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I have made a little deal with myself over the past couple of years. It goes like this. Because I get to choose the places I eat, and I’m pretty good at it, there shouldn’t be any reason I’d review an absolute minger — well, other than for the sheer entertainment value of shooting fish in a barrel. A few times I’ve left a restaurant thinking, “You know what, that was lousy. But they’re trying hard and I don’t want to give them a shoeing.” If I don’t write it up, I can’t claim expenses, so I quietly tear up the receipt and forget it.
There’s one kind of place, though, for which I’ve torn up too many receipts — four so far in the past two plague years. Four places, three with stars, all offering a tasting menu. This remains, for many, the ne plus ultra of “fine dining”. Let me tell you about the most recent one. It doesn’t matter what it’s called, because, frankly, neither you nor I could have told it apart from the others.
It was out in the countryside, somewhere that had once probably been a decent pub, now zhuzhed to tasteful anonymity, with a heartbreakingly bright-eyed and idealistic front-of-house crew and about a tenth of its seats filled. Which is funny, given that when you book they say they’re full until they “reopen the bookings list” three months out. But no. Turns out it’s just me, and half a dozen local retirees in blazers, looking at the menu with bewilderment.
Back in the day, when French, or more likely Catalan, chefs were experimenting with the menu de dégustation, there might have been a combination of craft and ingenuity that actually delivered 14 novel sensations, a dozen of which you’d enjoy and some of which would be truly memorable. Now it’s just an exhausting to-do list of knackered clichés. Three sub-courses of pre-starters used to be an opportunity for jeux d’esprit, twinkling creativity and exploration. Now they’re bar snacks; one a daringly savoury macaron, one usually an oyster and the third a liquid. They’re supposed to amuse your palate. They don’t.
There’ll be a “bread course” in there, somewhere around #4 or #5, through which the kitchen will prove they can make a sourdough nearly as good as your mum’s and churn their own butter. There will also be at least two courses that, the staff will dutifully explain, come from carefully husbanded kitchen waste, sometimes fermented, often reduced to a “broth” for the inevitable tableside “pourover”.
These fashionably austere courses, what we professionals have come to call “the bin food”, are intriguing because the menu will go on to feature — as well as that preliminary oyster — lobster/langoustine, foie, veal, game (in season), caviar, scallop, sweetbread, the exotic and arcane cheeses and (fashionably Australian) truffle. Exactly the same bloody shopping list of high-status ingredients that’s been impressing conspicuous consumers since ancient Rome.
The accompaniments will be routine, the presentation tortured. Savoury elements, rendered canapé-sized, “deconstructed” and laid out like overwrought desserts. They’re not setting fire to your pudding on a tableside cart like they did for your parents — nothing that lighthearted.
The funny thing is that the old service trolley is what the tasting menu reminds me of most. It’s a pretentious small-town restaurant’s semiotic indicator of “fine” dining, along with waiters in black tie and a French-accented sommelier. There’s no rule that says you can’t bring out great food on a trolley, but as the trend aged, the meat cart ceased to be a vehicle for creativity. Quite the opposite. It was the widely accepted signifier of solid bourgeois mediocrity.
Ninety-nine per cent of the time, today’s tasting menu doesn’t showcase a chef’s imagination; it masks its absence. Think about it. You want to display art and craft in food. Why adopt a structure that effectively prescribes the number of courses, the list of luxury ingredients and the techniques with which they are worried into shape on the plate? As long as wooden butter knives, compressed watermelon and serving things on an unhygienic looking pile of raw grain are sufficiently ubiquitous to satirise, there’s nothing creative about a tasting menu.
We know why, of course. Because the tasting menu stopped being about delighting customers a while back. It’s aimed at restaurant inspectors now, and other chefs, in an unending, highly codified pissing contest. The diners are merely the collateral table-fillers.
What this boils down to in the end is the opposite of hospitality. Banquets used to be served à la française, with dozens of disjointed courses on the table simultaneously, in a big, stupid display of wealth and excess. We stopped doing that in the early 19th century because we realised quite how stupid it was. The tasting menu today is about as appropriate. It’s certainly no less totally tin-eared in a world on the lip of recession.
A tasting menu can work. There are maybe half a dozen chefs in the country who can do it well — and I wish they’d stop, because it’s still a daft idea for most of the reasons above. It also perpetuates an utterly pointless aspiration for young chefs in a struggling industry. Every time I dutifully hand over the £15 cheese surcharge, I have the overpowering urge to yell at the open kitchen, “Honestly, mate, you don’t have to do this.”
I’m not going to pronounce the tasting menu dead. I think it’s doing a great job of killing itself. But with the very best will, I’ve had four solid goes at them, predisposed to be open-minded and generous, and four times I’ve walked out feeling poorer, somehow taken for an idiot and usually ready to throw up in the car park from the excess.
If you still think you might enjoy a tasting menu, I wish you luck, but you’re on your own now. I believe tasting menus are tired, inappropriate and bad for us as an industry. And I no longer think I’ll be doing you or me any kind of disservice if I never try another one.
Tim Hayward is the winner of best food writer at the Fortnum & Mason Food & Drink Awards 2022
Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at tim.hayward@ft.com
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