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The Japanese Origins of Modern Fine Dining

98 points by lnguyen 9y ago

jeff6845 9y ago
I spent quite a few years growing up in Japan back several decades ago, and my experience is that Japan is about efficiency. Most common foods were served in a bowl, not in smaller, highly decorate plates, and more of them. Food was always served prepared, meaning one did not need a knife or fork. One had to learn to use chopsticks, and for rice as well. There were establishments that look close to the pictures if one searches the usual search engines, but I observed most food was eaten in the home, or packed in lunch boxes.
- gkanai 9y ago
  > Most common foods were served in a bowl, not in smaller, highly decorate plates Kaiseki ryori is not 'common food' (a good kaiseki meal in a major city is easily 30-50,000 JPY or more) so what the article is writing about and what the average Japanese meal is are two very different things.
  - nihonde 9y ago
    定食 is usually served in five or six small dishes, and that’s definitely everyday food in Japan. The tableware is not often special, though. This article is backward to me. I’ve lived in New York and Japan long enough to know that the best food in NYC is average in Japan. NYC is stuck on a weird old-fashioned idea that French cuisine is the pinnacle of dining out. I’ll take any 4+ Tabelog rated kaiseki restaurant in Kyoto over Le Bernardin or any other Michelin-rated celebrity chef vanity room every single time.
    - malnourish 9y ago
      It's almost certainly personal taste, but I found kaiseki to be rather unappetizing when I visited. The presentation was absolutely wonderful, most of the food didn't align with my palette. It turns out some simple, wholesome curry really does the trick.
      - vram22 9y ago
        >It turns out some simple, wholesome curry really does the trick. Japanese or Indian curry? :) I was reading about Japanese cuisine recently, and saw that they have some dishes they call curry. But IIRC it was somewhat different from Indian "curries" [1], which are again very different from what passes for "curry" in the West (generally, though I'm sure there are places that do not use that term generically like that). [1] There is no such thing as an Indian "curry", though many Westerners seem to think so (being misinformed by whoever, from West or East). It is an umbrella term that means a variety of dishes that are usually somewhat wet or with gravy, that is the only common point. Other than that, a curry can contain anything, be hot or not, veg or non-veg, etc. Update: Checked the Wikipedia entry for curry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry That article says something a bit different from what I said above, i.e. that "Curry was adopted and anglicised from the Tamil word kari meaning "sauce", which is usually understood to mean vegetables and/or meat cooked with spices with or without a gravy." So the article emphasizes the spices, rather than the gravy, as I did. Could be. But the biggest thing to understand about India is that a lot of words / terms (not just in the area of food) are used quite loosely and with sometimes widely different meanings.
        eadmund 9y ago
        And then you get into differing meanings of 'gravy.' When I was on the Subcontinent, it meant what we in America would call a sauce; we use 'gravy' to mean a particular kind of sauce made from meat drippings. Very weird at first for a Westerner to see vegetarian food described as having a gravy!
        vram22 9y ago
        Ha ha, good one. And it emphasizes the point in my last paragraph, about the meaning of words. Yes, though curries are basically dishes in some sort of sauce, the word gravy is used here for that instead of sauce. It's probably only in a few high-end restaurants that they will call it a dish in a sauce (of some kind), on the menu, and when explaining it to customers. But another difference between Western sauces and gravy in India (the kind I said, used in curries), is that (as I understand it - not familiar with the details of Western cooking) the Western sauce is poured on the dish, or used from a saucer on the side, but in curries, the dish is cooked in the gravy - so the gravy is an integral part of the dish, not an add-on or pour-on.
    - blhack 9y ago
      >NYC is stuck on a weird old-fashioned idea that French cuisine is the pinnacle of dining out. How is this weird or old fashioned? French food is by far my favorite.
      - jamesjyu 9y ago
