On the road again: Las Vegas, day 4

Almost all of last night went to a fabulous dinner at Robuchon, one of America's few Michelin three-star restaurants and a bastion of French cuisine in the U.S. We opted, of course, for the largest menu, the sixteen-course Menu Degustation, and then we added a seventeenth course, a selection from the spectacular cheese trolley. One of the treats of this restaurant is its amazing bread cart, which offers over a dozen types of bread that they bake daily. We sampled entirely too many of them.

The result was a delicious meal in which we hit the food wall; we ran out of room and waddled out of the place like over-stuffed penguins.

After entirely too little sleep--the meal took nearly five hours--I arose at a time I frequently go to sleep, showered, and headed for the airport. The flights have been on time, however, and I'm in first class and enjoying bandwidth, so I cannot complain at all.

I'm posting now because I'll go straight from the airport to Scott's concert and from there to the usual whirlwind of settling in work at home.

Another trip to Las Vegas has passed without poker; I really must fix that!

On the road again: Las Vegas, day 3

I should probably be embarrassed that I'm in Las Vegas and doing little more than whiling away the day resting, but I'm not; I need the rest.

I should confess that I am also doing some research for the special project I'm not willing to announce yet. That is taking some time. More on it in a few months.

Tonight's dinner promises to be quite lovely, a meal at Robuchon, but I'll report on it tomorrow.

Back to the small tasks and resting.

Great service is hard

I ate at many fine restaurants while in Austin and Boston. Though in most of them the food was very good but never great, many clearly aspired to greatness. They had focused on making inventive, interesting menus and on executing them as well as they could. Even when their ambition outstripped their ability, the focus was clear. To be a truly great restaurant, though, requires more than just superb food; a topnotch place must also provide great service.

In all of the restaurants I tried, the service was not up to the food.

Given their lofty goals, I couldn't help but wondering why that was the case. Restaurant service is something amenable to rules and practice. When and how to clear, when and how to serve, monitoring the guests to make sure they don't lack for water, and so on--all of these problems are small. So, why don't more places offer great service?

The answer is obvious: Great service is hard.

For one thing, it requires an obsessive focus on the customer, not on yourself. You may not want to pour water right then, but if a glass is approaching empty, you need to do it. You might want to serve the next course, but if a guest just left for the restroom, you must hold it--maybe even remake it so it arrives at the table as it should. To be a great server, you have to put the wishes of your customers ahead of your own over and over and over again. That alone is very hard.

It's even harder than it should be, however, because most restaurants don't spend enough on service. If you give a server too many tables to cover, he or she is doomed to fail. Similarly, if no one has trained you on serving on the left and taking from the right, then no one should expect you to have that data. And, of course, there's the money factor: Great servers should make livings commensurate with their skill. If that means raising the prices a bit, so be it.

Finally, great service demands a very difficult level of subjugation of your own concerns. When you deliver a perfectly cooked medium-rare steak to the man who explicitly ordered it that way, and he then declares in a loud voice that he wanted it cooked brown all the way through (an abomination, by the way), you have to take it back--even though neither you nor the kitchen did anything wrong. Dealing with difficult customers is part of the job. (I have to say that I try very, very hard never to be such a customer.)

It's no surprise, then, that great service is rare. When you find it, however, it is a joy to behold and to experience. Dine at The French Laundry or Joel Robuchon, to name but two pinnacles of service, and you will understand how good service can be. If, however, you're eating at a less lofty place and the service lags the food, try to be understanding; the odds are that the servers are understaffed, undertrained, underpaid, and doing the best they can.

And always, always, tip a full twenty percent (or more) unless you have a very specific reason for tipping less--and even then, be sure the problem you have is with the servers and not anyone else.

On insanely expensive meals

Regular readers will note that I write frequently about food, particularly about insanely expensive restaurant meals. Ticia asked recently how I got into the hobby of "collecting restaurants," as I often put it, and suggested that others might want to know. So, I'll do my best to explain.

I didn't grow up with fancy food; far from it. I was a very shy and conservative diner for quite some years. Over time, though, business travel took me to cities with restaurants far better than I had ever sampled before, so my palate grew both more discriminating and more adventurous.

A group of us began eating out most Saturday nights and trying different local places, and that helped me expand my dining horizons.

What really pushed me over the edge, though, was a meal at Minibar in Cafe Atlantico many years ago. Minibar, for those who don't know it, is a six-seat restaurant-within-a-restaurant that sits on the highest level of Jose Andres' Cafe Atlantico. Andres worked at Ferran Adria's El Bulli in Spain, and while there he learned a great deal about molecular gastronomy. The meal we enjoyed on that first trip (we've since gone a second time) involved many of Adria's now widely known techniques, including caviar made from the essence of peas, various deconstructed classic dishes, and so on.

The presentations were like nothing I'd ever seen--and they were all delicious and whimsical and fun. Like many types of literature, and like SF in particular, these dishes were more than food, they were the works of artists in conversation with their field's past and contemporary artists. I know that sounds pretentious, but it's true; a chef who deconstructs a classic dish, such as Caesar salad, into a new but tasty concoction that captures the essence of the classic in a new way is both commenting on and honoring that previous dish.

