Culinary design has recently experienced something of a revolution. Where it was once the job of the chef to cook a meal, we are now seeing the chef stepping into all manner of other, more abstract and conceptual roles, far removed from what we all once knew.
Creativity as the stairway to culinary heaven
In the kitchen creativity reigns supreme – and indeed there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, speaking as a linguist, writer and pianist, I am more in favour of this than those who are perhaps of a more logical and mathematical orientation, but all the same I am faintly disturbed by the dominance of the chef, who is now dictating terms to diners and who is placing the desire to do this above their most important job, which is to feed people.
In a world of cuisine, the voice of a chef and his individuality can be a thing of majesty, bringing together envisioneering, a pioneering spirit and feeling for adventure to create a rather wondrous sensory delight. We have all been there and experienced it – that moment when you eat the kind of dish you will remember for the rest of your life, and which you know may never be equalled elsewhere. That's this writer's definition of umami.
The chef as messiah
But all too often the contrivances of these denizens is leading them to put style over substance - so that a fleeting multi-sensory moment is placed above the simple obligation to provide good food - and to present the chef as an untouchable messiah, thus contaminating a potentially outstanding culinary experience. Am I the only one who is bewildered, annoyed and disgusted by this (?), Yours Truly of Tunbridge Wells wants to know.
When I step back and see the culinary extremes which are being explored, then clearly we can see that this is an important moment in time. The industry is finding new frames, and polarities must be explored before we can determine where the confines of the best of it lies in order to justify a diner’s respect for the long term. The attainment of a fine goal lies ahead, but the journey there is proving rough for this diner, at least, and I would like to know if others feel the same.
So what is happening that is so thought-provoking?
Currently, the chef is redefining himself as the creator of an intense sensory and cultural experience that ranks as historic in the diner’s life or in the field of culinary art itself. When the chef concerned has an overt understanding of how such an evocative experience translates into a new human memory, and studiously develops an experience in an elegant and respectful display, then truly, some incredible feats of culinary engineering can be achieved and these things can indeed justify our full and deep admiration.
This is the good side of things.
Abandon hope all ye who eat here
But there is another side to this, under which chefs are creating a menu of enforced therapeutic interventions, which effectively drag diners into places which are sometimes at odds with their morals - as if this was some kind of amusing game. By refusing to accurately label what is on the menu and keeping it a 'secret', and with diners refusing to set clear boundaries when they realize what is upon them, the idea of challenging a diner is being taken to horrible extremes, so that I have to question whether this is appropriate or indeed even ethical.
On one television show, I watched as diners were unable to disguise their unease, but nevertheless called it ‘cute’ and ‘interesting’ to eat animals which had not been killed prior to cooking. In another, Giles Coren attended a chef in Charleston who proceeded to cut the face off a live crab - much as others tear the legs of live frogs. There is some science to suggest these animals feel pain.
As Gordon Ramsey once very memorably said, in words to this effect: "There is no excuse for perpetrating even the possibility of such pain, when it takes less than a second to kill a crab humanely before cooking it - just do it". He demonstrated this with a swift sharp lance into the animal's brain. I am not against eating meat or killing animals for food at all, but I am against the willful and callous lack of respect some animals are shown by breeders, transporters and slaughter houses when the former give up their lives for us as diners.
The unspeakable consuming the inedible
In a bsimilar vein we not only tolerate, but actively propel industries forward with our demands for products that are riven from defenseless animals in the most brutal and sadistic fashion – pâté de foie grois, live monkey brains, snakes skinned alive, various types of seafood cut and sliced while alive, bear bile etc. See this film on youtube of a young Asian school girl picking up a very large, live octopus and biting aggressively into its body in order to eat it raw, for entertainment purposes. With the animals clearly in agony, it attacks her face, as you would expect, and this is frankly richly deserved.
