Posts by Bart Janssen
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Feed: A scientist researches restaurants, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
ever so slightly “snobby” about food sounds right in Cuisine’s demo.
That's a little harsh, but if you look at the advertising in the front five pages, you'd have to say it's probably fair that Cuisine magazine makes their money from folks closer to the 1%.
But I don't think that's why they review the way they do. The problem with ranking restaurants is that for reviewers who eat out a lot - it takes something special to impress them. And it's worse for the top ranked restaurants because they will be visited two or three times by different reviewers and any misstep will drop them out of the running. There are very few cheap and cheerful restaurants that maintain that consistency.
There is another problem that isn't anything to do with the reviewers and is everything to do with the restaurants themselves. A lot of neat places to eat, with a couple of great dishes, make the mistake of having everything on the menu. If you have 30 different main courses on the menu it is unlikely they will all be your best work. If you look at the restaurants on the list they all have compact menus, things they know they can cook really well every time.
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Feed: A scientist researches restaurants, in reply to B Jones,
Can we have some Wellington representation here?
Absolutely. But not from me. My go to source for info on wtgn restaurants is Cuisine. And seriously I get to the capital maybe once every 5 years so how am I going to know.
So have at it, how do you track down the best dinner in Wellington?
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Feed: A scientist researches restaurants, in reply to Russell Brown,
It definitely does happen.
This is so true. And it's a real problem for the restaurants trying to hit the highs and impress fussy reviewers or fussy scientists.
We recently took my father-in-law to The French cafe. It was the third time we'd been in 5 years and to be honest for me it was their last chance. Yeah the restaurant in Auckland that has perhaps set the standard for excellence was on it's last chance for me. The dinner we had was amazing and the experience lived up to all the reviews. But prior to that we had two disappointing experiences, good dishes at great prices and even sitting unattended for 20 minutes without menus!
That's the problem with top end restaurants - your expectations are very high - as they should be because dammit you are paying through the nose. Nobody really minds if the server at a cheap and cheerful place doesn't know what's on the menu or your dinner arrives 10 minutes after everyones else's (well not really, I do mind, but I'm fussy).
I've loved every dinner I've had at Clooney's, two with in-laws and one fantastic winemaker's dinner and I'll go again. But for a place like Clooney's there is no room for Russell to get bad service and even less for the owner to not be deeply apologetic (honestly what does it cost to apologise?).
For many folks a dinner at some of these restaurants is a once in a long time experience - anything that sours that is really inexcusable. It's one of the reasons I loved Bowman's, the service was always amazing, you felt cared for throughout the dinner. It is getting better but I think seeing service as part of the package is still a problem in Auckland.
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Feed: A scientist researches restaurants, in reply to linger,
the Cuisine list seems largely a waste of time
Except that it’s a different set of reviewers coming to roughly the same conclusion. Also you get two reviews written by different people and that can help a huge amount when trying to figure out if you’ll actually enjoy eating there.
Also the cuisine list eliminates about half of the metro list, for good or ill.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Sacha,
The last five words of that! Always!
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to BenWilson,
Hilary seems to have feelings about that which are hard to express.
She is not the only person. The thoughts and emotions around these issues are not easy. And that's made even harder in the written word where tone of voice and the nod of the head are lost.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Hilary Stace,
So it is not about one foetus and one woman – it is about the how society, and various members of it, forms opinions about what is valued.
But isn't that another way of saying a woman should not be in charge of her own body ... because, reasons.
I am as uncomfortable with society saying you cannot have an abortion merely because the child will be differently abled as I am with a society that demands a woman has an abortion for the same reason.
This must be a decision for the mother. It is her body that is being used, she will be responsible for the child for at least the next couple of decades. And every time society has interfered with that bad things happen.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to BenWilson,
I'm not denying we weight rights all the time. Moreover we assign humans variable rights based on development and knowledge on a continuous scale all the time.
What I am saying very simply is that when weighing rights you should weigh the rights of the being that actually exists as more valuable than the rights of a being that may never exist.
There is a finite (and surprising large) probability that an embryo never becomes anything. That is not opinion. I am making a scientifically valid statement.
To me, that is a very simple point.
However, I would say that even if you were somehow magically able to know with absolute certainty that a given embryo would become a human I would still assign the decision to terminate a pregnancy to the mother.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to BenWilson,
a far more powerful right
Nope. Everything humans do on this planet shows that the "right to life" is meaningless.
Also you miss the key point. It isn't a fetus, it isn't a human, it is the possibility (not certainty) of a human. They are assigning a right to a statistical chance that there will be a human. And in the process denying the right of an actual real human.
It is the dismissal of the real person in the balance of morals and rights that I object to. The woman, whose choice this is, is casually ignored. Her rights are dismissed as "less than".
Yet she is real, she is loved, she loves, she has thoughts and opinions and ideas that are real. And she is the real person harmed by our current laws.
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Oh and as for drumming up comments - I strongly suspect your more fun focussed postings generate vastly more comments :P.
Although I kinda think the fun focussed postings often communicate serious issues very elegantly.
hmmm where are the "blatant suckup" tags.