Would that rose really smell as sweet..?

Slow-roasted
Chargrilled
Blackened
Burnt
Twice-cooked
Triple-cooked
Pulled
Shredded
Freshly ground
Freshly roasted

Homemade
Home-cured
Hand-crafted
Hand-carved
Hand-made
Artisan
Bespoke
Heritage

Organic
Biological
Sustainable
Responsibly sourced
GM-free
Gluten-free
Dairy-free
Sugar-free
High-fibre
Low-salt
Low-calorie
Low-fat
No-fat

Are you hungry? Do the words above conjure to mind luxurious plates, lustfully put together by a passionate chef and restaurant owner dedicated to the provenance and sustainability of their menu?

Pfft.

Smoke and mirrors.Here.

It was on my morning walk into work, through the backstreets and gutters of ‘Lambeth North’, an area hardly renowned for…well, anything (except The Horse – 1st December. Something special will happen. Truthfully it will.)

Anyway, walking past a bar-cum-pub-cum-hostel, I saw a sandwich board outside proudly announcing their “slow roasted pork on artisan ciabatta bread, served with a homemade apple compote”. The only things that will be slow-roasted in that sticky-floored cesspit of grime will be the blue-bottle flies caught in the neon strip bulbs, slowly frizzling and twitching their short lives away.

It got me thinking about what is written on menus nowadays, and what then arrives in front of you. How much of what is written is there to tempt and romance the diner, and how much an accurate representation of what has ‘happened’ to the ingredients? It’s like some verbal bandit bandwagon that all café, deli, restaurant, gastropub, pub, bar and street food stall owners have jumped on. If them at Café Fernados are selling ‘pulled pork and confit of onions on spelt focaccia’, then god damn it we’ll sell ‘blackened beef on a bed of wild rice with a salsa of crushed chilli and lime leaf’.

What you actually get is a spongy, slightly stale and dry sub, filled with sugary onions and strings of pork that resemble over-sized eraser rubbings; or perhaps burnt and leathery beef in a gum-arabic heavy ‘cajun sauce’, soppy miscoloured rice (I’d rather not think about why it isn’t white), and a red sauce on top that tastes neither of chilli, or lime, or, in fact, anything at all.

That would all be fine if the menu had read: ‘pork and onion sub’, or, ‘beef stew with rice’. Expectations would have been set correctly. The diner would know that they are not, in any way, in for a gastronomic experience. One would also expect the prices to reflect this un-gastronomic fare. And if they didn’t, well, neither Café Fernandos nor their competitors would do any good business, and so they would be forced to re-price their menu. A Darwinian Theory of Evolution for purveyors of food.

Upsettingly regularly I order something and remain amazed that someone has got away with describing my dish in such a sexed-up manner. And aside from my own disappointment, this trend for (misleadingly) elaborate descriptions is robbing those who do actually make cheese at home, for example, or slow-roast a whole pig for 29 hours. If everyone is supposedly doing or at least serving ‘artisan’ or especial ingredients and dishes, it is difficult to find, and support, those who are actually doing what they say they are. Sifting the wheat from the chaff and all.

In a totally naïve and hopelessly optimistic way, I would like to believe that if we all started probing and examining what we are told we are getting and what we actually get, food would get better. Or at least stop being so haplessly described.

And then in a more comfortably cynical way, all I can see is a readiness in society to accept surface impressions, and even if we sense that the outer impression belies the inner reality, we tend to ignore or disregard it. Take pop music – are you seriously telling me that the new girl-band in the charts can get away with ripping off a cover of what was a hugely successful pop song around 10 years previously, changing absolutely nothing about it? On the surface they are pink and pretty and have a strange name, and there is no issue with them ‘storming’ the charts with a like for like cover..??

And then there’s contemporary art. Don’t even get me started on contemporary art. It is slightly different in that not even the surface pretends to be something that it’s not. It looks ridiculous, and it is ridiculous. It looks like random bits and pieces put together that you can’t quite understand, and it is just pieces put together for no compelling reason, no matter how many times the artist or curator mentions the word ‘narrative’, ‘conflict’ or ‘exploration’.

When did we become so happy with the superficial? When did we become so ready to accept and not question? I’m not asking for Platonic discourse over every weeknight dinner, but please, a little discretion and demand for something better than this.

Please?

Are you with me?




Anyone?