What’s all the fuss about? That was my question. To
listen to Londoners, in the past twenty years the city had become a
world capital of cuisine, its best restaurants on par with the best
anywhere, its ethnic restaurants the envy of Europe. Encouraged by
the flourishing of farmer’s markets, a new ethic of organic and
locally sourced produce and animal products, and an infrastructure
of food obsession, featured daily on television, the print media,
and the Internet, its food culture was said to be vibrant,
innovative, even world-shaking. The Guide Michelin
for restaurants has for the first time devoted a whole volume to it,
making it only the fourth city to be so documented, after Paris, New
York, and San Francisco, and causing not a few outbursts of superbia
among the locals.1 Indeed, I have heard
well travelled Londoners say they prefer their home town to Paris,
which is too much of a museum to their taste. There are no new ideas in
Paris, the
feeling goes, nothing but the tried and true – steak frites and
moules frites and, if you’re lucky, a very old cassoulet. In
London, by
contrast, just about anywhere you go you are going to be served the
next new thing – and very likely by a Frenchman, who has fled his
homeland for more fertile kitchens.
I was sceptical.
I had had some excellent meals in
London,
but I had had some mediocre and downright awful meals there as
well. I always had a
good time visiting the metropolis, and being food obsessed myself, I
could think of no better way to ouvrir l’appétit on a cool
dark evening than to wander the back streets of the West End, the
restaurant capital of the capital, in search of the perfect menu and
the empty table. But I
didn’t believe the hype.
I was suspicious of the chauvinism. And in any case, being
something of a social scientist, I needed to see for
myself.
Being something
of a social scientist, too, I needed to engage in seeing for
myself from an uncommon perspective. I needed to check out the
scene not as a naive consumer, or a food critic giving advice to
consumers, but as an informed participant observer. I needed to do a field study
in other words, and observe, with a plausible degree of
systematicity and critical self-consciousness, as both an insider
and an outsider, the customs of the natives. The fuss about
London
food, for or against, accurate or phony, is itself an aspect of a
larger phenomenon: the buying and selling, the providing, the
eating, the digesting, the reporting, the assessing, and the
circulation of information about food in
London. These
things are all parts of a single cultural field, and it is to the
cultural field that the social scientist will likely turn his or her
attention. How, really,
is food culturally organized in and about
London? How was it
organized, that is – for this, in my view, is what ‘the cultural’
adds up to – phenomenologically, which is also to say, given the
constitution of the phenomenal, symbolically, structurally,
materially, and economically?
That is the main question. And at bottom it involves
coming to terms with the situation of food in that postmodern
world of which London is
one of the main social and economic centres. Where and how is food
located in a city like London? What
material and symbolic values are assigned to it? How are these values
asserted, negotiated, and experienced? And what then is all
the fuss about?
So there are the research questions, large and small. Unfortunately, I only had
five days in which to perform an initial study of the subject, and,
being a social scientist, I didn’t have a lot of money to do it with
either. But that
could prove to be a boon.
Under the conditions of scarcity imposed on me by my budget,
I could observe myself observing the cuisine of the city in
circumstances as most food critics, travel writers, and especially
consumers really do experience it – hit or miss, with limited time
and resources at their disposal. I could study it from a
vantage point of what Bernard Lahire (2003) calls the ‘sociology of
the individual’, or what followers of Michel de Certeau (1998) call
the ‘sociology of doing’.
At least playfully, in the spirit of the Menippean Satire as
well as in the framework of modern sociology and cultural studies, I
could look at the world of food consumption from an emphatically
limited, contingent, under-resourced vantage point, and therefore
see it as only an individual can see it – for that is what
individuals are, limited, contingent and under-resourced, required
to pursue individual ends within the terms of a system that is not
of their own making.
Whether I could observe without evaluating was another
question.
It is one thing to observe the
customs of the natives, however self-aware one is about the
limitations of observation: it was another to eat their food; and it was
still another to eat their food with or without registering value
judgements about it. In
the end, I found that value judgements were inescapable, in large
part because no one like me can sample a cuisine, whatever the
guidelines of a ‘science’, without also assessing it. To taste is also to exercise
taste, to make discriminations among sensations and processes with a
view toward pleasure.
There can be no fully neutral science of food.
I have seen plenty of studies from social scientists that
seem to presume otherwise, to be sure, imagining to extricate
themselves and their readers from the subjectivity they are
studying, and to assert a disinterested sociology of the group, but
the results are unconvincing.
That may be said even about Pierre Bourdieu and his
Distinction (1984), a work that is commonly cited as if it
were the final word on the matter, held up as definitive proof that
the subjective experience of taste is really an objectively
determined performance of class – and this in spite of several
inconvenient facts that undermine that assessment. For one thing, at the time
of its publication in English, Bourdieu’s study was already dated,
describing a France of the past, and especially a working class culture,
like similar cultures in Britain and the United
States,
that was in its death throes.
For another, for all its surveys and tables of results, it
actually took the form of a polemic against Kantian aesthetics and
the snobbery of post-war Parisian intellectuals. And for a third, Bourdieu
was not actually a cultural relativist and was not arguing that
taste was merely determined by class, but arguing instead that taste
was a domain of the social struggle for dominance (see Bennett
2005). Bourdieu was
writing with an agenda.
And if the disinterestedness of the sociology of the group is
a bit of a phantom in the work of Bourdieu, it is even more so in a
recent, British sociology of food that claims that people like me,
with cosmopolitan eating habits and interests and lusts, are
‘cultural omnivores’ (Warde 2000: note the use of this loaded term
‘omnivore’ as if it were merely a dispassionately descriptive term)
or even worse, that such cultural omnivores are ‘predatory,’ their
practices involving a ‘pillage of resources’, a ‘scouring of
habitats’, an ‘uprooting and repackaging of the foreign, the novel,
the dangerous’ (Bell 2002).2 Mainstream food
sociology in Britain is no less located in its assessments of the
food practices of modern Brits than the Brits themselves. Indeed, it is surprisingly
biased.
So: both the practice of eating and the study of it are
located in all kinds of ways; they always have an agenda, and always
must. In my study, in
any case, the legitimacy of which can only be assessed by its
results, the subject and the sociologist would be one. The individual and the
sociologisation of the individual through systematic observation
would be one. Or rather two, since the research would be a team
effort, involving an invaluable research associate (Marion Scott
Appelbaum), as well as the team leader (me).
Together we laid our plans carefully. We would stay in a budget
hotel in a residential area, a little off the beaten track but
convenient enough to the restaurants and shops we wanted to
visit. To save money,
we would do most of our major dining at lunch time, and take
advantage of lunch-time specials. We would visit as many
different kinds of places as time allowed, although we were
especially interested in the new things and the most popular things
among knowing Londoners – for example, that hybrid form of social
life known as ‘modern British cuisine’. We would also visit shops
and markets, and study street life. What, again, was the
phenomenological, material and symbolic place of food, the situation
of food in modern London? We took
along notebooks, a laptop, and a Dictaphone, along with a Time
Out Guide to Dining in London, 2007 edition (the Michelin
is much less thorough), and observations culled from various
Internet sites, including the on-line Zagat survey and the annual
World’s Fifty Best Restaurants featured on the site of the
London-based Restaurant magazine. Knowing how limited our
resources were, we knew not only that our findings would be partial,
tentative, and somewhat arbitrary, but that our project was
following less in the footsteps of Boas, Malinowski, and
Lévi-Strauss than in those of the countless journalists for the New York Times going on city
breaks and reporting back to well-heeled readers about where to
stay, what to see, and where to dine in Prague, or Singapore, or
Kansas City. Only we
would not pretend to observe the object of a 36-hour city with
timely objectivity, dispensing advice to consumers.
