The Schalter

Written by: Peter Sanderson

“Just because you like Jimi Hendrix doesn’t mean you can play like Jimi Hendrix.”
- Anthony Bourdain

Half of all restaurants fail and close within one year of opening their doors. You heard that fact before? It’s not true. The figure is closer to 23% in the first year and 50-60% in the first three years. It is a difficult business though, and yet in every town and city there are poor, even dreadful, restaurants that seem to persist year after year despite the fact they are selling crap food at inflated prices. The only people we can blame for that are ourselves.

I love restaurants. I love food and I love eating, so it follows that a place established solely to celebrate those things is pretty special to me. I don’t care if it’s a Michelin star restaurant set in a beautiful country estate or a stall in a Vietnamese marketplace where you sit on those wee red plastic seats, as long as the food is good. The former can be incredible because it usually involves luxury items and things you don’t get to try every day. The latter can be close to perfection as you sample a dish that the chef has made every day for the last 30 years.

I also love menus and wine lists. A ‘foodie’ being handed a menu is like a fan of Formula One being given a choice of keys and a race track. A whole list of what really gets you excited is placed on the table in front of you and all you have to do is pick the items you want. Very few hobbies give you the opportunity to get actively involved at the highest level possible. That is what is so damn cool about food and wine; this is not a spectator sport and to get the best out of it you have to be prepared to get your hands dirty.

Some of the best times in my life have revolved around food and restaurants: a romantic meal in Prague as the snow fell outside; eating a dish of king prawns with chilli and basil in Bangkok that was perfectly balanced and yet so hot it made me feel decidedly odd and check for hidden mushrooms; countless times sitting round the table at home with good friends, ripping bits off a roast leg of lamb or chicken. Good food and good company together make a sublime experience and nothing comes close to matching it for inspiring feelings of great contentment.

It goes without saying then that a bad meal in a restaurant can be frustrating as hell and deeply disappointing. A restaurant should be the culmination of all that is good about food. What it offers should be fresh, made from the best ingredients, well cooked and well presented. The entire point in going is so you can have something to eat that you couldn’t make for yourself at home. That’s the deal. It can all go wrong very easily indeed though.

Take, for example, the humble steak. Steak is the easiest thing in the world to cook. It’s a real barometer for a restaurant. A check that reads ‘2 Fillet, one rare, one med/rare’ is a chef’s dream order in a busy restaurant as it takes no prep, virtually no cooking time and is nigh on impossible to fuck up. You can do it blue, rare, medium rare or medium (some say there is also a ‘well done’ stage but that makes good chefs cry and, more often than not, guarantees the worst piece of meat in the establishment, so we’ll leave it out). If you get a poorly cooked steak somewhere then you should never go there again. Simple as that. If you ask for a steak rare and it comes medium/well then they may as well have brought you chicken. It changes the texture and flavour of the meal and that means you aren’t getting what you asked for, which, again, is the entire point of going out.

I think there are several ‘mistakes’ that we frequently make when dining out that detract from the experience and can be easily avoided:

We order the same thing time and time again

Can you imagine doing the same six tasks at work over and over again, knowing you’re capable of so much more and yet rarely, if ever, getting to show it? A grumpy, unchallenged chef who spends every night pissing his career up the wall isn’t likely to cook you the best meal of your life. Take a chance every so often. Never had liver, or, even worse, only had over cooked liver that’s all grainy and lost its sweetness? Order the liver and say you want it medium rare, you might love it. Try a veggie dish for a change; chances are it’ll be great.

We mistake quantity for quality

Step forward the buffet ‘restaurant’. I didn’t consider school dinners a great gastronomic experience and most buffet ‘restaurants’ are of a similar level. There isn’t a person reading this who couldn’t be head chef in a buffet restaurant inside a week. I’ve actually heard people say “It’s not the best food in the world, but you can have as much as you like”. Why on earth would I want extra helpings of crappy food? Can I have a poke in the eye as well?

It’s highly likely that there will be a place within walking distance that uses better ingredients and therefore produces better food and charges the same price. Go there instead.

We assume chefs know their stuff

We don’t know if the person in the kitchen knows sea bream from salmon. The ‘chef’ could be the owner’s mate or some spotty wee chav that flunked out of catering college. Worst of all it could be a ‘foodie’ that believes they’re Jimi Hendrix.

There are armies of bad chefs out there. Nobody would look at a botched building job and assume “perhaps the builder knows best. Maybe the roof sagging in the middle like that is a good thing,” so we shouldn’t do it with our food.

If you are sitting there with your dinner in front of you thinking “wow, this chicken is dry” then that’s because it is dry. You’re not imagining it; you’re being ripped off.

We think complaining will get you stabbed to death

It’s mad to assume that every dish out of the kitchen is going to be perfect. There are bound to be mix ups and mistakes and most restaurants really appreciate the constructive criticism. It has to be warranted of course, but you don’t need ten years of hard graft in the kitchen to know when fish has been overcooked. At worst you’ll be asked to leave and if that happens then trust me, it’s a blessing.

Complaining about bad food is critical to making sure the standard we get is high. We, as a nation, hate complaining about food. We sit and mutter under our breath and say “never coming here again” but we rarely say “this was bad” or even “this bit was great, but this part was not” to the people that can make a difference. I can understand that though. Who wants to go out for a nice meal and then sit and watch their partner eat as they wait for their (possibly tainted!) meal to come back to the table cooked as it should have been? Not me.

However, if you don’t complain it means you are condoning the meal. If you say “it was fine” when they collect your plate then it means exactly that; your meal was good and you couldn’t find fault with it. Renting some space, setting up a few tables and putting a man in front of a stove does not make a restaurant and the best judge of a bad meal is not the owner, the waiting staff or even the chef; it’s you. If complaining about shoddy food was the norm rather than the exception then you’d have a lot fewer poor dining experiences. And please, if your meal is terrible then never, ever leave a tip.

Best plan of all is to get over the fear of looking daft and try to head off a bad meal at the pass. People in the food trade love food. They love talking about it and they love telling you where it’s from, how they got it and why theirs is the best around. If they can’t tell you what you want to know then assume the worst.

If they are using the cheapest broiler chicken that money can buy and charging you £12 for the breast, then you have a right to know that. If their steaks are from clapped out dairy cows and yet cost the same as those from a prime ten month old, grass fed Angus then you have a right to know.

If you don’t know what cullen skink is, or what cerviche means, then ask. They’ll be happy to tell you and you might find the most fantastic dish you’ve ever eaten.

I don’t think any other industry enjoys such casual acceptance of mediocre service and for all our sakes we should try to change that.

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This post is tagged Culture, Food, Wine