5 ms·

Why are all the 'good' restaurants starting to look the same?

17 points by Spellman 12y ago

woah 12y ago
Are we seeing Medium's monetization strategy come into play here?
walterbell 12y ago
Native consumer anthropology advertising, yay.
markbnj 12y ago
Perhaps for the identical reason that all articles on the internet are starting to look the same.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Decades-old cybernetics has much to offer on the wise use of feedback loops.
- stillsut 12y ago
  Brought to you by Marriott. "Stay inside your comfort zone" -Most Interesting Man in the World
- dorfsmay 12y ago
  Yes, the fact that it is on medium is rather ironic!
nosuchthing 12y ago
It's disappointing to me that restaurants always tend to serve the same tired dishes with slight variations on recipe or style. The best and most exciting food and mixes of ingredients / obscure cooking techniques seem to come from hole in the wall restaurants with chefs who just really love food and know what tools/ingredients/techniques are available to them and like a brilliant mad scientist they serve up and share their successful experiments.
- derefr 12y ago
  Basically, everyone in the world agrees on what ingredients they'd like to cook with, and how they'd like to prepare things. When you give a chef unlimited time and money to make a dish, they make mostly the same stuff, which is what we tend to call "fine cuisine." There might be variation due to local consumer tastes, but a French chef and a Japanese chef and an American chef will basically agree on, say, who makes the best beef in the world, and then will (if allowed) all import that same beef. So, you only get originality and inventiveness and "ethnic flair", under resource constraints. Every "local dish" is a local resource optimization, making food tasty using ingredients or techniques that happen to cost less to apply (or, at least, used to, traditionally) in the local area. And hole-in-the-wall restaurants, running under the heaviest resource constraints, tend to thus produce food at its "most ethnic."
  - nosuchthing 12y ago
    I don't believe this is the case. I think many restaurants want to appeal to familiarity and safety. Restaurant patrons may often want the best American/European style slab of steak with seasoning they've come to expect. It's possible to create a wide variety of sauces or crusts for a slab of steak/lamb/bird/fish but often the chef decides on something familiar tried and true. There's plenty of room to explore with side dishes, soups, salads, curries. I highly recommend the book "Modernist Cuisine". It does an amazing job of breaking down cooking methods though photography, history, and scientific explanations of the physics of heat distribution from various sources and equipment. [1] [1] http://modernistcuisine.com/ http://modernistcuisine.com/
  - Mikeb85 12y ago
    While I agree that constraints can lead to creativity, there's not nearly as much 'consensus' when it comes to cooking as you think. Someone from France and someone from India will have very different ideas on how to cook something, even if they both live in Canada and have the same ingredients and cooking apparatus.
    - derefr 12y ago
cthalupa 12y ago
What a weird article. Modern culinary arts are at their most inventive right now, with boundaries constantly being pushed, with the trickle down reaching more and more places due to globalization, resulting in more and more people being able to have exciting dishes at affordable prices. At the same time, more and more attention is being paid to preserve authentic food, while elevating it to more haute cuisine levels. The author claims they're not trying to begrudge locals good food, but basically the entire article reads "I want to travel to places and have TRADITIONAL!!! cuisine, not this fancy bullshit!" There's never been a better time to be alive for foodies and even food tourists than now.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > TRADITIONAL!!! cuisine Which is no more than a few decades old at most, a century at the outside. People live, people die, and new people do the "same" food differently; people move, new people come, and there's a new influence in both locations. A static view of tradition is a Victorian invention, a reaction to the increasing pace of industrialization, and nothing more than nostalgia. Mix that with the idiotic notion that the Medieval period was a stagnant "dark age" and you have the modern notion of "traditional" "organic" food which was the same for ever until Evil Modernity Literally GMO Monsatan moved in and made a Mordor out of our little Shire.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >A static view of tradition is a Victorian invention, a reaction to the increasing pace of industrialization You understand that those two notions are contradictory, right? If industrialization "increased the pace", then indeed "static tradition" was what existed before it, as food and other aspects of tradition changed with a much slower pace -- even if not totally static (which is a strawman anyway, no Victorian thought food at 20 A.D was exactly the same as food in 1700 A.D)
erdle 12y ago
Well that was a bait and switch...
Mikeb85 12y ago
Everything around the world shows influence from everywhere else in the world. As people travel back and forth, they bring ideas back and forth, until eventually a sort of equilibrium is reached. As for restaurants, I'm not sure I agree entirely. A few generations ago, every 'top' restaurant was a French restaurant. Serving the same classic dishes. Now you have places serving 'Nordic Cuisine' (Noma, Faviken), Spanish cuisine has had a resurgence in a major way (Arzak, Etxebarri), South American cuisine is becoming recognized at the highest levels (D.O.M., Central), as is Asian cuisine (too many to list), there's 'avant garde' (El Bulli and the Adria brothers' other ventures, Alinea), and then you've got the chefs who break all the rules and just create whatever they want at the time (Pierre Gagnaire comes to mind). Not to mention the trends of gastronomic bistros, brasseries and pubs, cheap tasting menus, haute fast food and street food, etc... While I think it's somewhat true that the 'style' of a restaurant is becoming less location specific, I think there's more variety and innovation than ever before, more restaurants in general than ever before, and I would argue that food itself is getting more interesting. As for the article, it seems more like the writer just doesn't like the fact that Buenos Aires isn't as they remember it (almost a colonialist attitude IMO, that Buenos Aires should stand still for them). However this attitude also ignores history - people have always migrated, adopted new ideas, cultures, cuisines, etc... 'Traditional' European ingredients like the Potato and Tomato, for instance, both came from the New World. Nothing stands still.

