Doug PollardThe restaurant at the end of my tether
Another day, another Epicure, and another tussle with wine and food reviews. Was there ever a wankier profession than that of restaurant reviewer.
To go out night after night and dine out at your employers expense.
Of course, you then have to write about it, which gets pretty boring. And so they have evolved an achingly pretentious garbure de verbiage, in which pucks, cylinders, stacks, tiles and other objets de proteines nestle on plates next to amusing little curls and shavings, guarded by moats of cheffy effusions.
This has engendered a culinary arms race. Chefs turn out ever wankier food to match this prose, which in turn calls forth yet more hallucinatory babble from the writers. The end result is either Heston Blumenthal, who produces ‘dining experiences’ which look like they might be fun, if your bank balance can stand it.
Or wannabes in the burbs, like the well-known chef whose demi-rural establishment I visited last week.
His ‘dining experience’ might have been fun for those of a sado-masochistic disposition. For the rest of us it was an expense of dollars in a wasteland of wankiness.
I should have fled as soon as I saw the waiters in their sub-Zhivago brown peasant smocks.
The evening began with one of those unlisted and unannounced little ‘amuse geules’ that chefs are so fond of springing on you. In this case, small portions – a couple of desert-spoons – of excellent tomato soup topped with a wasabi foam, served in tall narrow glasses the size of test tubes, residing in a neat wooden rack.
The chef considered this to be so taxing to the digestion that he kindly allowed us a full 30 minutes before delivering the starters.
These were petits terrines des clichés, barely visible on their tundras of white porcelain, on which the chef had scribbled with a mayonnaise-filled pen. This conjured up memories of certain youthful off-piste activities.
The wankiness factor really kicked in with the arrival of the ‘bouillabaise’, served in inverted white porcelain picture-hats. In the central depression of each reposed a prawn, a mussel, a scallop and a scrap of fish fillet. The waiter drenched this petit bouquet des fruit de mer with a portion of hot tomato soup from an ordinary white gravy boat.
We whiled away the 45 minutes it took for the next course to arrive listening to the trio of ladies at the next table loudly discussing their breast implants, and staring at the little tea-light in its opaque glass in the middle of the table.
“Is that real?” demanded my friend, suddenly. I placed my hand over the top of the glass and kept it there.
“No. Batteries. You should have these at church. Much less messy.”
My main course – when it arrived, lukewarm - was described as pork belly. A small stack, built from remarkably equal thicknesses of fat and meat, which appeared to have been deconstructed, cooked separately and then reassembled, topped with a small thin sheet of what looked a bit like barley sugar. This turned out to be an improbably flat, thin, translucent and chewy tile of ‘crackling’. Memo to chef – next time, set the iron on ‘linen’.
The crackless stack had company - one of those ‘cylinders’ of pork meat - while a small bowl of chewy white worms was served on the side. As they had no taste, I have no idea what they were supposed to be or why they were there, and frankly, I wasn’t interested enough to ask.
The accompanying salads and wedges were, however, simple, straightforward and superb, the best part of the meal.
But the wine waiter sent the wankometer off the scale. First, she slowly and with extreme concentration emptied the chosen bottle into a ships decanter. From this she then poured approximately two centimetres of wine into each glass.
After the third micro top-up, one of my companions exhorted her to pour more. She looked stricken. She paused. “I don’t know,” she said, in an agony of indecision. “It looks bad. It’s all wrong, aesthetically, you know?”
“Pour,” my companion ordered, which she did with a pained expression. Then for a full five minutes she stood and watched us, unable to relax until the wine had been drunk down to the aesthetically correct two centimetre level. With a sigh, she returned to the shadows. Customers! What can you do with them?
My recommendation? To the punters – stick to the salads. To the chef – get a life. And stop reading restaurant reviews.