        I'd agree it's not weird, but it definitely is old fashioned. The French invented haute cuisine (which is French for 'high cuisine') in the 17th century. In the west (and many places in the east) French food is considered fancy. I believe that's changing now, with the proliferation of well known chefs that come from all over the world. But, it's hard to shake tradition.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        As someone who likes good French food a lot, I'd agree with the other comment that holding classic French cuisine as the ultimate dining experience feels a bit old fashioned. If someone handed me a wad of money in NYC and told me to go out and have a good meal, I might pick a more classically French restaurant but I'd probably be more likely to pick some more modern style of "farm to table" or whatever. When I have French eating out, it's more likely to be a bistro-style restaurant. (Of course, that's partly because I rarely have really high-end meals in restaurants.
        nihonde 9y ago
        My original comment wasn’t very well written but spawned a lot of responses. I meant old fashioned in the Julia Child, two-sticks-of-butter-to-taste sense of French cuisine. Of course, real French food is as varied and worthy as any other food!
        ghaff 9y ago
        That's true--although I'd argue that there's still more of a set of specific rules, recipes, and techniques associated with most French cooking than with modern high-end cooking overall. In fact, I've heard it argued that one of the reasons that it's hard to replicate the best of French food outside of France is that such a specific supply chain exists for that particular cuisine. We're probably splitting hairs at this point though. Once you go beyond classic French and bistro food (which do tend to have a fairly specific repertoire), the lines between where French ends and modern European or American begins gets pretty blurry.
    - krapp 9y ago
      >I’ve lived in New York and Japan long enough to know that the best food in NYC is average in Japan. It seems odd to deem the entire culinary culture of an international metropolis as being worth less than the mediocre fare of a country that puts corn and mayonnaise on pizza. I'm not saying the best food in Japan isn't the best food in the world, but Japan's average is in no way better than the best in NYC. That's just silly.
      - nitrogen 9y ago
        ...corn and mayonnaise on pizza. That sounds amazing, and very vaguely like Mexican food. There's no reason to believe that we in America have the final word on what pizza ought to be.
        Udik 9y ago
        > There's no reason to believe that we in America have the final word on what pizza ought to be. You might have forgotten an /s there at the end. Regards from Italy.
        nitrogen 9y ago
        I'm amazed that at least three people bothered to downvote this. Pizza prejudice.
      - RealityNow 9y ago
        As someone who's also lived in NYC and been to Japan extensively, Japan's fast food and mid-level cuisine is a hell of a lot tastier and healthier than America's. Wrote a bit about Japanese fast food in another comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=15209105 https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=15209105 That's a pretty bold and inaccurate brush you painted on Japanese cuisine. Yes western cuisine in Japan isn't that great, but who's eating western food in Japan? Funny you mention mayonnaise also because white Americans are stereotyped with eating mayonnaise sandwiches.
        krapp 9y ago
        I'd agree with you comparing junk food to junk food, but the claim being contested here is that Japan's average is better than the best available food in New York, which is just an insult. >Funny you mention mayonnaise also because white Americans are stereotyped with eating mayonnaise sandwiches. I'm not even going to pretend that I didn't grow up eating fried spam sandwiches with mayonnaise and government cheese, on white bread no less. But that's neither here nor there.
    - gumby 9y ago
      > This article is backward to me. I’ve lived in New York and Japan long enough to know that the best food in NYC is average in Japan. Not sure what you mean (as a former Tokyo, Paris and New York denizen myself). If you mean midrange and daily meals are better in Tokyo I'd tend to agree, though lukewarmly. Fast food? No way, a greasy katsu is as bad as a crummy slice of pizza, But for the high end experiences described in this article (typically €1200/$1500/¥20,000 per person -- though Manresa is cheaper!) I'd say country has little to do with it. Though I find those experiences excessively fussy. If I'm going to spend five hours on a meal I'd rather the food and environment fade into the background so I can enjoy the company.
      - RealityNow 9y ago
        I much prefer Japanese fast food as it's significantly more delicious and healthier. Go into any convenience store and you can get a tasty and healthy onigiri for $1, or a little bento box style meal for maybe $3-4. Of course there's also ramen/udon/soba/yakisoba, curry, okonomiyaki, etc, and all can be had for $3-10 (no tip). Also Tokyo is more of a true 24/7 city, whereas in NYC your options after 11pm are generally limited to cheap pizza, hot dogs, and halal (unless of course you hit up some Japanese restaurants on St. Marks or go to Korea Town). The thing NYC has going for it is variety. But overall, I still prefer Japanese food.
