Fake Rich Culture

Do you notice all the modern era Michelin 3-Star restaurants? Have you seen how they try to bring in these food innovations like puree'd this or that, with strange colours dashed and splashed all over large white plates, and a touch of purple flower here and there. 

You can get the very rare exception such as the guy up in Scandinavia who gathers stuff from the Nordic woodlands and infuses his meals with all of these completely exotic woodland ingredients. But overall the stuff that one is asked to pay major money for is simply bizarre.

Looks good in pics but it's a fake place
that has no authentic culturalbackground

And then too, there are those tacky places like the huge aquarium-walled restaurant in Dubai. With the stupid wine list that basically is a complete rundown of every 'well-known' French wine name - and nothing of genuine note there. It's just a pop fantasy idea of epicurean dining.

Everything way too expensive, too mass market-focused, too 'brand name-centric...'

There are reasons - very good reasons - why certain dishes always appear in traditional upper class establishments. You can veer off the rails all you want just because you can market stuff to cultural illiterates who have acquired some kind of 'new money,' but it doesn't mean a thing in the long run. The long run is why there is such as tradition. And there is such a thing. Trust me, even if you don't see a lot of signs of it right here, here - is the place that people do drift around who have real class and real wealth. I know, I get the private emails.

Tradition and class is about family and legacy. It's about sons and daughters and what you are handing on to them from what yourself were given. But that's the trouble with 'new money,' it's got nothing much good to say of its ancestry. I can hardly tell you, myself how much I owe my ancestors - those who came before me, and not necessarily just those from my direct family but from the generations before me, and yes, oh dear, the infamous 'class system' of the old days. I have myself never ever heard a genuine aristocrat badmouth the so-called peasant classes - for god's sakes without them, the estates would rundown and die! And nor the so-called 'lower classes' either. But what happened - why is this not the prevailing conception of what aristocracy does or thinks like? Well, two World Wars happened is what happened, and all the decent aristocrats died out! Or most of the anyway.

Remember the montage or collage idea spoken about in the
last article? Genuine modern art does have authenticity...

Now you might not think there is any advantage in knowing about traditions but if I simply lay a few of them out, after awhile, a sort of gravitas will develop in your mind and in your spirit, and you will find the golden road to paradise after all...

All haute cuisine dinner in Paris starts with onion soup.

And onion soup is only ever done one way. That is, the traditional way.

Yes there are signature dishes at places like the Tour D'Argent and so on, but the straight-and-narrow, if you are out with your mistress, will be turbot for a main course. It had better be your mistress too, even if it is your wife... Such things make sense in Paris, if not anywhere else.

This is baked turbot, see... If you look up pics of haute cuisine turbot
on the internet, you will see everything but this!

And a great wine will be something genuinely good, and not just something with a name. And we will look at some of these next time.