

Why are all the 'good' restaurants starting to look the same? - Spellman
https://medium.com/gone/why-are-all-good-restaurants-around-the-world-starting-to-look-the-same-d03f454c137d

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cthalupa
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
> 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
> _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)

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Mikeb85
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.

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

~~~
stillsut
Brought to you by Marriott. "Stay inside your comfort zone" -Most Interesting
Man in the World

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

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walterbell
Native consumer anthropology advertising, yay.

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nosuchthing
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
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."

~~~
Mikeb85
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
Note that I'm mostly talking about the five-star chefs who do global
competitions, as far as "cooking alike" goes. Like the best singers have a
"vocal range" so wide that it overlaps with a lot of the other best singers,
the best chefs have a "culinary range" so wide that it overlaps with a lot of
the other best chefs. Basically, a thousand-dollar meal in America doesn't
look a lot different than a thousand-dollar meal in Pakistan or one in Norway,
because if you're paying a thousand dollars for your meal, you're getting a
chef who could make _anything_ , and who has ordered their ingredients from
_everywhere_.

That doesn't seem to be a very widely-applicable point, I admit. But my real
argument is that this a point on a spectrum. Hole-in-the-wall short-order
cooks are on one end, inventing new ethnic foods out of necessity. "Globally-
ranked" chefs are on the other end, synthesizing together every style in the
world and thus ending up with their own "cosmopolitan fusion cuisine" culture
that doesn't really _belong_ anywhere except within the space of a fancy
lounge.

 _Between_ those points, most real chefs lie—not quite constrained to only
cook with what's grown locally, but not quite free enough to bring together
fresh ingredients from opposite ends of the earth on a whim. Western "home
cooking" is precisely in the middle, in fact: a cuisine that sits on one end
of the incentive-structure of the global shipping industry, cooking with
whatever can cheaply be brought from wherever it was grown to a local chain
grocery store.

~~~
Mikeb85
Still though, just thinking back to the cuisine in my wife's home country (a
thoroughly 3rd world country), even with something as basic as a fish you get
from a fisherman on the road, we'd eat fried fish, fish curry, fish stew, fish
sautéed with various starchy vegetables or greens then eaten with flatbread or
rice, and so on...

Even in a culture where the only cooking implement is a fire in the backyard
(and a clay oven similar to a tandoor), all the vegetables come from no
further than the next village over, and starchy vegetables are dug up from
behind the house, the variety was staggering.

Fusion cuisine exists everywhere BTW. African cuisine has Arab and Indian
influence, Caribbean cuisine has African, Indian and Amerindian influence,
Asian food has Western and Indian influence, and the various Asian cuisines
all borrow from one another.

Heck a great example of fusion cuisine is the Kebab - seen from Germany to
Turkey to Iran, Pakistan, all the way to Vietnam and elsewhere. All have
regional variations, yet all can trace some sort of middle-eastern (likely
Iranian) origin.

The fusing of cuisines has happened since the beginning of time, ever since
nomads encountered agriculturalists, since Egyptians traded with Sumerians,
since Greeks journeyed to Babylon and India, when merchants travelled along
the silk road (all Western cuisines use Black Pepper, which is certainly not
indigenous to Europe), etc...

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erdle
Well that was a bait and switch...