        evgen 9y ago
        24/7? Name me a single place in Tokyo with a Michelin star that is open after one a.m please.
empath75 9y ago
In a less serious sense-- prime time on The Food Network is basically non stop competitive cooking shows--a genre invented in Japan, afaik. That is going to have to have an influence on up and coming chefs. It's certainly had an influence on how ordinary people perceive chefs.
- kurthr 9y ago
  Ahhh... Iron Chef! Those were the days, with Chairman Kaga grasping the perfect pepper, "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you what you are." :^) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mhAPrBddfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mhAPrBddfM I learned that adding truffle will make anything better, and that you can make ice cream from anything.
dredmorbius 9y ago
"Fine dining" itself is largely a post-1980 phenomenon. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fine+dining&year_start=1958&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cfine%20dining%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fine+dining&ye...
- mc32 9y ago
  Maybe it's just that the phrase took off in the 80s rather than the practice itself. Nixons visit to China and the whole Peking food experience points to even Maoists appreciated what we call fine dining.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    I followed up (though didn't post here) some additional searches. "Restaurant" itself is reassuringly stable over time, though "Michelin star" and "restaurant review" also show a 1970 - 1980 launch. Investigations of this sort are somewhat fraught as language and tastes (both fashion and gastronomical) change. But this rather matches my own general awareness.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      I would have put it just a bit earlier for the US. But not by much. Craig Claiborne became food editor for The New York Times in 1957. Julia Child's The French Chef in 1963. Of course, that's just the beginning and you leave behind a few urban locales with a food/restaurant tradition of some sort and it took a lot f time to diffuse elsewhere.
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        Ngrams aren't entirely reliable, but if you manage to corral a concept sufficiently, they can often turn up the timing of a phenomenon entering into general consciousness. Occasionally the specific point of origin. I've run this on a number of concepts -- "democracy", "rugged individualism", various brand-name liquors, a whole slew of more recent political trends and concepts ("school prayer", "right to life" "anti-abortion", "creationism", "gun rights", etc. -- most are quite surprisingly recent), and more. The most interesting finds to me are concepts which are generally treated as essentially eternal which are not. There are also concepts which I'd have thought more recent, which turn out to be long-lived. In general, though, there's a sharp inflection point where these concepts emerge or break out.
contingencies 9y ago
I remember reading an article on how the Italian fascist period under Mussolini invented a lot of minimalist and modern dining traditions, however try as I might I can't find it again.
- mabub24 9y ago
  There was Italian Futurist cooking, outlined by Marinetti and Fillia. It was very modernist in the 20th-century sense. But, considering Futurism's uneasy relationship with Mussolini, I don't know how much influence it had on the Mussolini era. I imagine he would've had a weird "traditional Italian" and Roman Empire centric idea of cooking, but that's just me hypothesizing. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_cooking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_cooking
- theoh 9y ago
  "The Futurist Cook Book - The National"? https://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/food/the-futurist-cook-book-1.373989 https://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/food/the-futurist-cook-...
johansch 9y ago
This seems extremely superficial. :/ The headline doesn't really deliver.
gumby 9y ago
From the article: "the predominant narrative for the genealogy of contemporary international fine dining is that its paternity is exclusively French." Can't deny that's the dominant narrative and for the scope of the article, totally appropriate, but leaves out the answer to "why France?" In the 1600s, Marie de' Medici shows up and, (allegedly) appalled by the local cuisine, sends for her Italian cook. Since her son was Louis XIII, that set the standard. Which makes it mystifying that Italian haute cuisine has been pretty much absent on the stage. It's not like you can't get a great meal there!
- nemo44x 9y ago
