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WHEN did restaurants stop being places where you went to eat, and start becoming design concepts? About the same time as people began to have lifestyles, I suppose. It is not simply that both innovations are repellent: it seems terrifically sad that we've become a generation sensitive only to such stylised images, and those so bossily enforced. Two years writing a restaurant column has made me perhaps harsher than I should be about octagonal plates, pink and grey festoon blinds and colour co-ordinated vegetable purees, but Prue Leith and Polly Tyler have almost given me an apoplectic fit with their Enter- taining in Style (Macdonald, £14.95). I have got nothing against Prue Leith, although it is true I am not keen on that particular branch of landscape cookery of which she is such a revered exponent. No, what I dislike is this `restaurantising' of the home, which books like hers seem to exult in. I do not want to be told what shape plates to put what shaped food on, what decorations to put on the table and, worse, the walls. But what makes the book not as dreadful as it might sound, is that it is, quite simply., the funniest book I have read for ages. Arranged round the idea of several theme dinners, it gaily gives the sort of directions which would make the authors of Darling You Shouldn't Have Gone To So Much Trouble take to their beds for weeks.
Let us start with the 'Bistro Night for Twenty'. 'The essential ingredient for a Bistro Night decor should be light, or rather the lack of it,' we're told. For this, we'll need candles stuck in French wine bottles. It would seem important to get the wax to 'drip enthusiastically' down the bottles, so stand them in a slight draught. You will also need to whitewash your walls, get hold of four or five small tables and gingham tableclothes to go on top of them. Strings of onions are to be hung from the sideboard (this illuminated by a spotlight) and the menu chalked up on a blackboard. A word of advice from Miss Leith: 'If your French is shaky, use a dictionary to avoid the mockery of your friends.' But if you've got friends like that, what are doing inviting them to a dinner party? Still, invite them you will, and 'use postcards of France for invitations. Or better still find a friend in France to post the invitations so that they arrive complete with authentic stamp and postmark.' Now, is she mad or am I? To make the French touch truly convincing, strew Gauloises or Gitanes about the rooms. I should put them here and there between the Ricard ashtrays and carafes. Prue Leith says it will look distinctly Parisian, and isn't that what we're aiming for? The menu — tomato salad, choucroute garnie, tarte maison, that sort of thing — is thankfully the evening's saving grace.
The 'Surrealist Dinner for Eight' — 'an extraordinary, sophisticated concept' — is a real favourite of mine. Again, you're told to invite the guests in advance, though if you need to be reminded to do this, I really don't think you should be giving dinner parties in the first place. For this number, warm candles in the oven so that they can be twisted into exotic shapes and decorate the table with twigs hanging with wrist- watches. This witty motif can be taken further by covering wine bottles with fake fur fabric and scattering the table with plastic ants. The plot sickens. You can tempt your victims with jellied hands (jelly set in a rubber glove — but remember, you'll need extra gelatine) and faces made out of ham with a quiff of hollandaise sauce.
If you want to appear less formal, why not throw a 'Punk Party for Forty'. 'A make-up kit with plenty of purple, black, white and grey in it would seem essential. Trousers with carefully engineered tears and holes would help.' The thing is, you do need a cellar or garage for this 'merry send-up of disaffected youth'. Decorate with spray gun (in lurid colours, natch), zany glasses, zips and safety pins. Instead of vases, flowers may be put in squashed Coke cans and music — Sex Pistols, The Vibrators, The Exploited etc — must be loud. Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw quiche on the menu. Someone in the research department's made a slip-up somewhere. The Burns Night dinner is good too, with the invitation to be written on a piece of paper inserted into a tartan- covered loo roll.
If anyone's thinking of having a dinner party along these lines, please don't invite me: this book could even make me want to go to a restaurant.
Nigella Lawson
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