Hervé This has a blog!
Here's a very rough translation of his latest post (original here). Interesting stuff.
Proposal for changeYou can't criticise the hierarchical list published by the British magazine Restaurants ("the best restaurant in the world") while at the same time permitting the rating of chefs by stars or marks out of 10, as in the Michelin Guide, for example. Isn't it time that, as I suggested several years ago, we start distinguishing between artisans and artists? For artisans, the criteria are relatively simple, because they are technical in nature. If you ask an artisan for a tender, rare steak, you expect to get what you asked for. And since there are degrees of technical difficulty, we could rate artisans, and even establish a relationship between quality and price, by devising a kind of "technical grade" based on price. On the other hand, when it comes to art, how can we say whether W.A. Mozart is better than J.S. Bach, if Flaubert is less good than Rabelais, if Picasso is better than Rembrandt? In artistic cuisine, the technique must obviously be flawless, as in painting: how can one hope to arouse a specific feeling if one can't hold a paintbrush, play the violin, or construct a sentence? This being the case, how should we rate artists?I propose that we fight against the idiotic ratings of Restaurant magazine, but I also demand that the Michelin Guide change its lazy habits: let us distinguish artisans and artists, and for artists, let us try to give readers of the guide an idea of the style that they might find in restaurants dedicated to artistic cuisine. Please understand that I'm not militating on behalf of molecular cuisine, but simply so that culinary art (and not "the culinary arts": there is only one, the good one) might be recognised as it should be, in a more legible manner than yesterday and today.