  Haute Cusine is more than good food. It tends to be avante guard cooking with certain service standards. There tends to be a certain evolution and style to it. Marco Pierre White made some incredible food that was highly influential to Western haute cuisine but anyone serving food that way today would be considered passé even though it's simply astonishingly good, creative food. Italy is steeped in a good tradition that is its own thing. Haute cusine exists there. Look no further than Osteria Francescana. That caused an outrage in the Italian press when opened but is now universally agreed upon that its one of the worlds best restaurants with progressive Italian cooking. A revolution of a restaurant to a place resistant to change from tradition. Although I love fancy restaurants I prefer the warm, family style approach to food you see throughout Italy. Which is why Spain is my favorite food place. A great acceptance of super experimental food with a love for the traditional regional cuisine. It's such an open minded but authentic and true to itself good culture.
  - njarboe 9y ago
    It has been a long time since I have read the word authentic and not thought it was marketing speak. Thanks. It was a good word, now corrupted. I hope people realize the word is a signal that the thing being describe is inauthentic and stops being used in menus at least.
  - riffraff 9y ago
    did Osteria Francescana actually cause genuine outrage? There have been avantgarde cooks in Italy for decades, e.g. the "cyber egg" from Scabin dates to the '90s, and the "raviolo aperto" or "fish dripping" from Marchesi are from the '80s I think. As an italian, the only time I remember real outrage about cooking, is when a tv-famous chef mentioned he puts garlic in the amatriciana, but I've been out of the country for a while. EDIT: I correct myself, seems the "fish dripping" is from 2005.
majos 9y ago
My pet theory is that the rise in the "Japanese" style of fine dining -- which to me is characterized by pristine ingredients and a sort of atomized style, where most dishes appear as a combination of elements -- is in part explained by a roughly concomitant growth in the weight of reviews in determining a restaurant's place in a hierarchy. Maybe I'm underrating the influence of professional reviews before the 60s, or overrating the influence of professional and amateur reviews now, but it does seem to me that "Japanese" style cooking is easier to justify intellectually, and for that reason more likely to earn the Michelin etc. plaudits that make these restaurants' names. An audience can pretty easily grasp an account of the right grower/forager/fisher supply chains that produce really nice ingredients, and they're fun to write and read about too. And being able to discuss a dish as a sum of constituent parts (how many "nice" menus these days describe dishes as just a list of ingredients, one of which are unexpected?) makes the task even clearer. The built in diversity and, sometimes, narrative of a tasting menu also helps. Compare this to the difficulty of explaining why a single curry or mole tastes good, where it's hard not to fall back on hand-waving terms like "complex", or "haunting" or something. These dishes are, at least to me, far harder to pick apart and analyze in a convincing way, and that sort of analysis seems necessary to justify "fine dining", from what I can tell. Last I checked this was reflected in the allocation of Michelin stars, for which there are close to zero Indian, African, or Mexican (to name a few huge cuisines) last I checked, (though I think Mexico may have made some headway recently.)
- justicezyx 9y ago
  Agreed, Chinese dish, on the other hand, always appears as stir fry, no matter how different things are actually made...
  - Mikeb85 9y ago
    That's ignoring things like Chinese BBQ and dim sum, which are about as far from stir fried as it's possible to get.
    - justicezyx 9y ago
Mikeb85 9y ago
As interesting as this is, Japanese kaiseki, while having some aspects in common and influencing some chefs, is not really the origin of modern fine dining. French fine dining comes from the aristocratic courts of Europe, and if you go to one of the old temples of gastronomy in France, it's easier to see the influence. You start with hors d'œuvres, then move to entrées (appetizers), then typically you'll have fish and/or meats, often cooked on the bone then carved tableside. Then you move on to cheese/dessert carts. That's fine dining. Anyhow, the more modern style of many plated courses is largely a result of the wave of fine dining that came out of Spain, where chefs started serving many tapas in succession. And when the Spanish and French influences mixed, voilà, you have where we are today. However that's not to say there's nothing similar in other cultures. Kaiseki is of course similar (however also differs in many ways) to Western fine dining. Dim Sum is quite similar to tapas, yet different. Sushi is also similar to tapas in many ways. Anyhow, while there are similarities between lots of cultures' dining styles, the origin of Western fine dining is without a doubt French fine dining + Spanish tapas.

