Unless you get an obscure HD channel called Mojo, you're not watching one of the best food TV shows out there. It's called After Hours with Daniel and the premise is pretty simple. Daniel Boulud hosts an afterhours party at a restaurant in NYC. He cooks one course, the restaurant prepares the rest and he invites luminaries of the restaurant scene plus some celebrities to round out the mix. They sit down together and the cameras roll. There's only been eight episodes, there probably won't be any more, and that's a shame, but what's there is fantastic.

For the episode at Daniel you had the following guest list:

• Eric Ripert (a culinary god)
• Jacques Pepin (another culinary god - we're polytheists)
• Drew Nieporent (the owner of the Myriad Restaurant Group, one of the most successful in the country)
• Ruth Reichl (former food editor of the NYT and the woman who wrote the most famous review in history of the janus-like nature of a previous incarnation of Le Cirque)
• Jeffery Steingarten (judge on Iron Chef America and food author)
• Dan Barber (owner of Blue Hill a farm AND restaurant)
• Ariane Daguin (owner of D'Artagan)
• Rocco Di Spirito (a former celebrity chef who famously crashed and burned on NBC's reality show The Restaurant)
• The chefs from Balthazar
• Tiki Barber
• A few minor celebrities ... and with the list above, who the fuck cares who they are

Can you just imagine sitting around a table with these people. Wow.

While I'm on a language-related rant, I hate the way the use of the word "decimate" has devolved. The original definition of the word means to reduce a population by one tenth (hence the prefix deci). However the word has come to mean to reduce a population by a large number and has generally been accepted as such. Yet for a stickler like me, when you hear that "deci" slip out, it's like fingers grating on a chalkboard.

I hate the pretension that goes into labels that bartenders have for themselves nowadays. Some examples:

• Bar chef - The only chef is the one in the kitchen. The title chef means chief in French and is reserved for the guy that runs a kitchen. Period.
• Mixologist - Last time I checked, the only "gists" I knew were people that had gone to school and gotten some sort of scientific degree.
• Cocktail Stylist - Might as well be a hairdresser and totally excludes the world of mocktails.

Look, I don't object to those scholars of drink finding some sort of way of differentiating themselves and advertising the level of dedication they have to their craft (perhaps it's time for a "Master of Bartending" or "Master of Cocktails" degree, like we have Master of Wine or Master Sommelier or Master Chef), but there's a certain pretension in abandoning the term "bartender." A bartender is someone you chat with about your day, a fixture of the restaurant, someone that is familiar to you like no one else in the front of the house . The new titles have a certain distance to them that implies that the drink comes first, not the customer.

Personally I know that when I go into a bar I don't want to deal with a bar chef, mixologist or cocktail stylist. Half the time the drinks that I've had from aspiring "bar chefs" have not been memorable. There's a reason that the classic cocktails are classics. Just sit me at a bar where the bartender can make a great Tom & Jerry, Ramos fizz or rye Manhattan.