I do feel sympathy for my better half. She loves to eat out. Doing so is the highlight of her day, week or year. A Chinese takeaway, Indian buffet, a pub meal, fancy restaurant or Buffalo Girl – sorry, Grill. Must have been thinking of something else. She’s not fussy. As long as the place looks wholesome and the food appealing then she is happy to be wined and dined.
The problem is with me. I’ll eat owt. As long as it doesn’t contain parsnips (vile) or bananas (smell like rotting vegetation) and it just arrives I am happy. I can cope with Chinese carry oots. She knows the sort of thing I like. Buffets too are quite acceptable. For a fixed price one can pick and choose and have whatever takes the fancy. And you can’t go wrong with a fish supper. But restaurants? What’s the appeal? What am I missing? Can someone help me out, please? For Linda’s sake!
There seems to be three things wrong with restaurants:
1. Restaurants
2. Menus
3. Waiters
Isn’t that everything?
The Restaurant
How on earth does one choose which restaurant to eat at? In the absence of any reason to eat at a certain food emporium we wander round the town umming and arring, looking in windows, reading menus. Ah! This one looks good. ‘Sorry sir, we’re full up’. Not to worry, there’s another one up the road. ‘They’ve got room. In fact it’s empty. Why is it empty? Have the previous diners all died of staphylococcus aureus? Dare we risk it?’ This one is too expensive and that one too cheap. At this point I am getting hungry and ratty. So she drags me into to some darkened establishment where a supercilious man in black, peering down a hooked nose, meets us. ‘Follow me’. It’s either him or the poncy one with the Julian Clary voice who proceeds to mince his way through tables to the furthest point of the room. We are seated and a sinking feeling tells me that I’m trapped for some hours. I lean on the table in an attempt to make endearing noises to my beloved. It moves. One of the legs is too short. Either that or the floor is crooked. A serviette is sacrificed and I grovel on my knees effecting a remedy. It’s compulsory. The room is deathly quiet until someone remembers to start the bland background music. Maybe that is better than the recently experienced TV screens on every wall showing ‘music’ videos. Rhythmic noise accompanied by images of nubile, semi-naked young lasses, cavorting and writhing on a stage whilst pleasuring a microphone. I was distracted from the food but it hardly makes for a romantic evening out with the missus! Maybe that’s the point.
The menu
It goes on for pages and it’s all meaningless pomposity. The higher the price the worse it gets. The only bit that makes sense is the numbers. I like numbers. They mean things. I have a maths O level. I failed my English Lit. When the numbers mean pounds then I have a desire to keep the numbers small. I’m not enjoying this. I have to choose something. Pure white haricot beans in a rich tomato sauce served on squares of lightly seared seed bread. Sounds nice. Whoa! That’s baked beans on toast! And the waiter is twitching, his pen and pad hovering and all I can see are meaningless words. I’m under pressure. I make some random choices, stabs in the dark. He goes away. I try and relax by observing the wondrous plates of food being delivered to our fellow diners. ‘Wow, that looks good. Ah! It’s piled high. Ooh, that’s interesting. Oh dear, that one looks sad. It seems to have been dropped, scraped up and half left behind. I wonder who has ordered that? Oh no! It’s coming to me. Is this what that highfalutin description really translated into?’ Even homely food such as pies are not safe to order. I like pies, especially with extra gravy so that the pastry can go all soggy and flavoursome. A pie is a baked sweet or savoury filling in a pastry-lined dish, often covered with a pastry crust, according to my Collins English Dictionary. So when we last ate out and I decided to play it safe with a beef and ale pie, why did I get a bowl of stew with a bit of pastry floating in the middle? That is not a pie. And the stew had been overly seasoned and was not enjoyable. It is noticeable too that there is a direct correlation between the length of description and the amount of food received. If you go to a chippy and ask for a fish supper you will generally get a decent hunk of fish and scoops of chips. It’ll lay on your chest all night and see you through to next week. If it’s an ‘award winning’ fish shop then half the volume will be replaced by a slice of lemon and a sprig of parsley. If it’s gourmet fish and chips in a fancy restaurant then the chips will thrice fried and seasoned to perfection but there will be only three. The fish will be a stickleback or a solitary whitebait. It will all be beautifully presented of course with four drips of fishy roux scattered at random around the acres of empty plate. I remember Sandra recommending a certain restaurant because of its high quality food. ‘But,’ she added, ‘you’ll need to find a chip shop on the way home’.