98 points by lnguyen 9y ago

I spent quite a few years growing up in Japan back several decades ago, and my experience is that Japan is about efficiency. Most common foods were served in a bowl, not in smaller, highly decorate plates, and more of them. Food was always served prepared, meaning one did not need a knife or fork. One had to learn to use chopsticks, and for rice as well. There were establishments that look close to the pictures if one searches the usual search engines, but I observed most food was eaten in the home, or packed in lunch boxes.

gkanai 9y ago
> Most common foods were served in a bowl, not in smaller, highly decorate plates Kaiseki ryori is not 'common food' (a good kaiseki meal in a major city is easily 30-50,000 JPY or more) so what the article is writing about and what the average Japanese meal is are two very different things.
- nihonde 9y ago
  定食 is usually served in five or six small dishes, and that’s definitely everyday food in Japan. The tableware is not often special, though. This article is backward to me. I’ve lived in New York and Japan long enough to know that the best food in NYC is average in Japan. NYC is stuck on a weird old-fashioned idea that French cuisine is the pinnacle of dining out. I’ll take any 4+ Tabelog rated kaiseki restaurant in Kyoto over Le Bernardin or any other Michelin-rated celebrity chef vanity room every single time.
  - malnourish 9y ago
    It's almost certainly personal taste, but I found kaiseki to be rather unappetizing when I visited. The presentation was absolutely wonderful, most of the food didn't align with my palette. It turns out some simple, wholesome curry really does the trick.
    - vram22 9y ago
      >It turns out some simple, wholesome curry really does the trick. Japanese or Indian curry? :) I was reading about Japanese cuisine recently, and saw that they have some dishes they call curry. But IIRC it was somewhat different from Indian "curries" [1], which are again very different from what passes for "curry" in the West (generally, though I'm sure there are places that do not use that term generically like that). [1] There is no such thing as an Indian "curry", though many Westerners seem to think so (being misinformed by whoever, from West or East). It is an umbrella term that means a variety of dishes that are usually somewhat wet or with gravy, that is the only common point. Other than that, a curry can contain anything, be hot or not, veg or non-veg, etc. Update: Checked the Wikipedia entry for curry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry That article says something a bit different from what I said above, i.e. that "Curry was adopted and anglicised from the Tamil word kari meaning "sauce", which is usually understood to mean vegetables and/or meat cooked with spices with or without a gravy." So the article emphasizes the spices, rather than the gravy, as I did. Could be. But the biggest thing to understand about India is that a lot of words / terms (not just in the area of food) are used quite loosely and with sometimes widely different meanings.
      - eadmund 9y ago
        And then you get into differing meanings of 'gravy.' When I was on the Subcontinent, it meant what we in America would call a sauce; we use 'gravy' to mean a particular kind of sauce made from meat drippings. Very weird at first for a Westerner to see vegetarian food described as having a gravy!
        vram22 9y ago
        Ha ha, good one. And it emphasizes the point in my last paragraph, about the meaning of words. Yes, though curries are basically dishes in some sort of sauce, the word gravy is used here for that instead of sauce. It's probably only in a few high-end restaurants that they will call it a dish in a sauce (of some kind), on the menu, and when explaining it to customers. But another difference between Western sauces and gravy in India (the kind I said, used in curries), is that (as I understand it - not familiar with the details of Western cooking) the Western sauce is poured on the dish, or used from a saucer on the side, but in curries, the dish is cooked in the gravy - so the gravy is an integral part of the dish, not an add-on or pour-on.
  - blhack 9y ago
    >NYC is stuck on a weird old-fashioned idea that French cuisine is the pinnacle of dining out. How is this weird or old fashioned? French food is by far my favorite.
    - jamesjyu 9y ago
      I'd agree it's not weird, but it definitely is old fashioned. The French invented haute cuisine (which is French for 'high cuisine') in the 17th century. In the west (and many places in the east) French food is considered fancy. I believe that's changing now, with the proliferation of well known chefs that come from all over the world. But, it's hard to shake tradition.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      As someone who likes good French food a lot, I'd agree with the other comment that holding classic French cuisine as the ultimate dining experience feels a bit old fashioned. If someone handed me a wad of money in NYC and told me to go out and have a good meal, I might pick a more classically French restaurant but I'd probably be more likely to pick some more modern style of "farm to table" or whatever. When I have French eating out, it's more likely to be a bistro-style restaurant. (Of course, that's partly because I rarely have really high-end meals in restaurants.
