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Author believes the chefs that moved from NYC and SF suddenly lost the ability to cook good food. Clown article

by mrits 4y ago

addicted 4y ago
This article is just weird at best (no pun intended) but like many other industries that benefit from agglomeration this can very well be true. 1) Chefs rarely do any cooking. At best they are conductors. And restaurants are famously highly unprofitable businesses. So you need a combination of a large number of workers, willing to work for cheap (relative to cost of living for the area) and are still highly skilled. 2) Ingredients matter. NYC food used to be crap. It’s the farm to table movement that took advantage of the many local farms within the true state area that revolutionized food in NYC. And SF is in California. 3) Tastes matter. It’s hard for a place which identifies with a certain food to build a great overall cuisine. So New Orleans is great for Cajun/sea food, but it’s hard to see other cuisines flourishing as much (most places in the US tend to have a couple of international cuisines that do wel due to clusters of immigrants, but I’m talking about building a general food culture). That may be one reason why food in SF tends to be better than food in LA, which identifies very much with “healthy” eating even though LA has pretty much every advantage over SF to be a food city. 4) Competition matters. It takes time to build a competitive food scene that can weed out bad restaurants, or even restaurants that haven’t adapted to the modern world. NYC is an extreme, potentially going a little too far, example of this. So yeah, there are many reasons why great chefs can become not so great chefs after moving somewhere else, at least in a restaurant setting. The top chefs will probably be fine since they will get the cream of the crop and fly in ingredients and workers. But it’s the middle to top-middle layer where these factors show up the most.

Author believes the chefs that moved from NYC and SF suddenly lost the ability to cook good food. Clown article

by mrits 4y ago

Author believes the chefs that moved from NYC and SF suddenly lost the ability to cook good food. Clown article

This article is just weird at best (no pun intended) but like many other industries that benefit from agglomeration this can very well be true. 1) Chefs rarely do any cooking. At best they are conductors. And restaurants are famously highly unprofitable businesses. So you need a combination of a large number of workers, willing to work for cheap (relative to cost of living for the area) and are still highly skilled. 2) Ingredients matter. NYC food used to be crap. It’s the farm to table movement that took advantage of the many local farms within the true state area that revolutionized food in NYC. And SF is in California. 3) Tastes matter. It’s hard for a place which identifies with a certain food to build a great overall cuisine. So New Orleans is great for Cajun/sea food, but it’s hard to see other cuisines flourishing as much (most places in the US tend to have a couple of international cuisines that do wel due to clusters of immigrants, but I’m talking about building a general food culture). That may be one reason why food in SF tends to be better than food in LA, which identifies very much with “healthy” eating even though LA has pretty much every advantage over SF to be a food city. 4) Competition matters. It takes time to build a competitive food scene that can weed out bad restaurants, or even restaurants that haven’t adapted to the modern world. NYC is an extreme, potentially going a little too far, example of this. So yeah, there are many reasons why great chefs can become not so great chefs after moving somewhere else, at least in a restaurant setting. The top chefs will probably be fine since they will get the cream of the crop and fly in ingredients and workers. But it’s the middle to top-middle layer where these factors show up the most.