Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  My daughter, when she was a three-year-old developing the kind of observations that put parents terrifyingly on notice, used to say accusingly, ‘You’re not going out to work, you’re going out to dinner.’ She was on the winning team with that one. Nine-and-a-half out of ten people will agree that eating for a living does not count among the most taxing occupations in the world. Not even among the top 100,000. Many will argue whether it is work at all, or if it is in fact leisure time with a dollar value added to it.

  * * *

  EWEN

  I was starting a new job and getting the tour of the restaurant from the manager. We walk into the kitchen and there’s a chef running around with his pants down with a carrot stuck so far up his arse only the feathery top is poking out. The other chefs are killing themselves laughing and they all look at us in surprise—I guess they weren’t expecting any visitors—but the guy with the carrot manages to collect himself enough to pull it out and say, ‘Welcome to (X).’ The funny thing was the head chef was an absolute Nazi about produce, so when he came into the kitchen a few minutes later he spies a whole carrot in the bin, pulls it out and waves it around while lecturing everyone about not wasting anything. They had to secretly throw it out again so some poor customer didn’t eat the arse-vegetable.

  * * *

  But you try it. Please, be my guest. Put what you eat into words. Stick something in your mouth then describe it. Only first you have to eliminate ‘yum’ as an adjective. Yum is for children and television hosts. So is ‘beautiful’. TV chefs use beautiful as a rapturous catch-all when they don’t know what else to say. It’s important to pronounce it beauuuu-ti-fuuuul, with a crisp ‘t’, rather than ‘bewdiful’. I think the intention is to show something is so gobsmackingly delicious it deserves the extra effort of correct pronunciation.

  On paper it’s a little trickier. You should not—really, you CAN NOT, under pain of death—describe meat as moist, or dessert as sinful. However hard a brownie tries, a combination of sugar, flour and chocolate cannot be wicked in the classic jurisprudential sense. You can’t write about wafting aromas and succulent anything. Succulent is on Interpol’s watch-list of banned food words. They’ll send their crack squad of assassins to neutralise the culprit without a second’s hesitation. See also: tender, melting, decadent. In fact, the English language is shockingly ill-equipped to describe food in anything except the most ham-fisted ways. The Germans would probably have a word for the perfect briny slap of a good oyster. Food writers in English have been known to reach for ‘ozone’. Personally, I have no idea what ozone tastes like—I prefer it much higher up in the atmosphere, protecting the earth from the sun’s shattering rays—but a good oyster will taste like high tide and the fresh salt of an ocean gale rather than the seaweed dankness of a rockpool at low tide. But perhaps it’s better just to say the oysters are fresh, and good, and be done with it, although if all food writing were reduced to good and bad, fresh and not-fresh, the bottom would fall out of the restaurant reviewing market. Until the language police come a-knockin’ to really put the frighteners on dweeby food nerds getting all poetic with their dinner, we’ll be stuck with writers falling into the abyss of their own critical conceits like this: ‘Pickled and roasted quince plays support in a simple but totally convincing duet of two simpatico bandmates.’

  Ugh.

  Actually, I wrote that. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  To steal a quote and poke it with a stick, writing about food is like dancing about architecture. Elvis Costello said that, the interweb tells me, although it was music that struck him as an impossible subject to put into words. He’s obviously never been struck by how difficult it is to describe mashed potato without resorting to ‘creamy’ or babaghanoush without ‘smoky’ or crackle without ‘crackly’. Writing about food is all about donning a leotard and doing a representational dance about salt cod croquettes, or mustering an impassioned Dying Swan in response to a Peking duck where the pancakes are just slightly too thick and the cucumber slips out thanks to a heavy hand on the hoisin.

  Don’t get me wrong. I go innocently about my line of work most of the time, even pausing to cheer inwardly when a particularly good phrase pops into my head. (Can I say the panna cotta trembled like a bird in a cage? Like Obama: Yes we can!) But every so often the crushing absurdity of the job creeps up and thwacks me over the head with a rubber chicken. Usually when I’ve been sweating for two hours on how to describe yet another panna cotta. That’s when the inanity of describing the process of chewing, tasting and swallowing forces me to go and lie down on the couch until the shadow passes.

