Here’s an article on Adam Block [nytimes.com], the celebrity restaurant manager/opportunist who will be bringing Thomas Keller and a couple of other renowned chefs into Singapore’s new Marina Bay Integrated Resort development, developed by the Las Vegas Sands corporation. Block was also largely responsible for the celebrity chef restaurant explosion in Las Vegas itself.
But are satellite restaurants, where chefs spends a couple of weeks out of a year roaming the kitchen tasting (not creating), any good at all? This corresponding article [nytimes.com] published today declares that the sex is almost always missing. Even Gordon Ramsay has bollocksed it up. But how well can you train sous-chefs and staff to recreate Michelin star work? In Singapore?
Mark Bittman concludes by saying only Joel Robuchon has succeeded in maintaining quality:
[He] achieves this with a team of four people who have been with him for 20 years or more. Most multirestaurant chefs claim they’re operating the same way, with a training “team” and a surplus of talented underlings who are poised to move to Las Vegas, Hong Kong or even Dubai — and who will open their own restaurants if they aren’t promoted. Some of Robuchon’s team will accompany him to New York this summer, when he plans to open another L’Atelier, in the Four Seasons Hotel.Neither my brilliant meals at Robuchon nor my irksome ones at Ducasse, however, are representative; most operations lie somewhere in between.
sangsara.net 