Having spent much of my life travelling around the Far East and other parts of the world, it was not until last month that I finally set foot in the USA. It was a mixture of a few days to visit a trade show and then a much-needed holiday – or should I say vacation?
We visited only two cities and both in the south: New Orleans and Miami, as the main destination was elsewhere for some R&R on the beach. But we spent a total of eight days in the US and went to considerable lengths to seek out the best restaurants and enjoy some good American wines wherever we could.
I’m sure that in many ways we did not get a balanced view of dining out in the USA from our visit to just two states, but I came away with some lasting impressions and concerns about what could happen to us here on the old continent if American dining trends make it over to us.
First of all, I found myself constantly whining about the wine lists and wine service. One Sunday night in New Orleans, when the best of the city’s restaurants were closed, we took a recommendation and dined at the bistro of the Ritz Carlton Hotel. The food was actually quite good but the wine service, considering that we were at a Ritz Carlton, was shocking.
Neither the maître d’ nor any of the waiting staff had any knowledge of the rather poor wine list and they would only take orders by the bin number – a bit like ordering food at your local Chinese restaurant.
But what’s more, here and at pretty much every restaurant we visited, the bulk of wines were listed under their grape variety as opposed to their provenance or style, in many cases limited to nothing more than Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir.
We found the wine lists poor, even at the very best restaurants we visited. I have tried some great wines from the USA in the past but in the mid-price range that our restaurant budget stretched to we were more often than not disappointed with the US wines we sampled.
The Sauvignon Blanc was invariably too perfumed and often quite sickly, and we had some very unpleasant experiences of overly or unnecessarily oaked wines.
We came away with the feeling that the US consumer has dumbed down when it comes to wine, something I have started to see happening in the UK and we can only hope we are spared here in Portugal.
More gripes? Well, our main problem was the speed of service. Wherever we ate we felt rushed. No sooner had we ordered than our starters would appear and within what seemed like seconds of our starter dishes being cleared the main courses would be there. It was all but impossible to stretch a three-course meal beyond one hour and more often than not the “check” was presented to us without us having requested it.
And then there is the American obsession with frying everything. In New Orleans we had booked weeks in advance to get a table at the city’s top restaurant, well off the tourist track out in the Garden District. Gautreau’s has received rave reviews from America’s top food critics. If there were Michelin stars in these parts then this place would definitely have one.
They are famous for their sweetbreads served with crab – a delicious dish but the subtle flavour of the sweetbreads was lost to deep frying.
In Miami, we did some research to find one of the city’s best fish restaurants – Casablanca, where our “grilled” fresh fish had been pan fried. Now I know that the Americans call grilling broiling but as we had been expecting a nice piece of grilled fish, we were not happy.
More than anything we came away realising just how good we have it here in Portugal and elsewhere in Europe where Mediterranean cuisine has made its mark.
By PATRICK STUART [email protected]