  I guess no matter what you do for a crust, no matter how thrilling it seemed at the very start, one day it simply becomes work. Work with notable outbreaks of enjoyment, but still work. The spray-tan specialist at Paris Fashion Week sighing as he adjusts yet another supermodel’s G-string—work. A tennis pro-slash-Rolex ‘ambassador’—work. The Queen of England—work.

  Writing about restaurants is work, too. Not just the writing bit. Even the chewing, tasting, swallowing bit. I’m not asking for a violin to hit a mournful low note or anything, but even when my bum is perched on a plush seat, a napkin in my lap, a drink in my hand, it’s still work. I just get to work in a nicer place than most people. And drink on the job.

  It might seem strange to introduce dolphins at this point—I swear I would never dream of grilling one over charcoal after a brisk lemon-and-oregano Greek-style marinade with a whisper of garlic—but I often think of dolphins when I’m in a restaurant. They’re a remarkable species that can shut down half their brain at a time to let it take a break from all that thinking business. Seated at a restaurant table, the average reviewer will feel a bit like Flipper (hopefully minus the high-pitched squeaks and bottlenose) with half a brain focused on some gossipy conversation with a friend and the other half trying to figure out what the hell is in the aioli.

  Add to the half-brain affliction the fact that the job leaves the reviewer semi-catatonic by the time the bill arrives. Metabolising all that food and alcohol is hard work in itself. I’ve heard of some reviewers who manage to achieve the Platonic ideal of simply tasting each dish then pushing it away, rather than hoovering it up as though the food is carpet lint and their mouth is a high-performance vacuum. I know of one who uses allergies as an excuse to send food back after taking a few prim bites. I can’t decide if it’s admirable or pathological. People generally get into this food caper because they love food, so pushing it away makes about as much sense as a pacifist going into arms manufacture. Plus I can’t live with the look on the waiter’s face when a dish is only half-eaten and they know it’s a reviewer’s table, because when they take that plate back into the kitchen they’re going to get a grilling from a panicked chef that would make the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan look like a beach picnic.

  Forget the dolphins. Here’s another analogy. It’s like piloting a commercial plane. There are people’s lives—well, their livelihoods—at stake. Yet the critic is being asked to think critically while filling up to the brim with food and booze. They’re flying at a blood-alcohol altitude of 0.05. The cabin is depressurising. The oxygen is dipping into the red. A crash is imminent. Here’s an interesting factoid for you: the first sign of oxygen deprivation is the iron-clad belief that you’re NOT suffering from oxygen deprivation. That’s why most restaurant reviews become a little fuzzy by the time they get to dessert. Or, at least, mine do.

  One of the most rewarding parts of the job, apart from the subsidised eating and drinking, is the correspondence I share with readers. An example:

  Dear Ms Dubecki,

  Your review sucked. I recently tried the pork belly you thought was ‘so disappointing’ and it was WONDERFUL. You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about. Furthermore, you didn’t start writing about the food until ONE-THIRD of the way down. You seem to be much more interested in the music they’re playing and the chairs you’re sitting on than what’s on t
he plate. Are you a food reviewer or a décor reviewer?

  Yours sincerely, Anonymous Self-described ‘Foodie’

  P.S. You cannot use words like ‘leitmotif’ in a restaurant review. A leitmotif is exclusively a term for music. You are responsible for the pollution of the English language and the decline of Western civilisation.

  Dear Anonymous Self-described ‘Foodie’,

  I am glad you liked the pork. At $38, it would be a very good thing to like it. But have you ever stopped to consider the basis for your belief that one person’s restaurant experience will be the exact equal of another person’s? I struggle daily with the idea that something as protean as a restaurant can be quantified on an objective scale. On the other hand, maybe the French philosopher Descartes and the Matrix trilogy were right and we’re really only brains in vats—in which case this restaurant thing is just a very expensive illusion.

