231–240 of 314 posts
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No, I'm not making that assumption, and it serves my purposes fine, thanks for your concern.
You made that assumption so explicitly that there is already another comment objecting to it: > There's nothing about a 1-10 scale that implies that every visit to the restaurant will be equally pleasurable.
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> i.e. the only "salary" is that you can add working in a 3 star restaurant to your CV. Spain has salaries? I thought that was largely a US concept.
Do you mean as in being paid a fixed sum for a given period, as opposed to by hours worked or something? No, that’s a worldwide thing, and a very old concept.
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I've been to two Michelin-starred Sushi places in Japan. I thought they were both amazing, but I realised that my parents would not have thought so. They grew up relatively poor, and still have the habit of eating at home from a rotating menu of relatively straightforward recipes. Stews, soups, that kind of thing. They've gone to restaurants maybe a few dozen times in their lives , if that. I've been to so many Sushi…
I wonder if there is an analogy here to classical music. Most lay people would probably not be able to appreciate the technique, difficult, and musicality of certain pieces, but trained ears would appreciate the fine details. As a consequence, most people prefer “easily digestible” music such as pop music rather than highly refined classical music.
I know a lot about food/cooking, and think McDonald's makes a great burger.
When I last used the Michelin guide, about ten years ago, it was a little bizarre: IIRC descriptions would give 2-3 sentences about the decor or service, a short phrase about the food, the rating, and that was it. My choice was to blindly trust the rating or to look elsewhere. I took the rating into account, but I need much more information. Is it still that way? Did I misunderstand something?
> In those days, drink and driving wasn’t a factor, so half a bottle of wine with dinner every night This surprised me a little. Was drinking and driving so much more prevalent in the past?
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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 "…
Since you mention India, would you consider curry to be a kind of soup? I believe the relationship is similar to that of burgers and sandwiches. A curry is "just" a soup with spices. But if you walked into a restaurant and ordered "soup of the day" and got a vindaloo, you might feel deceived. If the waiter assured you that a vindaloo is ontologically a soup, I doubt that would be much consolation. Sometimes in langua…
My concern with ontological coherence is perhaps better explained by Goodman's "new riddle of induction": https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/#Ob...
> In the past all observed emeralds have been green. Do those observations provide any more support for the generalization that all emeralds are green than they do for the generalization that all emeralds are grue (green if observed before now; blue if observed later); or do they provide any more support for the prediction that the next emerald observed will be green than for the prediction that the next emerald observed will be grue (i.e., blue)? Almost everyone agrees that it would be irrational to have prior probabilities that were indifferent between green and grue, and thus made predictions of greenness no more probable than predictions of grueness. But there is no generally agreed upon explanation of this constraint.
(This is somewhat mineralogically naive, because emeralds are just green beryls; a beryl that was blue would be called an "aquamarine" or "maxixe," not an "emerald," because greenness is part of the mineralogical definition of "emerald." But it's straightforward to change the riddle to refer to, for example, grass. The grass has always been grue; should we expect it to still be grue tomorrow?)
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When I was over in states I went to Taco Bell 3 times, 3 different once, every single time I regretted it having to spending 'unquality' time in the toilet. Never again.
The consistency is impressive.
(if you know what I mean)
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> The difference would be completely lost on them. I've definitely heard the life advice to avoid trying this kind of thing in case you do like it, then everything less is permanently tainted with the knowledge that it's not as good. However, western super-high-price dining tends to be one or both of "demoscene for food" or "NFTs for food" - demoscene: a series of increasingly elaborate and labor-intensive techniques…
> I've definitely heard the life advice to avoid trying this kind of thing in case you do like it, then everything less is permanently tainted with the knowledge that it's not as good. Does that actually happen though? I know a thing or two about wine and sometimes buy bottles in the 50-100 euro range, which I feel are totally worth it, but I'm still happy to drink cheap plonk with friends most of the time. This work…
It definitely also happened to me with coffee. I used to be able to drink almost any coffee straight, but over time my taste drifted towards more expensive stuff and I started adding cream and sugar to hide the taste of cheap coffee. That’s mostly thanks to all of the trendy coffee shops in San Francisco where I did meetings. So one of my small projects during covid was actually finding the cheapest bulk coffee I could drink straight. As proof that my tastes had drifted, what I settled on turned out to be a step above the cheapest cohort, but thankfully still several times cheaper than making a daily habit of single origin coffee.
Thankfully, it never happened to me with restaurants. Despite having paid hundreds of dollars for a meal on a few occasions, I haven’t lost the ability to enjoy stuff across the whole price spectrum.
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> I've definitely heard the life advice to avoid trying this kind of thing in case you do like it, then everything less is permanently tainted with the knowledge that it's not as good. Does that actually happen though? I know a thing or two about wine and sometimes buy bottles in the 50-100 euro range, which I feel are totally worth it, but I'm still happy to drink cheap plonk with friends most of the time. This work…
If you do a wine blind taste test I bet you'll discover you're throwing your money away.
I'm guessing your reply is motivated by the 2001 blind tasting where oenology students couldn't even differentiate between red and white wine [1], which is certainly an interesting bit of research, but not the kind of slam dunk you would think when you read third-hand reports about it in the media or rationalist circles.
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Considering the owners of Arzak are not in jail and that not paying your workers would be a serious violation of Spain labor laws, I am going to go on a limp and posit that what you say is probably not entirely true.
I lived in Spain for a couple of years and I was of the understanding that many bars, cafes and restaurants existed on this basis. A waiter in a restaurant I frequented regularly explained this to me as to how, despite working there for 3 years, he couldn't just go and work in the UK for a few months and come back because he could so easily be replaced. I witnessed myself, on many occasions, groups of kids coming in,…
Kids applying to be interns in not the same thing than staff being unpaid and slave labor. That put clear limits on the duration of they work and that means they have no qualification. It's just a normal internship.
Three stars restaurant tend to have many interns because they have a lot of basic prep work to do and it's a good formative experience. That's fine. That's what internships are for. Usually interns are still paid a modest sum but the hospitality industry tends to operate on thin margins so they might be uncompensated. Where I kind of agree with you is that there is a general issue with abuse of staff in the industry so they are likely not treated as well as they should. Still I would not call that slave labor.
> A waiter in a restaurant I frequented regularly explained this to me as to how, despite working there for 3 years, he couldn't just go and work in the UK for a few months and come back because he could so easily be replaced.
Being replacable is not the same as being unpaid. Spain is part of the EU so the labor law of Spain has to adhere to the EU directives on labor. That means every employee is paid at least at the national minimum salary.