Last night, The High Life and I attended a panel discussion moderated by WOR’s Michael Colameco on whether the dining scene in NY is better than ever. Panelists included the Food Maven Arthur Schwartz, NewYork Magazine’s Gael Greene who has been reviewing restaurants for longer than I’ve been alive (seriously), respected industry consultant Michael Whiteman, and my greatest living food hero, my former teacher, Jacques Pepin. Basically, Gael eats out 8 days a week and thinks this is the best the NY food scene has ever been. Schwartz thinks everything is ridiculously overpriced (e.g. the $44 lamb chop) and that NY food has lost its finesse as the younger generation has taken over the scene. Whiteman was fairly balanced and gave good insight on industry costs and practices. And Jacques was classic Jacques. Funny and thought provoking, providing several perspectives that hadn’t really occured to me. He talked about the change in the meaning of “cooking from scratch”. Back in his day, to roast a chicken was a big deal, having to pluck and eviscerate a chicken yourself and cook it in an oven with inconsistent temperature controls. These days, you can buy a skinned, boneless breast of chicken, toss it in a nonstick pan and use prewashed spinach and presliced mushrooms, and that is what’s considered cooking from scratch! He also lamented the rise of young star chefs. He thinks that the great young American talent in the kitchens of NY are fantastic for the industry and for us as diners, but completely misguides aspiring “chefs”. He says you have to be honest with yourself and decide if you want to be a chef or an actor. If you love to cook, go to cooking school, if you want to become what you see on the Food Network, go to acting school! Those who get into cooking for fortune or fame are most likely to end up disappointed with their lives. As a side effect of this trend, the talent pool for the kitchen continues to deepen but the front of the house service gets weaker because nobody aspires to be a server the way they aspire to become a chef. He attributes part of that to the change in the way restaurants serve customers. Back in the 70’s, he said no restaurant would ever have thought to serve food onto a plate and bring it out to the customer that way. No, the chef prepared the food, placed it on platters and the platters were brought to the dining room where the waiter would then assemble everything in front of the diner, transferring food from the platter to the customer’s plate. The kitchen staff only controlled the cooking, the waitstaff controlled the plating. “Today, chefs have to both cook and decorate.” He also used that platter-to-plate shift as an analogy to what he forsees for the future of molecular gastronomy (the kind of scientific cooking done by the likes of Ferran Adria). The same way that plates replaced platters as the de facto service method, he sees techniques in molecular gastronomy trickling down into mainstream cooking. Not molecular gastronomy as a preeminent method of cooking per se, but with specific advancements in food preparation techniques driven by the movement ultimately growing into the norm in kitchens everywhere over time.

It was certainly a lively and entertaining discussion, but if the audience really wanted to know how well the NY dining scene is doing, they needed only to look at themselves. As Michael Colameco put it, where else could you get 600 people to actually pay to listen to a bunch of old guys just talk about food? Even wackier, during the audience Q&A session, one lady said she’s visiting NY from Canada as she usually does twice a year, in search of specific culinary items and ingredients. She was all frustrated because she couldn’t find ground pecans anywhere. Hysterically, the panelists then proceeded to answer her question by flaming her ruthlessly. Whiteman: “You traveled from Canada to NY in search of ground pecans??” Schwartz: “Why on earth would you want to get your pecans pre-ground??” And last but not least, Jacques: “Yes, I think she can save twenty or thirty seconds this way.”