Even if I am only something of a social scientist, I am
officially very much a professional literary critic, and so the fact
that I was following in the footsteps of journalists provided an
additional incentive.
My trip to London
would not only provide a window on the sociology of the individual,
but give me a chance to look behind the scenes of what amounts to a
literary genre.
Thirty-six Hours in Akron, What’s Doing in Berlin: fun to
read, providing you with tips for a future visit if ever you’re
lucky enough to go on one, and in any case furnishing you with the
vicarious pleasure of pretending to go on a whirlwind trip to some
far-off burg, these exercises in travel journalism have a form of
their own, a rhetoric of their own, an illusory objectivity all
their own. In fact,
after a while, a modern literary critic may well come to find that
there is something fictional about them, or even factitious. They are not only formulaic;
they almost always describe an experience that is too good to be
true. I wanted to
see what lay behind the exercises, and think about how language and
convention mediates between the experience of the writer and the
material that is actually written. So, again, we had two kinds
of questions to answer.
What would our five days in London
tell us about the culture of eating in
London,
and what would it tell us about the culture of writing about
food?
We were out on the streets within moments of checking into
our hotel. We were in
Kensington, not a ‘typical’ London
neighbourhood one might say, but what is ‘typical’, and why? Kensington is very wealthy
and residential; it has its own ‘high street’ with small and large
shops. It is not a
major destination for either locals or tourists, although there are
a number of hotels (we got an excellent deal, in a comfortably
shabby establishment, it being off-season) and there were plenty of
tourists on the streets.
It is not a place where one goes out of one’s way to dine,
but it is not an area where one cannot dine either. At the time of my research
there, an old department store was being converted into a very large
new Whole Foods market, the first outpost in
Britain of the American organic-gourmet food chain, and, it has
been said in the press, sure to change food retailing in
Britain utterly.
Perhaps we were researching a ‘before’, with an ‘after’ to
come. In any case, the
sociological model of that which is statistically ‘typical’ in the
context of a vast, diverse, cosmopolitan, and always rapidly
changing metropolis is almost certainly irrelevant. What is typical
about London is
its variety. Or not quite: for even if
London has
lots of variety in its social and cultural life, it has variety in
its own way. It has its
own way, one might say, of distributing variety, and what one
encounters when one visits the city, is not only what is unique
about unique places, institutions, and people, but perhaps even more
importantly, and certainly more noticeably, are its systems of what
may be called continuity-in-variety. These are systems inscribed
in its architecture, its structures of transportation and
communication, its patterns of work and leisure, of production,
distribution, and consumption.
The guidebooks direct the tourist to ‘landmarks’ like the
Nelson column in Trafalgar Square; the restaurant guides direct the
gourmand-tourist to places like Sketch, ‘the most expensive
restaurant in London,’ as almost all references to the establishment
are quick to mention (Cooke, 2003). I will have more to say
about the idea of the unique in what follows. Suffice it to say for now,
that though the unique is everywhere promoted, it is the
‘everywhere’ itself that really presses upon experience, and
continuity-in-variety is what the social scientist is obliged to
observe and explain.
Out on the streets, in Kensington, as social scientists more
or less following the route of a tourist-flaneur-gourmand,
passing along a route from Kensington Road to Kensington High
Street, sensing the continuities of London life – the architecture,
the pace of the traffic, the smell of the air – we looked for
food. And at first we
didn’t see much. London
has historically been a city of eating behind closed doors, and as
for food shops, whatever the situation may have been in the past, by
now they have almost entirely been absorbed by a handful of big
‘multiples’, the large corporations like Tesco and Sainsbury’s,
which have placed almost all the food available for consumption
inside big boxes with little outdoor display. This is the first thing to
know about the continuity-in-variety of the culture of food in
London. It is
almost entirely hidden from view. You do not encounter vegetable
stands on the streets of London, or food stalls, or the smells of
cooking, or the sight of people dining (except sometimes through
plate-glass windows, especially the floor–to–ceiling windows common
to coffee and sandwich shops), though you may well encounter that in
many sections of many other large cities in the world. You can go for miles on the
streets of London, in
other words, without encountering a tomato. (The few vaunted outdoor food
markets are in fact quite tucked away, the most famous of them, the
Borough Market, being hidden under a viaduct in a nondescript
neighbourhood.) What
you encounter everywhere are establishments through the doors of
which or behind the plate glass windows of which food is to be
found. And
not just any establishments: as a corollary to the fact that
food is behind closed doors and windows, the second thing to know
is that the London food scene is almost entirely dominated by large
corporations, with multiple locations – signages, brands, doorways
to enter, open doorways sometimes, but doorways all the same, or
else glassed-in eating areas that, instead of being terraces open to
the city, as in (say) Paris and Rome, are almost always, rather,
very much glassed-in.
The largest of corporations have dotted the terrain with
McDonald’s and Pizza Huts.
And smaller, local corporations, specializing in all sorts of
food, from Japanese to Portuguese to a hybrid called ‘world food’,
have bred multiples too: Wagamama (23 locations as of March 2007),
Pizza Express (96), Ask (23), Balls Brothers (18), Zizi (16), Yo!
Sushi (18), Nando’s (54: a Portuguese chicken shop), Giraffe (11: an
establishment where you are promised ‘world food’ but where the main
attraction appears to be the English breakfast). Even restaurants that aspire
to fine dining can come in multiples. There are eight branches of
Chez Gerard, five of Bertorelli’s, ten of Fish Works. One of the most renowned and
most expensive restaurants in London,
Gordon Ramsay, has developed into a multiple of ten locations in
London –
each with its own culinary identity, its own menu, head chef, and
style, to be sure, but each belonging to a corporate multiple all
the same.
But I hadn’t taken stock of all that yet. My knowledge was in
brackets. I was
attempting to experience the phenomenology of food afresh.
So we were out on the streets, on a bright but chilly early
spring day, looking for a culture of food. We passed a number of
imposing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, what the
English sometimes call ‘mansions’ though they are actually blocks of
flats and townhouses, and the imposing facade of a genuinely unique
institution, The Milestone Hotel, with a restaurant inside. The hotel is ‘five
star’. Every reference
you find to it in guidebooks or on the web makes that assertion, and
comments from customers on web-sites like Trip Adviser consistently
confirm that the hotel is ‘perfect’ or nearly so, that it is a ‘true
five star’, and so forth.
Certainly, the hotel, composed out of a pair of Victorian
‘mansions’, was handsome; at first, I thought it was a private club,
and I imagined it as a place where the Prince of Wales would feel at
home. (And after all,
it is just off Prince of Wales
Street.) But it is just a hotel,
albeit an idiosyncratic and expensive one, with rooms starting at
about £250. And anyway,
we were interested in food.
A very handsome looking plaque indicated a restaurant inside,
and displayed a menu.
