Though the original Mesopotamian place names survive, the world depicted is not that of early Islamic Iraq, but of 18th-century late Mughal India, with its love of gardens, its obsession with poetic wordplay and its extreme refinement in food, dress and manners.
Chicken Provençal had a shambling, all-over-the-plate quality — with stewed tomatoes, red and green peppers, black olives and mashed potatoes — but it tasted fine, a comfort-food contrast to the refinement elsewhere on the menu.
You could calculate how many servants were in his kitchen by the "refinement" of the food he served.
A disco-mirrored Buddha and eighties-era details, like dark slatted wood and glass-ball chandeliers, belie the refinement of the food.
Reading Piero Selvaggio's account of its extremely modest beginnings -- and his own, in Sicily -- makes the refinement of the food he has created seem all the more amazing.
The mismatch between the manly, clubbable dining room and the dainty refinement of the food was at its starkest in a main course of monkfish in which meaty slices were served over slippery farfalle and mussels in a weeny, starter-sized dish.
Well, let me tell you: You've been missing a level of refinement of both food and space that you hardly find anywhere these days.
If metabolomics was to be used for food authentication purposes, such a refinement, based on a much larger set of samples would be warranted.
One limitation is that the FAO Food Balance data does not distinguish the level of processing or refinement of individual food sources, and changes in carbohydrate quality were inferred from other non-systematic reports.
A concise, often changing à-la-carte menu (there is also a sixty-five-dollar tasting-menu option) features bar snacks that are ingenious refinements of junk food.
The refinement of Chef Eric Ziebold's food offsets a disconnect in service.
