I t’s a Sunday and as our son doesn’t have any
sporting engagements for the first time in 657 years my partner proposes a Family Day Out, a simple enough phrase always promoted in newspapers — The Best Family Days Out; Great Days Out For The Family — but one which always strikes terror in my heart. What amuses one family member often does not amuse another. The one who is not amused sulks. The one who would otherwise be amused sulks at the one who sulks. The one who was initially indifferent sulks because everyone else is sulking and in no time at all the Family Falls Out and the drive home is of the utterly silent type bar the odd pinch and consequent shriek (and that’s just the parents). Some friends of ours recently took their kids on the Eye, but their eldest daughter was so miffed at having been cruelly robbed of time that could otherwise be spent flirting with boys in Costa Coffee that she would only look at the floor. Not a chatty trip home there, then. Still, we persist, as this is our first free Sunday in 657 years and we decide on the Tate Modern. Our own teenage son is enthusiastic, as evidenced by many repetitions of, ‘Do I have to come?’ Yes, we tell him, because we are mean and enjoy being so. I am minded to add he’s lucky that there don’t appear to be as many air shows as there once were. When I was a child just the threat of ‘Biggin Hill’ would tow us all neatly into line. The trouble with kids today is that they just don’t know what it’s like to stand in a freezing field waiting for the Red Arrows in whom you have no interest whatsoever.
Anyway, the Tate Modern it is, plus lunch in their highly thought-of restaurant — or at least, that’s the impression I got — but which turns out to be grim with hateful, priggish service, but we’ll get to that. The Tate itself is a wonderful building — the old Bankside power station — on the river in North Southwark. We enter via the Turbine Hall and Rachel Whiteread’s ‘Embankment’, a gigantic labyrinth made from 14,000 casts of different boxes. We look at it first from the balcony. The great thing about taking kids to look at modern art is that their responses are uninhibited, whereas mine are not. If I say it’s great will I look like an arse? If I say it’s crap will I look like an arse? Do I like it? Don’t I like it? How am I meant to tell if I do or don’t like it? I know I should let it speak to me but what if I can’t hear it saying anything? My son, though, has no such troubles. ‘What do you think?’ I ask him. ‘Great,’ he says. ‘Fantastic, amazing, whoopee. Can we go now?’ No, I say. Instead, we take a walk through the exhibit. The bumf says it is meant to ‘invoke the sense of mystery surrounding ideas of what a sealed box might contain’, but I’m thinking it would be more fun just to play Jenga with it. Our son refuses to be won over. It is: ‘We’ve seen it now.’ Then, very hopefully: ‘I know! Let’s go!’ I had noted, on our way in, that the following Friday there would be a conference on Dada, the aim of which ‘is to try and think about Dada beyond the heavily mythologised narratives that surround the local groups and connect Dada to the recent concerns of humanities scholarship such as issues of identity, theories of the avant-garde and mass culture’. I wonder if I should book him in, as a nice surprise.
We pootle about, try to get into Henri Rousseau but fail, then make our way to the restaurant on the seventh floor. The restaurant is sleek and has the most amazing view right over to St Paul’s. The dining-room is chaotically busy but even though we haven’t booked we are led directly to a table, which is impressive. The other diners seem to be either Nicole Farhi lookalikes or gay male couples. Ah, but how do you know they are gay? I hear you ask. Can’t two men dine together without it being assumed they are gay? Fair enough, but I would say that Donny Osmond-style caps (in leather) combined with nails so buffed and dazzlingly shiny the Red Arrow team could spot them from the skies — nay, be blinded by them — is as good a giveaway as any.
The menu reads nicely and seems pretty decent, an eclectic mix based on fresh seasonal food: celeriac soup with spiced Bramley apple, lamb shank with roasted autumn vegetables; that sort of thing. Pricy, though. Actually, ridiculously pricy. The lamb, for example, is £15.75. A rib-eye steak is £18.95. For three courses and coffee but without wine you are not going to get away for less than about £40 a head whereas the set lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant in Claridge’s, for example, is £30. I hope that puts it into perspective even though perspective is pretty much out of fashion these days. Boxes are in, though.
The meal, however, is not just overpriced, it is also dismal and would, frankly, be dismal at any price. My glass of white wine arrives warm and when I point this out the waiter, a young chap with a silly Abe Lincoln beard (so arty!), snatches it away huffily without apology. Our son’s mango smoothie is £3.40 and comes in a small-sized water glass. A starter of beetroot and butter bean salad with garlic cress and sherry dressing is as dull and dry and flavourless as wood-chippings. ‘The worst thing I’ve had in ages,’ says my partner, ‘there doesn’t even seem to be any beetroot in it.’ Further, the waiter tries to snatch my partner’s plate away before he has finished. ‘Finished?’ Abe asks, snatching the plate away. ‘No, I bloody haven’t,’ says my partner, snatching it back. I tell him it’s not as if he likes it. He says that is not the point. He’s ordered it so now he will eat it. Our son is like this. Once, when he was little, he came back from school saying, ‘Lunch was horrible and ... and ... we didn’t get much of it!’ A main of corn-fed Suffolk chicken with savoy cabbage (at £13.50) is woeful: a very small bit of chicken on top of a very sad mush of cabbage. I have the mussels Castilian with rustic bread, which is like mussels with a tin of Heinz tomato soup tipped over them. And the rustic bread? A crudely torn wodge of white baguette, hard at the shorn ends from where it has been standing around for too long. Need I go on?
I think the Tate Modern restaurant is a bit like a motorway service station. You have a trapped clientele. You can charge them what you like for stuff that’s not very good. Actually, I don’t think I mean that. I don’t think the restaurant is on a cynical mission to see what it can get away with. But I do think that if it were a stand-alone restaurant it would fail in ten minutes. We leave without having dessert or coffee and get back to art. I suggest the Nude/Action/Body exhibition in the gallery below. ‘Will it be like porn?’ asks our son, with his first flicker of interest. ‘You bet,’ I lie. I’m not sure he even properly knows what porn is yet, but after the Picassos, I’m guessing that he now thinks it’s about large triangular ladies (often blue) with their breasts and fannies all over the shop. The thought keeps him very quiet all the way home.
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