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Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

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Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#111

Post by jrumbut »

pottertheotter wrote: post #79
tomcam wrote: post #3

Went to Paris and dined at a number of Michelin-starred places, including Le Cinq. The food was fine, but... I didn't get it! I think there is a culinary language that I understand as little as a typical Michelin-starred chef would be able to evaluate a tightly-written C program. On the other hand I was lucky enough to dine at Poppy Seattle every year of its existence and felt their completely original approach to th…

I consider myself quite the foodie and have eaten at numerous Michelin star restaurants, but I don't really care for them much anymore. However, I'll point out one exception. I ate at CORE by Clare Smyth* in London a couple years ago and it is my favorite meal I've ever had. It was too new to be in the Michelin Guide, but now has 3 stars. What made this experience different was that the food was accessible. It was im…

It's important to distinguish restaurants that are good because they provide novelty and those that are good because they make the best darn chicken parm you've ever had.

I find a lot of reviews don't do a good job making this distinction, especially for less familiar cuisines.

So I'm happy to hear your review of Core, if I am ever in the area I'll have to check it out.

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#112

Post by wenc »

zarzavat wrote: post #43
OJFord wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err, no? We may have an unexpected (to me) dialect barrier. To the best of my knowledge, McDonalds serves primarily burgers (is a burger what you're calling a sandwich?), Starbucks serves (coffee aside) mostly sandwiches, and also salads and stuff. (It is about ten and three years since I've been to one, respectively, but I doubt that much has changed!)

To be fair, McDonalds does call their burgers "sandwiches", I suspect some marketing person thought that "sandwich" sounded healthier than "burger".

Not to split hairs, but I believe there is a distinct difference between a burger and sandwich -- and it's not a dialectal one. A burger always has a patty (which isn't just meat, but a piece of flattened ground up meat) whereas a sandwich does not. The burger patty is what makes a burger a burger and not a sandwich.

That's why you'll hear the term chicken sandwiches (because they don't contain patties), but you'll never hear burgers ever being called "beef" sandwiches. (Beef sandwiches exist -- like roast beef sandwiches, beef-on-weck, Italian beef, pastrami sandwiches, etc. -- these contain forms of beef that are not burger patties). Beef burgers and beef sandwiches are different things.

Similarly, chicken sandwiches ≠ chicken burgers. They're different things. The latter always has a (chicken) patty. The former almost always doesn't.

McDonald's and most other fast-food places are actually pretty consistent with their burger vs sandwich terminology and don't really mix them up.

https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/full-menu/burgers.html

https://www.bk.com/menu

https://www.chick-fil-a.com/menu

Source: paid my dues and eaten too many burgers and sandwiches to gain this useless knowledge.

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#113

Post by kragen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #93
kragen wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably so, yes, and it wouldn't be hard to imagine cases where the numbers shift around a lot, but the post I was replying to assigned a fixed 1-10 number to each site.

You're still making some very rigid assumptions about what kinds of things a scale can mean. I'd be more likely to judge restaurant ratings in terms of how often you'd like to eat at a given restaurant, not in terms of whether 50 meals at one restaurant is better in some sense than 12 meals at another restaurant. You can only ever eat one meal at a time.

Well, it's at least reasonable to ask whether you'd be willing to give up the possibility of ever again eating at the Cheesecake Factory in exchange for eating at Poppy once, even if it's a fairly speculative question—nobody is likely to face such a choice (unless the chef at Poppy wants to kill them, in which case other considerations likely outweigh the Cheesecake Factory). Answers "yes", "no", and "maybe" are all plausible, and they provide a clearer explanation of someone's preferences than just a 1-to-10 scale. You can easily imagine two people who both rated CF 3 and P 10 one of whom says "yes" and the other "no", but who just have very different relationships to food.

