Over a decade and a bit, the Table Talk column in Style has evolved into being
more or less about restaurants and food. It’s also more or less about
whatever has settled on my retina that week. Here are answers to some of the
questions that I’ve been asked over the years:
— I always book under a false name, but I never wear a disguise. Getting
into a wig and a costume and talking in a funny voice to eat dinner is weird
and way too self-obsessed – it’s the sort of thing they do in America. Yes,
sometimes I am recognised and the first thing that happens is that
everything gets worse. Particularly the service.
— I always pay – always. There is no such thing as a free lunch. I never eat
with restaurant PRs, or go to restaurants on the advice of press releases.
The choice is capricious and random. Sometimes I choose, sometimes my
editor; mostly the Blonde chooses. I don’t have a favourite restaurant or
secret restaurants that I don’t write about.
— And no, not anyone can do it. Reviewing isn’t complicated, but most
people who think they can review can’t. Expertise isn’t always a help; it
can make you talk down to your readers and distances you from their
experience. But over the years, you do acquire it – I now know a lot about
food. Except cheese, which, like grammar, I cannot retain a single piece of
useful information about. I’ve also worked in kitchens as a cook,
dishwasher, waiter and a maître d’. And I can cook.
The problem and the skill is not actually in the food, or in having an eye for
decor, an ear for the staff, or a nose for the wine list (which I rarely
mention, because I don’t drink). It’s in the language.
English, which is so gloriously verbose about so much of life’s gay tapestry,
is summarily tongue-tied when it comes to describing food and eating. The
reasons are partially cultural. It has never been considered polite to talk
about food, partly as there hasn’t ever been much food that you could be
polite about. Food and talking about food was something the French did. It’s
often pointed out that while the words for farm animals are Anglo-Saxon,
their names when they’re cooked are Norman – pork for swine, beef for
cattle, mutton for sheep – distinguishing who did the herding and who did
the eating.
But then, many of the words that we do have are swaggered in a Pooterish
bourgeois snobbery. I can’t write “moist” or “succulent” or “luxuriant”
without shivering. Writing about food and the sensation of eating can be as
nauseating to read as watching someone eat with their mouth open. So you
have to pick your way through the verbiage with care and imagination.
You do need to be pretty omnivorous – I’ve always said that I’d eat anything
anyone else ate, as long as it didn’t involve a bet, a dare or an initiation
ceremony. I’m often asked what the most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten is.
Buried shark in Iceland, jewel beetles in the Kalahari, fertilised duck eggs
in Vietnam, seal blubber with the Eskimos in Greenland and warm blood with
the Masai in Tanzania all pale into wholesome yumminess compared with the
fast food available on every high street after 11pm, or the chilled,
dehydrated and microwaved amuse-bouches lurking in petrol stations.
My particular interest in dinner really only begins with the food. I’m
constantly fascinated by why and how we eat. The movement of ingredients and
the history, anthropology, mythology, manners and rituals of food. Dinner is
a defining human occasion. We are the only species that ever existed that
offers hospitality.
Is my opinion worth any more than anyone else’s on the bus? With a modest
blush I must say yes. It’s also worth more than that of most chefs and
restaurateurs – I’m a professional, this is what I do; they’re big men, but
they’re out of condition. Do I ever get bored, blasé, bilious? No, hand on
heart, I’m always excited about dinner. I still get that frisson
with a new menu. Do I ever eat or order badly on purpose, look for awful
food to make good copy? Of course not. Despite what you think, it’s no
easier to write a bad review than a good one; it’s just that you prefer
reading the bad ones.
Finally, people often say: “Seeing as you know so much, why don’t you open a
restaurant?” And I think of Brendan Behan’s famous quote: “Critics are like
eunuchs in a harem – they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every
day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.” Like so much of Behan’s work,
that’s smart, but not quite right. Critics may well be like eunuchs in a
harem who know how it’s done – but having seen it done every day, they just
don’t fancy having it done to them.
ORGANIC
Can we just get the organic thing clear? Organic does not mean additive-free;
it means some additives and not others. Organic does not mean your food
hasn’t been washed with chemicals, frozen or kept fresh with gas, or that it
has not been flown around the world. Organic does not necessarily mean it is
healthier, or will make you live longer; nor does it mean tastier, fresher,
or in some way improved. Organically farmed fish is not necessarily better
than wild fish. Organically reared animals didn’t necessarily live a happier
life than nonorganic ones – and their death is no less traumatic.
More importantly, organic does not mean that the people who picked, packed,
sowed and slaughtered were treated fairly, paid properly, or were free from
artificial exploitation. The Chinese workers who drowned in Morecambe Bay
were picking organic cockles for a pittance. If you really want to feed the
hunger in your conscience, buy Fairtrade.
So what does organic actually mean? Buggered if I know. It usually means more
expensive. Whatever the original good intentions of the organic movement,
their good name has been hijacked by supermarkets, bijoux delicatessens and
agri-processors as a value-added designer label. Organic comes with its own
basket of aspiration, snobbery, vanity and fear that retailers on tight
margins can exploit. And what I mind most about it is that it has
reinvigorated the old class distinction in food. There is them that have
chemical-rich, force-fed battery dinner and us that have decent, healthy,
caring lunch. It is the belief that you can buy not only a clear conscience,
but a colon that works like the log flume at Alton Towers.
In general, I applaud and agree with many of the aims of environmentally
careful producers, but it is time we all admitted that the label “organic”
has been polluted with cynicism, sentiment, sloppy practice and lies to the
point where it is intellectually and practically bankrupt.
And it hasn’t made anyone a better cook.