Called Cheneston, it had items like a starter of ‘Terrine of
foie gras with toasted brioche and pear chutney’ for £17.00 and a
main course of ‘Pot roast supreme of guinea fowl with celeriac and
parsley mash, morel mushroom sauce’ for £24.50; ‘Tournedos of
Aberdeen Angus beef, galette potato and burgundy shallot sauce’ for
£29.50; and for the vegetarian, a ‘Pea and mint risotto with seared
scallops and minted foam’ for £29.50. Expensive, in other words (American readers,
we are talking fifty to sixty dollars for a main course in
2007 dollars), and devoted to a conventional if a little updated
British-Continental style of eating, the restaurant already stood
for me as a representative of the hazards of triumphant London
cuisine. Heavy and rich
food this was; if not unappetizing (some of the dishes seem very
promising) it was nevertheless bulky. Above all, it was mish-mash
food, French ingredients, cooking techniques, and terms
(galette, tournedos), combined with a few Italian and
Spanish tricks (the risotto, the ‘foam’), vying against Asian
condiments (chutney, but made from an English fruit), British
ingredients (Aberdeen beef), and un-ironic allusions to bland English home
cooking (pot roast and mash, rather than daube and
purée).
Triumphant London cuisine going back to the days of Carême
and the heyday of the Empire has ever been thus, featuring a
vocabulary that is hybrid, and a style of eating that is heavy
rather than light, organised around the consumption of meats with
sauces, starches, and condiments (see Goody, 1982; Mennell, 1985;
Colquhoun, 2007).
We went on, down Kensington Road. An Indian
restaurant nearby boasted a ‘fusion’ cuisine, which on the evidence
of the menu mainly meant curried meats – roasted beef, braised lamb,
and stir-fried chicken portions, served in sauces made with raisins,
garum marsala, and chili.
We next saw a convenience shop, a narrow and shallow emporium
where one could buy cigarettes, liquor, newspapers, and urgent
foodstuffs, like fruit juice, soft drinks, canned beans, and
eggs. I went in to buy
a newspaper, and stood in line at the high checkout counter behind
an American woman. She
was nervously studying the display of confections below the cash
register – Cadbury’s milk bars, Mars Bars, KitKats, those sorts of
things, at least fifty different kinds. She looked and looked. A heavy set woman in her
forties, she was perturbed, while both I behind her and the clerk in
front of her huffed and puffed, waiting for her to make a
decision. Finally, she
blurted it out, expressed her desire and befuddlement. ‘Don’t you have any English
toffee?’ she asked. The
clerk, a young man, an immigrant from the east, paused before
answering. Like most
Englishmen, I am sure he had never heard of ‘English toffee’. ‘Only have what’s here’, he
said. The woman
tottered away, indignant, and I bought my paper.
Out on the streets, as we reached the corner of Kensington
Road and Kensington High Street, we finally found a row of colourful
establishments, One Restaurant, an Iranian establishment, a Prezzo,
a Strada, a Café Uno (three similar Italian chain restaurants,
specializing in pizza and pasta), a Starbucks, a Giraffe, Utsav, an
Indian takeout, Stick and Bowl, a Chinese noodle house, another
convenience market, and then further along, off Kensington High
Street, two places in an alley that were the first restaurants that
attracted this particular ‘cultural omnivore,’ arousing his culinary
curiosity, Cuba and Arcadia, the latter a genuinely local, which is
to say individually owned and operated Italian restaurant, the
former a Cuban theme establishment. The scene for someone like
me – a ‘predatory’ food enthusiast with a taste for picturesque and
adventurous eating – was starting to seem hopeful. But then as I turned back up
to Kensington High Street I found that this small strip of
restaurants was pretty much the end of it. Most of the rest of
Kensington High Street, and the side streets immediately off it, was
devoid of culinary culture.
Big clothing stores predominated, the kind one would find on
almost any high street in all of
Britain: an Accessorize, a Top Shop, a Gap. In fact, if you were
blindfolded and driven about for a bit, and let down in the middle
of Kensington High Street, apart from the Tube station, it would be
very hard to know where you were. It is almost
indistinguishable from at least 30 different high streets across the
United
Kingdom. And apart from that small strip
of colour and promise, the food was not only behind closed doors,
but phenomenologically absent. By the Tube station is a Marks
and Spencer with a small separate doorway leading downstairs (I was
reminded of Joseph Conrad’s description of the steps down to
the
anarchist-pornography shop in The
Secret Agent) to the food section, where the speciality is
prepared meals in cardboard boxes, supplemented by prepared
sandwiches available in plastic containers, and further down is the
one genuine supermarket of the area (in advance of the opening of
Whole Foods), a Waitrose, which also pushes a lot of prepared meals
and sandwiches, along with a cornucopia of bottled mustards, honeys,
chutneys, and what the English call cooking sauces, ranging from
Tikka Marsala to Bolognese.
Off the high street, you are in the midst of the old
empire.
The architecture is elaborately costly, large and brawny; the
residential buildings bespeak not only wealth but patriarchal
power.
Marion very inconveniently decided, as we wandered past
glorious ‘mansions’ and town homes and even some detached houses,
done up in white painted limestone, or in brownstone and
parti-coloured brick, that she wouldn’t mind living in these
parts.
But the high street itself is unimpressive, and the
restaurant scene is small. Where did the wealthy eat?
Clearly, either at home or in a different neighbourhood.
Clearly, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the
wealthy almost always dined at home, from meals cooked by
servants.
And the food shops and stalls of the high street were the
shops and stalls where servants were the main social actors. Now the
servants were gone, and so were the shops and stalls. In
advance of the opening of a Whole Foods, there was little beside
chain restaurants specialising in generic Italian food (or rather,
‘Italian’ food) and a pair of food emporia, Marks and Spencer and
Waitrose.
After our wander through Kensington, it still being too early
to eat, we searched for a pub, and we didn’t have far to
search.
Just off the High Street, mingled with small service shops,
was a handsome old Victorian pub, The Prince of Wales, with wooden
floors and panelling and very high ceilings. We
found a seat in the back, partook of a couple of pints, and observed
the natives. The pub encouraged dining. It had
many tables, like ours, suitable for dining, crowded together, and
there were menus everywhere. At
4.30
in the afternoon it was noisy and busy, and as
workers from nearby shops filed in after five, it got even
busier.
What one mainly observed was that almost everyone was
drinking beer, and that the main buzz of the place was the struggle
to find a table. We saw several confrontations
over table space. Meanwhile, we studied the
menu.
Apart from fish and chips and scampi and chips, there were
potato wedges with cheese, nachos, salmon fish cakes, ‘posh bacon
and eggs’, steak and ale pie, Chicken Kiev, chicken tikka,
hamburgers, and for the vegetarian, mushroom risotto. The
fact is, food like this (featuring bits and pieces of the cuisines
of seven national cultures) is available in pubs all over
London and in much of the rest of the
UK too, and much of it comes no less
pre-made than the take-away meals that dominate the shelves at Marks
and Spencer. It is not being judgmental
to say that.
‘London food is both centralised and
distant’, I wrote in my journal next morning. ‘Food
is something you go to’, I went on. ‘It
is never simply at hand. Organized into zones – zones of
circulation, ‘neighbourhoods’, ‘financial districts’, ‘entertainment
districts’– this city. Food is in the entertainment
district or else it is hidden from you, and one way or another you
have go to it. So you
go. . . . We need to go to Soho. There is nothing out here in Kensington. We’re on
our way.’