As for frequency, I think that might have more to do with variety and familiarity than quality. Surely, even if you agree that Tim Horton and McDonalds have equally terrible food and you hate it, you'd be more willing to be condemned to eat, each day at your choice that day of either of the two, than to be condemned to eat every day at just one of them, chosen today for all time. But that clearly doesn't mean that the union of Tim Horton and McDonalds has food that is less terrible than either of the two, which would be contradictory.

(You could of course have a scale of restaurant variety rather than quality, and in that case surely a PizzaHutTacoBell would rate higher than either a PizzaHut or a Taco Bell. But that's surely not the kind of rating we're talking about here—is it?)

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#114

Post by kragen »

wenc wrote: post #112
zarzavat wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, McDonalds does call their burgers "sandwiches", I suspect some marketing person thought that "sandwich" sounded healthier than "burger".

Not to split hairs, but I believe there is a distinct difference between a burger and sandwich -- and it's not a dialectal one. A burger always has a patty (which isn't just meat, but a piece of flattened ground up meat) whereas a sandwich does not. The burger patty is what makes a burger a burger and not a sandwich. That's why you'll hear the term chicken sandwiches (because they don't contain patties), but you'll n…

It sounds like your concept of "sandwich" is ontologically incoherent. What kinds of generalizations apply to all or most sandwiches but not to a patty between slices of bread? We have "sandwiches don't contain patties", of course; but is there anything else? It sounds sort of like defining "Indian" to mean anyone from India who isn't from Goa, "British" to mean anyone from Great Britain who isn't from Cornwall, or "murder" to mean any event of one person killing another except when the first person is named Derek.

Such ontologically incoherent definitions are obstacles to clear reasoning (though less seriously than eargrayish definitions like defining "murder" to mean either one person killing another or stepping on the shadow of the King). Is there a reason your proposed definition of "sandwich" is not among them?

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#115

Post by wodenokoto »

kragen wrote: post #18
tomcam wrote: post #3

Went to Paris and dined at a number of Michelin-starred places, including Le Cinq. The food was fine, but... I didn't get it! I think there is a culinary language that I understand as little as a typical Michelin-starred chef would be able to evaluate a tightly-written C program. On the other hand I was lucky enough to dine at Poppy Seattle every year of its existence and felt their completely original approach to th…

I think there's a significant question about the linearity of the scale. Is this quadratic, linear, logarithmic, exponential? If quadratic, then the Cheesecake Factory experience gives you 9 "utils" and Poppy gives you 100 utils. You'd rather eat at Poppy once a month than Cheesecake Factory 11 times a month, but you'd rather eat at Cheesecake factory 12 times a month than either. (If 12 times a month is too much, sw…

I think because cheesecake factory is lowly rated, you'd rather eat there once a month, than twice ...

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#116

Post by thaumasiotes »

kragen wrote: post #113
thaumasiotes wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still making some very rigid assumptions about what kinds of things a scale can mean. I'd be more likely to judge restaurant ratings in terms of how often you'd like to eat at a given restaurant, not in terms of whether 50 meals at one restaurant is better in some sense than 12 meals at another restaurant. You can only ever eat one meal at a time.

Well, it's at least reasonable to ask whether you'd be willing to give up the possibility of ever again eating at the Cheesecake Factory in exchange for eating at Poppy once, even if it's a fairly speculative question—nobody is likely to face such a choice (unless the chef at Poppy wants to kill them, in which case other considerations likely outweigh the Cheesecake Factory). Answers "yes", "no", and "maybe" are all…

> Surely, even if you agree that Tim Horton and McDonalds have equally terrible food and you hate it, you'd be more willing to be condemned to eat, each day at your choice that day of either of the two, than to be condemned to eat every day at just one of them, chosen today for all time. But that clearly doesn't mean that the union of Tim Horton and McDonalds has food that is less terrible than either of the two, which would be contradictory.

> (You could of course have a scale of restaurant variety rather than quality, and in that case surely a PizzaHutTacoBell would rate higher than either a PizzaHut or a Taco Bell. But that's surely not the kind of rating we're talking about here—is it?)

