eat great food. meet great people.
Few clichés in food criticism are as vacuous as this observation commonly applied to exotic cuisines:
Not all dishes will be to all tastes…
The last to use it was Matthew Norman of The Guardian in his Weekend magazine review of the London Szechuan restaurant My Old Place.
I challenge him or anyone else who’s ever shared this revelation to name 20 restaurants – no, make it 1 restaurant – where all dishes will in fact be to all tastes.
In his review of The Wine Theatre on London’s South Bank, the Guardian’s Matthew Norman quotes the expert opinion of his dining companion, who says the squid salad “was like eating a well lubricated Durex.”
Is Norman overestimating his readers? The analogy is of limited value to those lacking the worldly knowledge of his companion, a music critic with 30 years of experience under his belt. I, for one, have never tasted a Durex, lubricated or otherwise, nor has my tongue ever met latex. Come to think of it there was that one night in Madrid….
Subsequent to the naming of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, awards judge and Guardian food critic Jay Rayner makes a courageous case for haute cuisine in down times:
…just as with the very highest of high fashion, the highest of haute gastronomy eventually filters down to what we all eat on a regular basis and we all benefit from it.
My concern with trickle-down gastronomics (my term, not his) is that the great influence of innovative masters like Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal, the chefs at the restaurants named best (elBulli) and second best (The Fat Duck) in the world, often results in overly ambitious homages with disastrous consequences in all the wrong places. Architecture provides a parallel. From the modern masterpieces of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe came the nightmarish tower blocks of Glasgow and the hellish projects of Baltimore.
Fortunately, a badly conceived meal does not last as long as a badly conceived building.
My first objection to Norman’s review of The Crown Inn in the London commuter county of Buckinghamshire may sound like a quibble, but it does illustrate his propensity to base his pronouncements on thin evidence. He samples but two of the mains on offer (6 on the menu + daily specials), yet claims to have backed “the main course winner”. Sorry, Matthew, but you cannot follow just two horses in the Grand National and be confident that one of them is THE winner.
My second objection is the greater neglect. [Read more...]
