On Sat, 21 Jul 2007 01:44:45 -0000, "
> magnanimously proffered:

>On Jul 20, 8:50 pm, "Zippy P" > wrote:
>> > Another time, a reviewer described an undercooked potato as being
>> > overcooked. I've gone to these places and found the opposite of the
>> > food critic's opinion to be true.
>>
>> Couldn't it have been one way when they went and another way when you went?
>> I don't understand.
>
>No, because the restaurants/steak houses didn't advertise aged beef,
>which would have been a good selling point.
>The critics just made it up.
>
>I'm aware of day to day differences in food quality, staff, and
>management. I'm writing about food critics who can't tell the
>difference between frozen french fries and fresh and who think that
>fish has no flavor until it's at least a day old. (I've read that,
>too. My 85 year-old mother can smell the difference 10 feet away, why
>can't they)?

When I first came to Auckland I worked several part time jobs the
first couple of years. One of them was in an upmarket retail fish shop
called Jaybell's Seafood Bazaar. It was down on Auckland's waterfront
and was the retail end of a huge fishing business - a joint venture
between New Zealand and Japanese interests.

In theory, the fish couldn't be fresher unless you caught them
yourself. Jaybell's fishing fleet would pull up to the processing
factory behind the retail store, unload (by that time the fish would
already have been graded), and either processed for export (mostly to
Japan to be flown out later that day) or for domestic consumption (our
shop, other shops, restaurants, supermarkets, etc). Of course the
weather sometimes made it impossible for the fleet to go out and
frozen fish would be thawed out during the day. But it was always
marked as having been frozen and customers informed of this.

I worked the busy days (Thursday, Friday and Saturday) and, because
I'd been made "assistant manager" and "weekend manager" I got to divvy
up all fish that hadn't sold by the time we closed on Saturday to the
other staff members at the shop. Even our cats got to dine on scallops
from time to time - but that's another story.

Anyway, there was this tiny woman in her seventies who used to come in
several times a week to buy fish and when I was there she'd insist on
me serving her. It was always the same routine and, if it was
available, she'd invariably buy skinned & boned gurnard.

First, she'd ask me if the fish had been frozen and if it was fresh.
Then she'd ask if it had come in today. Since the answer was usually
yes to all the questions, she'd then choose a couple of fillets. Then
she'd ask for me to put them on the paper we used before we wrapped
them and hold it up so she could smell each fillet. It was amazing.
This woman could tell the difference between fish that had come in
that morning or just a few hours later.

As I got to know her and her ways, she stopped verbally asking me to
smell the fish and would simply smile, wrinkle up her nose and I'd
know what she meant. She really had me trained.

One day I asked her if she'd like to try any of the other varieties of
fish on offer and she answered, "Oh no ... kitty likes gurnard the
best."

So all this time she'd been buying the fish for her cat! She didn't
even eat fish herself. "Can't stand it," she explained. "Never could."


--

una cerveza mas por favor ...

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