      - nihonde 9y ago
        My original comment wasn’t very well written but spawned a lot of responses. I meant old fashioned in the Julia Child, two-sticks-of-butter-to-taste sense of French cuisine. Of course, real French food is as varied and worthy as any other food!
        ghaff 9y ago
        That's true--although I'd argue that there's still more of a set of specific rules, recipes, and techniques associated with most French cooking than with modern high-end cooking overall. In fact, I've heard it argued that one of the reasons that it's hard to replicate the best of French food outside of France is that such a specific supply chain exists for that particular cuisine. We're probably splitting hairs at this point though. Once you go beyond classic French and bistro food (which do tend to have a fairly specific repertoire), the lines between where French ends and modern European or American begins gets pretty blurry.
  - krapp 9y ago
    >I’ve lived in New York and Japan long enough to know that the best food in NYC is average in Japan. It seems odd to deem the entire culinary culture of an international metropolis as being worth less than the mediocre fare of a country that puts corn and mayonnaise on pizza. I'm not saying the best food in Japan isn't the best food in the world, but Japan's average is in no way better than the best in NYC. That's just silly.
    - nitrogen 9y ago
      ...corn and mayonnaise on pizza. That sounds amazing, and very vaguely like Mexican food. There's no reason to believe that we in America have the final word on what pizza ought to be.
      - Udik 9y ago
        > There's no reason to believe that we in America have the final word on what pizza ought to be. You might have forgotten an /s there at the end. Regards from Italy.
      - nitrogen 9y ago
        I'm amazed that at least three people bothered to downvote this. Pizza prejudice.
    - RealityNow 9y ago
      As someone who's also lived in NYC and been to Japan extensively, Japan's fast food and mid-level cuisine is a hell of a lot tastier and healthier than America's. Wrote a bit about Japanese fast food in another comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=15209105 https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=15209105 That's a pretty bold and inaccurate brush you painted on Japanese cuisine. Yes western cuisine in Japan isn't that great, but who's eating western food in Japan? Funny you mention mayonnaise also because white Americans are stereotyped with eating mayonnaise sandwiches.
      - krapp 9y ago
        I'd agree with you comparing junk food to junk food, but the claim being contested here is that Japan's average is better than the best available food in New York, which is just an insult. >Funny you mention mayonnaise also because white Americans are stereotyped with eating mayonnaise sandwiches. I'm not even going to pretend that I didn't grow up eating fried spam sandwiches with mayonnaise and government cheese, on white bread no less. But that's neither here nor there.
  - gumby 9y ago
    > This article is backward to me. I’ve lived in New York and Japan long enough to know that the best food in NYC is average in Japan. Not sure what you mean (as a former Tokyo, Paris and New York denizen myself). If you mean midrange and daily meals are better in Tokyo I'd tend to agree, though lukewarmly. Fast food? No way, a greasy katsu is as bad as a crummy slice of pizza, But for the high end experiences described in this article (typically €1200/$1500/¥20,000 per person -- though Manresa is cheaper!) I'd say country has little to do with it. Though I find those experiences excessively fussy. If I'm going to spend five hours on a meal I'd rather the food and environment fade into the background so I can enjoy the company.
    - RealityNow 9y ago
      I much prefer Japanese fast food as it's significantly more delicious and healthier. Go into any convenience store and you can get a tasty and healthy onigiri for $1, or a little bento box style meal for maybe $3-4. Of course there's also ramen/udon/soba/yakisoba, curry, okonomiyaki, etc, and all can be had for $3-10 (no tip). Also Tokyo is more of a true 24/7 city, whereas in NYC your options after 11pm are generally limited to cheap pizza, hot dogs, and halal (unless of course you hit up some Japanese restaurants on St. Marks or go to Korea Town). The thing NYC has going for it is variety. But overall, I still prefer Japanese food.
      - evgen 9y ago
        24/7? Name me a single place in Tokyo with a Michelin star that is open after one a.m please.

