Recently I went out for dinner. And that’s all I can tell you. Except that the restaurant was in Hoxton. Or Peckham. Though it may have been in Carlisle. Anyway, there was short rib. Definitely short rib. Or perhaps hanger steak. Or chicken. Nah, I’ve got nothing for you. The whole meal is a black hole. My time went in and absolutely nothing came out.
Some eating experiences are like that. When I started as a restaurant critic I used to take notes. The fish was soft. The chips were crisp. The raspberries were sweet. I would write these words down studiously, page after page, with a plan to come up with better ones when I wrote the review. Until one day I forgot my notebook and realised I hadn’t ever needed one. Either a dish was memorable and therefore I could write about it, or my mind was a complete blank, and I could write about that instead.
It’s common these days to point and laugh at restaurants which do stupid things to their food to make it memorable: the ones who serve their dishes in mini-wheelbarrows or hollowed-out sheep skulls or on slate, and I am very happy to join in with this. I love a roaring mob, me. But what’s most curious about all that stuff is that it’s wasted effort. Those stupid food service items are bound to fail. Sure, we’ll all remember the mini-wheelbarrow or the sheep’s skull, but we’re never going to remember the food that was actually in it. The things that make food memorable are never about the accessories. They are so much more subtle, so much more emotional than that.
When, as a small child, I was ill, my mother would make me boiled eggs mushed up with warm pieces of buttered toast. It was basically boiled eggs and soldiers without all the admin. I can still remember the texture; the way the soft, slippery yolks rubbed up against the crisped toast. Even today, buttery eggs make me think of the hotness of the bed sheets and the tone of my mother’s voice, though not the words.
In adulthood I have other memories. I recall an open shellfish lasagne eaten at the wonderful Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham in the early 90s, before few had heard of either it or chef David Everitt-Matthias. It was the first meal of ambition I had paid for with my own money and that pride at a kind of adulthood obtained only emphasised the intensity of the boisterous flavours. Eating oysters at the ramshackle Company Shed on West Mersea in Essex, where the water and land negotiate endlessly with each other, I tasted the brine and slap of the sea and felt like I was somewhere far off the edge of my known world. A breakfast of pancakes and maple syrup eaten in a diner on West 44th St, on my first ever morning in New York, will never be forgotten. The pancakes weren’t particularly special, but the breakfast seriously was.
Do I need tell you that the shellfish lasagne would not have been more memorable if it had been served to me in a mini-wheelbarrow? That those oysters were going to stay with me for life without being presented on a ship’s anchor? No, I thought not. And that’s the point. While chefs are busy trying to manufacture the “wow” factor, we are there supplying our own. Chefs can try as hard as they like. They can raid roofs for their slates. But I’m afraid it just won’t make it happen.
