Food - Bee Wilson declares she prefers a quiet night in with the Naked Chef
Why is Britain a nation of so many good cookbooks and so many bad restaurants? This conundrum struck me anew as I was eating an especially mediocre meal in an overpriced provincial restaurant the other day. The salad was icicle cold and barely seasoned; the pasta was boiled to the consistency of brains; the squid was purest rubber; the creme brulee came garnished with an absurd selection of mint leaves, icing sugar and calligraphic squiggles of fruit puree, none of which disguised the basic disappointment of the sorry cream. For this treat, we were charged - once nondescript wine, service and mineral water at £3.50 a bottle had taken their toll - the catastrophic sum of £40 a head. It made me want to weep.
The bitterness of such meals is compounded by the thought that one could make something infinitely better at home for a tiny fraction of the sum. Some might say that such skinflintery is missing the point. There are those who think that restaurants now are primarily "theatre", with food playing a secondary role. Indeed, the historian Rebecca Spang has recently shown that this was always the case. Even in the early restaurants of post- revolutionary France, the drama and the element of sociability were as important as what you ate. Yet the food has to count for something, or else why not go to the opera instead?
What seems odd about the legion bad restaurants of modern Britain is that they are so out of kilter with what is displayed in British food books. Never before has there been such a comprehensive range of sources on how to eat well, from the many glossy coffee-table publications, replete with pictures of chocolate, cherries and chestnuts, to the fine, informative volumes produced by Prospect Books. Having eaten a bad, lazy restaurant meal, the kind where they serve "seasonal" parsnips in July and swamp their skate in apricots and cumin because they think it's original, I long to thrust into the hands of the chef any number of good books - and sometimes to beat him or her round the head with them, too.
What improvements might be effected with just half an hour in the company of Alan Davidson, Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, Rowley Leigh, Helen Saberi, Claudia Roden, Michel and Albert Roux, Rick Stein, Antonio Carluccio, Sri Owen, Nigel Slater or, for all her sins, even Delia Smith.
The trouble is partly that, what with the so-called food revolution, many restaurateurs don't realise how ignorant they are. They have imbibed a few dogmas about how well we all eat now. They think that good food consists of throwing tempura and fancy names about the place, with which you can then lecture the customers.
During our recent meal, we were told that the special was swordfish with sauce vierge. If you look in French cookbooks, you will find two basic meanings for the term vierge (or virgin). Both are, as you'd expect, rather simple and unsullied. One is a butter frothed up with lemon juice, salt and pepper. The other is an uncooked mixture of tomato concasse, olive oil and possibly a herb. "Oh, no," we were airily told. "We take some shallots and cook them down in a wine jus with butter, then we add some coriander and make it like a salsa, then we . . ." But by this point, they had lost us. It is ignorance, too, that enables establishments of this sort to serve disintegrating paglia e fino and call it "seafood linguini" at £14 a go.
You might say that complaining about such restaurants is a very middle-class whinge, the kind of plaint familiar from Private Eye's Great Bores of Today. True, but the bad value of these places is indicative of a lack of value at every level of society. The poor spend 14p a loaf on economy bread that isn't really bread. The rich spend £14 a plate on linguini that isn't really linguini. Both are the dupes, it seems to me, of an orthodoxy that says we've never eaten so well.
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