Judgment Call: How Many Friendlies for Fridays?
As America awaits Japan’s “sushi police” to surface in LA and Japan itself braces for French plans to critique Tokyo restaurants, China is staying the traditional course of not interfering in others’ affairs and instead rating its own eateries, albeit “Western” ones.
According to this China Daily story (thanks to The Crow for passing it on), ”Beijing is to introduce a rating system for its Western-style restaurants, bakeries, bars and cafes by the end of the year to help diners make more informed choices.” Evaluators will look at factors such as food authenticity, service, hygiene and management as they award establishments from three to five stars, though given the upcoming Olympics, you might have expected them to give out rings, or gold, silver and bronze medals, or even Friendlies / Fuwa.
The Beijing Western Food Association came up with the standards and, says its secretary-general, the aim is “to improve Beijing’s Western food services in a short period of time,” though skeptics might wonder how sticking stars beside restaurant names will eliminate the chance of tomato ketchup appearing on spaghetti noodles or encourage wait staff to refrain from screaming orders across dining rooms. However, she added that the association organized a “Western food expo and cooking contests” last year and will do so again this year, will organize lectures with foreign chefs and restaurant managers, and aims to have 10,000 chefs able to cook “Western” food by year’s end.
I instant-messaged M-Dawg to ask him what he thought were the biggest problems in Beijing’s Western-style restaurants and he (instantly, of course) came up with three:
“1 (by a longshot). The waitresses have never eaten anything on the menu
“2. The chef has never eaten anything on the menu
“3. The waitstaff thinks that “good service” means monitoring diners at all times, so that once you lift that last morsel off your plate with your fork, the plate is gone before the morsel has reached your lips.
Personally, I’m wondering how places such as Cox and Tim’s Texas BBQ, that serve up some very authentic food, will fit into this evaluation scheme…
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The rating system is one with Chinese characteristics –
Personally I have met with and on occasion worked with western chef organization and I can say that they are a government organization and adhere to that style of management-
AS far as restaurants being authentic – that will only happen if the chef is from that country of origin and or had trained there – an important aside is that for anyone to be truly competent in there respective cuisine they have to live, breath and eat the food they are cooking – many many times in five star hotels the food the staff that cooks your five star meal is not of the same origin… need we say more …
As for the training 10,000 chefs – who’s going to do that? Chinese chef’s??!!
Hi Chef,
Thanks for the response.
Not sure how those 10,000 chefs will be trained – might require some massive video conferencing!
Cheers, BB