empath75 9y ago

In a less serious sense-- prime time on The Food Network is basically non stop competitive cooking shows--a genre invented in Japan, afaik. That is going to have to have an influence on up and coming chefs. It's certainly had an influence on how ordinary people perceive chefs.

kurthr 9y ago
Ahhh... Iron Chef! Those were the days, with Chairman Kaga grasping the perfect pepper, "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you what you are." :^) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mhAPrBddfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mhAPrBddfM I learned that adding truffle will make anything better, and that you can make ice cream from anything.

dredmorbius 9y ago

"Fine dining" itself is largely a post-1980 phenomenon. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fine+dining&year_start=1958&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cfine%20dining%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fine+dining&ye...

mc32 9y ago
Maybe it's just that the phrase took off in the 80s rather than the practice itself. Nixons visit to China and the whole Peking food experience points to even Maoists appreciated what we call fine dining.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  I followed up (though didn't post here) some additional searches. "Restaurant" itself is reassuringly stable over time, though "Michelin star" and "restaurant review" also show a 1970 - 1980 launch. Investigations of this sort are somewhat fraught as language and tastes (both fashion and gastronomical) change. But this rather matches my own general awareness.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I would have put it just a bit earlier for the US. But not by much. Craig Claiborne became food editor for The New York Times in 1957. Julia Child's The French Chef in 1963. Of course, that's just the beginning and you leave behind a few urban locales with a food/restaurant tradition of some sort and it took a lot f time to diffuse elsewhere.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      Ngrams aren't entirely reliable, but if you manage to corral a concept sufficiently, they can often turn up the timing of a phenomenon entering into general consciousness. Occasionally the specific point of origin. I've run this on a number of concepts -- "democracy", "rugged individualism", various brand-name liquors, a whole slew of more recent political trends and concepts ("school prayer", "right to life" "anti-abortion", "creationism", "gun rights", etc. -- most are quite surprisingly recent), and more. The most interesting finds to me are concepts which are generally treated as essentially eternal which are not. There are also concepts which I'd have thought more recent, which turn out to be long-lived. In general, though, there's a sharp inflection point where these concepts emerge or break out.

contingencies 9y ago

I remember reading an article on how the Italian fascist period under Mussolini invented a lot of minimalist and modern dining traditions, however try as I might I can't find it again.

mabub24 9y ago
There was Italian Futurist cooking, outlined by Marinetti and Fillia. It was very modernist in the 20th-century sense. But, considering Futurism's uneasy relationship with Mussolini, I don't know how much influence it had on the Mussolini era. I imagine he would've had a weird "traditional Italian" and Roman Empire centric idea of cooking, but that's just me hypothesizing. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_cooking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_cooking
theoh 9y ago
"The Futurist Cook Book - The National"? https://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/food/the-futurist-cook-book-1.373989 https://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/food/the-futurist-cook-...

johansch 9y ago

This seems extremely superficial. :/ The headline doesn't really deliver.

gumby 9y ago

From the article: "the predominant narrative for the genealogy of contemporary international fine dining is that its paternity is exclusively French." Can't deny that's the dominant narrative and for the scope of the article, totally appropriate, but leaves out the answer to "why France?" In the 1600s, Marie de' Medici shows up and, (allegedly) appalled by the local cuisine, sends for her Italian cook. Since her son was Louis XIII, that set the standard. Which makes it mystifying that Italian haute cuisine has been pretty much absent on the stage. It's not like you can't get a great meal there!

