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	Upcoming Events Recent Events Calendar Regional Groups Calendar Archive About SIGS	Stirring the Pot The History, Dynamics, and Ethics of Luxury Dining September 19, 2005 By Julie Logue-Riordan, CCP Clark Wolf and Betty Fussell On September 19, Clark Wolf moderated a fascinating discussion on The History, Dynamics and Ethics of Luxury Dining. The influential panel was made up of Betty Fussell, author and food historian, Michael Bauer, Executive Food and Wine Editor of the Chronicle, Harvey Steiner, Editor for Wine Spectator, and Niloufer King, Asian specialist and anthropologist. According to Fussell, luxury food began with fire and is as old as cooking itself. “Because what luxury food does is bring lust and excess together. It is the big pleasure principle. The moment you have more than you need for survival or reproduction, you have luxury. The dictionary says luxury is something desirable in excess of what is necessary to live.” Harvey Steiman and Niloufer King Bauer discussed his article The Magnificent Seven, about seven Bay Area restaurants which are truly at their pinnacle. “I thought it would be interesting to look at them back-to-back within a 3 week period. And I thought to make it a more even playing field I would just review the tasting menu, matched with wines. This is the pinnacle of what a restaurant does”. For Bauer, the common denominator for these 4-star restaurants is innovation, which he equates with haute couture. These restaurants set the bar and influence all the other restaurants. For example it is now easy to find pizza with crème fraiche and smoked salmon on it. Steiner spoke about luxury as it relates to wine. “When you get past the necessity, you’re in it for the hedonism and that’s what expensive wines are all about. Wine is from the ground, it is from the earth, but so is great sashimi from the ocean; it is a basic food, lifted above the rest by some sort of brilliance. Because it happens to be in the right place, nurtured the right way and carefully handled, it is brought up to be something special. The same thing you do with food you do with wine. The result is something that gives you tremendous gratification.” Our Panel at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel Wolf asked Steiner to talk about having a super premium wine next to the least expensive wine on America’s tables. Steiner’s feeling is that it works the same way as having supermarket chicken or a carefully raised free-range chicken. “What makes wine expensive is not necessarily that it is very good, because the cost of making something that is really very good does not even approach what some of these wines actually cost. It is rarity. It is PR, marketing, cachet, perceived rarity. If you can convince everybody that the wine is worth it, then that’s the price it is. It is rarity or perceived rarity which drives the price of wine up.” Betty Fussell, Clark Wolf, Harvey Steiman, Niloufer King and Fred Martin King’s experience with luxury was an interesting perspective. She grew up in India. Having spent her childhood in boarding school, food was a constant preoccupation. “And we saw luxury as a can of baked beans after lights out.” Luxury food for her parents was what was not customary for them. “I can remember many party hostesses who had cooks, shopping and cooking daily the fabulous fresh food we all want now, rushing for the can opener to open the tin of peaches to honor a guest. Things like Spam were considered really rather wonderful. So the whole idea of what luxury and desirability means is determined by culture, history and/or economics.” Fussell had an interesting observation about class in America and that is the democratization of desire as a result of the influence of television and credit cards. “We are no longer trying to compete with the Joneses, because thanks to television we now know what it looks like on the other side and we’re keeping up with the Gates’. The same thing happens with food. Now with the credit card you can do it, you can have the $400 meal as a luxury for yourself and yet it may be commonplace for someone like Bill Gates.” Jennie Schacht, Shuna Lydon, Lili Rollins, and Weezie Mott Steiner feels that in our food world, class is determined by what you know. “It’s how much you learned about the food, whether you can look at a wine list and talk about where the wine came from or what score Robert Parker or Wine Spectator gave it. The idea of the food snob is being the one who thinks he knows more than the next guy is beginning to fade. I sense that and hope it is true.” Moving to the ethical side of luxury, Wolf brought up the fact that many of the high end restaurants are involved in charity work now, and how ethics influence how we look at higher end dining. The panel felt that part of the rationale for the charity work is American’s egalitarianism. Bauer felt that the high-end restaurants were driving the sustainable foods. Steiner added that this is another reason to be thankful for Alice Waters. “She is the dynamic force behind the sustainability movement. Whenever you have, it’s good to be able to share with those who don’t have. It’s just basic human kindness, isn’t it?” Betty Fussell and Jeannette Ferrary Wolf asked Steiner about the resurgence of table side cooking which until recently had been on the decline. Steiner pointed out that tableside cooking is what luxury dining was all about at one point. “When nouvelle cuisine arrived it wasn’t about very little food on a very large plate, it was about taking the show back to the kitchen and giving control back to the chef”. According to Steiner that was a sea change when nouvelle cuisine became luxury as opposed to having a guy in a tuxedo cook for you. Here are the panelist opinions as to the future for luxury dining: Harvey Steiner – “We’re training a lot of good cooks.” Niloufer King – “Blurring the distinction of Western and Eastern cuisines.” Michael Bauer- “Restaurants are incorporating all cuisines; it is not just a European based model any more”. Betty Fussell – “There is the double face of globalization. You have “slow” and local vs. beef transported in from Brazil”. Julie Logue-Riordan and Clark Wolf Chef Staffan Terje's hors d'ouevre Laura Martin Bacon, Maurine Killough, and Patty Barish Photos courtesy Larry at A la Carte Digital Studios	List of Recent Events February 2010 Visit to Nettie's Crabshack February 2010 A visit to FullBloom Baking Co. January 2010 Annual General Meeting December 2009 Wine Sig: Rosé sparkling wines November 2009 Cooking Teacher SIG: Gifts from the Kitchen November 2009 Tea Pairing with Numi Tea November 2009 STP: Spice at Campton Place October 2009 Canned Tomato Tasting October 2009 Traveling Table Visits Brown Sugar September 2009 Visit to AG Ferrari September 2009 Cooking Teachers SIG report September 2009 Lark Creek Steak hosts Australian Traveling Table September 2009 Recession-Buster Wine Sig August 2009 Over $6000 raised at BBQ August 2009 2009 BBQ a big success July 2009 Cooking Teacher SIG: Korean cooking July 2009 Traveling Table: Estate July 2009 Sustainable Meat and Seafood June 2009 C.J. 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