In Praise of Small Menus An Article by Rachel Sugar www.grubstreet.com The best way to experience a restaurant, I have always felt, is by eating exactly what it wants to feed you. I do not want choices. I want the best thing. A restaurant might have five or ten best things, but it cannot have 45. There are many infuriating things about the world, but one of the more fixable is the sensation of acute regret from having ordered wrong. Why are there possibly wrong orders? Recently, I was at a fancy restaurant with great pastas and bad pizzas. So cut the pizzas! A kitchen that focuses on its strengths turns out consistently excellent things, even if that results in fewer total things. fooduxchoicesimplicity
Seeing and Knowing An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi Sōetsu The results of intuition can be studied by the intellect, but the intellect cannot give birth to intuition. Scholars and criticsUnderstanding its essence knowledgeintuitionseeing
Scholars and critics Let us take a look at how one of these scholars or critics goes about his work. Let’s say he is going to write a commentary on a particular painting. If he is not a man of intuition, certain features will characterize his approach. First he will try to place the painting genealogically, or he will try to define the painting by assigning it to a particular school. He feels uneasy unless he succeeds in doing this. But more than anything, he is extremely wordy. He seems incapable of speaking of beauty without innumerable layers of adjectives. critique
Understanding its essence One can study an object and note its features, but that only touches the surface. A knowledge of an artwork’s properties does not lead to an understanding of its essence. understanding