SUMMER WINE AND FOOD Restaurants
The trials of a critic
Nigella Lawson
Eating all too frequently in expensive restaurants and getting paid for it is thought of by most people as quite a cushy number. At the risk, however, of sounding a whining ingrate I have to say that life on the restaurant circuit is not just a bowl of cherries.
Quite simply, restaurants have overstep- ped the mark. One indication of this is the ridiculous amount it costs to eat in this country. Readers might, and quite rightly, object to the number of expensive res- taurants covered in this column, but you try finding, once every other week, a restaurant which costs under £15 a head where the food is even just slightly more than passable. Anyone who has eaten regularly at various restaurants will have noticed that the difference in price be- tween good food and mediocre is negligi- ble. And although I have nothing much against other people eating badly, I have no desire to subject myself to it very frequently, even in the pursuit of truth and a marginally cheaper bill.
One of the reasons why restaurants have become so ludicrously overpriced is the insistence of so many restaurateurs that your meat-and-two-veg represents nothing less than an art form. It is a question not so much of idees au-dessus de sa gare but of complete insanity.
I used to feel simply contemptuous of the ridiculous landscape cookery that has infiltrated almost every restaurant kitchen in London, but now I have had enough. In principle, I have nothing much against mix and match vegetable, symphonies de fruit de mer, magrets de canard, with blackcur- rant sauce and elderflower fritters, but it can get you down after a while. When every other menu starts to look as if it had been lifted from Marinetti's La Cucina Futurista the restaurant critic's life does not seem quite so charmed.
There is far too much of this self- important grandeur, with all its accom- panying folies: the waiters who expect you to clap when your plate is put down in front of you; the pink-lit interiors; the preciously sparse flower arrangements; the vulgar straining towards 'tastefulness'. It's a Conde-Nast world, all right, but does one want to be reminded forcibly — and at such cost?
It is not, of course, all martyrdom and drudgery. Although few in number, there are restaurants which go some way to restoring one's faith in the whole business. This is largely a personal matter, however, and in my view the best restaurant is either the nearest one, where the service is friendly, you don't have to book and the menu is not too adventurous or else an old favourite, which again is far from being a matter of the good alone.
What all the restaurants I go to regularly — the Caprice, one I am forbidden to mention, the Ark — share is a friendly and sympathetic atmosphere. Their particular qualities may not necessarily transmit themselves to other people: after all, there are so many peculiar reasons why one takes to or against any one restaurant. The very places with least to recommend them can worm their way into the hearts of sentimental people who remember happier times at the corner table.
My own requirements are well-spaced tables (even if there is a particularly interesting row going on next door), an unpretentious and amenable waiting-staff (and if one intends to go regularly it is nice to be recognised, though only in quiet fashion), pleasant associations (this neither one nor the restaurant can do anything about) and food one wants to eat. Why the English insist on thinking that the best thing to choose in a restaurant is something one would not cook at home is beyond me. The chances are that what one normally cooks is what one actually wants to eat. I exclude from this Chinese, Indian and other cuisines which need eight pairs of hands and a good temper. One might like the odd bit of culinary frou-frou, but it would be very odd if one wanted to make a habit of it.
But of course, the best restaurant of all is the one you would never recommend to anybody.
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