Comment Is Free

There are lots of things that contribute to making restaurant comment worthwhile (or not as the case may be). Who paid for dinner is only one of these things and - if you actually take the time to understand how most of the content you digest is produced - a pretty bloody insignificant one.

As a punter, if a restaurant suddenly turned round and stumped up for your dinner, you'd feel pretty special wouldn't you? You'd probably go round telling your mates just how bloody fantastic the place was and why they should all get down there pronto, right? Well of course you would.

I did it for my first freebie review; and that was of a formula curry house on a 1970s housing estate for goodness sake. Once I hit review number twenty, though, I was pretty nonplussed about the whole freebie thing. By review 100 I was sick of eating free stuff I didn't fancy when there was great food just up the road I could chose to pay for. The point is, free stuff eventually normalises. After a while you just don't see it as justification for special treatment because it's not special. It's normal.

But hold on, and forget about money for a minute. Surely if the restaurant knows you're coming you can expect special treatment regardless of who's paying? Your experience isn't going to reflect whatever Mr Average Restaurant Punter's experience is so why should he pay any attention to you? Quite possibly he shouldn't, but the reality depends on something far more important than a bill. Even if a restaurant knows they have someone important in, they can't retrain their chef, alter their systems, change their prices, tweak their concept or get rid of the ultra-rich backer who is making them do stupid things that no one in their right mind would see as either necessary or enjoyable aspects of dining out. The staff can treat their special reviewer guest well but money and a by-line picture don't factor in to how she spots, interprets and responds to fundamentals that staff can neither change nor hide. How does she spot, interpret and respond? This depends, not on cash, but entirely on the aim behind her review.

Those wishing to increase traffic to a blog might well have adopted the approach that being trustworthy and fair is key, but what they'll quickly have discovered is that traffic goes up based, not on accuracy, but on how many comments they manage to leave on other, more popular, blogs and whether Chris, Lizzie and Helen (or maybe Andy or Angie depending on the genre) will give them the time of day on Twitter. Photos are important too, in that people want to see some sort of mildly aspirational lifestyle before they pay you even a jot of attention. None of which helps promote a focus on accurate reviewing no matter who is picking up the tab. So why bother? And what sort of obsessive lunatic deems it morally inappropriate to simply show off an experience for a burgeoning readership to pass their own judgement on anyway? Is there some under-the-table code that, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, asserts clinical recommendation as the only valid form of restaurant publicity? Perhaps we should ask the experts.

How do professional, expense-accounted restaurant reviewers perceive their job? Do you think they see it as to objectively critique restaurants with a view to directing your eating-out-pound to those most worthy of it? Main-title newspaper critics have eaten so many hundreds of thousands of meals that they are numb to the experience and see no obligation to use their not inconsiderable influence to sing the praises of a struggling but brilliant restaurant you'll love that might otherwise close or that is stumping up for their dinner. They are going to give their views based on two things only: whether they liked the food, and whether liking the food is going to enhance their personal brand more than not liking it. A combination of writing skill, entertainment factor and credibility of viewpoint, personal brand is what keeps a critic read, what lets them sell newspapers or generate page views, what triggers the debate that keeps them at the heart of restaurant opinion, and what maintains the professional clout necessary to position them as an authority on restaurants and thus remain gainfully employed in the media. Without personal brand, reviewers don't sell papers. And without paper sales, expense accounts are pretty hard to justify.

Let's imagine for one crazy moment, though, that as a way to generate interest in their work, a restaurant pundit had actually decided to write considered, accurate reviews of excellent restaurants they had personally made the effort to discover. Even if they did this, something else would get in the way of their ability to be truly objective: knowledge.

If I have bothered to work a day or two in ten different establishments each year because I am genuinely passionate about grasping the realities behind putting food on a restaurant table for money and using that knowledge to offer others a clear idea of how their eating choices can make dining out better for everyone, does it matter if a restaurant paid for my meal? No, not even slightly. I will still understand everything that is going on and judge the operation accordingly because my knowledge and motivation demand that I do so.

