As a wine
maker and food lover, unfortunately I’ve come to learn over many years, (perhaps too many now),
that some folk just love to show-off. And without fail, they tend to be those who
know the least about wine, but feel the need to prove otherwise in public. Most
of them don’t hail from the so-called ‘Wine & Foodie Cities’, but perhaps
suffer from wannabe deprivation. Whether
it’s name dropping of winemakers they may have met or spoken to at a wine
event, and now refer to as ‘good friends’, or babble on about the wine ‘Terroir’,
perhaps lamenting on about some exotic French Bordeaux or Burgundy they rate as
something ‘unsurpassed’, or the fact that they only drink Champagne, because it
is always the best Bubbly one can buy - nonsense. I have to bite my tongue as I have little
time for those types and tend to move away from the conversation as swiftly as
possible. My wife says that I battle to hide my disdain.
In the same
vain, I feel very much the same way regarding the wave of so-called 'hip'
restaurants that suddenly became all the rage within the past decade (at the
outside), in cities like Cape Town, Sydney, London, San Francisco to name a
few, particularly it seems amongst the nouveau riche about town or foreigners who
only read the ‘Hobsnobbery Places to Eat Out when visiting town’ ratings. But more annoyingly those who feel the need
to tell everyone-they've-been-and-you-really-should-go-types,
when the truly honest response is more that they were left in awe of the
creativity and all, but bloody hungry afterwards. I just don’t like
leaving a restaurant having paid a small bond on a 5 course meal with exorbitantly
over-marked-up wine to need to pop into KFC for dinner afterwards. It sort of goes against my grain.
Look, I'm
all for art, my mother’s an artist, so I had no option but to.., but keep art in a gallery
or on a wall somewhere appropriate. I
really don’t want to eat art, otherwise it would all be created on flavour, colour
infused rice paper. However, when you want me to buy into the fact that the
tiny morsel of whatever you're ripping me off with in your restaurant as a
result of the apparent blood and sweat induced 'added value' creation before me, the result of over-touching, molding,
infusing and nitrogen nuking a perfectly good raw ingredient in plastic bags
under high pressure is worth it, I’m not really that impressed. I get particularly disappointed when the
plate arrives not with the Portabellini mushroom the waitron had so carefully
and skillfully described, but a mushroom flavoured skid-mark thereof instead. Don’t give me that ‘jus’ nonsense, this isn’t nouvelle
cuisine Paris of the 70’s, give me ‘sauce’, or at least call it that. ‘Jus’ for some reason gives one the right to
up the price rather significantly. It’s ‘posh’ you see. Give me the bloody (ed) mushroom for god's sake. I could have purchased something that looked very similar to that infused skid-mark at the babyfood section at Pick 'n Pay!
OK,
granted, it may not have been infused by truffle oil (squeezed out of a poor
little innocent truffle apparently - is
that even possible?!). But don't tease me with bull, smoke and
mirrors. Just give me the delectably prepared flavoured mushroom, so I can see
what I'm about to tantalise my taste buds with next. What happened to being
able to use all of one’s senses in enjoying food? Like my wine, I like to see what I’m
drinking, touch it if necessary (not in public of course..), at least be able
to fork my food or pick it up with chopsticks (not a straw), chew it, feel it
swirling about, taste it and assimilate all that together. The good ol' tantalisation of the senses are
what I'm after, not the equivalent of eating in the dark, whilst everyone
fumbles about making the right noises. Most often people around the table tend to have a hushed debate as to what's what, so as not to appear ignorant to the table of snooty, apparent food fundis sitting at the next table.
Somehow
when one ads an amuse-bouche to the proceedings (the French term meaning “Amuse
the mouth”, aptly so as they are very small teaser samplings of food served
before a meal, to whet the appetite and stimulate the palate – and boy won’t
you need it!). Or the entremets of
palate cleansing sorbet between courses, somehow giving license to the
establishment to now charge more than double that of the fantastic Bistro or
Italian Trattoria down the road. The one that uses the same ingredients, though
absolutely fresh, doesn’t over complicate matters, but rather than employing stressed
artists, uses passion and generations of skill past down from Nona to grandchildren,
where simplicity of lovingly assembled natural flavours are ‘the art’. Give me that, not sous-vide cooking methods
where once fresh ingredients need to be sealed in vacuum-sealed plastic pouches
then placed in a temperature-controlled steam environment for hours on end. That’s just food abuse!
At the end
of the day, I’m quite happy paying good money for great food, great wine, great
service and ambiance, but I just don’t want to eat fragments of art on a plate
and sip on pretentiously overpriced wine that is merely there to impress the
snob among us, rather than its intended purpose, to simply enjoy lovingly
created passion on a plate and in my glass.
Here's a little 'taste' of what I mean.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvsWibR_nsk