In fact, our first meal for the trip took us to
Chinatown, just down the road from Soho, where I learned an important lesson. On a
pleasant night, we walked the distance from Kensington to the
West End; it seemed to take about an hour. Having
decided on Chinese food for our first meal, we then walked the
Chinatown walk. Many of the restaurants are
centred around a festive, brilliantly lit plaza, the pedestrianised
Gerrard
Street. This is a manufactured
Chinatown rather than the real thing. But it
is a fun place, where the kind of Chinese food you don’t get in most
of the rest of England is available. I had
had jellyfish salad in a small establishment there once – a mark for
me of quality and authenticity. But where should we go for this
taste-testing meal? A friend had recommended a
dive, The Crispy Duck on Wardour
Street. (It has since moved to Gerrard
Street.) Time
Out had recommended a new Sichuan
Place, Bar Shu, a ‘2006 Runner-up Best New
Restaurant’: it is not ‘London’s first Sichuan restaurant,’ the guidebook said,
‘but it’s the first to have recreated Sichuan food so successfully’. We had
trouble finding it, though; my research assistant was getting cross;
I was getting cross. And when we finally found it, I
for one was unimpressed. The menu did not seem adventurous
or for that matter especially Sichuan, and it was surprisingly expensive,
with all the interesting main courses at 20 pounds or more. It was
off our budget. So I insisted that we walk back to
the centre of Chinatown, which made my assistant even more cross. Where to
go?
There were so many. So many of them seemed alike, with
menus on the pavement set on stands in glass and metal cases,
offering a dozen kinds of beef, a dozen kinds of pork... And I
didn’t want to try a place I had already eaten at. We
walked about. I was getting ravenous. My
assistant was losing her patience. Finally, we made it to the Crispy
Duck, a dive with dirty walls and floors, smoked tea duck hanging in
the windows, and very low prices: perfect perhaps. And I
was hungry and tired; I could not have walked another block. But you
could smell acrid grease and soapy steam when you walked
in.
We were ushered upstairs, to a small table against a wall
with peeling paint; there was a hole in the tablecloth. The menu
was enormous, and the more you looked at the more expensive and
complicated it got. But on the first few pages were
set value meals, like one where you could get crispy duck, mixed
vegetables, sweet and sour pork, and prawns in black bean sauce for
eleven pounds fifty. I gave up eating sweet and sour
pork when I was twenty years-old, but who was I to argue against
crispy duck with pancakes, mixed vegetables, and prawns for eleven
pounds fifty? My assistant dissented. She
wanted to try the à la carte. There were all kinds of things we
could try.
‘No!’ I insisted, thinking about my budget and my hunger, and
reduced at this point to the condition of a child ready to throw a
tantrum.
The eleven pounds fifty was dancing in my head like
characters in a Technicolor cartoon. Eleven pounds fifty. Crispy
duck.
Eleven pounds fifty. Crispy Duck.
Most of the food, when it arrived, was pretty bad. (It is
not really judgmental to say that, although being able to say it
required an exercise in taste: the food was bad the way the weather
outside is either good or bad.) The duck was passable but stale;
the vegetables were overcooked, soggy and tasteless; the pork was as
unsavoury as one might expect it to be, deep fried meat pieces
swimming in artificially coloured, gloppy sweet sauce, cheek by jowl
with stray onions and peppers. Only the prawns were really
passable.
Meanwhile, in the table next to us, a pair of posh young
Chinese women had ordered à la carte. The food came on what looked like
better dishes. A handsome pork dish, with the pork
slices fanned over a dark and steaming sauce came first, followed by
a plate of dark green Chinese broccoli, sprinkled with what looked
like flecks of garlic and ginger. In fact, the women called the
waiter over, and got into a heated discussion with him about the
broccoli.
Look at this, they were apparently saying, it’s too ... soggy
probably.
Eventually, after extensive negotiation, the waiter picked up
the plate and took it back to the kitchen. About
five minutes later he returned with another dish of broccoli, which
this time indeed looked a bit brighter and crisper. He also
brought the women a plate of fish slices, lightly sauteed and served
with a pale, translucent sauce. The women dug in: the pork, the
fish, the greens. Meanwhile I was getting a
bellyache, forcing myself to consume our glop, trying to put on a
good show for my assistant, who had only picked at her food, and was
finding solace in the crisp white wine we had ordered.
I had made the most fundamental and common mistake of
gastronomic tourism, the kind of mistake no food critic, or for that
matter food sociologist, should ever make. I had
ordered the food devised for the tourists. I had
let my hunger and impatience and greed get the better of me. But I
could not have been the first of my kind to make such a
mistake.
No, there must be thousand cases like mine: restaurant
critics, upon whom so much depends, the prosperity of restaurateurs,
the happiness of diners ... ordering the wrong thing. Only
they never tell you that. No. They tell you that the restaurant
was wrong.
Or else, more likely, they keep silent about the experience
entirely.
Never once have I read a restaurant review which includes
such details as finding oneself humiliated in front of one’s dinner
companions, or annoyed beside the example of true savoir faire expressed by diners at the next
table over. No restaurant critic I know of has
ever (by his own account) spilled the wine, bickered with his wife,
dropped his fork on the floor, gotten sick and run to the bathroom,
or, as I did, forced himself to consume soggy cabbage and deep-fried
sugar-candy pork in a desperate attempt to redeem his dignity. No, the
restaurant is always wrong, and the only real thing in question is
whether it is a little bit wrong or very wrong indeed.
Embedded in this critical practice – for a practice in the sociological sense is what
it amounts to – is a common misapprehension of the nature of
consumption, a misrecognition, actually, that serves the ideological
purposes of modern consumerism as such.
According to this model, the customer is always right. It is
only the provider that can get it wrong. The
customer has no responsibility in the transaction with the provider
except to pay, behave reasonably well, and quietly exercise the
faculty of taste. Instead of communication,
consumerism thus demands disinterested, quasi-Kantian reception – a
point that Bourdieu might have made. Instead of contributing to the
experience of consumption, the consumer is only thought to be an
uninvolved recipient, with no creative, strategic, or ethical
input.
But that is clearly wrong. Our experience at the Crispy Duck
testified to the decisive role of the consumer. In fact,
all of our experiences of dining in London testified to that. It is
the practice of restaurant-reviewing, always at the service of His
Majesty the Baby, the helpless consumer, that gets it wrong.3
We had other meals planned: a posh Sardinian meal; a trendy
eco-friendly meal, lunch at a trendy diner called Canteen, in
Spitalfields; dinner at a Wagamama, one of the semi-fast-food
wonders of modern London. The best of the meals was enjoyed
at the eco-friendly restaurant, a place called Acorn House, in
King’s Cross. At Sardo, on Grafton Way in
Fitzrovia, we ate a meal that, however close to a Sardinian
experience it really was (probably not that close, though the basic
ingredients of the dishes and the approach to cooking seemed
authentic enough), would have fit right in to the fashionably funky
Italian dining scene in New York or Chicago (in fact, I have since
eaten in a place in upper Manhattan just like, except that the
patrons had darker hair and higher cheekbones). Along
with a guest we had (collectively) spaghetti bottarga, made with
mullet roe, a veal chop with beans, grilled swordfish, asparagus
salad, and sauteed mixed vegetables, washed down with a couple of
bottles of Vermentio Funtana, a full-bodied but very drinkable
Sardinian white. Everything was well prepared and
presented, fresh tasting, and complex, and both the diners and the
restaurant staff, all of them doing their jobs, made the experience
zesty.