The Waiters
Waiting is an art. Very few ‘waiters’ are suitably talented. Waiters should be invisible but present: phantasmal but without the weirdness. So why do they loiter and malinger, waiting to snatch my plate away before I have finished? Unless it is a busy restaurant in which case there are usually insufficient waiters (take that as you wish) and that means that there is usually time for the setting-in of rigor mortis between courses. When it is time to escape, which can’t be done before paying, all the staff will have simply vanished. The whole experience has wasted hours of my life that I won’t get back and taken pounds out of my wallet that I could have spent on something enjoyable.
In the interest of balance, I must say that I have had some hugely enjoyable meals in restaurants. Two stand out, even after many years. So it can be done. The first was on the island of Capraia. I had gone there with a geeky friend who was on a lovelorn quest to track down his ‘thinking mans’ heartthrob, Kate Humble. She had been there some time earlier presenting a TV programme in which boffins were able to turn seaweed into deodorant. Anyway, that’s irrelevant. There was a restaurant, we were told, about a mile or two out of town. We investigated. A man was in his garden. We inquired. Although the man spoke only Italian, this friend of mine has the enviable ability to communicate with life-forms from all corners of the galaxy using a smattering of French, Portuguese, Norwegian, Faeroese and Jameld. And lot’s of gestures. It wouldn’t be Italy without those. The plan was that he would collect us from the town, feed us and return us to said town all for a fixed price (25 Euro, if I remember correctly). There were no menus, no waiters, no dodgy table legs. We all sat at one long table. His missus did the cooking and the food just arrived. And so did the wine. No questions, no decisions. I just sat and was fed. It was wonderful.
The second was in Dorchester. Matt Follas, a Masterchef winner, cooked the food. Although he had a menu, the recommended option was his ‘taster menu’, a fixed meal of six dishes for a given price. That is what we went with. The highlight was his fish soup. It was perfect. Even Linda liked it and she has this belief that she’s not into seafood. And when the chef is friendly, relaxed and chats with his clients, telling them about the food and blah, it’s great.
I can’t complete this piece without reference to Benoit of Calais. He was, possibly still is, a typically Gallic waiter. Everything is done with a ‘humph’ and a shrug of the shoulders. At some point during our meal at his brasserie a certain female diner of British extraction had irked him and he could be heard loudly muttering something about ‘une vache’. Linda dared asked for the desert menu. ‘I will get you ze ‘desert’ menu’ he retorted. The word ‘desert’ being most emphatically pronounced. I noted that the rum and raisin ice cream came with a danger warning – contient alcool. I had to go with it even though I am not keen on ice cream. It’s always too cold. It freezes the tonsils and the flavour is wasted at such frigid temperatures. Like keeping tomatoes in the refrigerator.
‘Je voudrais le rum et raisin, parce que c’est dangereux’ I attempted.
‘Is monsieur driving?’
‘Not for a few hours.’
‘Bon’.
It arrived. There seemed to be a few too many raisins for normal rum and raisin ice cream. No complaints there. But when I tucked in I realised that the whole thing had been doused in rum. What can one say? The best rum and raisin ever? Benoit will forever remain a legend in the folklore of the Fearnan-Smith household. Personality, character, entertainment and a willingness to take that extra step.
So there we have it – highlights in a sea of mediocrity. Maybe I am autistic. Or maybe there is just so much overpriced indifference in this world. Maybe that is what people pay for because they don’t know better, have to follow the crowd and do what they think is expected. Why do you keep paying out money for what is not bread, and why spend your earnings [hard-earned money] for what brings no satisfaction? asked Isaiah. He has a point. But it doesn’t help Linda. Any suggestions?
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