  Yours sincerely, Larissa

  P.S. I hope my vat isn’t next to your vat.

  Maybe I should simply have written, ‘It’s my review and I can do what I want with it, so YA BOO SUCKS!’ but I won’t sink to the level of Urbanspoon and TripAdvisor, where a ragged consensus is crowd-sourced from anonymous contributors with an axe to grind, a barrow to push, and crimes against syntax to commit in Randomly Capitalised screeds: ‘We were Kept Waiting for half an hour and then the Eggs were OverCooked and only ONE Peace of Toast this should nevr happen Ill Not return Again.’

  I’d like to get my hands on the brainiac who decided the criticism business could be reduced to a popular vote like the Logies. Democracy be damned. There’s no fun in being a critic if it doesn’t come with official Voice of God status, preferably read in the voice of James Earl Jones as Darth Vader although a classic Charlton Heston would suffice. I’d be far happier if the job came with a gold badge that said ‘Voice of God’—even VOG would do, at a pinch—but am prepared to settle for acknowledgement that it’s more valuable than the wisdom of the huddled online masses.

  Just for example, if someone going by the name MadDog64 sees fit to alert consumers to a Sichuan restaurant where ‘If you order something spicy it comes with a lot of spice’ and ‘The service is absolutely terrible’, he (assuming he because surely a woman would follow gender protocols and call herself MadBitch) is missing two points. Firstly, the name ‘Sichuan’ is dialect translating from the Mandarin as ‘before the hotpot is ended you will beg for death’. Secondly, experiencing cheerful, upbeat service in a place like this would be like seeing a Chekhov play adapted by Andrew Lloyd Webber with lots of high-stepping song-and-dance numbers.

  I visited the same Sichuan restaurant as MadDog, and indeed it did have the kind of service Marxists fondly imagined when they talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat. We asked our waiter for advice on the encyclopaedic menu with photos of dishes all bristling with a thick forest of angry red chillies so it looked like the same picture reprinted 200 times. ‘Here,’ he whispered, pointing discreetly so no colleagues would report him to management for being helpful. ‘This one good.’

  He was right. It was excellent. We even tipped. I hope he wasn’t punished for our indiscretion.

  I’ve long harboured a soft spot for these laminate, fluorescent-lit places that evoke parts of China only heard about here if an earthquake wipes out 50,000 people. The food can be outstanding (and outstandingly cheap) plus they don’t give two hoots if they’re serving a restaurant reviewer or the person who puts the stickers on fruit. Everyone is treated equally as a complete and utter annoyance. Only high-ranking Party officials and Canto-pop stars have a chance of getting service without setting their hair on fire; sometimes you even see diners get so tired of waiting they go foraging for their own drinks and cutlery. It’s good to feel part of a noble and proud tradition of non-service stretching back into the fog of history, honed into comfortable recognition. For a reviewer who is used to being given the Rolls Royce, ridgy-didge, here’s-something-Chef-prepared-especially-for-you treatment, it’s a spiritual detox to be treated with withering contempt.

  The places that really annoy me—by ‘annoy’ I mean ‘make me want to return under cover of darkness with a tin of petrol and a lighter’—are a sneaky new breed of restaurant that poses the biggest threat to eating norms since the Chiko Roll. Ladies and gentlemen, introducing . . . the Gen-Y restaurant.

  The Gen-Y restaurant—generally opened by older svengali types to bleed money from a target audience still thrilled that they can legally drink—is essentially an edible business model set to a retro-ironic soundtrack. Not so much a restaurant, truth be told, as a cafeteria with a high opinion of itself. You’ll find none of the outmoded ‘luxuries’ like linen, or cutlery that isn’t jumbled in a box on the table, or things quaintly called ‘entrees’ and ‘mains’. Basically the model is: get them drunk, chuck a bunch of food on the table in no particular order, and get them out thinking they’ve experienced the final word in hipness.

