Eating out is one of life’s greatest pleasures for columnist Debora Robertson. She’s an easy-going sort of person, but she has a warning for restaurant kitchens: stop messing with her dinner – it’s not going to end well for anybody
My cooking year: October
I thought I’d seen it all. And frankly, I thought we were better people now, after the bad old days of the 2010s. Remember then? When eating out was all square plates and slates, the latter designed to set nerves jangling as cutlery scraped across them, as soothing as an angle grinder on a Sunday morning. We had the mini wire baskets, or even little shopping trolleys, for chips, things with gravy served sloppily on chopping boards, and salad dressing served in pipettes, bestowing on dinner all the easy charm of a lab experiment.
There was the restaurant in York that served bread in cloth caps and the wine waiters were whippets. Fine, I made the last bit up, but it only didn’t happen because they didn’t think of it first. Then there was the London restaurant that really did (notoriously) serve a dish called Sex on the Beach, which comprised mushroom ‘sand’ upon which was draped a used ‘condom’ made from tapioca filled with honey. How clever, how witty I guess – perhaps not so much now when our real beaches are, well, you know.
I thought those dark days were behind us, that we were living in more honest times, when food could be messy, where squiggles and foams were as fashionable as perms and winkle-pickers, where ‘honesty’ when it came to presentation was the norm. But perhaps that’s where it all went wrong. There was a time a couple of years ago when almost every young chef I spoke to was taking pottery classes in order to, in the spirit of authenticity and truly expressing their unique aesthetic, make their own plates. Isn’t it lovely to have a hobby?
The problem is, many of these rustic, often rimless, plates in every shade of the rainbow, from taupe to oatmeal to storm cloud grey, also elicited that same nerve-jangling knife-on-slate feeling as you tucked into your thousand-day old, dry-aged roast sirloin to share.
I had resigned myself to this, but then they extended the range to bowls too, the unspeakable criminals. I sort of see where they’re going with it. It lends an air of medieval peasantry to every dish, and you can’t get more authentic than that. I have nothing against bowls. Bowls are good friends of mine. But you can’t send a bowl to do a plate’s job.
