Food High End Restaurants and Small Portions

I hate that sushi bars serve only two pieces of nigiri per plate.

And why are uramaki (my favourite) rolls almost completely absent from their conveyor belts?!

 

I never have tried Sushi before. Not even sure where that is served in this area.

 

You know, that would be a great thread in itself. What is a high end restaurant. Might get around to making that thread.

 

A builder I was working for wanted - no, was DESPERATE - for me to stay late one night and finish a job he stupidly told the client would be ready
the next day. The deal was he would buy me Sushi for dinner. I ordered... and ordered ...and ordered. I gorged myself like a pig at a trough and
when he got the bill he nearly had a heart attack. Hee hee. Bet he wont do that again.

 

The whole purpose is not to become stuffed to the gills, but to understand the subtlies of flavor combinations. So it's more about the experience, than anything else. It is sort of like minimal art, which my uncle told me is about how little things operate and interact together, quite swimmingly. Too many flavors lead to competition in a dish. Even when I was in France, years ago, my house mum taught me that certain flavors do not belong together. Iceberg, a useless and nutrition-free green, has now found a place in culinary life with its marriage to blue cheese. The crispy cool teamed with a creamy, tarty mold makes for a great combo in contrasts. So what if you have to pay $50 for a slice of nothing.

 

You mean all those salads I've been eating have been for naught?
Do they even count for roughage?

 

So I'd have to eat a whole lot more than I do to get any usefulness from it.

What lettuces do y'all recommend for salads. We sometimes get those mixed greens in a bag salads. Also, like to get baby spinach and mix in with the salad.

 

Just not ICEBERG (HA,.....WITH BLUE CHEESE DRESSING)

 

iceberg does serve the purpose of unclogging some pipes.

 

Fremen, as a rule of thumb, the darker the green, the better it is.

 

Thanks. I'll remember that.

I guess the baby spinach helped out in the iceberg lettuce salad, at least.

 

Spinach is a staple at my house, it's so easy to use in pretty much any recipe.

 

I wouldnt necessarily agree with that. There are a couple of restaurants that have multiple locations that are pretty high end. Its mainly in the steak house area. Places like the Capital Grille, Mortons, or the Palm don't have the most innovative food, but it is high quality and it is expensive. I would classify these places as high end.

 

When you're so rich that your sphincter is tighter than a drum, small portions are of the utmost importance.

 

LOVE THIS.
Plus, Gorden Ramsay is a goddamn wanker that cries in the corner when yelled at. Him and Rachel Ray should carpool off a cliff together.

Also, it seems lately that restaurants are using a LOT more salt....a few hours after eating I am "dying" for water...

 

you can think about this sociologically---(the late french sociologist) pierre bourdieu's book distinction is really fun (and a bit disconcerting) on this--small portions can be connected to a sense of distance from necessity. it's a socio-economic class position thing, a kind of unconsciously replicated orientation that folk carry across subsequent re-positionings...

anyway, to explain: for bourdieu, working-class folk in the main value quantity and whether a dish is filling or not above other attributes when it comes to evaluating food. if you equate that with economic correlates, for example (and this is but one option) and assume wage-labor as a base line (remember back in the day when industrial diversity was circumscribed by national boundaries?) so a certain degree of economic pressure, then this relation to food kinda follows. the relation would be transmitted in a sense--by transmitted i mean replicated through one's family, across one's upbringing, so assimilated by kids from their parents through routine exposure. in bourdieu-speak, it would form an aspect of habitus, which is a term that refers to such unconsciously replicated traces of class background in one's aesthetic preferences.

the flip of this is that distance from necessity is a marker of socio-economic status that is also replicated through these un-or-semi-conscious dispositions. if i'm being clear enough, you can probably put this together from here: small portions, attention to presentation move the experience away from the criteria of plenty and filling. depending on one's own dispositions, this can be seen as normal or as a violation of rules, even as you might not be able to quite figure out what rules or where they come from.

curiously enough, bourdieu (and others of this school) align these sorts of relations to food with others---like a preference for representational art as over against a tolerance for abstraction for example. i mention this partly because i think it interesting and partly because, in my little world, it helps make more obvious what this notion of socio-economic status as tied to a sense of distance from necessity means.

(how this alignment of preferences in quite different areas would work leans on the notion of habitus and its relation to field, so embodied and objectified history, in his terminology--but for that, you can read the book. i find it entertaining. but i am a dork.)

thing that's particularly french (and 1970s) about bourdieu lay in the usage of class as a main axis for orienting this sort of analysis. you can map it onto american comportments/preferences, but it takes a bit more work intellectually than you might think reading distinction (were you to do such a thing) primarily as a function of the tone in the writing, which presents things as simply the case universally. there's a preface tacked on to the english translation that talks about "field effect" to indicate these matters, and it's useful.

the main difference, really, is that the general american ideology of class would have you believe that class distinctions are somehow minimal in the u.s. of a.---which is hilarious...but, at the same time, this ideology of class does have effects on the ways in which the kind of machinery outlined in distinction might work in an american context. it'd be less obvious and the machinery/social order described by it less pyramidal, really.

at the same time, reading the book can make you really really self-conscious about a lot of preferences you hold.

but i digress.