Dear readers,
I’ve written this column for over a decade and, like all things, it has to come to an end at some point. This is that point. There’s a combination of factors that have helped me make my decision and I won’t bore you with them.
Of course, I will still eat. Of course, I will still write. But the combination won’t be determined by the regularity of submission needed for this format and the language will not be sanitised to avoid poking the eyes of this newspaper’s readers.
What I will wrap up with is a handful of titbits I’ve learned along the way, the snippets of knowledge that help me have a better dining experience in the hope that they can help guide yours.
So draw a chair, tip two fingers of your favourite tipple into a familiar tumbler, and let’s start at the beginning.
I’ve always been a curious eater. I recall eating a fly as a small child, hoping it would taste better than it did. I live to tell the tale, even if I know it makes some people a bit uncomfortable. Just be happy it was I and not you. Being a curious eater is essential to heightened dining experiences because we must broaden our palate.
There’s nothing wrong with comfort food but slipping into the safety net that a pizza can deliver, for instance, hurts us twice. It traps us in a cycle of eating the same thing with no hope of new discoveries and it reduces our ability to enjoy a pizza because we cease to appreciate what’s available to us all the time.
Think of the beauty of a sunset. We are enamoured with it because it is fleeting. Were that orange blob of light on the horizon to hang around there for 12 hours, we’d look at it and be wholly unimpressed. Have I just likened a pizza to a sunset? There’s an equivalency to me.
In seeking a broader and deeper experience, we must also learn to avoid obvious traps. My one recurrent nightmare is looking up at the truck that has struck me, quite fatally, and my ebbing thought being the disappointment that my last meal was. Life’s too short for food that won’t give pleasure.
If the first two pages of a menu are a description of the place and its chef, the likelihood is that they’re compensating for an inability to serve good food. Stand up, apologise to the serving staff for wasting their time, and go elsewhere. This is the time to resort to the comfort of your favourite pizza.
If a menu is packed with clichés, there are two possibilities. Some clichés exist because they are good enough to merit endless repetition. Others endure no matter how unbearably trite they are. The issue here is that it’s hard to tell the difference.
What can help discriminate is the number of dishes on a familiar menu. A chef can have fresh ingredients for 10 dishes but not for a hundred.
The pizza/pasta/grill/salad menu with a hundred dishes will feed you but it will definitely not be adding a life experience worth remembering.
Likewise, there are ‘concepts’. A concept is an idea. A concept is not a theme for a restaurant that needs distraction from poor food and service. If it looks like a ‘concept’, smells like a ‘concept’, and more worryingly is introduced as one, stay away.
As you discover more, you will know what to leave out by being significantly more aware of your palate and your preferred dining experience. Let’s take the ‘best restaurants in the world’, the coveted top 50 list, as an example. It is remarkably divisive in nature and that’s actually helpful.
Would I rather visit the opera that most of the list comprises, the restaurants with well-rehearsed dishes that occupy the menu for years, or the jazz-club restaurants that riff daily on whatever the market has to offer? I’m more for jazz than opera but that’s a personal preference and in no way does it dent the merit of perfect repetition.
The pizza/pasta/grill/salad menu with a hundred dishes will feed you but it will definitely not be adding a life experience worth remembering
Two of the names that spring to mind are the Osteria Francescana and Noma. They are wildly different. The former is predicated on iterative perfection of a handful of dishes until execution is impossible to fault. The latter changes menu every season and is based on ingredients that are available to the kitchen practically on a daily basis. They are both contenders for ‘best restaurant’, whatever that may mean, and neither one is for all of us. Find your preferred experience and hunt down restaurants that can provide it.
Having said all this, do shake things up once in a while. The last time I ate at a starred restaurant in the French tradition I was ready to leave by the fourth course, itching to ditch the overbearing service and dishes that looked like they belonged in a jeweller’s showcase in favour of informality and spontaneity. But I persevered against the odds of this privilege and learned a few things as I did so.
As obvious as this may sound, remember that a meal is a dialogue. Chefs spend their days and nights thinking about how their creations can delight us. They then toil in the kitchen, trying and refining, until the dish is deemed fit for our consumption.
The dish eventually reaches us via a member of the service team, insulating us from the chef.
So, broadly speaking, there are two teams responsible for our meal. The front-of-house is composed of the people who greet us, take our order, deliver our food, and in general take care of our experience. The kitchen deals with the food. Be nice to both and be fair to both.
If you are out with someone who treats a member of the service team with anything less than respect, strike that person off your list of acquaintances and tell them why you’ve done so. Similarly, if you are treated poorly by anyone on the restaurant’s team, let them know that you will be having none of it. Diners and service staff are equals and all should treat all as such.
The kitchen is a tougher conversation because it is usually insulated from the dining area we’re sitting in. If you’re impressed by a dish, as soon as the empty plate is being taken away, do ask the person doing so to pass on your compliments to the chef. Insist that they do.
The chef ought to know when their work is being appreciated. And out of the same respect, if there is anything wrong with your dish, ask that your message be conveyed to the kitchen as well.
If you’re brave, and the situation is one that merits this sort of behaviour, it can be rewarding to simply let your choice of food be made by the chef. I’ve done this in more situations than I care to remember and it is almost inevitably a good thing.
I’ve asked the guy running a food truck to simply ‘feed me whatever you love to cook most’. Showing the person who is cooking that you trust them opens up a rapport that goes beyond placing an order from their list.
This is not to say that a chef doesn’t put their love and effort into every dish they cook. It is just that a chef always has a little left in the tank for a lover of food who appreciates their talent. And if anything in life is worth celebrating it’s a chef’s talent.
That’s all I have room for. It’s been a fun ride and I have you, dear readers, to thank for half of it. The other half of my gratitude pours out in the direction of the beautiful humans who have prepared and served my food along the way. You know who you are.
Be excellent to one another.
With respect and gratitude,
Ed.