Journalists are paid to report what they see and, as a result, they get to see terrible things. Being a restaurant critic, I know far too much about this. Oh, the atrocities I have witnessed. The most recent was at the Birnam Brasserie inside the Gleneagles Hotel. They called it a cassoulet. I would call it the death of all that is good and hopeful in the world.
The problem with that so-called “cassoulet” – and yes, I’m using those quotation marks like weapons – seems to be not just a bad day in the kitchen. It feels more like a systemic issue to do with the way restaurant kitchens work; one that means there are many dishes which should be left entirely to the home cook and never ordered from a menu.
Restaurant kitchens like to break dishes down to their constituent parts, only to be assembled when an order arrives. In theory, this enables quality control over each element and saves on wastage.
A cassoulet should be a concoction in which all the elements spend 24 hours getting to know each other. But if too few people order such a finished, melded dish, all the ingredients go to waste. If the various ingredients are kept apart until the last moment, they can have an alternative future. And so, instead of receiving a cassoulet, you get violated beans with some pig bits plonked on top.
For the same reason, if you order a crumble you won’t get a crumble. You’ll get everything you deserve, which is to say some pre-stewed fruit, with biscuit rubble plonked on top, and a dismal sense of misery at what could have been had you stayed home and made your own damn crumble. It’s why restaurant kitchens infuriate the pie liberationists, by sending out stew with a plank of pastry on top. If you want a pie, make it at home. Or get a takeaway from Greggs. They sell enough baked goods to do them properly.
Restaurants are also terrible at anything which takes time. My roast potatoes are better than every roast potato I have ever been served in a restaurant. Mine are crunchier, richer and ruder than any professional’s. My Yorkshire puddings are better.
And then there’s roast chicken. I’ve eaten many of the big marquee names of the roast chicken world: the poulet de Bresse at Chez L’Ami Louis in Paris, currently yours for €95+. There’s the famed chicken at Zuni Café in San Francisco, which I feel no need to ever eat again, and the black leg chicken at La Petite Maison in London, which I now can’t afford. When the latter opened in 2007, it cost £35. Now it’s £105, which just makes me want to stick drawing pins in my forehead to make me think about something else. Plus the one that I do at home is always better and I’ll fight anyone who argues.
Restaurant kitchens screw up cheese on toast. It’s too simple and they don’t know what to do with simple. Scrambled eggs baffle them, and while macaroni cheese may now be a thing, it’s nowhere near as good a thing eaten out as it is eaten in my house. The tragedy is that I keep ordering all this stuff, my soul deep-basted in hope. This time, I think. This time it will be good. But it never is.
Don’t get me wrong. Restaurant kitchens are brilliant at many, many things. I depend on them to be so. But when it comes to comforting food, it all falls apart. Chefs are stumped by the homely. Which is why that’s where those dishes should stay: at home.