I am not a member of Peta, but how can it be pleasurable to serve, be served or eat these delicacies for human delectation knowing we may have inflicted such pain unnecessarily – and these are only a few examples. All this is to say nothing of the sickening sales of aborted human fetuses for general human consumption in China, as exposed by Sharma Yojana and Graham Hutchings in The Daily Telegraph.13 April 1995, International, p.14,
A plate of narcissicm
When it comes to television shows, one can turn over to other channels, but how is the diner in a restaurant being given a choice when the chef has loaded the experience towards his own selfish desires? Of course, one can take a laissez-faire aproach of 'Whatever-happens-to-you-in-your-life-you-deserve-it-get-over-yourself-have-a-cigarette', but do you really want to eat food that has been cooked by cruel and dishonest hands? And how is this going to be squared with the demand to cook only with ingredients that are ‘fresh’ and ‘honest’, and which is propounded by just about every chef out there?
Secondly, the notion of entertaining the diner – oftentimes just a euphemism for misdirection – has reached epic levels: ecco Heston Blumenthal. Who can forget the occasion, when this ineffable master of mirth invited a group of celebrities to a chocolate banquet, at the end of which they were told to – wait to for it – lick the wall?
It may sound fun on the surface (pun intended), but do you really want to work that hard for your dessert? Methinks, you have paid to have it served to you, thank you very much. And besides, the idea of licking anything other than a clean fork or spoon in a restaurant is rather unsavoury – dust will have gathered on the facility between preparation and eating, and insects may also have alighted on it. Fancy a light frosting of Raid anyone?
I thought not.
A licence to pry
This is not the only role the chef is now seeking to assume. Chefs are delving, probing, and projecting as never before…we now have the chef as psychologist, with his dishes as ink spots awakening long-forgotten memories and emotional associations, and in so doing pointing to a whole new world of culinary communications between diner and chef. Neurologists would be pleased with the new neural networks which chefs now believe it is their duty or wont to create. Or would they? And how far is it reasonable to go?
Do chefs have any sense of their diners’ emotional boundaries? Do they understand that just because you are exploring something in your own life as a chef, this does not mean that others have to be happy to go there as well. When someone books a table in your restaurant, they are most probably just looking forward to a nice burger; they are not seeking a person-centred intervention with the cow.
Burnt rubber anyone?
I admit it is not realistic to expect a chef to know what each diner’s individual olfactory peccadillos are, but there is a difference between offering something up, and planning a cynical invasion. I remember sampling a soup which our entire group agreed tasted of burning car tyres – who wants to recall a car crash? And cottage pie which both smelt and tasted of pickled leather - we later discovered that the chef had, for some inexplicable reason, doused the entire dish with malt vinegar. I love the smell of a beautiful leather saddle just as much as the next person, but this does not mean that I want to eat one.
How different is it then when you encounter a chef who, while being aware of his own skills and desires, prefers to merge them with the diner's desires and consequently composes a symphony of culinary art? I remember tasting a dish in Provence once, which was so flawless and effortlessly beautiful that it brought a lump to my throat.
My husband and I were seated on a pretty balcony overlooking a river, with crystalline air above us, and verdant colours everywhere. With dappled light glancing around this textured scene, the waiter deposited a plate of Eden before me - a simple salad which was so beautiful that I had tears in my eyes when I tasted it, completely caught off guard, and the moment was etched in my heart forever.
The gravity of scent
I suspect that apart from wanting to satisfy our hunger, most people choose dishes on a menu by their names and ingredients, trying at the time to identify those flavours which will yield a pleasing ‘story’ over several courses, or which will deliver at least one feel-good moment. Some of us may order food for its potential to energize us, distract us from a difficult day, comfort us, nourish or transport us to other places. In this way ordering food can be a positive emotional experience from the start.
But in that there are also scents and smells which carry deeply unhappy associations for everyone – indeed our sense of smell is our most potent, going straight into the limbic system and often bypassing logical and even conscious thought – why put any food that emits these on the menu at all?
