For most people, the enjoyment is enough; pleasure doesn’t need explaining. If you ask why they liked the play, the soup, the view, they’ll probably use all-encompassing, evocative words of emotion or volume – it was ‘great’, ‘terrific’, ‘amazing’, ‘good’, ‘very good’. Press them, and more than likely they’ll describe what they’ve seen, done, eaten.
‘There was this sensational ballet/novel/lap dancer – it was fantastic’. Analysing why something was moving or entertaining or funny, or wasn’t, doesn’t improve it. In fact, dissecting things might actually break the spell, tarnish the experience.
There is something odd, something obsessive, something a touch neurotic about wanting to be a critic, wanting to pull the legs off delicate bits of fun. It certainly isn’t part of cultured life. I don’t think critics feel things more intensely or on another level.
Their knowledge and experience, if they have any, doesn’t necessarily make them more sensitive to the all-round enjoyment of a sausage than anyone else is. Indeed, many of us critics look like we enjoy life only occasionally and then grudgingly. But being able to organise, distil, articulate and parse a sausage in the context of aesthetics, taste, morality, history, anthropology and fashion, whilst remembering it is still just a sausage, does give me a separate, academic, rather drily smug satisfaction.
Never have thought like that
Criticism doesn’t improve your experience of culture – but good assertive, stringent criticism does prevent creativity and craft sinking to their levels of least public resistance and to sycophantic pleasantries.
And the review itself may be entertaining and provoking. Criticism at its best elicits a response of ‘that’s what I think, but I’d never have thought it like that’. The strongest parts of the culture are those that hate their critics the most. Critics criticise so that everybody else can get on with enjoying themselves. We are civilisation’s traffic wardens.
Over the decade and a bit that I’ve been doing it, the Table Talk column in The Sunday Times has evolved into being more or less about restaurants and food. It’s also more or less about whatever has settled on my retina that week.
Questions answered
Here are answers to some of the questions that I’ve been asked over the years.
I always book under a false name, but I never wear a disguise. Getting into a wig or costume and talking in a funny voice to eat dinner is weird and way too self-obsessed. It’s the sort of thing they do in America. Yes, sometimes I am recognised and the first thing that happens is that everything gets worse. Particularly the service.
I always pay – always. There is no such thing as having a free lunch. I never eat with restaurant PRs, or go to restaurants on the advice or recommendation of press releases. The choice is capricious and random.
Sometimes I choose, sometimes my editor – mostly the Blonde chooses. I don’t have a favourite restaurant, and I don’t have secret restaurants that I don’t write about.
And no, not anyone could do it. Reviewing isn’t sophisticated or complicated or particularly onerous, but most people who think they can review find that they can’t. Expertise isn’t necessarily a help; it can make you talk down to your readers and distances you from their experience.
But over the years you do acquire it – I now know a lot about food. Except cheese, which like grammar, I simply cannot retain a single piece of useful information about. I’ve also worked in kitchens as a cook, a dishwasher, a waiter and a maitre d’. And I can cook. The problem and the skill is not actually in the food or in having an eye for décor, an ear for the staff or a nose for the wine list (which I rarely mention, because I don’t drink). It’s in the language.
English, which is so gloriously verbose about so much of life’s gay tapestry, is summarily tongue-tied when it comes to describing food and eating. The reasons are partially cultural. It has never been considered polite to talk about food, partly out of necessity, as there hasn’t ever been much food that you could be polite about. Food and talking about food was something the French did. It’s often pointed out that while the words for farm animals are Anglo-Saxon, their names when they’re cooked are Norman – pork for swine, beef for cattle, mutton for sheep – distinguishing who actually did the herding and who did the eating.
But then, many of the words that we do have are swaggered in a Pooterish bourgeois snobbery. I can’t write ‘moist’ or ‘succulent’ or ‘luxuriant’ without shivering. Writing about food and the sensation of eating can be as nauseating to read as watching someone eat with their mouth open. So you have to pick your way through the verbiage with care and imagination. You do need to be pretty omnivorous – I’ve always said that I’d eat anything anyone else ate, as long as it didn’t involve a bet, a dare or an initiation ceremony. I’m often asked what the most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten is. Buried shark in Iceland, jewel beetles in the Kalahari, fertilised duck eggs in Vietnam, seal blubber with the Eskimos in Greenland and warm blood with the Masai in Tanzania all pale into wholesome yumminess compared with the fast food available on every high street after 11 o’clock at night, or the chilled, dehydrated and microwaved amuse-bouches lurking in petrol stations.
Why and how we eat
My particular interest in dinner really only begins with the food. I’m constantly fascinated by why and how we eat. The movement of ingredients, the history, anthropology, mythology, manners and rituals of food. Dinner is a defining human occasion. We are the only species that ever existed that offers hospitality.
