I had them in a great restaurant and realized just what can be done with them, particularly with the right sauce. And that doesn't even count the various foods that I never would have tried had I not had them somewhere - just yesterday I made a fruit Pavlova and infused the whipped cream with sea buckthorn juice. Absolutely delicious, and I never would have even gotten the idea but from a great restaurant.
I invariably take the tasting menus with wine pairings and probably 6 or 7 times out of 10 I take something home from the experience. We eat like kings at home, mainly from my experiences out.