Apart from the 'tart au chalet cuir marinee', varius other horrors come to mind: durian (custard, onions and rotting meat), Limburger (dirty feet), boiled liver for use in terrines (sock cemetary), and tripe (soiled nappies). A recent question on Facebook about 'your most hated food' yielded a shortlist of strangely aromaless foods equally capable of invoking universal horror, but this mainly related to texture. These included tapioca ((ball bearings), avocados (candle wax), spinach (slime) and lentels (spawn of the devil). This latter courtesy of my brother-in-law. Disappointingly, Marmite never made it onto this list. I can hear Brits and Ossies and ossies loading their muskets already.
Waiters and gaiters
Apart from bad taste in menu development, another issue is dress and the lofty height, from which even waiters are now mandated to diminish their diners. Have you ever eaten in a restaurant where the staff wore more expensive clothes than the guests?
The Strand One in London managed this inadmirable feat, discomforting everyone in our party in the process and ensuring we never booked there again. And we were not poor or inelegantly turned out: we were all high earners working for a top city firm, celebrating the fact that we had just secured a multi-million pound contract from a leading British financial institution. The staff however were wearing Armani silk suits – and they made sure we knew it by opening their jackets and pointing to the labels. Gone are the days when the host or hostess knew that as the host you dress down. It is your diners who are supposed to be the stars of the show.
In these establishments, people are reminded that they come in at a rather poor third place, after the ace (chef) and the wildcards (other staff).
As someone who has always held waitressing staff in high regard for doing what is often a spectacularly difficult job, I feel betrayed by the tendency of restaurants to groom them to patronize their guests. If a restaurant manager assumes that a diner's trust can be used as a free license to trample on their position, then is it not time for us diners to vote with our feet – or better said, wallets? Methinks a refreshing visit to Stockpot beckons....
The chef at the Colosseum
Another example of unhealthy psychology is the idea of culinary competitions – currently all the rage around the world.
The first of these was a delightful and relatively friendly exploration of what amateurs could produce, with Lloyd Grossman encouraging his fellow judges to 'huddle' in order to determine who had won, but things have changed since then and ‘progressed’ to a level of brutality which I have on occasion endured, rather than enjoyed.
We now have the chef as the uncomfortable gladiator. Stripped bare by the inescapable and penetrating stare of the digital lens, he/she competes against other worthy rivals in ever more difficult Olympics, presided over by one Cesar or another – Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsey et al.
Perhaps the ‘ultimate’ of these is Iron Chef Australia, where the modern addiction to mawkish voyeurism has produced an arena, with friends and family staring vicariously into the heat of the abyss, projecting victory onto their own and willing all the others to crash and burn, maybe literally, although of course no-one has the honesty to say this outright.
I am Spartacus, am I heck.
Interestingly, rather than being a true test of each gladiator’s real skills, Spartacus is regularly being paired off with another cook for one challenge or another, who is usually either incapable, disorganized or otherwise generally not worthy of this partnership. Roman ethics indeed: it’s like watching the Christians being slaughtered all over again. Not exactly fun and far beneath the output, which human intelligence could produce in TV programming if they really put their minds to it.
“But X million viewers could not possibly be wrong,” I hear you cry, along with a host of TV producers. Well yes, actually they can, as Hitler proved. They can be very wrong, and putting them in a group does not make them right. It just makes you aware of how many sheep there are out there.
Beauty bites the dust
In worshipping the notion that ‘ever greater’, ‘ever harder’, and ‘ever more horrifying’ is the best credo for gaining inspiration in programming and the pinnacle of human interest – Big Brother's 'Bush Tucker Trials' come to mind – the media is willfully and stupidly blinding itself to our best qualities, which are not only more interesting to behold, but which, I would wager, could earn them more money: our ability to create real beauty in different, challenging scenarios, and to continue to elevate it through sustained creativity and raw physical effort. But no, what we most get are ever worsening repetitions of the same formats.
