Dining Out On Affectation (with extra jus)

I went to a Michelin starred restaurant a couple of weeks ago. I love good food, but restaurants of such quality, and the inevitable accompanying pageantry, take me so far out of my comfort zone that I can’t even see my comfort zone any more. As a kid, “going out for dinner” usually meant a takeaway from the local chippie, or a trip to Mother Hubbard’s if somebody had a birthday or a wake. Frankly, the mere presence of cutlery that wasn’t plastic made us feel we were getting a bit above ourselves. Nowadays “going out for dinner” generally translates as “I’ve got a voucher for Pizza Express” or “we’ve not had a curry for ages.” So this was a rare treat.

So, how do you know you’re having a world-class dining experience rather than a standard Friday night at your bog-standard tandoori or local Wetherspoon? Here are some indicators:

-          The “tasting menu”. This is where you’re charged a set (usually large) amount of money for what is ultimately a series of canapes presented as mini courses which you need a magnifying glass to see.

-          The dishes feature mysterious ingredients or are so incomprehensibly titled that you can’t work out what they are, but are too afraid to ask. What, for example, is a Mahogany Clam? And how does he differ from a Standard Clam? Suddenly you find your tiny portion of meat comes with “jus” (rationed, crap gravy) and pea puree (substandard mushy peas). Other parts of your meal sound decidedly unappetising, but to admit this would be to show your lack of culture, so you keep quiet and eat your smoked salmon with “a smear of liquorice gel”, even though this sounds like something you’d rub on a mouth ulcer, and your “shaved fennel with birch syrup” (I promise I’m not making this up) even though, as far as you know, fennel isn’t particularly hairy and birch syrup sounds like a hippy remedy for a hangover.
 

-          Each staff member has a designated job, and cannot and will not stray onto a colleague’s territory. You must not ask the person who puts the napkin on your knees (posh diners evidently being above doing this for themselves) if you can order wine, the wine waiter (sorry, sommelier) if you can order your food, expect the person from whom you order your food to actually be the person who then brings you your food, or ask the person who brings you your food for the bill. At the restaurant we visited, there was one waiter whose sole job seemed to be to replace pieces of cutlery, and he looked positively excited when the woman next to us dropped her knife, swiftly replacing it with more aplomb than was strictly necessary.

-          You are not allowed to eat or drink until the content of each course has been explained in great detail. With each course, the sommelier appeared at our table and we were treated to a very informed description of the wine and why it was the best wine for what we were about to eat, and we had to nod sagely as we learned about the different types of grapes that grow along the Chilean/Argentinian border, pretending to be interested. We then had to go through the same thing with the food, as the waiter whose job it was to describe the food gave us an elaborate overview of what, owing to the tiny portions, would take us less time to eat than it took him to describe. “Here you have gently grilled lobster which was caught just this morning off the Sussex coast. His name is Barry, and he was the youngest of seven. Barry is served on a bed of fluffed quinoa with a light drizzle of menstrual jelly.” (OK, I made that last bit up.)

-          Once you have the wine, great care is taken that you do not pour this yourself. Instead, it is placed just out of reach, thus ensuring that the Head Wine Pourer stays in secure employment until retirement and you remain thirsty.

-          At the end of the meal, it is obligatory that you try the recommended “digestif”. This invariably tastes a bit like cough mixture.

-          The evening ends with a phone call from your bank querying if your card has been stolen or if you really did just voluntarily spend over £200 on coffin-roasted Trafalgar Square Pigeon with deadly nightshade compote and goat-sick glaze followed by organic blackcurrant soufflé sprinkled with locally-sourced vanilla-infused orphan tears.

My friend described this as "some chunks with some coloured sand". I still don't know what it actually was.