June 30, 2009
My five fav tables
I said I would not write any restaurant reviews. That promise lasted only a few hours it may now seem. I will try to avoid making it into a bad habit.
Here are my five favorite restaurants. I will present them on this page and it is likely going to change depending on the mood I am in from time to time.
This list is presented in no order of preference. It is highly subjective and not only based on the food served in these restaurants but on total experience, originality, uniqueness, produce quality and culinary ability. So who are they?
Continue reading "My five fav tables"
Posted at 03:48 PM | Comments (0)Gastroville is back to life
After some time off blogging, I have revived Gastroville. Vedat continues to publish his thought provoking and thorough reviews at www.gastromondiale.com. I will continue food bloggning at Gastroville but there will be no restaurant reviews. Well at least probably none. Instead it will be about gastronomy, great produce, cooking, chefs and people who defend great gastronomy, health and random thoughts on food and food related topics. There is a lot in the pipeline for the coming weeks and months.
Posted at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)Mission Statement - Updated
I am a passionate food and wine lover who believe that full enjoyment of the natural bounties of this world enhances everybody's joie de vivre. We have evolved over millions of years but the locus of dining is a relatively modern institution called the restaurant. As we all know, in recent years, those who are in charge of restaurant kitchens achieved the higher status of "chefs", as opposed to mere "cooks", and the buzz created by media is such that some of these chefs are regarded as the equivalent of cultural ambassadors for their respective countries and regions. This is not necessarily a bad development as higher prestige and promise of wealth is attracting and will continue to attract talented and intelligent individuals to this profession. As always there is another side of the coin. The media attention and the buzz required by a chef to become successful has meant that over the last 10-15 years, a new generation of chefs has come onto the scene who are focused on offering creativity and novelty as the means to capture the attention of the food media. In their search for novelty, chefs borrowed ideas from the food industry. Industrial jellifiers, stabilizers, and colorants and synthetic agents for improving tastes and synthetic starches and sugars became the norm for chefs who wanted to get attention. Produce became less and less important as large restaurant suppliers entered into the gastronomic scene and started making deliveries in anonymous trucks, to avoid revealing that Michelin-starred restaurants received deliveries from large industrial food suppliers. Restaurant critics stopped talking about how the food tasted. Some critics saw their chance to take their profession to a new level by intellectualizing food and the chefs were not late to applaud this development. The intellectual perception of a dish became more important than what was actually on the plate in terms of quality of ingredients, flavor pairings and execution.
Continue reading "Mission Statement - Updated"
Posted at 09:05 AM | Comments (0)About Me - Updated version
About Gastroville - Update
I am Mikael Jonsson and I am behind this blog.
Gastroville was launched by Vedat Milor and me in 2005 with the aim to offer discriminating evaluations of restaurants in different categories/price points to maximize dining value for distinguishing and caring gourmets.We also aimed to develop reliable and rigorous criteria when evaluating restaurants. To cut a long story short, after some time I somewhat lacked the passion to continue writing about my eating experiences in restaurants, partly because I liked cooking better since it allowed me to make "made-to-measure" food incorporating the desired quality of raw material and preparation methods but also because I thought the world of gastronomy was about to become industrialized. Vedat, who is one of the most experienced palates I have encountered, continues to publish opinionated reviews on www.gastromondiale.com. Our old restaurant reviews can be found on this blog as well as our food rating standards. I still stand by our previously food rating standards and they are roughly still my view on the basis for what constitutes great food.
I will now after some time off from blogging take it up again but I will do so from a different perspective. I will not publish any restaurant reviews, or I should say only sparsely so since you should never say never.
Continue reading "About Me - Updated version"
Posted at 08:28 AM | Comments (1)June 15, 2009
Gastroville is being updated
Gastroville is being updated and will soon come back in a new shape. Please stay tuned.
Posted at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)