I long for the day when Master Chef would eliminate the task which involves preparing vast quantities of food in an obscene rush, which causes common sense to go out of the window and which brings about epic fails not worthy of the contestants' skills and which are completely unnecessary. I take no joy in this, nor can I see how this respects food or has any bearing on the competitors’ future career ambitions, which usually involve running restaurants with far less diners and being able to give each plate for more attention.
What next?
The chef as Dr Frankenstein
These days we have the delights of ‘molecular cuisine’, with the chef as the eccentric chemistry buff, who has converted his kitchen into a lab, presenting food with tweezers in jars or, God forbid, on petri-dishes.
Yeuch.
Not for him the personal labour of whisking vanilla custard and cream to make ice cream or the dream of conveying the sincere and comforting feeling to the diner that he is personally invested in them having a good time. Oh no. This chef prefers to distance himself from the act of cooking entirely. His ices must be made with smoking chemicals to harvest the cries of ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ which he believes to be his divine right (see the home page on Heston Blumenthal's website: "This is where it's at"), while diners are entirely distracted from the dissociation which is really going on here. Smoke and mirrors? There may be a lot of smoke around, but these mirrors are plate glass to me…
Death on the tiles
Another issue which of major concern is the health and safety of staff and diners in these establishments when dangerous chemicals are being used to cook innovative food or make new drinks.
In one London bar a young woman was served a cocktail laced with liquid nitrogen – which promptly dissolved half her stomach, leaving her permanently unable to eat solids and facing severe vitamin deficiencies for the rest of her life. In Germany a young chef lost both his hands using liquid nitrogen.
Does anyone care about this? What safety and security measures are in place when these chemicals are brought to the table – are the staff protected from splashes or splatters onto their face and/or body? Are you as a diner?
The answer to that would be 'no'.
Victory to a burly-handed baker
Contrast this with the caring that was evident in a simple cafe halfway around the world - Argentina - and which delivered one of my most favourite culinary memories: simple, honest food, with a staggering impact.
It happened around thirty years ago when I was in my early thirties. I travelled to Buenos Aires to dance the tango. My husband had to rehearse his lines for an opera and I knew I could not be socialising with him during this time, so he decided to go sailing in Spain, something he had long since aspired to do. His plan was to do his sailing certificate in the mornings and learn his opera in the early evenings before dinner.
I had been studying the tango for two years in London, taking lessons from visiting masters and practising 23 hours per week on top of my full-time job. I felt ready to hit the place where tango had been born, but I knew that my husband, with his two left feet, would only hold me back and he knew this. To get any dances in a tango hall you have to be seen with someone who already knows how to dance.
So a split holiday was the perfect solution because it allowed each of us to follow our favourite pursuits without worrying about the other, and we would rejoice in rejoining later – absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that.
And so the deal was on.
We both booked our holidays, said our goodbyes, and climbed on our respective planes. While our family and friends thought this was a prelude to divorce, we were each having a whale of a time, regaling each other with stories of our experiences every evening in our respective phone booths. I would call Mark from the booth inside a forex bureau just before I went out to an all-nighter, and he was due to eat, or he would call me from the hotel foyer.
On my first morning after arriving and sleeping late, I walked to a café across the road and sat, overwhelmed by the bustle around the place and the glory of the faded architecture around me.
I ordered coffee and media luna – their version of croissants. The coffee came first, served with three packets of sugar, and I did as I always do when abroad: I copy the locals. I noticed they were all putting all three packets in their coffee, so I did the same. It was thick, sweet and oh so creamy – and I have never found coffee like it since.
When the media luna came, it was a dainty, perfectly shaped, dense crescent of lusciousness. Its scent spoke to me of ancient wheat fields, sun-tanned farmers, and the burly hands of a baker in dusty rooms, toiling in good faith that his work would be appreciated when it reached the light of day. As rich as this image was in my over-fertile imagination, none of this could prepare me for the incredible experience of biting into it.
