The New York Times catches up with Georges Perrier's exit at Le Bec-Fin and the changing tastes of fine dining in Philadelphia.
In recent decades, though, that din was starting to get a lot louder elsewhere. Around the same time that David Lee Roth stopped sleeping, diners in cities like Philadelphia -- diners, like me, who were totally psyched to have some ethereal hummus before, say, going to a Van Halen concert -- started waking up to a new way of going out to dinner.
Colman Andrews, the editorial director of The Daily Meal, told me that Le Bec-Fin represented “the last of a dying breed. Every city of any size used to have at least one ‘fancy’ French restaurant, where the food was serious, the atmosphere was a little starchy and the service was correct. But the audience for good restaurants today wants their dining experiences to be casual and comfortable. They may still demand good, complex food, at least some of the time, but they don’t want to have to dress up to enjoy it, or to feel as if they’re dining in a museum.”
Original source: The New York Times
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