This response from “Tina” showed up at the end of the post I did on oatmeal a few weeks ago:

“I don’t know where to post this since the ‘Feedback and Questions’ part gives me an error and ‘not found’ message when I click on it. But I need some help from area lovers of fine restaurants.

“A special celebration is coming up in May for me and I am looking for a nice restaurant where my husband and I can go for a really nice dinner. Someplace nice, without kids, great food and service, and (obviously)not a ‘chain’ place. I was thinking Italian maybe, with cannoli on the menu - hard to find. But I am open to anything. Someplace other than the typical steak and potato as I have done it too many times. Something with good wine/scotch and where we can get a nice meal with 3-5 courses. We haven’t been to any really fine dining places, and that is what we are looking for but it is so hard to know what is going to be worth the money. Basically, some place we can make reservations on a Saturday night a few weeks in advance to ensure not waiting forever.

“Sorry…don’t know where to post this but since F.K. started this string and he knows the fine dining establishments, I am going to the top.

“Thanks for any help, and feel free to move this post to the appropriate area.”

Tina doesn’t say how much she and her husband want to spend on this celebratory occasion, so let’s consider that matter open to debate or interpretation or of no account. The requirements are simple: a really nice three-to-five-course meal at a restaurant for grown-ups with a good wine list (and scotch) and great service. On Saturday.

My immediate reaction is to say Erling Jensen or Chez Philippe. Expensive? Yes. Superb in all the aspects of fine dining that Tina is looking for? Also yes. If a Friday night were manageable, Erling Jensen has its wine tasting dinner, four courses and five glasses of wine for $75. That’s $150 for two people plus tax and tip. Other than that, Erling Jensen is a la carte, with soups, salads and appetizers ranging from $8 to $19 and entrees from $29 to $42.

Chez Philippe is only prix fixe, three courses for $68 or five courses for $75; wine is additional.

Menus and wine lists are available at peabodymemphis.com and ejensen.com.

For Italian, I would recommend Bari, though cannoli do not appear among dessert options. It has the advantage of being less expensive than Erling Jensen and Chez Philippe and of fielding an excellent list of Italian wines. The menu is available at barimemphis.com.

Many other possibilities exist, of course, and I bet that readers and posters to the “Whining&Dining” blog will be more than willing to weigh in and give Tina their advice. So go ahead.

Frequent blogger Carole H just returned from a trip to Orlando, where she ate at Emeril’s Tchoup Chop and reports back that it was a visual and culinary delight. Pictured here is a coconut creme brulee with tuile cookie and strawberry/whipped cream garnish and bourbon pecan pie with house made vanilla bean ice cream.

Here’s what she has to say about it: “It is the most visually beautiful restaurant I’ve ever eaten at in my life.  The food was exquisite & the service was near perfect.  They don’t do a lot of lunch business & we were the only ones in there for awhile around noon.  I think there were five different people bringing us things & clearing our table.  They all wear Hawaiian type shirts & dark pants & there is an open chef’s table by the kitchen.  The ceilings are very tall & there is a pool in the middle that becomes a fountain as the water spills over the end.”

We had shrimp chips w/an Asian peanut sauce dip & scallop ceviche, which were complimentary appetizers.  The menu changes daily.  I had kalua pork loco moco w/an omelet instead of a fried egg & it was served on top of fried rice.  My friend had mahi mahi that she said was the best she ever ate (she has lived all over the country, incl. San Francisco).  It had fried lotus root chips on top - not much taste but nice crunch.  There was a mushroom sauce around it & it was perfectly cooked.  She also had a green salad.  Our entrees were $18/$19 & wine was $9/glass. ”

Have you had a good meal lately you want to share with us? Send a picture to me at biggs@commercialappeal.com and if it’s the right resolution and so on, I’ll post it. 

My thanks go to page designer Donna Bauer for coming up with the “Oat Cuisine” headline for my story about oatmeal this morning. She told me yesterday that she had been wanting to use that pun for years, so I’m glad I gave her the opportunity.

