From a thread on the New York Board discussing a particular new restaurant:



I don't understand why people resist the idea that cuisine can get dated.

It seems strange to claim that cuisine, alone out of all areas of human endeavor, is immune to fashion.

Styles of architecture can get dated. Styles of visual arts can get dated. Styles of theatrical and opera production can get dated.

But cuisine can't?

I don't care what they say, fennel is timeless,

One difference is that food is consumed whereas old buildings are not. We don't need any new gothic buildings to appreciate the style. But if people stopped making quenelles de brochet we wouldn't know how good they are.

I was thinking about that distinction. It's true, of course.

But the fact is that the level of appreciation for someting like quenelles de brochet will vary during different periods -- just like the level of appreciation of Gothic architecture.

There was a time in the late 19th Century when classical music listeners didn't like Mozart much. For most of the 20th Century, continuing on into now, he was considered supreme. Notwithstanding changes in performance practice, the music remained the same.

As Dr. J. says. New is not necessarily better. Sure, there is trendy food - and there is cuisine that transcends all of that. Panna cotta isn't less tasty because somebody down the road puts squid testicle foam on toast points. If all you care about it what's trendy in food, you'll be missing out on yummy, well-prepared classic stuff.

But even among classic stuff, different classics will be appreciated more or less at different times.

It's not like there's some static conception of what's good. There was a time when early Renaissance painters were patronized as "primitives". Now, most people consider them giants of Western art. Who knows what the consensus will be 75 years from now?

Also, for all that people abjure newer things as "trendy", in food as in art, I would say that if you don't engage with what's current, you're not really experiencing the form itself. You're only bathing in the comfortable.

I mean, so-called classical music fans who only listen to Brahms. As far as I'm concerned, they don't even like music. They just want to take milk baths.

To whoever is claiming fashion and technology are not changing food very rapidly, I propose taking a look at the Time Life Foods of The World series.

Gastronomic pretence dates. Food doesn't.

If there were anything to the food/art analogy, you might have a point, but there isn't so you don't.

True, which is why nobody should be putting people down for getting excited about a combination that is new to them but is passe to the trendy.

I need to get up to Canada ASAP.

Are you running towards or away from the squid testicle foam?

One of the functions of cuisine, like any other cultural product, is to articulate social differences.
As cultural trends get diffused broadly through the culture, there will be a demand for innovations so that people can express
the fact that they are, say, elite well-educated urbanites. Restaurateurs are clearly going to meet that demand.

The old trends will thus be perceived as dated, as they no longer fulfill their previous function.

<trendoid>
Oh, but squid testicle foam on toast points is SO last month!
</trendoid>

Restaurant food is not the same as food. Much of what is served (and therefore swallowed by the blogging masses as being fashionable) is the result of technological advances that have little to do with flavor and much to do with mass production, advance preparation, reduction of labor, reduction of outliers, regulation, economics, changes in perception of what is (un)healthy food, and even changes in dress code.

I actually agree with you about that.

There is, however, a lot to the food/architecture analogy, I think.

Two ways to enhance the discussion would be for an Admin to insert a question mark in the thread title :pedant: and to make it clear that the discussion is - I think - not about food so much as about cuisine (or dishes, if you prefer). In other words, the way food is prepared and presented.

Also, in order to make sense, the question has to be about the dining public's reaction to the way food is prepared and presented.

Can dishes become dated in this sense?

Of course they bleeding well can. Do I have to get out my Vincent Price book of menus again?

You needn't stoop to the populist, the food in the Marco Pierre White video that someone posted also looked dated. However, I think it's more to do with presentation than substance.

As the initiator of this thread:

1. I wanted to use "cuisine" instead of "food," but then at the last minute changed because I thought it sounded pretentious. But Wilfrid of course is right that "cuisine" is what I meant.

2. When the the thread was posted after I submitted it, I was as surprised as anyone else to see that I had forgotten to type in the question mark.

Looks like this guy is dating some food.

You are assuming that Vincent Price's food was ever anything other than bad.