Speechless I called the waiter over, and asked in my broken porteno Spanish – a somewhat unusual blend of tourist and literary terms – “Who made this?”
“It’s marvelous, isn’t it?” he said, with real delight. "He is a poet, no? He puts rosewater in the dough...”
This to me, is a perfect example of what real culinary love does to a chef, a restaurant, and a diner. It merges multiple sensory universes into a single, silent circus of the soul.
The chef as alchemist
When it comes to the chemistry of cooking, the idea of the chef as an alchemist is not new. Culinary dictionaries are full of their creations, but there is an overt artfulness which is trying too hard, and a meanness of spirit at work in the way some modern culinary creations are being served, which is in direct contrast to the seeming generosity of the promises which the menus make and the rich linguistics that they use.
The first thing that strikes me about this type of chef is a lack of knowledge about the human brain and how it processes sensory stimuli. When I look at some plates of food which have been served to me in recent times, the scant offering on display makes it clear to me that the chef does not know that a diner needs more than a microdot and singular second to take the gastric delight on board. Why is this so?
Here comes the science...
Smell is the most potent of our senses. When we smell something, it goes across the scent receptors in our mouth and jaw, straight into the limbic system, affecting emotions immediately, and being instantly processed by the subconscious mind, where flow states are generated. This ‘process’ of its pathway into the limbic system is so instantaneous that the associations are created within a nanosecond in the subconscious mind, and in fact, a full conscious awareness of the memories and any associations which are being invoked may only develop later - or not at all.
In his seminal, and fascinating book ‘Neuro-Gastronomy’, Gordon Shepherd explains that flavour is developed in the brain as a response to an olfactory experience. The response consists of comparison, recognition, and association, after which the information is filed away for retrieval at a later time, if required.
Speaking as someone who is an accelerated learning trainer: this whole journey (of the scent molecules leading to a permanent culinary association being created in the brain) can happen in an instant, if the intensity of the scent is strong enough, but if it (or the food being eaten) is weak or sparse in scent, this will not happen and more then one meeting or 'intake' of the scent will be required. In culinary terms this means you will need to eat more of the dish (it's sauce for example) during a single sitting, or visit the restaurant several times and eat the dish more than once, to generate a permanent memory for recall later on.
Lessons from babies
Before they can see properly or speak, babies recognize everything by smell. Many of our first scent-related experiences and the associations we have made around them, stay with us for life. How else could we say some perfumes remind us of home or a wonderful holiday or mother – or invoke anxiety or a sense of loss?
For the first 6 years of our life, we are pure unconscious mind in that everything we experience goes directly into the back of our brains – the subconscious mind. You can tell a little child that you are from the Planet Zog, and it will believe you. This is because at that age we do not have our judgment filters set up. It’s very easy to teach a child languages and to perform on stage during that time because they normally have little or no sense of looking ridiculous when trying something out – the way we adults do. Because they do not judge, they have much more of a ‘have-a-go’ mentality.
When we are seven, however, things get harder. We develop judgment filters, through which we process the world – more or less consciously deciding which information we want to remember and how we will remember and apply it. If you are a parent, this is when your kids start actively judging you and your parenting (“Stupid tooth fairy…”).
Every second of every day the subconscious mind takes in 11 million bits of information – we can distinguish 2 million colours visually alone – but we could not possibly consciously process that, so we need these judgement filters (meta-programs) to help us do the work.
They help us to make decisions, including ones about what to focus on, and as such also govern the decisions we make and therefore also our behaviour. A thorough understanding of them and how to work with them benefits a business leader because it unfolds a deep sense of what motivates people and the fabric of their character, which ultimately expresses itself in their decisions and communications.