Speaking of oatmeal, as LL and I were testing the products mentioned in the story and the sidebar, I couldn’t help noticing how we take different approaches to oatmeal. I like mine with brown sugar or honey and a little milk; she likes hers with salt and butter and a little milk. It takes all kinds, right? She does have far less of a sweet tooth than I do.

And thinking about that issue brought to mind the ritual my father went through when he ate oatmeal many years ago, when I was a child. He would rummage through the kitchen cabinets and drawers looking for any stale confection to crumble into his oatmeal: stale cake or doughnuts or Danish pastries, the last few chocolate chip cookies in the jar, an old brownie — anything sweet and slightly over the hill was grist for the mill (oops, ha-ha) of his oatmeal. Then he would top his creation off with a sliced banana. And he insisted on using skim milk, which to me was like pouring milky-pale water into your cereal. I would sit there appalled in a state of goggle-eyed disgust and then frown wildly like a cadet existentialist.

Ah, family life. As I said, It takes all kinds …

Read my Whining & Dining column in tomorrow’s paper and find out about my dinner last week with Morgan Freeman. Yep. Morgan Freeman. You’d have to look long and hard to find someone less celebrity-obsessed than I am, but I gotta tell you: This was a thrill. He’s quite the charmer and I had a fabulous, fabulous evening. To top it off, the meal at Madidi in Clarksdale was excellent. The best tuna I’ve tasted, great softshell crab, good wine and excellent company all ’round.

Morgan was completely gracious to all the folks who came up with their digital cameras and at one point, I was snapping so many photos for people that I had no idea who the cameras belonged to. Bill Luckett, Morgan’s partner in Madidi and Ground Zero, was kind enough to invite me to join them when I called earlier in the week to check on the status of Ground Zero in Memphis (no date yet, but everything’s a go, he said).

What is fine dining?

I ask because there has been some discussion about this category of restaurant — whatever it is — in responses to several posts that Jennifer Biggs and I entered on the blog in the past week or so.

In writing about favorite restaurants, FIG said, “Sad to say, not any of the fine dining restaurants, very disappointing.”

When I asked FIG to elaborate about “fine dining” in Memphis, this was part of the response: “not … necessarily bad, just disappointing. They tend to fall into two categories here, (1) misguided hodgepodge of too busy plates with numerous ingredients that are confused as being creative … And (2) pseudo upscale Southern trying to reinterpret Southern cuisine by rehashing tired old ideas.”

Ouch!

And on the post about the pricing of Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label, Chris Henderson, general manager of Equestria (where service is excellent), said this about fine dining in our area: " ... there is no fine dining in Memphis. No one measures up to the standard of service that our parents and grandparents once experienced. I would say that there are only a handful (of fine dining restaurants) left in the U.S."

Ouch, again! You can bet that the owners, chefs and managers of establishments like Chez Philippe and Erling Jensen would disagree with both of these viewpoints.

Perhaps we need to ascertain what fine dining really is.

Does a fine dining restaurant have to have white cloths and napkins on the tables and great china and utensils and glassware? Does fine dining imply an atmosphere of cool, subtle elegance or unabashed luxury? Do we know we’re in a fine dining establishment when we open the menu and see appetizer prices going up to $20 and main courses going up to $40 or more? Does the idea of fine dining imply a particular type of food that employs the best, if not luxury ingredients, creatively conceived and artfully and beautifully arranged? With emphasis, of course, on classic French cuisine? Or can fine dining be “American” or “fusion,” whatever those terms mean?

In a fine dining restaurant, does the waiter say, “Hi, my name is Steve and I’ll be taking care of you guys tonight”? Or do we count on waiters who exercise courtesy, discretion, helpfulness, efficiency and a certain amount of intuition, if not actual clairvoyance? Who are there without seeming to be there?

Has the seemingly relentless tide toward the casualization of American life and culture ruined everything that would contribute to fine dining? Is the “casually elegant” tier in restaurant dining merely a way of getting out of dressing up a little? (Jacket, yes; baseball cap, no.)

