The coming couple of years will see an increase in the availability, and the demand for, more long-form video. If your video strategy involves uploading the 90-second promo for your 60-minute TV series, you’ll need to revisit that strategy.

Back to Chow: these episodes have been around for a little while, but I ran into them only a week ago, and watched all of them in one sitting. (More, please.) I don’t mind the short length because I leave with something substantive, not meaningless promotion for something I have to watch in another context.

Grant Achatz’s cookbook has been released, and even if you never attempt a recipe, this is an amazing work of art. It contains more than a hundred recipes from Alinea in Chicago, along with stunning photography, and when you buy the book, you get access to an accompanying web site with more recipes and how-to videos (I got a sneak peek at the site a few months ago, and it’s exceptional).

This won’t replace the experience of dining at Alinea, but it comes close, and if you’ve eaten there, it’s a nice way to remember the experience.

For a six-pound coffee table book (oh yeah, it’s also a cookbook, right?), the price is surprising – $50 (far less than that if you order at Amazon). Your foodie friend will love this.

It’s been almost 11 years since Reichl wrote that review in the Times, and The French Laundry is still one of the most exciting places to eat in the country, and it’s still one of the best.

What is “exciting?” The French Laundry has been open since 1994, and almost since the beginning, meals have opened with “Pearls and Oysters.” The excitement that one feels about this dish isn’t that it has arrived at the table (we knew it would), but that the dish is technically perfect and that it tastes absolutely delicious. So, if you think about “exciting” as the resulting impression of the marriage of technical perfection and delicious food, then The French Laundry is an exciting place.

In limited career as a diner, this is how I’ve come to see French cooking: there is invention, but the focus is on the elevation of ingredients.

At the hands of Keller and his chefs, foie gras en terrine is creamy perfection. The salad of compressed watermelon confused us because we couldn’t relate the technique of compressing the watermelon to a clearly identifiable result. However, it was delicious, with Hawaiian Hearts of Peach Palm adding a floral hint to the flavors of watermelon and radish. The Confit de Coeur de Veau was clean and delicate, a little like the most refined pastrami you’ve ever tasted; the frog’s legs, suprisingly sweet and tender.

The experience of eating there is also exciting because nearly every party in the dining room is there to celebrate; there are few jaded diners or awkward family get-togethers. So the atmosphere is one of delight and the staff respond accordingly, stopping to share the stories of the restaurant and the food, adding their own personal touches.

There was a time when I thought that a dinner at The French Laundry would be the end of a food journey, the equivalent of reaching the top of K2. But it’s also the beginning. Great food is the result of fine, fresh ingredients and excellent technique, among other things. Experiencing the technical expertise of one of the finest kitchens in the US resets one’s palate for other experiences to come, and increases one’s enjoyment of the next meal. Even if you’ve just climbed the tallest peak, the mountain next door may be just as thrilling.

And that’s why, 24 hours after our dinner at The French Laundry, we could be dazzled by Meadowood in St. Helena. Here’s a restaurant with two Michelin stars, and a young chef (Christopher Kostow) who has been at the helm for only six months. The tasting menu there was stunning, and the slow-cooked tenderloin was the most amazing beef I’ve ever eaten.

The French Laundry dinner provides a new context for the meal we had at Alinea in June, 2007, and Manresa last August, and several dinners at Coi. It will be a reference for us as we dine in the future.

Achatz has been battling late-stage cancer of the tongue, and as Max notes, not only does he appear to have won the battle through a still-controversial therapy of radiation and chemo (as opposed to surgical removal of part of his tongue), his sense of taste is returning.

The most fascinating part of this piece is Max’s description of how Achatz’s sense of taste is returning – one taste at a time – sweet first, then salt, then bitter – and how Achatz is using his new discoveries about how these tastes relate to each other to inform what he creates in the kitchen.

Like any great New Yorker profile, you get deeper insight into the individual profiled, and you also run across many gems of knowledge along the path.

We went to Alinea in May 2007 with a couple of close friends, and the nearly six hour meal of 25 courses (and 23 wines) was one of the most amazing culinary experiences of my life. My boyfriend, Chuck thought about the meal for months before writing about the oxalis course on his blog. He has a photographic memory when it comes to food and wine.

You can watch Grant Achatz in action here – an episode from Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie, the best culinary series on public TV or any TV (produced with WGBH).

AND… you can listen to Michael Nagrant’s in-depth podcast interview with Grant Achatz here.

Men’s Health, which has taken an increasingly active approach to this topic, has produced a list of the 20 Worst Foods in America, which contains some expected entries, and a few surprises, as well, like the 900 calorie “smoothie” from Jamba Juice. The term for this series is fucking shocking, and this is just the tip of the fatberg.