Without wishing to complicate the issue unduly: while cuisine becoming dated is inevitable, my long-standing complaint is that there are many features of classic cuisine which could usefully be revived in a modern idiom, if only chefs had the patience, the time and the technique.

I'll throw out one example of this being done successfully: Kreuther's squab-foie croustillant at Atelier - classic in conception, contemporary in execution.

ETA: The one thing I have been pleased to see over the past ten years is a return to the sheer variety of main ingredients one sees on old menus. A decade ago, I constantly griped that the average New York fine dining menu gave you a choice of beef, chicken, lobster, tuna and some white fish. This has changed, for the better (although few realize that scattering menus with sweetbreads and brains and cockscombs is a reversion to how upscale dining used to be).

It's a collection of menus from restaurants once regarded as the finest in the world. La Pyramide, and so on.

From 1971 - Fonduloha

But a couple of examples (that I've posted before) from people who certainly could cook.

From Mossiman's A New Style of Cooking (a Sainsbury Cookbook so possibly dumbed down).


From Nico's My Gastronomy.

I love Nico's book, and the pictures.

Ah, I'm curious now. Do the combinations in each dish seem weird or the preparation?

That's an example of food that's meant to be novel (and sophisticated). But it was always shit. However, the food in Elizabeth David's books of the same period is generally wonderful.

I chose the most ostentatious presentation.

I didn't know that ostentatious meant the same thing as phallic.

incidentally i have two Olney books on the desk - Simple French and Provence (this one has great photos). Nothing looks or sounds outdated.

right but in the sense of this thread neither Olney nor David are "Cuisine" in fact they are sort of the opposite

Jay Cheshes's TONY review of the New York outpost of Govind Armstrong's Table 8 seems pertinent here.

For the little it's worth, I think this is an extremely astute remark.

Depends on the phallus.

There was a time not long ago when La Cote Basque was a top NY restaurant, and Jean-Jacques Rachou was considered one of the best chefs in NY.

1. True, but at the time at least some people thought it was good. It's an obvious joke today.

2. I'll use any pretext to post a picture that awful.

I wonder if anyone really did. My mother would occasionally make "exotic" things (melon with creme de menthe springs to mind) for special occasions but not even she pretended they tasted good. "A bit disappointing" was her usual reaction.

I don't think that's true.

For example, every neighborhood restaurant that tries hard can serve you a falling-off-the-bone soft but not overcooked piece of meat with perfectly crispy skin these days, and do so 200 times a night without fail. That is a substantial difference in cuisine (even if it were always the case that a few experts could serve you such a dish at a very high price point)

There are other, more subtle changes that are substantial:



And this is the peak of nyc gastronomy, 1998 (not that those aren't delicious dishes, but who would serve them to you today? maybe Atelier de JR would serve a shot glass for the same price...

It's worth noting that the examples that people are giving are from NY and London, rather than from say,
anywhere in Italy.

In terms of dated cuisine? I think thats sample bias more then anything else. I have some 60's French cookbooks at home and I assure you they are plenty dated.

ETA: at the risk of a disasterous derail....Italy has always been a cooking rather then cuisine country.

Silver Spoon is horrible!

I did say Italy not France. French "cuisine", by which I guess we mean haute cuisine and the various strands of nouvelle cuisine which followed have certainly changed radically over the last 50 years.

OK, the Betty Crocker recipe was a bit of a reach but here's a menu from the Copacabana night club from 1973. This was mainstream restaurant food. It's like a visit to another world.

The Mr still has a few cookbooks from his days as a culinary student in France. They look positively ancient.

I was putting off saying that in hopes that you were gonna.

The quality of a cuisine or gastronomic movement that finds previous cuisines or gastronomic movements to be dated is the defining quality of a cuisine or gastronomic movement that will eventually become dated itself.

Saying that something is 'modern' today is that same as saying something is 'so 2010' in twenty years time.

If the kind of cooking that becomes dated has an analogue at all, surely it must be the fashion industry.

True, but it is very difficult to find clothes for sale that were not impacted by the fashion industry when they were produced.

sure but how does that contradict what is being said here?