Taking the positive aspects and implications (or the negative) of the questions I have posed here, does Memphis (and the area) truly not have restaurants that qualify as "fine"? Does anybody care?

Come on, "fine dining" patrons, restaurant owners, chefs and managers and all you readers who wouldn't pay more than $25 for a meal, including drink, tax and tip, let us hear from you.

Photo credits:
1. The elegant table setting is from jupiterimages.com.
2. Daniel Boulud’s tuna tartare is from nibble.com.
3. This incredibly romantic corner of Michel Guerard’s restaurant is from vanin.be.
4. This dish, from Cafe Toulouse of Le Bernardin, is from shopping.beloblog.com.

One of those days again, when eight hours at work feel like 327 hours, and of course it doesn’t help that the milieu in the Bluff City has been fraught with gloom, so we trek over to The Belmont, about eight minutes from the house, for a burger. And we get a perfect parking place! Right by the back door! Good omen! The interior of the place is so gaudily lit up with Christmas lights, I mean a million tiny lights, at least, that it’s like sitting inside a Christmas tree, say the one at Rockefeller Center. We don’t even need menus. LL orders a burger, medium rare, with cheddar cheese and fries. I order a burger, medium rare, with Swiss cheese and bacon; LL does a double-take and gasps, and the waiter says, “What’s wrong? Did you mean to order bacon on your burger?” And LL says, “No, I just can believe that he ordered bacon.” And I got onion rings.

I’ve always loved the burgers at The Belmont. I love the quality of the meat and the almost rectangular soft, but slightly chewy French roll the burger comes on. I love it that this kitchen has never been afraid to cook a burger exactly to medium rare because that’s what the customer wants. This is one juicy, meaty, flavorful burger, and the Swiss cheese and bacon, oh, and the little paper container of cole slaw which is never quite enough but adds some zip and crunch — well, I’m sorry, but I’m about to go out on a limb here and say that this is, OK, not THE best but certainly among the top three or four burgers in town. It’s individually styled but not eccentric; it creates its own tradition of greatness without losing sight of the honorable American heritage of burgers.

The Belmont was packed last night: couples young and middle-aged and elderly; families with children; groups of friends; a few solitary diners eating at the bar. A gentle hubbub of conversation over the eclectic range of music. A sense of complete, comfortable unchangingness in the heart of Old East Memphis. Isn’t that the definition of a favorite place?

When I reviewed Umai at the end of March, I gave it two stars, based mainly on the fact that service was amateurish and erratic, that it took eons to get dishes out of the small, open kitchen and that much about the French-Japanese fusion restaurant seemed provisional. The food, however, was close to excellent.

Last night’s meal proved that service is much better — well-known waiter Patrick McNamara, formerly of Wally Joe, now presides at Umai — the food still takes a while to get to the table but not hours, and the food itself is better than ever. In fact, throughout our dinner, there wasn’t a single misstep. Presentations are artful, beautifully detailed, without being precious or pretentious; flavors are married in series of often playful comparisons and contrasts, the primary emphasis being on purity and intensity. Sushi and sashimi are now available at Umai, but we stuck with the regular menu.

Dinner began with a tasty tuna salad-kimchi amuse-bouche and continued with appetizers of black mussels and the fish Grenobloise. The mussels are flash roasted and then steamed in and served in a kimchi-miso broth and accompanied by thin triangles of toasted bread. This is a great mussels preparations. The mussels are good size and deeply flavorful, as is the broth, which brings an earthy exotic flavor. The Grenobloise is an unusual dish for a restaurant that employs so many Japanese themes and ingredients; this preparation is pure French bistro, two small filets of (in this case) flounder, crusted with panko crumbs and perfecty fried, served on dense, glossy mashed potatoes with a caper-butter sauce.

LL ordered the roasted hijiki seaweed salad, a dish of striking intensity and power. As you can see in the photograph above (which she took), the salad is also beautiful to look at, flecked with sesame seeds, topped with thin lemon slices and adorned with a hem of English peas. I had the soup du jour, a generous portion of ginger and sweet potato soup (no cream) with exquisite balance between the ginger and the sweet potato. (That’s the other image, which I took.)

