Luxeat

Happy 2012!

Dear Readers, I wanted to thank you for visiting my blog

and wish you lots of success,joy and love in 2012!

This is my dog in  warmer times ;)

My new drink of choice ...

..at least when i was in Brussels. Kriek is  Belgium beer fermented with cherries. Normally i don't like  beer, but this one tastes like slightly alcoholic cherry drink(very distinctive and natural flavour).I wonder if you can buy it elsewhere..

P.S. Apologies for being absent from the blogosphere  recently - too much work!

 

Half a million dollars tuna

A 342 kg blue fin tuna has been sold for record  $400 000 this morning.  I guess it will be more and more expensive in the future because of the overfishing...

Happy 2011 from Luxeat

The Menu Code

An excellent WSJ article by Amy Ma about the trend at contemporary restaurants to give their dishes nondescript names.El Bulli famously does that , Bo Innoovation so as many other modern restaurants. While I agree with the Hong Kong blogger Peter Chang that such menus are " really annoying" ,what i find most annoying is "carte blanche"menus - when you don't get any menu at all (and they would just ask you before the meal if you have any allergies or products you don't like). Many highly rated restaurants around the world exclusively propose such menus. L'Astrance, Passage 53,Yam'tcha in Paris, Momofuku Ko in NY or Quintessence in Tokyo to name a few.

Café Gray Hong Kong paradox

 
(Image from http://www.cafegrayhk.com/ website)

When i was in Hong Kong few weeks ago, i stayed at the Upper House .I adored the hotel for it's intelligent luxury, sincere service as well as for reasonable prices. The only drawback i thought was it's restaurant. I found the food at Café Gray too complicated and pretentious. And i think that there is nothing worse than "pseudo gastronomy", when a chef tries to cook creative and nice looking dishes, but forgets the most important ingredient- the taste. (I thought exactly the same about Café Gray in NY 4 years ago. It has been closed since then.)

"Taking" pictures from luxeat.com

A friend of mine forwarded a certain Wow confidential newsletter May 2009 that  uses a picture of me and Joel Robuchon that was taken by my friend in NY in 2006.
Dear Wow newsletter, I don't mind that you use this image ( although i don't understand what I have in common with your story), but i would have appreciated if at least you asked for permission to use the image. Thank you.

The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2009

The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2009 (or here, if the link doesn't work)list is out and once again it proves how subjective and irrelevant it is.(It does get a huge exposure in the world's media though,a great marketing trick by San Pellegrino?) One of the "new entries" is Le Chateaubriand in Paris. I was there one year ago and found it quite low compared to other Parisian bistros. And now Le Chateaubriand has 40th place among the "World's 50 Best Restaurants" ( among Per Se, Cracco or Les Ambassadeurs) . It must be a joke, isn't it? By the way,the ingenius Les Ambassadeurs has 47th place while Le Chateaubriand is the 40th, i wouldn't even dare to compare these two places, other than they both serve food...

The list is plenty of other irrelevancies, not only this one...

© Mikael Damkier - Fotolia.com

Half kilo of Wagyu beef anybody?

I wish I had a supermarket close to my home like City Super (the one in the IFC mall) in Hong Kong.  You can find there everything your little heart desires,including all sorts of Wagyu Japanese beef. Or maybe rather not ... as i would spend all my money there!(The prices are in Hong Kong dollars). Some more pics after the jump...

Happy Holidays!