Is my opinion worth any more than anyone else’s on the bus? With a modest blush, I must say yes. It’s also worth more than that of most chefs and restauranteurs – I’m a professional, this is what I do; they’re big men, but they’re out of condition. Do I ever get bored, blasé, bilious? No, hand on heart, I’m always excited about dinner. I still get that frisson with a new menu. Do I ever eat or order badly on purpose, look for awful food to make good copy? Of course not; despite what most of you think, it’s actually no easier to write a bad review than a good one; it’s just that you prefer reading the bad ones.
Finally, people often say, ‘Seeing as you know so much, why don’t you open a restaurant?’ And I always think of Brendan Behan’s famous quote about us. ‘Critics are like eunuchs in a harem – they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.’ Like so much of Behan’s work, that’s smart but not quite right. Critics may well be like eunuchs in a harem who know how it’s done, having seen it done every day, they just don’t fancy having it done to them.
STARBUCKS
Have you ever been to a Starbucks? (God, I’m beginning to sound like those judges who say: ‘Pray, what is a Rolling Stone? And could you enlighten the court on the exact nature of a T-shirt?’) Of course you’ve been to Starbucks. Starbucks is your second living room. The question I should have asked is: Why?
I’m not a habitué of these West Coast coffee shops. Not for any snobbish reason – just because I like coffee. An American café sounds like the punch line to one of those jokes in which the Germans end up the lovers, the Italians the soldiers, the French the marriage counsellors and the Greeks the cooks, architects or hairdressers – in fact, anything at all. I can’t think of a single thing I’d trust a Greek to do professionally, except make Turkish coffee. (That should get the postman’s hernia pulsating.) Asking Americans to make coffee is like asking them to draw a map of the world.
‘Okay, so this is your house, that’s Disneyland, and what’s this squiggle over here? Right, that’s everywhere else.’
American coffee is only coffee because they say it is. It’s actually a pale, scalding infusion of junior-school jam-jar brush water. Americans who drink one a week imagine they’re in the grip of a vicious caffeine frenzy that prohibits them from signing legal documents, operating heavy machinery and adopting children, but, oddly, helps if they want to plea bargain a murder – or bomb developing countries. It’s not a drink for grown-ups.
Anyway, I did go to a Starbucks recently. And I’m still reeling. I can’t remember the last time I was served something as foul as its version of a cappuccino. I say ‘version’, but that’s a bit like saying Dot Cotton’s a version of Audrey Hepburn.
To begin with, it took longer to make than a soufflé. I was the only customer, and asked the girl for a cappuccino. There followed an interrogation that would have impressed an SS Scientologist. What size did I want? Did I need anything in it? Was I hungry? By the time she’d finished, I felt like sobbing. ‘You’ve found Tom, and Dick’s under the stove in D Hut, but I’ll never give away Harry – he’s got Dickie Attenborough up him.’
Suspiciously, she passed the order, written in Serbian, to another girl standing all of three inches away, who, in turn, slowly morphed into Marie Curie and did something very dangerous and complicated behind a counter, with a lot of sighing and brow-furrowing. An hour and a half later, I was presented with a mug. A mug. One of those American mugs where the lip is so thick, you have to be an American or able to disengage your jaw like a python to fit it in your mouth. It contained a semi-permeable white mousse – the sort of stuff they use to drown teenagers in Ibiza, or pump into cavity walls. I dumped in two spoonfuls of sugar. It rejected them. Having beaten the malevolent epidermis with the collection of plastic and wooden things provided, I managed to make it sink. Then, using both hands, I took a sip. Then a gulp. Then chewed.
I had the momentary sense of drowning in a snowman’s poo, then, after a long moment, a tepid sludge rose from the deep. This was reminiscent of gravy browning and three-year-old Easter eggs.
How can anyone sell this stuff? How can anyone buy this twice? And this was only a small one – just a baby. The adult version must be like sucking the outlet of a nuclear power station.
I slumped into a seat. There was a pamphlet about fair trade, and how Starbucks paid some Nicaraguan Sancho a reasonable amount for his coffee so that he now had a mule to go with his thirteen children, leaky roof and fifteen coffee bushes. It made not screwing the little no-hope wetback into penury sound like the most astonishing act of charitable benevolence. And they just had to print a pamphlet about it, so we all know the sort of selfless, munificent, group-hug people we’re dealing with.
I’ve just looked up the origin of cappuccino. I always imagined it was nineteenth-century Italian. Actually, it appears first in 1683, just after the relief of Vienna from the Ottomans.
The retreating Turks left behind sacks of coffee, and an enterprising double agent, Franz Georg Kolschitzky, opened the first European coffee shop (disputed with Caffe Florian, in Venice). It was not a success until he added milk, honey and cinnamon. The cappuccino was born.
He needed something to go with it, so he got his neighbour, the baker Peter Wendler, to turn his excellent butter buns into Turkish symbols. Ta-ra! The croissant.
All that history, all Sancho’s effort, and it ends up as Starbucks. Oh, the pity and the shame. The name, by the way, comes from Capuchin monks, who had white habits. Interestingly, they also donated their name to a monkey, simply by adding a syllable.