The power of scent-memories to affect turnover
From the chef’s point of view, the key to creating powerful and positive new memories lies in understanding how new memories are created and are lodged in the psyche. Without this the chef will fail to create the intense experience he desires, let alone find it ensconced in the brain with any permanence that is strong enough to bring the diner back. We have experienced poor dining experiences like this many times, and they have been memorable - for all the wrong reasons.
Successful creation of magnetic culinary memories comes from tasting superb flavours several times, lingering over each mouthful, and allowing enough time to lapse for the associations between it and one’s life experiences to build.
This is not going to be achieved in a second in the mind of an adult - at all - if the flavour is not truly discernable. It takes time to forge connections that will be of any lasting importance, simply because we have those inhibiting judgement filters set up. With this paradigm a few drops of sauce, for example, will not provide this kind of opportunity. The chef who does not get this, will find himself having to reinvent his client list every week, and may see his revenues go down. It is that profound.
I would like to give a specific example: a few years ago we dined in a modern restaurant, where the food served came on a large platter with small dots of sauce around the main meat. There was so little sauce we could not properly taste it, had no idea what it was made from, and even today I can only ‘remember’ it as a wasted opportunity.
I can recall it was finely textured, as in blended, but I can’t recall the flavour because there simply wasn’t enough of it for me to discern this, let alone linger and imbibe (or encode) it into long-term memory. I write this as a trained chef with a fine palate and an even finer nose: I can accurately distinguish up to 8 scent notes in a perfume – which I have been told is a rare feat for someone who is not a professional perfumer.
Compare that with an experience from a few years ago, when we visited a small Thai restaurant behind our condo in Bangkok. Nothing to write home about in terms of décor or service – its location was a shipping container on a deserted piece of wasteland – but the food was a sensation. My dish was seabass in spicy orange and tamarind sauce.
It was a large fillet of fish, cleverly wrapped around a tender stick of lemon grass, this in turn settled on a lake of chilli and syrupy goodness, made with staggering amounts of lemongrass slices and something else which I could, initially not define, but which later turned out to be multiple types of citrus sauces. including pomelo.
As I ate it, the flavours kept developing in my mouth for a full twenty minutes. Every mouthful tasted different, unfolding more and more floral aromas in the nose, and the heat only hit after some twenty minutes, like a mellow scirocco, emerging from the base of my spine and creeping all around the sides of my body and up to my scalp. I kept shaking my head in disbelief, as this emotionally overwhelming experience developed, and in the end, fell completely silent. I simply had no words.
Two days later we returned, but it had gone..... All the same, how delightful was it to have found a place, where the chef got it, and had no issues with setting out to deliver it? There was plenty of food on the plate, plenty of sauce and therefore ample opportunity to enjoy and imbibe what I was tasting, intellectually. That dish became a part of my psyche that day - that is what great cooking should do – and will be forever.
The chef as social catalyst
Apart from this, an essential part of the dining experience is social. It has to do with speaking together, sharing and debating the experience with co-diners. This is ‘meta-learning’ at its best – insight which you get from melding your experience with those of others. Social intercourse intensifies the act of imbibing and so provides the very essence of what makes the moment unforgettable.
My mother used to say she would rather have a poor dinner and great company than the other way around, because the company can make or break the meal, regardless of how great or horrible the flavours are. I think she was right, and for this reason, it is important to enable socialising in a restaurant.
Sarastro's in London's Drury Lane is the best example we know of a restaurant whose owner got this.
The now deceased Richard, commonly known as Prince, had this down to a fine art: anyone arriving to book a table and finding him busy, would be enticed to sit down and enjoy champagne on the house at a sociable round table immediately inside the door, while waiting for a few minutes. If you refused, you would be charmingly heckled until you did. This is how his restaurant was fully booked from the day it opened, and stayed that way. The fact that the food also delivered cemented the glory of any evening there and ensured you went back many times more.
