Sources: Men Arrested Trying To Repaint Bedford Bike Lane
Video: Sad Subway Rant
Call to Ban Carriage Horses, Close Stable
VIDEO: Cycling Activists Repainting Bedford Ave. Bike Lane
Oh D'Oh They Didn't! TSA Posts Airport Screening Manual On Web
The New Yorker's annual food issue hits shelves today (we'll feel lucky if we get ours in the mail before Thursday). Articles include Calvin Trillin on Candians' beloved poutine, a peek inside flavor labs, Adam Gopnik on cookbooks, and John Colapinto’s "exclusive" look at the rating process of the New York Michelin guide. Apparently this is "the first time in its history" Michelin has permitted a journalist to speak with one of its anonymous inspectors. Colapinto joins an anonymous inspector for a meal at three-star Jean-Georges. It's a lonely and fattening life:
Assigned specific areas of the city to cover, Maxime, who lives in Manhattan, spends weeks riding the subway out to the farthest reaches of Queens to make her way through a selection of Thai restaurants, eating two meals a day, every day, and she typically eats alone, since talking with a spouse or friend is frowned upon... Maxime eats out more than two hundred days of the year, lunch and dinner. She eats the maximum number of courses offered—at Jean Georges, we were having three courses, plus dessert; that way, she said, “you really get to see the most food”—and she is required to eat everything on her plate. It is a regimen that calls to mind the force-feeding of the ducks that supply Vongerichten with his velvety foie gras.
Nice work if you can get it—each Michelin inspector must have a degree in hospitality, hotel management, or cooking, and make it through a rigorous application process, followed by an apprenticeship under one of the European inspectors. But it's this systematically intense approach to dining that makes critics like Frank Bruni "wonder if a certain sort of chromosomal stodginess can ever really be completely leached out of the Michelin guide and the system... They claim a lot of science to them, but is there a lot of soul to them?"
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
You think it would raise some suspicion when a solitary diner goes into a top-tier restaurant and orders as many courses as possible for themselves.
Or maybe that's how rich people normally eat.
Anonymous ?? Hardly
If you've ever seen the BBC show "The F Word" you'll know that the maitre'd's totally knows when a reviewer is coming. Everyone in the kitchen steps up their game, they customize the food for the reviewer, and everyone seated around the reviewer so the reviewer does not suspect anything.
And if you read the New Yorker article, you'll see that the Michelin inspectors are almost certainly an exception to that identification process.
Those are newspaper and magazine restaurant reviewers. Each of their columns has the reviewer's name in the byline. Not at all the same situation.
Right, because a 'reality' TV show is surely the best way to know what happens in reality.
I always thought it was named after the tires... now I know it's named after how the reviewers look like after "having" to eat all that food...
"It is a regimen that calls to mind the force-feeding of the ducks that supply Vongerichten with his velvety foie gras."
But if you were to pan sear the livers of Michelin inspectors, the flavors would range from stale truffle oil to Kimchi.
"she is required to eat everything on her plate"
Who would know if she didn't? Does Michelin have anonymous inspectors watching their anonymous inspectors? And if so, do they also have to eat everything on their plates?
with a name like Maxime, does she also comment on Yelp?
If you read the article you'll see that Maxime is not her real name. The reporter asked her name, the inspector's boss said just make one up, and Maxime is what she picked.