17 points by Spellman 12y ago

woah 12y ago

Are we seeing Medium's monetization strategy come into play here?

walterbell 12y ago

Native consumer anthropology advertising, yay.

markbnj 12y ago

Perhaps for the identical reason that all articles on the internet are starting to look the same.

walterbell 12y ago
Decades-old cybernetics has much to offer on the wise use of feedback loops.
stillsut 12y ago
Brought to you by Marriott. "Stay inside your comfort zone" -Most Interesting Man in the World
dorfsmay 12y ago
Yes, the fact that it is on medium is rather ironic!

nosuchthing 12y ago

It's disappointing to me that restaurants always tend to serve the same tired dishes with slight variations on recipe or style. The best and most exciting food and mixes of ingredients / obscure cooking techniques seem to come from hole in the wall restaurants with chefs who just really love food and know what tools/ingredients/techniques are available to them and like a brilliant mad scientist they serve up and share their successful experiments.

derefr 12y ago
Basically, everyone in the world agrees on what ingredients they'd like to cook with, and how they'd like to prepare things. When you give a chef unlimited time and money to make a dish, they make mostly the same stuff, which is what we tend to call "fine cuisine." There might be variation due to local consumer tastes, but a French chef and a Japanese chef and an American chef will basically agree on, say, who makes the best beef in the world, and then will (if allowed) all import that same beef. So, you only get originality and inventiveness and "ethnic flair", under resource constraints. Every "local dish" is a local resource optimization, making food tasty using ingredients or techniques that happen to cost less to apply (or, at least, used to, traditionally) in the local area. And hole-in-the-wall restaurants, running under the heaviest resource constraints, tend to thus produce food at its "most ethnic."
- nosuchthing 12y ago
  I don't believe this is the case. I think many restaurants want to appeal to familiarity and safety. Restaurant patrons may often want the best American/European style slab of steak with seasoning they've come to expect. It's possible to create a wide variety of sauces or crusts for a slab of steak/lamb/bird/fish but often the chef decides on something familiar tried and true. There's plenty of room to explore with side dishes, soups, salads, curries. I highly recommend the book "Modernist Cuisine". It does an amazing job of breaking down cooking methods though photography, history, and scientific explanations of the physics of heat distribution from various sources and equipment. [1] [1] http://modernistcuisine.com/ http://modernistcuisine.com/
- Mikeb85 12y ago
  While I agree that constraints can lead to creativity, there's not nearly as much 'consensus' when it comes to cooking as you think. Someone from France and someone from India will have very different ideas on how to cook something, even if they both live in Canada and have the same ingredients and cooking apparatus.
  - derefr 12y ago

cthalupa 12y ago

What a weird article. Modern culinary arts are at their most inventive right now, with boundaries constantly being pushed, with the trickle down reaching more and more places due to globalization, resulting in more and more people being able to have exciting dishes at affordable prices. At the same time, more and more attention is being paid to preserve authentic food, while elevating it to more haute cuisine levels. The author claims they're not trying to begrudge locals good food, but basically the entire article reads "I want to travel to places and have TRADITIONAL!!! cuisine, not this fancy bullshit!" There's never been a better time to be alive for foodies and even food tourists than now.

cbd1984 12y ago
> TRADITIONAL!!! cuisine Which is no more than a few decades old at most, a century at the outside. People live, people die, and new people do the "same" food differently; people move, new people come, and there's a new influence in both locations. A static view of tradition is a Victorian invention, a reaction to the increasing pace of industrialization, and nothing more than nostalgia. Mix that with the idiotic notion that the Medieval period was a stagnant "dark age" and you have the modern notion of "traditional" "organic" food which was the same for ever until Evil Modernity Literally GMO Monsatan moved in and made a Mordor out of our little Shire.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >A static view of tradition is a Victorian invention, a reaction to the increasing pace of industrialization You understand that those two notions are contradictory, right? If industrialization "increased the pace", then indeed "static tradition" was what existed before it, as food and other aspects of tradition changed with a much slower pace -- even if not totally static (which is a strawman anyway, no Victorian thought food at 20 A.D was exactly the same as food in 1700 A.D)

erdle 12y ago

Well that was a bait and switch...

Mikeb85 12y ago

Everything around the world shows influence from everywhere else in the world. As people travel back and forth, they bring ideas back and forth, until eventually a sort of equilibrium is reached. As for restaurants, I'm not sure I agree entirely. A few generations ago, every 'top' restaurant was a French restaurant. Serving the same classic dishes. Now you have places serving 'Nordic Cuisine' (Noma, Faviken), Spanish cuisine has had a resurgence in a major way (Arzak, Etxebarri), South American cuisine is becoming recognized at the highest levels (D.O.M., Central), as is Asian cuisine (too many to list), there's 'avant garde' (El Bulli and the Adria brothers' other ventures, Alinea), and then you've got the chefs who break all the rules and just create whatever they want at the time (Pierre Gagnaire comes to mind). Not to mention the trends of gastronomic bistros, brasseries and pubs, cheap tasting menus, haute fast food and street food, etc... While I think it's somewhat true that the 'style' of a restaurant is becoming less location specific, I think there's more variety and innovation than ever before, more restaurants in general than ever before, and I would argue that food itself is getting more interesting. As for the article, it seems more like the writer just doesn't like the fact that Buenos Aires isn't as they remember it (almost a colonialist attitude IMO, that Buenos Aires should stand still for them). However this attitude also ignores history - people have always migrated, adopted new ideas, cultures, cuisines, etc... 'Traditional' European ingredients like the Potato and Tomato, for instance, both came from the New World. Nothing stands still.