ELECTRONIC HOUSE CALL - May 21, 2004

I am back in the US of A, mostly through the pile of mail that awaited me ... and as I write this, waiting for a flight to Chicago! As I may have mentioned, I am presenting a program at the NRA show on Sunday afternoon. If you will be in town, please drop by and say hello. From the windy city, I go to New Orleans for a couple of days to work out the logistics for Super Summit 2005.

I should be fully back in the swing of things by this time next week, so I will keep it short today. I have lots of new ideas after the trip and expect I will find a few more gems to share on this trip.

Vive la France
Three weeks in France is enough to cause even the most meat-and-potatoes person to re-examine their attitudes toward food and wine. Every patisserie (pastry shop), even in the smallest villages lays out a spread that delights the eye as well as the palate. The locals still get their bread fresh every morning from local bakeries. The produce is wonderfully flavorful and not very far from the farm that produced it.

And wine -- even the house wines, most likely produced within a few miles of the restaurant, have character. The best wines are very expensive, even there, but most decent bottles could be had for under $10 and I bought several very drinkable wines for $2 a bottle. I suspect the bottle itself cost more than the wine that was in it.

As is our norm, we did not venture very high on the food chain. While an exceptional meal from an exceptional chef is always a delight, we tend to be travelers, not tourists, and look for the places that the locals go. In fact, other than talking with some of our British ex-patriot hosts, we really heard very little English anywhere on this trip.

All that being said, I think that service standards in the US are generally higher than we experienced in France. Restaurant staffers are personable enough but do not seem to have a focus on the quality of the guest experience. What they do seems to work for their market, however, so I do not fault them for it. But there, as here, I think that service can be a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

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