Decked out in historic and often erotic statuettes, with pearl necklaces and ballet shoes from Covent Garden dancers flung over the chandeliers, and tiger striped tablecloths and velvets everywhere, the venue is a riot for the eye and whenever I take people there, I can't wait to see their faces when they walk in. The tables are placed in theatre boxes fixed all around the inner walls of the venue, and accessed by tiny staircases, which Prince bought from salvage yards and decked out in imaginative fashion, and in any outlandish fabrics that he could find.
Many guests arrive in dinner outfits ready for the theatre, while others wear fancy dress for tango or birthday parties. Once seated, you will be serenaded by opera singers or wandering minstrels, magicians, and other entertainers. I've even seen a double bass player take his instrument around as he played. The merry chaos encourages banter, and I would defy any diner from joining in the fun. The dining is fundamentally good – the mezes is outstanding as is their signature dish Chicken Sarastro (served with orange, walnuts, and raisins in a red wine jus) – but the company we enjoyed there made it superlative, and as I write this, I have to say I miss that place.
The chef as seducer
Of course, a dinner is, or should be, an intimate seduction. The diner wants to be romanced. Any lover worth his or her salt knows that you should allow your partner time, and you should care enough about their experience to step into theirs. This is what a real union of hearts is all about.
Lovers who fail to do this are, generally speaking, rather poor. The 'wham, bam, thank you Ma’am' approach might be fine for a moment, but it will not necessarily attract a long-term partner. Just like self-absorbed chefs, such lovers don’t care what your experience is like or how you feel about it, and they are best consequently forgotten, deliberately. As diners we have all been there, done that – and bought the pizza afterwards.
Requited love is the holy grail of human relationships – the restaurant equivalent of umami – and anyone who has experienced it once, will yearn for it and know that nothing else compares. The chefs who aspire to this, want their diners to eat something which resonates in the heart, and brands it with joy. Food for the heart and mind. Food you taste and talk about, and taste again – because enough is being provided. Speaking commercially, if a restaurant achieves this, they will have committed guests and a steady income – people who reserve the same table year on year and who can hardly wait for their next dinner there.
But how different is it for restaurants who don’t ‘get’ this?
The indifferent chef
Most people probably can’t think of anything worse than dining in a restaurant where the chef has lost his critical eye and who is entirely dissociated from the physical and emotional experiences of their diners. This is usually one of the reasons why some modern restaurants with perfectly competent chefs go under. How else can you explain the need for Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, Restaurant Inspector and Restaurant Impossible?
I would like to offer a detailed account of a personal experience at a top-class restaurant which was not entirely failing, but where the dining experience was oddly unhappy. Very thought-provoking even now, several decades later. The scene was a restaurant called The Bell at Aston Clinton, just outside London.
In those days this was a much-talked about fine-dining à là carte restaurant, and I was excited to be invited there by my biggest client for a Christmas dinner. Being somewhat young in my professional life, I was not used to perks and extravagances of this type. Imagine my delight then when my client even invited me to bring my husband along.
We could hardly contain our excitement as we arrived in our Sunday best and were shepherded into the hushed environs of the Georgian mural-adorned rooms, where gleaming silver abounded and waiters with crisply starched aprons flitted noiselessly here and there like dramatic butterflies.
The experience has remained in my memory for various reasons. First it proved that even the highest quality of food cannot make up for the misery of being served by a team of clearly unhappy staff. Second, much as the food itself was excellent, the experience presaged the modern movement we are now all seeing, in which dining establishments are now tightly controlling their guests, mistakenly thinking that this represents a positive experience, and worse still, believing that this transfers power from the diner to the kitchen. It was a prime example of how diners are being ‘allowed’ to dine and all the discomfort that this confers.
The event was also notable for the fact that even in such dining establishments choosing from a menu can still be a ‘luck of the draw’ experience. After ordering and being entertained by an amazing sommelier from New Zealand – he made the dinner special for us, as no-one else there did – we reached the stage where all our dishes had been delivered and placed before us.
