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GP 2 May 2007:
Better Than Best—First
Best of Class. The Global Province looks for
products, and companies, and experiences that reek of quality. Our
Best of Class section is strictly about bests, though you will find
riffs about quality in several places, such as
Big Ideas and
Agile Companies. This week and next we are citing a few
better-than-bests that stand out from the pack. We hope they will inspire
you as you get ready for summer vacation. Now, above all, it is time to
celebrate the restful and civilized, well away from the madding crowd.
- Soba at Nippon.
Restaurant Nippon is the classic Japanese restaurant in New
York—ostensibly the first to serve sushi there and certainly the first
to serve fugu, or poison blowfish. But we most cherish Nippon’s soba
noodles, homemade from buckwheat harvested at Nobuyoshi Kuraoka’s own
farm in Canada. The difference between this delectable and the packaged
imitations you are presented at most Japanese restaurants is striking.
Many other dishes here are worthy of your attention if you need variety:
fluke is nicely presented, without fear of the parasites that may
inhabit it at lesser places. Highly distinguished Japanese avail
themselves of this restaurant, and we first learned of it in Japan in
1976. On one occasion food was sent from Nippon to a Japanese heart
attack victim being treated at Bellvue: it was thought to be healthier
than the hospital fare. In fact, it was just more savory.
-
The First Church of Christ, Scientist. Bernard Maybeck’s
Christian Scientist Church is an oddity for a Berkeley where we suspect
the most sacred object these days is organic lettuce and perishable
conversation. Maybeck, a regional architect of the early 20th century
who is nationally revered, went on to do things for the Christian
Scientists in other parts of the country. Maybeck’s charming
homes—about Berkeley and San Francisco—form a very restful backdrop for
a Bay Area that is conflated with rhetoric and marginal passions.
Maybeck did get it right here: one does not even have to enter the
church to feel its persuasive spiritual power and the architect’s simple
combination of artistry and piety. For more on Maybeck, read about his
“Regional Solution to Modernity,” on the Global Province. Maybeck
himself lived in Berkeley, and the parcels of land he bought there often
tided him over during thin financial times. He was a great friend of
geologist Andrew Lawson, the crusty author of the report on the
earthquake of 1906, and he built a rock solid house for the flinty Scot
in Berkeley.
-
Mushrooms at La Boqueria or Mercat De La Boqueria. Early in the
morning Barcelona’s top chefs gather here to put together their market
basket. The
Observer has called it “Probably the best market in the world,” and
we would not quibble. Years ago, after sailing around the
Balearics, we took in Barcelona and in no time at all knew that the
best thing about the city was La Boqueria and the assorted creations of
the architect Gaudi. Soon enough we were taking its several delights
back to our hotel room, feeling not at all compelled to go out for all
meals. While it is renowned for all manner of thing, we remember
particularly the mushrooms, and the legendary Petras may sell 600 cases
in a day. To one side is an all-mushroom restaurant that begs to be
tried. We did—with great pleasure. It is only matched by a small café
that offers choice morels in the old city of Bergamo.
- Sculpture al fresco at Lousiana. As in so
many things, the best museums in the world are the small ones, usually
stowed in out of the way places. Such is Lousiana, north of Copenhagen.
Denmark is an unusually civilized country: it protected its Jews during
World War II with many of the citizens donning the gold stars the Nazis
wanted to pin on the Jews. Copenhagen has a kindly zoo: the animals are
sent to the country for recuperation when they seemed a bit tired,
needing a rest from the crowds. Fifteen percent of the country’s
electric power is generated from the wind, making it a world leader in
greening. It is home to Vestas, the leading company in wind turbines.
It is such an environment as this that produces Louisiana which we
alluded to in
“Museums: Is There a Muse in the House?” As we said in
“Museums as Special Places,” Louisiana is mightily blessed. It is
set near the water on a beautiful estate that needs no art, but the
works outside and in remind one that the right art can be a complement
to nature.
- Always The Thin Man.
If you were holed up in a Southwestern motel where the beds lacked
springs and the food were only an afterthought in the town’s formica
bars, what would you want to have with you? Well, we hope even this
50’s motel would have a DVD player. Then you could watch
The Thin Man and marvel at the way America used to blend
together simplicity and sophistication. The Thin Man (all six
episodes are available on DVD) is number one on
our family movie list. William Powell and Myrna Loy trollop through
six adventures, martinis in hand, with never a thread out of place, and
plenty of witty lines to help us ignore the plots. It is almost
unthinkable that these two never got married, for they were so well
matched in the movies. Nick and Nora Charles were dreamed up by
Dashiell Hammett, but he never got very far with them, The Thin Man
being his last novel. His career and personal life was rather abortive,
but Nick and Nora live on as a fond way of looking at a mixed era in
American life.
- Mario Villa’s Domestic Wares. It is most
appropriate that the Nicaraguan designer Mario Villa should have settled
so firmly in New Orleans. With all its troubles, it is, at its best,
the city where comfortable and beautiful domesticity is most ingrained.
Both uptown and in the French Quarter, we will find locals out eating
the food at better eateries, not entirely surrendering their restaurants
to outlanders. One shop of antiquities holds only an assortment of
wares for the kitchen: we have a crustacean painting from
Lucullus that reminds you of what the town is all about. Once, down
the street on the other side, was a shop that had furniture and such,
with every item having the shape or at least the image of an animal.
Villa has designed everything from flaring metal beds to lamps to
jewelry—each a genuine appeal to the imagination. Katrina closed his
gallery, but he stills sells out of his abodes. He has degrees from
both Tulane and the University of New Orleans—one in architecture and
one in anthropology. New
Orleans Homes captures the breadth of his work.
Destination Restaurants. A week or two back a
business friend wrote to thank us for pointing out a new restaurant in his
part of the country. He said, “We had to go twenty or so miles, but it was
worth it. There are,” he continued, “very few destination restaurants in
our part of the world, but surely this was worth the trip.”
Strange it is that you have to travel to the margins,
to unlikely places around the globe, to find the experiences and the
craftspeople who excel. In a globally connected world, one is looking for
artisans and individuals who are disconnected enough to rise above the herd.
They are not on Main Street or Wall Street.
P.S. We recommend you visit our companion site
Spicelines, where you will find endless examples of the excellent and
the exotic.
P.P.S. Maybeck once appeared before Berkeley’s
city government to save a tree—in the middle of LaConte as we remember. He
called it “a noble and thrifty tree.”
P.P.P.S. Strategy
World is doing a voice and web seminar with John Hagel on May 9, 2007
(11 A.M. EST). Hagel gives us some of the answers for dealing with today’s
short product cycles, where every product and every service becomes a
commodity before you can say, “Jack Robinson.” Global economics and new
technologies have so changed the playing field that traditional corporations
have to morph their strategies, organizations, and just about everything
else to remain viable. He and John Seely Brown have summed all this up in
The Only Sustainable Edge. If, implies Hagel, the
organization can get smarter at a faster rate, it can deploy those smarts in
ways that give an edge. While we clearly don’t believe Hagel has found the
‘only’ sustainable edge, he does make us think about how to out-scurry the
competition. Instead of just running scared, maybe one can learn to
run smart. You can get some of his drift at
www.hagel.com and at
edgeperspectives.typepad.com. We, on the other hand, have said that you
can create experiences that cannot be duplicated. We call it “splendid
customization,” remembering well that England once rejoiced in its splendid
isolation.
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