Restaurants like this communicate the message that it is all right to eat and drink, to take one’s
time, to indulge, to consume in good cheer. At
Canteen, on the other hand, the winner of a design award, popular
among office workers in the East
End – so
popular that we were told, coldly, that an hour and fifteen minutes
after being seated we would have to vacate our table for a party
that had reserved it – we got just the opposite message. The
food, service, and ambience were all unpleasant: burnt
macaroni-cheese for me, run-of-the-mill fish and chips for Marion,
served peremptorily by a harried waiter after we had been ushered in
by the hostile host, and eaten on uncomfortable bench seats in a
sterile environment that would not have been out of place, except
for the high quality and finish of the materials, in the food court
of a upscale shopping mall in Minnesota. (The
owners of Canteen have since then opened several other outlets in
London.) At a Wagamama, our meal was
pitiful: mushy noodles – overcooked instant noodles, the kind one
can buy dry in a styrofoam pot for under a pound – drowning in
condiments, prepared by cooks, as Marion put it in her log of the
evening, who had seen pictures of Asian noodle dishes but ‘had no
idea how they were supposed to taste.’
Certainly there was no resemblance between the thick, chewy,
lightly dressed fresh-pulled soba noodles I used to love for lunch
in San
Francisco’s Japantown and the watery ramen topped with a
mixture of undercooked and overcooked vegetables swimming in bottled
sauce I received at Wagamama. (It is not judgmental to say that
either.
The food was bad as a cold wet afternoon in November is bad.)
Acorn House was an exception, though not in all things. What was
happening at Acorn House, no less, exemplified the London system of continuity-in-variety than
any other place we visited. It also exemplified the struggle of the
culture of food in the face of the post-industrialist economy. But I
will get back to that.
The highlight of our experience was intended all along to be
Petrus, a Michelin two-starred ‘Modern French’ restaurant, run by a
celebrity chef, Marcus Wareing, a protégé of Gordon Ramsay. All of
the guidebooks suggested that this was one of the premier places to
eat in London. We studied pictures of the dining
room and were impressed. Situated in the Berkeley Hotel in
Knightsbridge (where single rooms start at £459 per night), it
looked comfortable and chic, an art nouveau – art deco establishment
with dark wood and velvet-clothed walls, high windows, brass
fittings, claret-coloured furnishings, and white linen
tablecloths. It had an enormous wine list,
somewhat smugly featuring the red wines of Chateau Petrus (though
the food has no connection to the region, the terroir, or the people who work at the
chateau), and a complex tasting menu. It also had a special lunch menu,
three courses featuring either a pork or a beef dish, for thirty
pounds a person, which was about as much as we could afford. And as I
guessed, correctly, among the most prominent restaurants of
London it was one of the easiest to secure
a reservation for. Marion and I nervously phoned in,
and requested a time slot we thought would most likely be available,
2 o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. Our
request was accepted, though only on condition that we leave a
credit card deposit and agree to the restaurant’s dress code, and
not wear jeans, or tennis shoes, or other proletarian paraphernalia.
So we were going to eat in a Michelin two-star in one of the
swankiest parts of London, on the ground floor of one of its
most expensive hotels, with a suitably snooty clientele, in a dining
room overseen by a renowned chef. For us it would be the culinary
equivalent of visiting the Eiffel Tower the first time; only, since it was
only a two-star, not a three, and since we were going to order the
bargain lunch, it would be like going to see the Eiffel Tower but not taking the lift to the
top.
We would stand under the structure, we would have seen it,
something auratically unique and famous and impressive, but we would
always be left to wonder what we had missed, a third Michelin
star.
The experience in any case, speaking of the auratic, would be
akin to the exercise of what John Urry (2002) calls the ‘tourist
gaze’.
Going to a site, in this case Petrus, taking pleasure in
apprehending something defined by its differentness from our
accustomed habitat, and at the same time participating in the
construction of its differentness, we were gastronomic tourists in
search of aura, who were also, conversely if paradoxically, bringing
aura with us. We were looking for
something that couldn’t be found unless it was looked for, since the
looking was part of what was being looked at. You get
the idea.
That we were social scientists, however, had a serious impact
on the experience. We were aware of observing
ourselves observing and participating in the auratic restaurant
scene, as if we were pursuing reality within a hall of mirrors. But the
‘difference’ in question, the outcome of our visit to Petrus, was a
performance of class, privilege, and glamour that, for all its
artificiality and pretentiousness, was neither insubstantial nor
inconsequential. What we would experience would be
a performance of class, privilege, and glamour in fact, even if we were only, in principle,
visitors to the fact. Though a modest research grant was
in part responsible for our tour of the site, what we would enjoy
that afternoon was precisely the kind of experience precisely that
the pursuit of wealth today is designed to procure, especially in
financial capitals like London. Our site of pleasure was an
economic goal, a motive for real economic behaviour, and no doubt
therefore a pretext for all sorts of barbarisms and
depredations.
Be that as it may, we were novices; we were uninitiated, and
felt it.
Needing to arrive by appointment to an elaborate mid-day
dinner, we got a little anxious; we suffered from stage fright. We spent
a lot of time grooming ourselves that morning, picking out our
clothes, and, once dressed, worrying whether we were dressed
appropriately. We spent the morning wandering
about the streets of London involved in other research, looking
at food markets, but with our minds distracted and our hearts in our
mouths.
Would we make it on time? Would our clothes be mussed by the
time we got there? Would we make a good
entrance?
Would we, as we partook of our sybaritic pleasures, as it
were, remember our lines? By one o’clock in the afternoon we were nearly frantic with
expectation. The day was nearly wasted because
we could think of nothing else and by the time of our arrival – we
were five minutes late, since we had turned left rather than right
as we neared our destination, ended up in the wrong neighbourhood,
and were forced to rush about looking for a cab, which eventually we
did find – I was in a sweat. But we were welcomed, with easy
graciousness, by a young woman at the door, who seemed to have had
it held it open for us by yet another worker, and then by the maitre
d’ standing front and centre, a smiling young Frenchman with slicked
back hair, and, at our table, by a relieved and serious and
heavy-lidded waiter, all of them greeting us as if we had come home
from a hard day in the fields oppressing the natives, and everyone
was glad at our safe return.
The restaurant, it turned out, was excellent, though not I
think the best I have ever eaten at. We were seated at a large square
table that stood as if an island within a broad archipelago of
table-islands, with the spacious sea of the thick wine-red carpet
all about us. Whatever else I enjoyed that
afternoon, I can safely say that, in a public restaurant, I have
never been given so much room to eat in before. Only
about ten of about twenty tables were occupied, populated by very
well dressed couples and trios, who every now and then raised their
eyes from their own tables and gave fellow diners mischievous looks,
across the expanse, of guilty self-satisfaction, as if they had been
caught dallying with the ladies (and/or the eunuchs) in someone
else’s harem. A private room behind us was
occupied by about a dozen young revellers: some kind of guilt-ridden
office party, it seemed. The food was delicious, if not
surprising, with only two slight disappointments: an amuse-bouche of
salt cod puree (in other words, a brandade de
morue, though the restaurant eschews French terms when it can),
which was placed on our table as we arrived and that was a bit bland
as brandades go; and a tarte tatin
(there’s no English equivalent) for
two, which was very brown and bubbly but neither particularly sweet,
nor succulent, nor sour, nor fruity, nor crusty, nor rich. But for
the rest, all was very fine. In order, this is what we
had:
– A glass of mushroom-shallot soup, topped by truffle foam
and resembling a glass of sweet mocha with cream on top, but tasting
savoury only.