I finally got it: the meals were not just sustenance, and not just delicious, they were also art experiences, performance art of a very special type.

When you eat at The French Laundry or Alinea or Robuchon in Las Vegas, to name but three, you are not simply feeding yourself; you are experiencing the art of a chef and a style of dining that the chef has created and refined. You have the opportunity to learn and experience new things--even as you stuff your face.

A true foodie, I believe, is not just in it for dinner at these fancy places, of course. A true foodie should also love any food that tastes good or is inventive or is otherwise interesting. So, I'll happily enjoy a hot dog or macaroni and cheese, but I'll also crave these more adventurous offerings, even if they cost a small fortune, and I'll enjoy them both as meals and as the art experiences they truly are.

On the road again: Las Vegas/CES, day 3

Today's rhythm was the same as yesterday's: work, CES, work, out, work. We hit the South Hall of LVCC today and saw a fair amount of cool stuff, though nothing that really blew us away. We hit our first netbooks, and our take is decidedly mixed. We tried multiple Asus offerings, and after typing on them for several seconds, we both concluded there was no way we'd personally want them. The HP Mini family, by contrast, was interesting, in large part due to its keyboard's larger size and more sensible layout. We also found the HP Media Server of interest.

Dinner tonight was flat-out great, courtesy of Robuchon, where we had the special tasting menu featuring black truffles. Every dish was a winner. Wow.

After the meal, we worked a bit and then headed to the Bellagio to see O. I've seen this Cirque du Soleil show five or six times now, and tonight, like every other time, it was magical.

I wish I could afford to take all my friends and loved ones to Vegas so they could eat this meal and see this show.

If in my books I can provide moments of magic anywhere near as powerful as those in O, I will have achieved a very great deal indeed.

We can buy Jamon Iberico!

Jennie pointed out to me that the famous Spanish ham is now available for online ordering here. If you don't know the ham and simply check the prices, you may believe this is a con game designed to separate rich fools and their money.

It's not. This ham is amazing and, though more expensive than I'd like, worth the cost.

I've eaten Jamon Iberico three times, all in the same restaurant: L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon in the Roppongi Hills district of Tokyo. Each time, I opted for the same basic dish: half a dozen unadorned slices arrayed on a plain plate, each slice so thin you could almost see through it. The taste every time was the same: wonderful, like the best ham you've ever tasted turned to 11. Wow.

I'm thinking now about the right excuse to order some and prepare it. Yum.

Philcon, day 2

I slept late, which was glorious. (I realize it may seem sad to some folks that I find sleep so exciting, but I don't get a lot of it, so I enjoy it when I can.)

My first con activity of the day was to listen to a panel on electronic publishing. The panelists--Eric Flint, Gordon Van Gelder, Jim Kelly, and Eva Chalker-Whitley--presented mostly intelligent commentary, and though it was old and familiar ground to me, I wanted to be there to support Eric.

I stayed in that room to be on the next panel, whose topic was SF and myth. I didn't know any of my fellow panelists, though the moderator, John Henry (who writes as Jack Campbell), had been on a Balticon panel with me. He did a good job, and I enjoyed my discussions with him as well as some parts of the panel. Overall, I'm not sure the audience got much from us, but almost all of the twenty or so folks stayed to the end, which is something.

By this time we needed to eat, but pickings were slim, so I settled for two hot dogs from a small hotel snack table in the lobby. The dogs were soaking in slightly discolored water, but I've eaten worse, so I wolfed them down. After a walk through the largely uninspiring though well-intentioned art show and another pass through the dealer's room, I went upstairs to work--and to give myself some quiet time while the hot dogs waged war against my stomach. My digestive system carried the day, but it was rough going for a while.

I attended Eric's guest of honor speech at 4:00, which though enjoyable--he's a fun enough speaker--did cover much of the same ground as the earlier panel.

Dinner tonight was at Le Bec-Fin. The meal was expensive and extremely good, but having eaten at what are arguably the two best French restaurants in the country, Robuchon at the Mansion and Guy Savoy, both in Las Vegas, I was expecting better than I got. Still, the comparison is probably unfair to Le Bec Fin, and we certainly enjoyed our ten-course tasting menu.

And now I'm working, which is, I suppose, what I can say about this hour of most nights.

Tokyo food-fight 2007: Robuchon kicks Ducasse's butt

While in Tokyo, we did what any sensible foodies would do: we ate at the restaurants of two famous French chefs. The first dinner was at Joel Robuchon's Atelier, his approachable, bistro-style establishment on the second floor of one of the shopping buildings adjacent to our hotel in Roppongi Hills. The second was at Alain Ducasse's Beige, a fancy place perched on the tenth floor of the Chanel building in the pricey Ginza district.

The Beige dinner cost more than twice as much as the one at Atelier and featured a setting that merged the themes of its name with the designs of Chanel (yes, the staff wore custom Chanel designs).

Robuchon's Atelier delivered far and away the better meal. Robuchon's dishes featured more inventive mixes of ingredients, better presentation, and, most importantly, better taste.

Both meals were, of course, extremely good, way past normal restaurant fare--as they should be, given the chefs, the settings, and the prices.

But Robuchon won going away.

If you're in Tokyo and you want great French food, head to Atelier.