nemo44x 9y ago
Haute Cusine is more than good food. It tends to be avante guard cooking with certain service standards. There tends to be a certain evolution and style to it. Marco Pierre White made some incredible food that was highly influential to Western haute cuisine but anyone serving food that way today would be considered passé even though it's simply astonishingly good, creative food. Italy is steeped in a good tradition that is its own thing. Haute cusine exists there. Look no further than Osteria Francescana. That caused an outrage in the Italian press when opened but is now universally agreed upon that its one of the worlds best restaurants with progressive Italian cooking. A revolution of a restaurant to a place resistant to change from tradition. Although I love fancy restaurants I prefer the warm, family style approach to food you see throughout Italy. Which is why Spain is my favorite food place. A great acceptance of super experimental food with a love for the traditional regional cuisine. It's such an open minded but authentic and true to itself good culture.
- njarboe 9y ago
  It has been a long time since I have read the word authentic and not thought it was marketing speak. Thanks. It was a good word, now corrupted. I hope people realize the word is a signal that the thing being describe is inauthentic and stops being used in menus at least.
- riffraff 9y ago
  did Osteria Francescana actually cause genuine outrage? There have been avantgarde cooks in Italy for decades, e.g. the "cyber egg" from Scabin dates to the '90s, and the "raviolo aperto" or "fish dripping" from Marchesi are from the '80s I think. As an italian, the only time I remember real outrage about cooking, is when a tv-famous chef mentioned he puts garlic in the amatriciana, but I've been out of the country for a while. EDIT: I correct myself, seems the "fish dripping" is from 2005.

majos 9y ago

My pet theory is that the rise in the "Japanese" style of fine dining -- which to me is characterized by pristine ingredients and a sort of atomized style, where most dishes appear as a combination of elements -- is in part explained by a roughly concomitant growth in the weight of reviews in determining a restaurant's place in a hierarchy. Maybe I'm underrating the influence of professional reviews before the 60s, or overrating the influence of professional and amateur reviews now, but it does seem to me that "Japanese" style cooking is easier to justify intellectually, and for that reason more likely to earn the Michelin etc. plaudits that make these restaurants' names. An audience can pretty easily grasp an account of the right grower/forager/fisher supply chains that produce really nice ingredients, and they're fun to write and read about too. And being able to discuss a dish as a sum of constituent parts (how many "nice" menus these days describe dishes as just a list of ingredients, one of which are unexpected?) makes the task even clearer. The built in diversity and, sometimes, narrative of a tasting menu also helps. Compare this to the difficulty of explaining why a single curry or mole tastes good, where it's hard not to fall back on hand-waving terms like "complex", or "haunting" or something. These dishes are, at least to me, far harder to pick apart and analyze in a convincing way, and that sort of analysis seems necessary to justify "fine dining", from what I can tell. Last I checked this was reflected in the allocation of Michelin stars, for which there are close to zero Indian, African, or Mexican (to name a few huge cuisines) last I checked, (though I think Mexico may have made some headway recently.)

justicezyx 9y ago
Agreed, Chinese dish, on the other hand, always appears as stir fry, no matter how different things are actually made...
- Mikeb85 9y ago
  That's ignoring things like Chinese BBQ and dim sum, which are about as far from stir fried as it's possible to get.
  - justicezyx 9y ago

Mikeb85 9y ago

As interesting as this is, Japanese kaiseki, while having some aspects in common and influencing some chefs, is not really the origin of modern fine dining. French fine dining comes from the aristocratic courts of Europe, and if you go to one of the old temples of gastronomy in France, it's easier to see the influence. You start with hors d'œuvres, then move to entrées (appetizers), then typically you'll have fish and/or meats, often cooked on the bone then carved tableside. Then you move on to cheese/dessert carts. That's fine dining. Anyhow, the more modern style of many plated courses is largely a result of the wave of fine dining that came out of Spain, where chefs started serving many tapas in succession. And when the Spanish and French influences mixed, voilà, you have where we are today. However that's not to say there's nothing similar in other cultures. Kaiseki is of course similar (however also differs in many ways) to Western fine dining. Dim Sum is quite similar to tapas, yet different. Sushi is also similar to tapas in many ways. Anyhow, while there are similarities between lots of cultures' dining styles, the origin of Western fine dining is without a doubt French fine dining + Spanish tapas.