The Canard Est Mort, Long Live Good Grub

By MELANIE REID

WITH a certain weariness, I pick up a spoon to poke my amuse bouche. Oh Lord, how boring. A portion of quince puree topped with an exquisite sliver of bruised leveret’s genitals. How out of touch can a chef be these days? Leveret is so last year. One would expect, at the very least, cappuccino of truffled eel “en papillote” topped with wilted spinach soubise, if not braised cheek of hermaphrodite chevre nestling on parsnips fatiguees. Anything else is not a suitable entree for the “thrice-cooked squab pigeon from Anjou” (and, no, I don’t understand that one either, let alone want to eat it, but I believe you can get it at Andrew Fairlie’s restaurant at Gleneagles).

That’s the trouble with restaurants these days. They just don’t try hard enough. Their levels of absurdity, which had for years been climbing steadily, meeting higher and higher standards of gobbledegook both in the kitchen and on the menu card, have stalled into a kind of unambitious, common-or-garden nuttiness. Come on Gordon, Marco and Heston: only seven courses, and including something as dull as wafers of pig’s head on Edzell Bleu puree with jus de saucisse? That won’t set new performance targets for originality, will it?

I am, of course, wasting my breath. The monster of which I write has passed well beyond parody. It’s me who is the canard mort, my parsnips fatiguees, my greens well and truly wilted. Yesterday saw the release of the latest Michelin listings, giving stars to 122 eating establishments in Britain and Ireland, and thereby shoring up once again the myth that good food is an elite experience forwhich one has to pay ridiculous sums of money and wade through great swathes of phoney language.

Of all the creations of our affluent age after modern fashion, the foodie culture is perhaps the most risible. Michael Winner it was who blamed the demise of home cooking skills on the rise of feminism, but Winner it also was who helped found this particular school of the grotesque. Eating out, by his rules and those of other critics, became elevated to a high art form: in other words, the snobbier, sillier and more elite the restaurant, the more praise it got.

A French colleague, who says Britain is by far the worst place for pretentious menus, still sniggers at the delicious pomp of “palette de couleurs” she once found on a dessert menu, which turned out to be three scoops of ice-cream: chocolate, vanilla and strawberry, that everyday dish from the beachside cafe.

Ever since the top end of the restaurant trade exploded in the 1980s, I suspect the emperor has had no clothes, but a gullible public, unsure as to whether one ate glandes d’ecureuil or rubbed them on a bad back, has never questioned it. There was a social kudos, a certainty, gained from spending ridiculous sums of money on things you didn’t really understand. Their need to believe was massaged by food critics such as AA Gill, burlesque poets, who came away with things like “the sauteed squid with baby artichoke, chorizo and tomato water danced off the plate like a naked choir singing kyries”. Tomato water! Oh give us peace!

My contention is that the foodie culture has been destructive, serving only to widen the vast gap between top-end fodder and the junkwhich is slowly killing the vast majority of the Scottish public. Wasn’t it rather ironic yesterday to celebrate the arrival of two new Michelin one-star restaurants in Scotland on the same day as the executive, in charge of a nation fuelled by chips and Irn- Bru, launched a children’s book in primary schools called When Sammy met Sally, to promote the importance of healthy eating at a young age? (Point of fairness: Andrew Fairlie, whose restaurant is Michelin two-star, has some involvement with the book. ) There is something more than faintly obscene about the reverence accorded to famous restaurants – and the men who cook there; and the casual acceptance of meals costing GBP200 – in the face of the scandalous unavailability of good, fresh food to vast swathes of the Scottish public.

Now this may sound all very hairshirted, but in a country where some 240,000 children live in poverty, and where many millions more have lives blighted by ignorance about healthy food, there is a seriously decadent metaphor to be found in the promotion of restaurants where diners will, unthinkingly, spend a week’s child allowance on a pretentious amuse bouche – the starter’s starter. Hilarious, isn’t it, to think that your nage of langoustine with white truffle risotto would pay for enough fish suppers to keep a child alive for a week.

Ah, but where is the aspiration? What is the difference, others will argue, between dining from an expensive menu, driving a prestige car or spending large amounts of money buying paintings? Aren’t these all symbols of an unfortunately divided society and a free market economy? Isn’t this just a case of: tough, but that’s life? And what of the many families the restaurant industry supports; what of tourism?

Perhaps, but I think it depends on how you view food. I happen to think it has been elevated to a height and status it does not merit, and with it the cult of the celebrity chef. Plainly, over the past few years, the clear intention of the restaurant industry has been to elevate serious cooking to an exclusive art form, similar in calibre to opera or ballet. With this has come the self- congratulatory boom in the awards industry, the argument being that we should strive to raise standards in cooking just as we do so in architecture or literature. But food elevated to a form of elitist entertainment is based upon gimmick, exploited by salesmen, and guilty of a quite astounding amount of excess.

Restaurant food is in need of a revolution. We await the fall of Rome. Pretension and showbiz has had its day. Chefs should, a la Jamie Oliver, become much more clever about producing beautifully cooked, simple, accessible food: the kind which, to this day, is still served in France, and without any need for cod translations on the menu. Prizes would be won not for silliness, but for demystifying food. This would, if nothing else, match the sombre mood of the century: against waste, against conspicuous extravagance, but in favour of good taste. We badly need to reconnect the idea of good food with hunger and nutrition, and by doing so help to re-educate the lost palates of a generation of young people.

So the game is up. And should anyone doubt that it is all a game, they would do well to consider the salutary tale of a certain famous chef called Heston Blumenthal, the man whose trademark is dubbed molecular gastronomy. Mr Blumethal cooks sardine on toast sorbet, snail porridge, white chocolate and caviar buttons, bacon and egg ice-cream, basil blancmange, beetroot jellies, salmon with liquorice and cauliflower with chocolate. And what does he eat at home? Why, Heston likes nothing better than a carry-out curry.

(c) 2007 Herald, The; Glasgow (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.