  It sounds like I have an axe to grind against Gen-Ys in general but I assure you it’s not the case. Some of my best friends are Gen-Ys. I can forgive them their rampant me-ism because they’re the first generation set to fall behind their parents in fairly significant things like healthcare and education and housing. I’m totally prepared to cut them some slack in terms of the global economic clusterfuck.

  Just not when I’m out to dinner.

  You could argue the Gen-Y restaurant is all about distilling the contrary spirit of youth into restaurant form. They don’t like the term ‘restaurant’ for starters, which is too old-timey and prescriptive. They’ll usually tack an ‘eatery’ onto their name, although in the end it matters not a jot because on the first visit you’ll walk up and down the street half a dozen times until you spot the sign in twelve-point on the underside of the window frame.

  As for service at a Gen-Y restaurant . . . how to explain . . . think of Manhattan, and then think of Brooklyn. See what I mean? You’ll be thinking of beards and tattoos and piercings and old-man fashion—brogues and braces and fedoras—mashed up with lace singlets and T-shirts bearing the logos of long-forgotten 1970s electronics brands. In other words, they’re all about the style, not the substance. They’ll have one or two circus ringmasters—mature waiterly types who know to serve from the right—but otherwise the floor will be buzzing with waiter pre-schoolers hired because they have pink hair and arms full of tattoos.

  I realise it’s hypocritical and indefensible to be charmed by certain restaurants’ lack of charm, and annoyed by others. But the Gen-Y restaurant, like New Coke, promises a whole bunch of stuff it doesn’t deliver. It shamelessly pretends to uphold the pillars of the restaurant as invented in post-Revolution France—things like comfort, and service, and napkins that aren’t an anorexic piece of one-ply that go soggy if someone so much as breathes heavily near them. The laminate Asian places I love simply say, ‘This is what we are—take it or leave it. Option two better.’ See the difference?

  Honestly, I don’t give a pad kra pao if a table of diners wants their waiter to jump into a selfie to post on Instagram. I’ll even move so they get better light. What I object to is the attitude dripping from these places that they’re doing you a favour by letting you have a table, although I realise I’m totally out of step with the rest of the world on this one. ‘I remember when restaurants had values,’ I’ll say sadly, looking around at some heaving joint like a grizzled war veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder. ‘When they used to seat you at a time pre-ordained on the telecommunications device, and the tables weren’t rammed so close you wind up sitting on a complete stranger’s lap when you’re just trying to get to the toilets, and maybe even have carpet so you could talk to each other in normal conversational tones instead of having to crack out the semaphore flags . . . What this generation needs is a good blooding.’

  I have a mate who owns a tragically hip no-bookings place where a queue forms even on Sunday, when it’s closed. He gets in the next day and the answering machine
will be clogged with plaintive messages: ‘We’re out the front, why don’t you open the door and let us in?’ It’s a terrifying window into how the modern psyche has been trained to believe the coolest restaurants are more like an abusive partner.

  My number-one tip when visiting a no-bookings restaurant-cafeteria-eatery is simply this: take a book. I’ve read the first chapter of Ulysses more than fifty times thanks to arriving ridiculously early to grab a table for my friends. That’s my new status in life—Reconnaissance Girl—because most of my eating partners in crime quite rightly believe queuing is an affront to human dignity. At the first sign of a wait, they’ll abandon me to get poundingly drunk in the bar on my own until a table becomes available three hours later, by which time I’m not hungry anyway because I popped out after the third cocktail to get some chips.

  Maybe it’s because I have a personal history with no-bookings restaurants. I’ve been hurt too many times before. I fell victim to the social humiliation of queue rage at the first restaurant I ever reviewed at length. There’s me, nervously carrying my brand-new Spirax notebook and blue biro, and there’s the man in the orange T-shirt who storms up to accuse me of pushing past him to take the last table. What’s a girl to do except be very polite in case he’s carrying a concealed weapon? The staff were lovely, though. They sided with me, but do you see what’s wrong with this sentence? The staff shouldn’t have to side with anyone. It’s a restaurant, not Ultimate Fighter.