– For her, a smoked trout ravioli in a seafood cream, which
tasted (she claimed) like sex; for him, a crab bisque served in a
small sauce boat and then drizzled over a pyramid of shredded crab
meat and ribbons of drizzled sauces in a white soup dish.
– For her, aged, hung, lovingly reared Angus Aberdeen rump
steak, served au jus on a mound of tiny crinkly root vegetables, the
medium rare beef so fat and juicy one almost didn’t need to chew it;
for him twenty-four hour wine-braised belly pork (Americans would
call this a sideloin of pork), also served with its juices and baby
vegetables, the meat again very tender and in this case intensively
flavoured, as if wine and pork and vegetables had been combined and
sublimated together into a new chewy essence.
– For both, a palate cleanser served in oversized shot
glasses, with layers of apple sorbet, sauce anglaise, and apple
jelly.
– For both, a cheese plate, chosen from an impressive cheese
board, their selections including an Epoisse and an Ami de
Chambertin (both soft, rinded cow’s milk cheeses from
Burgundy, to go with our wine) which were
unctuous and earthy, one milky tasting and the other one cheesy and
salty.
– For both, but ordered by her, the fatal tarte tatin, served with a boat of clotted
cream and a scoop of banana ice cream.
– For both, coffee and bon-bons, the bon-bons with the
sweetness and crackle of cookies from the cookie jar, taken on the
sly, but better, and in a great quantity.
– For both, inebriation and satiety.
We didn’t get all of this for our thirty pounds each, it must
be added.
The cheese course was extra. And we found ourselves encouraged
to drink a bit more than we expected, and more extravagantly, which
also added to the cost.
As we sat down, while the amuse bouche was being placed on
the table, a Champagne trolley was wheeled in front of us, smelling of
ice and bubbles. It was hard to say no when we were
asked if we would care for a glass of champagne. We were
given three choices from already open bottles in a silver tub. We chose
the first, without quite understanding what the waiter had
said.
Enjoying what turned out to be a good but unexceptional Ayala
Brut Majeur, we found out when the menu came that our little
acquiescence to bubbles and ice had already cost us an extra
twenty-four pounds. If we had chosen the third
Champagne offered, a vintage something or
other, it would have cost us seventy pounds. That’s
one hundred and forty dollars for two glasses of sparkling
wine.
As our order was taken, we found ourselves both having fish
for a first course and meat for a second, and as we thought it
silly, having come this far, and having already been soaked for the
Champagne, not to enjoy each course to its
full, with proper accoutrements, we decided to take a little splurge
on the wine. (The French call this ‘going all
the way’).
So we ordered half a bottle of white Jean-Max Roger 2005
Sancerre for the fish course, and to go with the meat and the rest a
full bottle of red burgundy, a 1998 Pernand-Vergelesses, indeed a
Premier Cru Laleure-Piot ‘Vergelesses’, which, though I (to my
shame) had never heard of either the winemaker or the type of wine
before, seemed a bargain at only fifty-nine pounds, since it was the
only impressive-sounding wine more than a few years old available at
less than seventy quid. (Unlike Marion, however, who raved
about it, I was a bit disappointed by the results, finding the wine
to be a little too thin and fruity. It was still perhaps a little
young.)
In any case, the total bill came to two hundred and
twenty-one pounds, far more than I had ever paid for lunch or dinner
before.
I pretended not to be shocked. I pretended that it was worth
it.
Perhaps it was. I paid the bill and walked out on
my own two feet as if I were accustomed to spending two hundred quid
for lunch, with smiles and thanks to the servers all around, the
fine waiter who supervised our meal and the assistant waiter who
brought the main courses and the assistant assistant waiter who
brought the secondary items and the assistant assistant assistant
waiter who filled our wine and water glasses if someone higher up
wasn’t around and who brushed the crumbs off the table cloth, and
along with them the sommelier, his side-kick the evil demon tending
the champagne trolley, the receptionist at the front who had had the
front door opened for us and showed up by the table every now and
then, swaying her hips, and above all the slick, smiling, joking,
friendly, helpful, and altogether artificial maitre d’. I walked
out with Marion on my arm, out through a bar and an
informal, cheaper dining facility, out through the marble-floored
hotel lobby, and out into the cool bracing air of a late
London afternoon. Did we
hail a taxi to get back to our hotel, which wasn’t that far down the
road?
I don’t remember. But I remember the two of us
getting back to the room and collapsing, overwhelmed by the amount
of food and drink we had introduced into our bodies, uncomfortable,
bloated, exhausted. We threw our clothes off and went
to sleep, dreaming the uncomfortable dreams of the overstuffed, and
woke up in the dark, still a bit bibulous and full. We
weren’t able to eat another thing for the next twenty-four hours.
That’s what one gets, alas, for two Michelin stars in
London, though the guide books might not
tell you all that. And as for its meaning – the
meaning of the restaurant, or our experience of it, of the class
system it betokens, of the Michelin and related rating systems it
participates in – a little bit more remains to be said. The
original Michelin system was a very French affair, and in
France today it continues to be
Gallocentric, and even xenophobic (Mesplède, 2004; Remy, 2004). For the
most part ignoring what in England are called ‘ethnic restaurants’,
not to mention fast food joints, and devoted to what Remy
unapologetically calls tables
bourgeoises, the Michelin system documents its own kind of
‘continuity-in-variety’. Although regional variations
abound throughout France, the Michelin system presumes that they all
add up to a single jangling whole, much like the concordia discors of the universe depicted
in classical cosmology, and the presumption is not entirely
wrong.
From the top of the Michelin rating system to the bottom, and
below that to the literally thousands of restaurants and
cafe-restaurants and bistros that don’t make it into the Guide, and from Brittany to the Côte d’Azur
(and perhaps all the way to Corsica), most of the dining out
establishments in France serve what is justifiably thought to be
‘French food’, a single kind of food with
regional and qualitative variations. Alain Ducasse at the Plaza-Athenée
serves the same kind of food as the
nameless bistro around the corner; it is only much more elaborate,
much more finely sourced, exquisitely prepared, obsequiously served,
and (one imagines) better tasting. The Michelin system proposes in
fact that the three-star restaurant will serve as a model for the
bistro around the corner and all the other dining establishments in
France, that it will set fashions,
standards, and principles of French cookery for everyone everywhere
else.
However well or ill the little bistro around the corner or
the little relais in the countryside live up to the model, however
humbly, cleverly, mechanically, or unimaginatively, or however
idiosyncratically or regionally varied the bistro or the relais may
prove to be – so that everywhere in France steak frites inevitably
ends up on the menu, along with a regional or traditional plat du jour – the three-star restaurant is
supposed to sit astride a hierarchy of emulation to which all
non-‘ethnic’ restaurants are understood to belong.
The same concordia discors,
however, simply cannot be found in London or anywhere else in the
United
Kingdom. Petrus
is already a different kind of restaurant from almost anything
to be found elsewhere in the country. It is French, though with no
regional affiliation, and it is luxurious, operating in the
tradition of haute cuisine; indeed, it is
emulating three-star establishments like Alain Ducasse at the
Plaza-Athenée. And in all these respects it
serves a very different kind of food than will be found in almost
any other eatery in London or the UK. The concordia discors of French cuisine in
France supposes at once a horizontal and a
vertical integration, horizontal by way of the regionality of French
food, and vertical by way of the standard-setting role of the most
prestigious establishments. The world of food in modern
Britain, however, is integrated neither
horizontally nor vertically. Regional variation is minimal, and
vertical integration is impossible.4 Food in modern
Britain is segmented.