Since we were drinking red wine (the Hewitson “Miss Harry” 2005), we chose red meat entrees. LL had the “Drunken Duck,” slices of medium rare duck breast that had been marinated for 48 hours and then seared. These are served on a bed of creamed potatoes with steamed choi sum (in the bok choi family) and the dark mahogany “drunken duck” sauce. I’ll unlimber the word “intensity” again at this moment to say that the duck is one of the most emphatically rich, deeply flavorful and intense dishes, I mean sublimely delicious, I have ever encountered, and we made little inroad, though we took home what we couldn’t eat.

Almost that intense is the sirloin strip encrusted with guajillo (a chile pepper common to Mexico) and chickory coffee, grilled to the requested medium rare — actual medium rare — and served with a tasty and exotic “sour” fried rice and a Japanese curry veal au jus. Lord have mercy! We took a lot of that home too.

McNamara convinced us to try one dessert, the “homemade pie du jour,” last night being an apple and apricot tart that was almost more savory than sweet.

When people talk about bargain dining, Umai should be at the top of the list. Appetizers are $7 to $13, entrees are $17 to $20. The short but well-chosen wine list is equally cost-conscious, the white wines ranging from $20 to $29, the reds from $16 to $35.

The restaurant still feels a bit provisional in furnishings and comfort-level — it’s cold in fall and winter — but service is thoughtfully Old School and the food, as I think I’ve indicated here, is superb.

Umai is at 2015 Madison. It’s open for lunch Wednesday through Friday, dinner Wednesday through Saturday and for Sunday brunch. Call 405-4241.

When we lived at the Greenstone at Poplar and Waldran, we used to go to Saigon Le frequently, because it was just down Poplar and around the corner on Cleveland. After we moved out east, though, we lost touch with the place and its great, inventive Vietnamese cuisine. Venturing downtown recently, however, and needing an early dinner, we stopped at Saigon Le and were really glad that we did.

The restaurant, which opened in April 1993, is owned by its unassuming chef, Hoa Nguyen (known as “Mama”) and operated by the expansive Le family. My first review ran in The Commercial Appeal on May 28, 1993, and while we didn’t use a star rating system in those days, my reaction was more than just enthusiastic; I thought the food was remarkably fresh, delicious and creative. I wrote a brief “Second Helping” on June 24, 1994. Then in March 1995, Saigon Le burned to the ground. Hoa Nguyen was determined to rebuild the exact building in the same spot, and that’s what the family did. The restaurant reopened in October that year, and I wrote another rave review. From that time until the early 21st century, I always included Saigon Le on my annual list of the city’s best restaurants and mentioned Hoa Nguyen as one of our best chefs.

Anyway, when we went into Saigon Le recently, everyone welcomed us with “Long time no see!” (there was none of the brusqueness that has occasionally soured patrons’ experiences at the restaurant) and our waiter immediately brought us a new salad in Mama’s repertoire, a small platter holding finely shredded seaweed, sliced cucumber, sliced onions, basil leaves and boiled shrimp, all bathed with a light, slightly sweet, slightly vinegary dressing. If any dish on earth were fresher, cleaner and tastier than this, with its blending of mild and piquant flavors and its lovely combination of shades of green and white with the pink shrimp — well, I can’t think of it, so never mind.

We ordered the appetizer pancake, which is actually an omelet (of sorts) folded around mushrooms, onions and bean sprouts. This comes with a plate of various salad greens — opal basil, romaine and such — that you wrap around a piece of the “pancake,” dip in a savory sauce (mixed with red chili paste) and happily devour.

For entree we asked for the curry chicken soup. Mama’s genius reveals itself here in a dense, mustard-yellow color broth of amazing complexity and subtle heat. This holds only pieces of chicken, white potatoes and sweet potatoes with a few bits of onion, and believe me, it needs nothing more to be completely satisfying. Oh, heck, let’s just say it: It’s awesome! The chicken you can dip in another multi-layered sauce, heavy on the black pepper, that contains slices of red chilies.