BILLS
Why don’t more people do runners? Given the quality and service offered by so
many restaurants, combined with their prices, I’m astonished more people
don’t refuse to pay. Tip: walk outside to answer your mobile and never
return. (A lawyer writes: only try this at home.)
Years ago, a defrocked lawyer taught me how to do a legal runner – a meal in a
restaurant is a private contract.
But attempting to avoid payment is fraud, and that’s criminal. So what you
have to do is leave your real name and a bona fide address (your
mother-in-law’s is best), then offer what you consider to be the actual
value of the raw ingredients. In an expensive restaurant, this is about
one-third of the menu price. For spag napolitana, it’s 20p. Minus service,
of course. You don’t want to pay that. You must, though, pay the full price
for wine, unless you reckon there was something wrong with it. Having done
all that, they have to let you go or call the police. Plod will tell the
maître d’ what I’ve just told you: it’s a civil matter.
Three words of warning. One: on the scale of bourgeois embarrassment, having a
row about the bill comes just under having your phone ring the theme from
Bonanza in the last act of King Lear. Two: the restaurant can sue you for
the difference, and courts take a dim view if they think you’re trying it on.
Three: don’t try this in the same restaurant twice.
The point of all this is that you’re not revolting enough. The modern,
sophisticated packaging of restaurants makes customers feel that it’s uncool
to complain, as if it showed you, like – duh! – cared. But a restaurant
isn’t a teenage boyfriend, it’s a service. Shrugging and saying “Whatever”
isn’t putting it in its place. If you don’t like it and if it’s not what was
promised, don’t pay. Don’t be cool, be magnificent. And if they go to the
mat, offer to return the goods there and then.
THE DURIAN
The durian is possibly the oddest of all God’s little gastronomic tests.
Originally from Malaya, it’s now farmed all over the Far East, where it is
not just loved, it’s adored. Durian stalls dot the roadside, yet it is
illegal to carry them on public transport and many airlines refuse to take
them as cargo.
You can tell you’re in the presence of a durian from 20ft. They smell. No,
they stink. They have the most exotically complex and psychologically
confused life cycle of any vegetable, and rely on fooling carnivores to
spread their seed. So they give off the odour of rotting flesh. It’s the
scent of corruption, a whiff of the charnel house, a gag from a hot grave.
If Stephen King books smelt, they’d smell of durian.
Inside, the flesh is marmoreally slimy, some say silky. Personally, I think
it’s like lost babies who have been drowned in baths of whey. The flesh
clings to the stones like putrefying muscle. You have to suck and nibble.
Few westerners manage that twice.
The actual flavour is one of the most complex and difficult I have ever come
across. It’s one of those tastes that we consider grown-up, like truffles or
anchovies, olives or oysters, tastes that teeter on the edge of disgusting
and are rites of passage to acquire. For most Europeans, the durian is way
over the edge, in the Vale of Vile. It has been likened by horrified
travellers to civet cat, sewage, stale vomit, used surgical swabs,
fruit-eating bat pee and brown sherry. The actual taste is a discordant
descant of the smell.
It’s not sweet or savoury or acid or juicy, but it lingers for hours like the
manifestation of avarice, corrupt indulgence and suppurating decadence.
Now, through true professional vanity, I hate not being able to understand the
pleasure in things that others eat, and this was my third confrontation with
the durian. I managed two mouthfuls before recoiling, and I’m getting a
glimpse of the possibility of perhaps nearly, just about, enduring it. But
to do so might mean stepping into a world I’m not spiritually equipped for.
Filipinos, Malays and Indonesians happily turn durian into ice cream, sweets
and cakes. They eat it with salt, or stewed with sugar, or pickled with
vinegar. Nothing so marks the yawning gulf between hot East and cool West as
this strange, misbegotten Caliban food – a vegetable that thinks it’s a
cadaver.
COUNTRY PUBS
What is it with dirty jokes and country hostelries? I’m talking about those
“fine dining” pubs, where “Dennis and Fiona welcome discerning travellers to
relax, revive, savour and marvel in an atmosphere of timeless rustic
elegance. No children, no smoking, no proles’ overalls. Dogs by prior
arrangement”. In short, the sort of place that makes you fervently wish it
were possible to order up bulldozers like minicabs.
Why is it that these places invariably have smutty cartoons in the men’s
lavatory, involving badly drawn big breasts, a shooting double entendre and
talking foxes? The prudish, leering hypocrisy of these men-only gags is an
endearing staple of country hospitality, and I don’t want to be implicated
in it when I’ve got my flies undone.
The last country pub I ate in featured a cartoon of a group of Welsh miners in
the changing room after work. They’re all naked and all black with coal
dust. All except one of them, who has a white willy. His mate’s saying, “I
see Llewellyn went home for his lunch.” Geddit?
The Blonde and I were sat at a sticky round table that could have been a
Braille menu. The place was full of whispering old folk, the itinerant
retired who traipse the B roads of Britain because they have nothing else to
do. The food is the sort of careless English fare that owes more to daytime
television and women’s magazines than any particular county, and for which
Gary Rhodes has much to answer.
It was replete with everything that makes eating out in the muddy bits of
England such a hideous torment. It was pretentious, twee and run for the
convenience of the management. The food we ate was risibly bad, the
atmosphere was smilingly inhospitable, the decor a sordid cliché of rural
nostalgia, puppy porn and green-welly fascism – and they charge you two quid
to sit on the ground outside. It is not just everything I despise and loathe
in lunch, but everything that embarrasses and depresses me about tweedy
Albion.
Stick this up in the gents.
Table Talk: Sweet and Sour, Salt and Bitter, by AA Gill is published by
Orion at £16.99. To buy it for £15.29 including p&p in the UK,
call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585 or visit
timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