On the streets of London, therefore, though one will find, if
one is looking for them, doorways into palaces of haute cuisine rivalling some of the haut-ist
cuisine in the world, one will not find lots of little bistros
emulating haute cuisine or much of any
type of French cookery. Instead, one finds: Wagamama,
Pizza Express, Yo! Sushi, and Nando’s, as well as countless fast
food-take out restaurants, from the many large local chains like
Pret A Manger (with 120 locations in Greater London) and EAT The
Real Food Company (sic; with 61 locations
in London) to American-based multinationals like McDonald’s and
Subway’s and, especially in the less well-heeled neighbourhoods,
countless kebab shops and other takeaways (see Jackson 2006). The
typical lunch of the typical Londoner is not a twenty-four hour
braised sideloin of pork washed down with a 1998 Pernand-Vergelesses
Premier Cru, but a ‘stuffed’ sandwich made with
square ‘sandwich bread’, slathered with mayonnaise and layered with
a few slices of animal protein and vegetable matter, served cut in
halves in a triangular plastic box, with the insides of the sandwich
halves showing, taken from off the shelves of a refrigeration unit
from Pret A Manger (which in spite of the name serves nothing
French), EAT, Greggs, Marks and Spencer, Tesco Express, Darwin’s
Deli (one location), or even Boots, the ubiquitous British drugstore
chain, the sandwich accompanied with a sweet soft drink and a packet
of ‘flavoured’ crisps – these last on the shelves of every sandwich
purveyor in Britain including crisps flavoured with seasoning
powders to resemble such items as pickled onion, roasted lamb with
rosemary (I am not making this up), spicy prawns with Thai chili,
roast chicken, beefsteak with onions, Mexican-style nachos, and
Barbecue ribs – and eaten on the run.
Because of the segmentation of purveyance (marketing
executives call this ‘niching’) modern Londoners can well claim to
have available to them an especially varied diet. Even the
potato chips are varied, featuring flavours from the four corners of
the world.
As we have seen in the case of the Prince of Wales, that most
traditional of British dining options, the pub lunch, can set
Chicken Kiev alongside Chicken Tikka and steak and ale pie; or in
the case of snooty Cheneston’s, chutney and risotto can be placed
cheek-by-jowl with foie gras terrine and pot roast and mash.
But there is no integration. For that reason, the food scene in
London can very aptly be characterized as
‘postmodern’ in the most familiar sense: the food scene lacks a
centre, or a framework of hierarchical value. But for
that reason too, the idea of London as a capital of cuisine has to be
severely qualified. The lack of a centre or a
governing hierarchy of culinary values makes it easy for Londoners
to experience the thrills of novelty and dissonance in the midst of
an orderly but bustling cityscape. That dissonance is one of the most
exciting things about London. It has engaged restaurateurs in a
competitive struggle, indeed a somewhat Darwinian struggle for
custom that has resulted over the past twenty years in some
fuss-worthy achievements of quality. But it has made London dining a divided and fragmented
affair.
The kind of food one eats depends almost entirely on how much
one is able, willing, and knowledgeable enough to pay (call this
knowledgeableness ‘cultural capital’, if you will) so that the
well-to-do and fashionable set in London subsist on an almost
completely different diet from the majority of Londoners. At all
price points, and at all the niches of the market, restaurants
persist in cultural isolation from one another, and from the general
culture of the nation. The shared community of
consumption in modern day Britain, if such a place exists at all, is
to be found not in the places where it eats but in the places where
it drinks, and even the public house industry (with the spread of
chains like Wetherspoon’s at the low end and Bar One at the high) is
increasingly segmented.
Running a restaurant in London, or anywhere else in
Britain, therefore presents a unique
challenge.
In the midst of the Tower of Babel of food here, it is very difficult
for a restaurateur to
find his or her own and proper language, not to mention his or her
own proper voice or style. And in the midst of the Darwinian
struggle for custom, it is very difficult to find an infrastructure
to rely upon. Go to a restaurant in a seaside
town in any of the Latin countries, and you have a very good chance
of getting a fine seafood dinner, and that is because the
infrastructure is there. The restaurateur doesn’t have to
look far for decent fish, or decently trained servers and cooks;
they are already there. In London, however, the produce, the service,
and the cookery all have to be searched out, nurtured, and
sustained.
They cannot be taken for granted. The money and effort
required to develop and sustain the system is one of the reasons why
food, good as it sometimes is, is so expensive in London, and it is one of the reasons why
the logic of the multiple has come to dominate the restaurant
scene.
We discovered a pointed example of this in one of the first
places we visited, the celebrated Acorn House. An
outgrowth of Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen project, Acorn House is at once
a commercial institution and a charitable trust, which trains chefs
from disadvantaged backgrounds and serves reduced price meals to
agency employees. Its main mission is both
ecological and aesthetic. It wants to provide food with
minimal waste and maximum sustainability, producing the lowest
possible carbon footprint, using only locally sourced and seasonal
ingredients; and it wants to do all that on the ground floor of an
office block at the side of a drab and busy thoroughfare, near
King’s Cross, while both providing cheap meals for employees and
competing for the custom of fussy Londoners capable of spending
thirty quid a head or more for a meal. It has
its own compost heaps and vegetable plot on the roof of the office
building, and only the most eco-friendly of equipment, furnishings,
and fittings. It gets its cooking oil from rape
seed grown within a hundred miles or so of the centre of London, its
pork and artichokes from even closer, its table water (with low
energy filtration) from the tap. Though rather late in the day by
international standards, given the examples from way back of Chez
Panisse in Berkeley and Slow Food in Bra, Acorn House is
aiming to create a new infrastructure of restaurant service. The
sourcing of ingredients, the developing of the work force, the
management of the home economy of the establishment, and even the
financial structure are all new and unique. The
cuisine too, though based on traditional Italian principles, is
somewhat new.
Our meal there, taken in a sleek, open and inviting dining
room, with light green furnishings along with lots of wood, was all
about vegetables. We ordered from the ‘Menu for
March’, the only menu available. I started with a rich beetroot and
cardamon soup, Marion with a watercress and parsley
concoction. I then had grilled sea bream
served on a bed of two items from a so-called salad menu, borlotti
beans and artichokes, and Marion had roasted guinea fowl au jus
served on a bed of three other salad items, celeriac, salsify, and
spring cabbage with pancetta.
The flavours of every item were fresh, assertive but
balanced, and every item too was cooked exactly à point – which is to say, at just the right
amount of doneness. The beetroot soup tasted of beets;
the guinea fowl roast, which was hot, unctuous and moist all the way
through, tasted of fowl, and was slightly gamy. This was
no supermarket chicken. The salads were stars in their own
right.
We especially enjoyed the salsify, a root vegetable we had
not had much experience with before, its flavour and texture
something between celery, parsnip, and asparagus. These
‘salad’ items, slightly vinegary and garlicky in taste, added
lightness, contrast, and variety to the heavy meat of the guinea
fowl and the dense fish flavours of the sea bream.