They were covered in giant silver helmets, stolen from Roman centurions. Each guest was now flanked by a member of staff clad in gleaming black and white satin waistcoats, waiting patiently for our conversation to cease. One felt this heralded a moment of great import.
You couldn’t cut the air – not even with a machete.
Then the helmets were removed – and produced mixed reactions of gasps and (deflated) silences in turns.
I had pulled a blinder, it turned out, by choosing a timbale of game surrounded by finely cut vegetables. It superceded anything I had expected, being nothing short of a work of art, and was really worth scrutinizing before wading in. It consisted of various root vegetables, cut into tiny meticulously shaped juliennes, all placed in two multi-coloured chevrons, one running this way and the other in the reverse direction, to form the lining inside the cup, which had then been filled with game in a rich white wine sauce.
When it arrived, you could only see the beautiful dome of winter colours on the outside, like a jousting tent, and had no sense of how equally marvelous the interior filling was going to be. It made me – and the other guests – gasp for the attention and love, which had clearly been lavished upon it, and it invited me to take my time, disseminating it so that I could work out how it had been made. There was plenty of food in the dish and I loved every ounce of it. This, to me, was a perfect dining moment – and it is the kind, which a chef should aspire to deliver for their guests.
Other guests around the table were similarly delighted with their food, but how different then was my husband’s rather more quixotic experience? He had, unfortunately, chosen the quail.
The waiter removed the helmet in front of Mark with all the flourish of the Black Knight bowing to the King, and there it was, all 2cm of it – perched on a micro carrot. I don’t know if the staff were able to make a distinction regarding our reactions as a group, but there was a moment of stunned silence around the table, not for how great this was, but for the paucity of the dish and poor attention given to it overall.
The work of art in front of me and the comforting quantity of food in it only emphasized the absurdity of what my husband had been given – not to mention the audacity of a chef who would display his own laziness in such a brazen fashion. I felt then – and still feel today – that the plate should have contained two or three quail to justify being on the menu at all.
It was nothing short of a disgrace.
With the group desperately trying to suppress laughter and empathy in equal measure before the waiters, Mark was desperately trying to stifle an angry shout of ‘WHERE’S MY DINNER?’ This took place at a time when a wonderful 3-course meal at Florian’s Italian restaurant in Crouch End, cost £36 for two, including coffee and a glass of wine. The Bell, by comparison, was charging £80 per head in 1991. You can do the maths regarding how much that would be now.
This was outrage with knobs on and a far cry from the French experience we were to have in later years, where smoked quail meat was served to me in plentiful amounts, resting on lambs' lettuce, scattered liberally with raisins, garlic, and toasted almonds, all anointed with a gorgeously unctuous apple vinaigrette – a complete revelation of simple flavours.
Eaten in Limousin, while we were seated in a lively town square adorned with fairy lights, and with the hubbub of local gossip around us, and our much-admired Bernese mountain dog watching us peacefully, the dish was a deep bow to the god of culinary goodness and resulted in a lovely conversation between waiter, kitchen, and guest. It was an unforgettable moment in my life.
Standing back and looking at the stark contrast between these two experiences, makes me reflect on a legal question around this:
Although we have mostly dined out well in our lives, and we all bore the dinner at the Bell with good humour, it did not go down as a memorable meal in the positive terms that it could have done. We were mindful that our hosts had paid a lot of money for the meal, and felt that both they and we had the right to expect better. It hurt that it was not delivered; and it hurt to be served by staff who were doing a sterling job and who were clearly being bullied at work. So many failures on so many levels.
All this makes me wonder whether a diner has ever sued a restaurant for breach of contract?
Maybe it's time someone did.
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Credits: the cartoon was - very kindly - supplied free of charge by Mark Anderson of www.andertoons.com. Check out his extensive library of cartoons, and cartooning classes for schools and libraries.
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