now open until 1030pm friday and saturday
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I dunno that machete bread 1.0 stuff was not good. Also some dishes have been insanely over salted and there was bitterness on the pizza from the charring of the cheese crust. There were also great highs but if I am comparing it to the multiple iterations of angler his food definitely does not reach that level of taste/consistency.
Adding all these odd front of the house choices, reported poor hospitality, and sticker shock from some of the menu pricing and I am definitely not in a rush to go back.
Skenes might be a culinary âgeniusâ but if leopardo is messing up the easy stuff that means they arenât nearly as good as people give them credit for
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To me it was not an interview but just friends shooting the shit and not worrying about whether the audience could follow. I could, because I know enough to fill in most of the gaps, but I was constantly thinking that a relatively uninformed listener / viewer would be pretty lost.
I think Changâs main point was that Skenes takes his insistence on maximum quality and flavor so far beyond the point of diminishing returns that itâs bad for business. Like the employee spending 25 hours a week making dough that could be done 98% as well in a tenth that time.
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Fair enough. But if the point of the conversation was just two friends talkinâ, then maybe they shouldnât have published it as a public-facing pod and instead approached the conversation differently.
And maybe I just have no clue what iâm talking about and Iâm totally off base. But â given the natural variance in ingredients, cooking, and the techniques, skills, and abilities of individual chefs â i suspect that nobody could reliably identify that 2% difference. indeed, i hazard to say that â with the exception of processed foods and the like â thereâs a 2% difference in âtasteâ every single time a dish is made.
Thatâs what I mean by the point of diminishing returns. Skenes will do things that seem to him to lead to optimal results even if heâs the only person who would notice the difference, or maybe even he wouldnât.
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Skenes talks about testing different doughs in the episode. Iâm pretty sure he admits for most people it was delicious regardless, and that he was taking that into consideration
I enjoy the âinside baseballâ podcasts and wish Chang did more of them
The dough talk reminds me of this:
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Maybe Iâm wrong. But in a couple instances I got the sense Skenes was getting annoyed.
it was weird. dave just kept interrupting and badgering josh about his supposed obsessiveness over âflavorâ and his process for figuring out how to make the best tasting food. and although i couldnât tell whether josh was getting annoyed, i definitely think that josh disagreed with daveâs characterization of his process. dave made it sound like josh spent years locked in an arctic research station trying to figure out whether he should have 1 gram of a certain kind of flour, or 2 grams. when josh kept suggesting that, in reality, it was the kind of normal and ordinary experimentation and testing that you would more typically see at fine dining â just this time, he applied it to pizza.
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The end result was eight? nine? kinds of flour sourced from various sources around California (not a major wheat-growing area). Chang may have been exaggerating but he has a point.
Respectfully, this is wrong (generally, not about Leopardo necessarily) and not the way to approach criticism of aesthetic or subjective things - food music art etc.
Iâm interested in the subjective experiences people recount on here. What they taste in certain dishes, what works for them or doesnât, and how it compares to previous experiences, either at that restaurant or with that dish. Iâm as guilty as anyone of pushing for objective assessments sometimes telling people their opinions are âwrong,â but all we can really do is describe our taste as specifically as possible and listen to others with an open mind. Itâs a bit the Elvis Costello line about criticism âwriting about music is like dancing about architecture.â
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I mean, âgoodâ is a spectrum â food can be good in different ways, to different extents, and at different times and in different contexts. But I just disagree that the food at leopardo is âbadâ â or that we canât even assess whether the food at leopardo is âgoodâ or âbad.â Evaluating food might require more nuance than what I displayed in my initial post. But we can still come up with ways and criteria for doing so â the same way we do with art.
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There is such a thing as objectively bad food, but youâd be unlikely to encounter it at Leopardo.
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Skenes said in some interview or article I read that food âqualityâ is objective. Itâs an interesting debate. I think there are objective components and subjective components.
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I think he meant that if youâre comparing the same ingredient from various sources the criteria for which is best are mostly if not entirely objective.
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âi expected to order pho, what vietnamese restaurant doesnât have phoâ
- real review I read at a hue vietnamese restaurant that specialized in bun bo hue and bun rue
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Maybe Iâm getting into semantics, and if so I apologize, not trying to make this overly philosophical, but there were a few posts, mine included, that specifically criticized the taste of certain dishes. It wasnât solely about the service or elements of the experience outside food.
And Iâm not saying that we canât assess ingredient quality or level of technique and then notice how that correlates with our own taste and assessments. But I am more interested in why someone likes something - the criteria theyâre using and what theyâre tasting - than whether itâs âobjectivelyâ good.
We largely agree on this! Essentially weâre debating postmodernism without calling it that. For me itâs good to try to develop criteria while acknowledging these things are often more subjective than weâd like.
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Cute
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Recent menu additions:
Tenderloin
Spaghettini pomodoro
A vegetarian version of the lasagna (wild mushrooms, fior di latte & spinach)
Two âcontorniâ â wild arugula and roasted broccoli.
Itâs starting to look like a balanced menu!
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