Is Something Amiss at One of Paris’s Great Restaurants?

It was a bad week for L’Arpège, the three-Michelin-star restaurant where the tasting menu—sans beverage—costs $475 and “every ingredient comes with its own passport and provenance.” Almost every ingredient. The small piece of soft plastic found in one diner’s fleurs de courgette recently was “of unknown origin,” according to The Times of London. Worse, “the recipient of this indigestible morsel happened to be reviewing the food for one of France’s most influential newspapers.” Sure enough, Stéphane Durand-Souffland let fly in Le Figaro: “From beginning to end, the dinner left us in a state of great perplexity. [Chef Alain] Passard was passive, without energy, as though going through some soulless routine. In this category, at this price, it’s unforgivable.” Catastrophe? Bien sûr.

Raise the Endurance? The explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship sank in 1915 and was discovered, just last March, in nearly 10,000 feet of water by the maritime archaeologist Mensun Bound. Bound noted recently that the Endurance will eventually “decay out of existence” if it isn’t raised and preserved. “We’ve got to think about conserving it and the process of that, which museum is going to take that, which could take forever and a day,” he said in The Guardian. “But if we leave it there, it’s organic, it’s going to decay some time beyond our lifetime.” Alexandra Shackleton, the explorer’s granddaughter and the ship’s legal owner, said after its discovery that she preferred the Endurance to remain where it is.