There are many gloomy thoughts that occur to me when I'm forced to stay in one of those dismal city-centre hotels where the breakfast buffet festers under the sort of heat lamps used to keep intensively reared chicks from dying. What did I do to deserve this? Will anyone mind if I torch the joint? Where am I? But prime among them is usually this: how, in God's name, can they serve bacon looking like that? Really. How can a professional kitchen bring themselves to send out pallid, pink, flabby, uncrisped bacon with meat the colour of a healing surgical wound?
Why can't people get things right? I'm often told that my restaurant reviewing job is merely expressing opinions on matters of taste. And occasionally that's true. Some people like their kippers poached; I prefer mine grilled. Some like sugar in their tea; I do not. But the older I get and the more I travel about Britain being fed nasty things, the more I realise that most of the time it isn't about personal taste. It's about right and wrong.
Undercooked bacon is wrong. It's a waste of good pig. Fried eggs with slippery, plastic-looking whites and hard crumbly yolks are very wrong. Cooked mushrooms, with no hint of colour, swimming in salty water, are obscene in their wrongness. As are hot, wet tomatoes masquerading under the word "grilled". A completely undressed salad – no oil, no vinegar, no salt, no anything – plonked on the side of a plate of food as a garnish is completely and utterly wrong.
If you make a Caesar salad and put anchovies in it, they have to be the salted kind. The silvery marinated ones – boquerones – are the sort of wrongness that ought to be punished by the attachment of electrodes to sensitive body parts. Broad beans in their tough outer husks are wrong. Overcooked broccoli is wrong. Undercooked pie pastry is wrong. Pineapple on a pizza is seriously (insert expletive) wrong. Refusing to serve a burger medium-rare for "health and safety reasons" is petty, juvenile, irritating and, wrong, wrong, wrong. As is asking for a steak to be served well done. But then we already knew that.
Why do these things happen? Occasionally it's because people have no cause to give a damn. It must be bad enough working in the kitchens of a grim hotel on the most unglamorous stretch of a Midlands ring road without also pulling the short straw of the breakfast service. Why the hell should they care whether the mushrooms, tomatoes, eggs and bacon are properly cooked? They are doubtless given no incentive to do so by their managers, who are the ones who should really take the blame.
The rest of the wrongness comes down to a killer combination of ignorance and misplaced creativity. People only put marinated anchovies in a Caesar salad because they think they can improve upon the recipe. They can't. Likewise, they put pineapple on a pizza because… well, because… oh, search me. I haven't a clue. People undercook pastry out of incompetence, overcook hamburgers out of timidity, order well done steaks out of childishness. And if I ruled the world all of these things – and many more – would be punishable by a long stretch inside. Which probably explains why I don't rule the world. Even though I'm completely and utterly right.