You seem to be making a fairly strong argument and then confidently drawing a conclusion that is the opposite of the one the argument suggests. The value of food is determined at the most fundamental, objective level by what else you've eaten recently. If you are short on something, your perception of taste will change so that the nutrient you are short on tastes better. What's the argument for variety not being a part of food quality?

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#117

Post by wenc »

kragen wrote: post #114
wenc wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to split hairs, but I believe there is a distinct difference between a burger and sandwich -- and it's not a dialectal one. A burger always has a patty (which isn't just meat, but a piece of flattened ground up meat) whereas a sandwich does not. The burger patty is what makes a burger a burger and not a sandwich. That's why you'll hear the term chicken sandwiches (because they don't contain patties), but you'll n…

It sounds like your concept of "sandwich" is ontologically incoherent. What kinds of generalizations apply to all or most sandwiches but not to a patty between slices of bread? We have "sandwiches don't contain patties", of course; but is there anything else? It sounds sort of like defining "Indian" to mean anyone from India who isn't from Goa, "British" to mean anyone from Great Britain who isn't from Cornwall, or "…

It's not a question of ontology but of convention.

Burger is a subclass of sandwich, but it's a distinct subclass that has a different name, and the superclass name is excluded.

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#118

Post by lmm »

blunte wrote: post #44

Michelin Star restaurants, in my 6 or 7 different experiences, are as much about the title as the food. Indeed the service is more formal, to the point of being a bit ridiculous in some cases. But the food itself was not so much more special than a really good unknown restaurant. It's really a bit silly, a status symbol that allows pomp and circumstance to satisfy people who need something "special" to talk about. I…

I've had great meals at places that weren't in the Guide. But I've never had a bad meal at a restaurant that was in the Guide. Given that there are far more restaurants in the world than one person could visit in a lifetime, that makes the Guide pretty useful.

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#119

Post by kragen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #116
kragen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's at least reasonable to ask whether you'd be willing to give up the possibility of ever again eating at the Cheesecake Factory in exchange for eating at Poppy once, even if it's a fairly speculative question—nobody is likely to face such a choice (unless the chef at Poppy wants to kill them, in which case other considerations likely outweigh the Cheesecake Factory). Answers "yes", "no", and "maybe" are all…

> Surely, even if you agree that Tim Horton and McDonalds have equally terrible food and you hate it, you'd be more willing to be condemned to eat, each day at your choice that day of either of the two, than to be condemned to eat every day at just one of them, chosen today for all time. But that clearly doesn't mean that the union of Tim Horton and McDonalds has food that is less terrible than either of the two, whi…

If we accept that, then as I suggested in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28613379, the whole project of rating restaurants on any kind of scale is doomed. Do you really think there's no sense in which the entire McDonalds menu is worse than a particular main course at Le Cinq? That the whole idea of Michelin stars is entirely nonsense? That food quality reduces entirely to variety?

I was attempting to separate out the "variety" aspect, which as you say cannot be evaluated in isolation and thus makes no sense to print in a guide, by proposing long time scales. Would you really argue that nothing is left once you factor out variety?

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#120

Post by kragen »

wenc wrote: post #117
kragen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your concept of "sandwich" is ontologically incoherent. What kinds of generalizations apply to all or most sandwiches but not to a patty between slices of bread? We have "sandwiches don't contain patties", of course; but is there anything else? It sounds sort of like defining "Indian" to mean anyone from India who isn't from Goa, "British" to mean anyone from Great Britain who isn't from Cornwall, or "…

It's not a question of ontology but of convention. Burger is a subclass of sandwich, but it's a distinct subclass that has a different name, and the superclass name is excluded.

Fortunately, as Wikipedia explains, most people do not share the illogical convention you are advocating, though presumably most of the people you know do.

(...please God don't let him ask me about hotdogs...)

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