But of course they are not really ‘salad’ items, in the
Italian sense of the word. They were not insalate; they were verdure and fagioli. And though classic Italian cuisine
might serve any of them as antipasti, it would never serve them, at
room temperature, with an oil and vinegar dressing, as an
accompaniment to a large portion of hot animal flesh or fish. Though
everything on the menu (apart from some classically Northern
European soups and deserts) was Italian, the dinner itself was
something else; it was an innovation, and yet another hybrid
affair.
Not that there is anything wrong with that, as a character on
Seinfeld might say. But the
very success of what Acorn House is doing betrays the contradictions
inherent in modern London cookery. Here, in a restaurant
devoted to local sourcing (and that in the midst of the largest
conurbation in Europe), the items themselves were often of foreign
provenance – Italian beans, African guinea fowl, not to mention
olive oil and charcuterie from Italy and what is openly acknowledged
to be dairy products from Norway and France. Most of
the cookery was foreign too. And yet again, here in a
restaurant devoted to Italian principles, the meals themselves were
put together in a non-Italian way, an Acorn House way. (Nor for
that matter, were there any Italians on staff, as far as we could
tell.)
Acorn House was not only trying to promote not only a new
ecology of restaurant management, but a new way of putting meals
together, a new way of eating, which mimicked Italian traditions but
also violated them in favour of something less conventional and
ceremonial.
And it was doing it, again, by establishing what amounted to
a new infrastructure of food. Acorn House was meant to be not
just a restaurant, but an institution with an identity, and it was
meant to have an identity that not only branded it, giving it an
image attractive to customers, but that also laid down an
economy of restauration, from organic rape seed farmers in Essex to
compost pits on a rooftop in King’s Cross. It is
all very heroic, and I wish them the best. But it
also amounts to a phenomenon Andrew Ross (1991) once called
attention to on the subject of New Age science. An
alternative to establishment science, New Age science is
counter-cultural, oppositional, even revolutionary. But in
its attempts to oppose the establishment, it ends up mimicking
it.
No practice is more capitalistic, entrepreneurial, and
consumerist than New Age science, with its alternative publishing
houses, medical facilities, health products, trade shows, and
boutiques.
And the same thing could be said about the New Age innovation
called Acorn House. If it is trying to revolutionise
the way people eat, though in a counter-cultural spirit, it is
in fact doing no more no less than what most successful new ventures
in London do. The fuss about London, over and
above the unfortunate facts that most food in London is still not
very good, and most Londoners still eat poorly (on which see
Blythman, 2006) stems from the un-centred, un-hierarchical energy of
the London food scene: every new successful restaurateur in London
is trying to reinvent London cookery, trying to bring forth, out of
the Darwinian jungle of the London food scene, a new and dominant
species.
But the first commandment of London cookery isn’t then to ‘make it
good’, but something much more ambitious. It is
biblical, even: ‘Go forth and multiply!’
Talking to Jay Rayner at the Observer
(2007: 63) head chef Arthur Potts made all of this very clear. ‘We
won’t buy from just anyone’, Potts said, speaking of his suppliers
of beets and vodka and cheese. ‘They have to be willing to fit in
with what we are doing here.’ But that shouldn’t be difficult,
Potts went on to say, in spite of the evidence of the thousands of
other restaurants and take-away joints in the vicinity of
London. ‘We should be the way all
restaurants are run.’
I trust I don’t have to underscore the irony of all
this.
‘I’d like there to five Acorn Houses scattered around
London,’ added Jamie Grainger-Smith, Pott’s
business partner. ‘Why stop at five?’ Arthur Potts
interjected during the interview. ‘I want thirty-two: one in every
London borough.’
Works Cited
Bell,
David. 2002. Fragments for a New Urban Culinary Geography. Journal for the Study of Food and Society 6
(1):10-20.
Blythman,
Joanna.
2006. Bad Food
Britain: How a
Nation Ruined Its Appetite. London: Fourth Estate.
Bennett,
Tony. 2005. The Historical Universal: the Role of Cultural Value in
the Historical Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. British Journal of Sociology 56
(1):142-64.
Bourdieu,
Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique
of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by R. Nice.
London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Certeau,
Michel de, Luce Girard, and Pierre Mayol. 1998. The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 2, Living
and Cooking. Translated by T. J. Tomasik. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Colquhoun,
Kate. 2007. Taste: The Story of
Britain Through
Its Cooking.
London: Bloomsbury.
Cooke,
Rachel. 2003. 'I could have opened a safe little brasserie like the
Ivy.' Observer, November 9, 2003.
Goody,
Jack. 1982. Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A
Study in Comparative Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hannerz,
Ulf. 1990. Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture. In Global Culture: Nationalism Globalization, and
Modernity, edited by M. Featherstone. London: Sage.
Jackson,
Kevin, and Richard Heeps. 2006. Fast:
Feasting on the Streets of London. London: Portobello.
Lahire,
Bernard. 2003. From the Habitus to an Individual Heritage of
Dispositions. Towards a Sociology at the Level of the Individual. Poetics 31:329-355.
Mennell,
Stephen. 1985. All Manners of Food: Eating
and Taste in England and
France from the
Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford: Basil Blackwood.
Mesplède,
Jean-François. 2004. Trois étoiles au
Michelin: Une histoire de la haute gastronomie française et
européene. Paris: Éditions Gründ.
Phillips,
Cath. 2007. Time Out London: Eating
and Drinking 2007.
Rayner,
Jay. 2007. All Taste and No Waste. Observer
Food Monthly, March, 60-63.
Remy,
Pascal. 2004. L'inspecteur
se met à table.
Paris: Éditions des Équateurs.
Roberts,
J.A.G. 2002. China to
Chinatown: Chinese
Food in West.
London: Reaktion Books.
Ross,
Andrew. 1991. New Age – A Kinder, Gentler Science? In Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and
Technology in the Age of Limits. London: Verso.
Urry, John.
2002. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed.
London: Sage.
Warde,
Alan, and Lydia Martens. 2000. Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption
and Pleasure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1
The
appearance of the Michelin Guide to London, however, was part of a general
expansion of the Michelin imprint, which has since gone on to cover
Tokyo and the Main Cities of Europe.
2
Bell claims that Ulf Hannerz (1990) had
long since ‘observed’ this about ‘the cosmopolitan’. But in
fact, Hannerz says no such thing. The overheated if amusing language
is entirely Bell’s invention.
3
Roberts
(2002: 151) cites a 1935 account of Caucasian eating in Chinese
restaurants in Los
Angeles: ‘There are several cafés where you can get
excellent dinners – if you know how to order. If you
ask for Chop Suey, they know you for a tenderfoot and treat you
accordingly. Real Chinese food is delicate and
rare . . .’
4
The
fundamental idea of the leading food critics in
Britain, like Matthew Fort of the Guardian,
is that almost all the good food in Britain is to be found in the vicinity of
London. Certainly all the ‘best’
restaurants in Britain are in the South, and, apart from
three or four places in Berkshire and Oxfordshire, all within the city
of limits of London. Meanwhile, in spite of a fad for
serving ‘local produce’ in all the four corners of Great Britain,
virtually every ‘Modern British’ restaurant with ‘local produce’
pretensions is still serving dishes like roast beef with gravy, lamb
chops with gravy, mashed potatoes, and platters of steamed mixed
vegetables: the ingredients are sourced locally, but they are mainly
the same ingredients and virtually the same style of cooking as one
finds anywhere else in the country.
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