What a great meal, aided in its compelling nature by the fact that even with a couple of Tsingtao beers, the tab was about $30.

Saigon Le is at 51 North Cleveland and is open for lunch and dinner every day except Sunday. Call 276-5326.

Just back from a very nice lunch at comfortable and welcoming River Oaks with a couple of wine-tasting friends. Red wines being the theme, we stuck to dishes (mainly) that would complement what we were tasting, so let me dive in right here and say that the appetizer of beef short ribs ravioli, with sauteed wild mushrooms, garlic coulis and sherry emulsion ($8) was (1) perfect for a chilly afternoon, (2) incredibly tender and succulent, and (3) a terrific bargain. Now chef Ben Vaughn is deeply involved with deconstructed food concepts, so this was ravioli in the “new sense,” meaning that rather than being “ravioli,” it was one “raviolo,” and not only that but simply sheets of thin pasta draped over a heap of the melt-in-the-mouth beef. Did we care? I didn’t notice.

One of our party ordered the Caesar salad ($8), which, in the deconstructed sense, appears as a sheaf of hearts of romaine lettuce standing upright within a ring of puff pastry; that’s right, the salad was inside the crouton! So to speak. Another appetizer was the charcuterie plate ($8, another incredible bargain), which brings various rustic sausages, a selection of different cheeses, pickled cipollini onions and grilled flat bread. This serving is so generous that we saved some of the cheese for after the meal, to have with the last red wine and espresso.

Now I hate to be a disappointment to readers of Whining & Dining, but since the three of us were tasting red wines, we all opted for the tournados of beef tenderloin ($15), not very imaginative, perhaps, but certainly appropriate. The beef, cooked properly to medium rare, came with creamy, glossy mashed potatoes, sauteed baby green beans and a rich and flavorful truffle bordelaise sauce.

So that’s it, three guys tasting red wine and eating like robber barons on a winter night. Too bad River Oaks is so far from Downtown.

River Oaks is at 5871 Poplar, where the Cockeyed Camel used to rock. Lunch is served Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; dinner is 5 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Friday, 5 to 11 p.m. Saturday. Call 683-9305. Menus are available at riveroaksrestaurant.com.

We had dinner last Friday at Assaggio in Cordova. I ws really looking forward to the lasagna, which I noted as one of the best items on the menu when I reviewed the restaurant in the Playbook on August 10. I wasn’t disappointed. The lasagna is fresh and spicy, hearty and flavorful without being heavy, and the serving is generous.

We noticed after a few minutes that a couple who had come into the restaurant after we did and were seated at the table next to us seemed concerned about something. The gentleman had ordered the lasagna and evidentally didn’t like it and was complaining to his wife. He called the waiter to the table and complained about the dish and said he didn’t want it. The waiter politely asked what was wrong with the lasagna, and that man said, “It’s bland.”

Well, now, it seems to me that feeling that a dish is bland is not grounds for sending it back to the kitchen. Palates are different, of course, and what was pleasantly spicy to me may indeed have tasted bland to this diner. Why didn’t he, then, have recourse to salt and pepper or perhaps some red pepper flakes.

No, sending food back to the kitchen, which is a nice way of saying “refusing to accept a dish at the table,” is a serious matter and should be done when a food item is either prepared in the wrong manner (getting a well-done steak when you ordered rare or vice versa), if there’s a foreign object in the food or if there truly is a flaw, if, say, fish smells spoiled and disgusting or meat is so tough that it’s difficult to cut or the food is so salty that it’s inedible.

The staff at Assaggio performed exactly as they should have. The waiter took the lasagna away (while I thought “Bring it to me!”) and brought the man a menu and he chose something else for his dinner. One of the chef/owners came from the kitchen and apologized. Every effort was made to accommodate the patron.

But I think he was wrong to send the food back.