If, on the other hand, I have little to no knowledge of what happens in a restaurant, where food comes from, what it should cost and what good value actually constitutes, then after paying for my dinner, I will produce personally-biased drivel that's worth nothing to anyone in terms of whether or not they should eat in the same restaurant I did. Who paid means nothing when the commentator doesn't know enough to comment in the first place. Would Tripadvisor be any less useful if its millions of contributors ate for free? No, it would still be huge crock of biased, ill-informed shit. If I understand the effect of a freebie I can largely ignore the freebie but if I'm not motivated to promote restaurants I have rightly understood to be deserving of business because they are fundamentally great places to eat and - conversely - be honest about those that aren't, it really doesn't matter whether I ignore the freebie.

So let's say I've busted my butt for ten years learning everything I can about cooking, kitchens, restaurants and media, and my burning passion is simply and only to guide diners to their eating nirvana. I may try and I may pay but unfortunately, something else gets in my way. Were my editor* of the persuasion that certain restaurants were off limits for objective, critical comment, it wouldn't bloody matter what's free or whether I like it because as a mere writer my hands would be tied. To scrape a living I would have to wrest a moderately positive picture from a meal I considered overpriced, dull or poorly cooked because if I didn't my editor would do it for me then not commission me again. Why? There are lots of reasons.

1. Saying Restaurant Gordon Ramsay represents a fundamentally overpriced experience for the majority, or that the Fat Duck - like McDonalds - is more of a factory-cum-theatre than a restaurant, is not going help an editor's publication appeal to a majority audience. Regardless of the "truth", these sort of left-field opinions make credibility easily assailable, going, as they do, against the majority of job-scared, tow-the-line pundits. Tasked with generating a decent readership, this is something most editors are less keen on that the proven one-two, punter-bagging punch of a fluffy viewpoint alongside stunning photos.

2. Most providers of restaurant content exist because of: hobbyism, sponsorship or advertising. If an editor pisses off the advertisers or sponsors that keep her website, book, magazine or whatever funded, she has suddenly regressed to having a hobby rather than a job. So editors must ensure pieces that concern advertisers or the interests of advertisers are nice to advertisers regardless of what their writer thinks or who is funding them.

3. Editors aren't bloody stupid. They know that punters want entertainment. They know that if their weekend review were a series of humourless factoids recorded by an unswayable multi-millionaire, their readership would slowly bugger off. Hence, they edit, and their writers better bloody well learn to minimise how much editing they have to do by not writing anything they'd need to edit no matter how accurate it might be.

4. A huge percentage of restaurant and food content relies on the cooperation of PR agencies. If a restaurant appoints a PR, that firm becomes the writer's gateway to interviews, exclusives and pre-written content. Without the cooperation and continued trust of PRs, it can be somewhat challenging to discover and secure the volume of editorial opportunities needed to survive on a skeleton staff propped up by handy - but fundamentally biased - press releases. Where do you think restaurant news comes from? Do you think it's all gathered independently via meticulous research or, if taken from a press release, re-written by some all-knowing restaurant genius who researches it back into reality? No, it's processed from press releases with minor changes by underpaid sub-editors who, yesterday, were cut and pasting some gibberish about cleaning products and are generally dealing with so much volume across so many different subjects as to be utterly desensitised to the quality or accuracy of content. Anyway, the point is that if editors let knowledgeable, ethically-minded writers roast restaurants represented by certain PRs, those PRs would withdraw their support and those editors would have to hire more writers or researchers they couldn't afford and their bosses would fire them.

Now, speaking of PRs, here's a poser for you: it's wrong for a blogger or journalist to approach a restaurant and offer them publicity based on a meal that will not be charged for, but it's not at all wrong for the same restaurant to pay a PR agency £25k annually to pimp freebies out to exactly the same bloggers and journalists. In actuality, those writers who make contact independently are saving restaurants a huge amount of money: if everyone did it, restaurants would have far more money to sink into our dining experience. Follow the logic here: if you think instances of "blaggergate" have nothing to do with PR agencies who are experts at getting information into the media and at the same time need to protect their businesses from an ever more open and broad market for restaurant promotion you are, frankly, naive.

Many PRs were once journalists. Why? Because there are less jobs around for journalists, and those that do exist no longer pay very well. This low pay, however, is offset considerably by press trips and previews: opportunities for journalists to try out things they will write about. A hotel, a bicycle, a phone, an album, a film, a car, a wine or even - *shock* - a restaurant. Journalism is built on these little tasters and, strangely, no one questions a music reviewer's opinion of an album he didn't pay for. Whereas a journalist eating for free can only be a total crook.

Just as a freebie distances one from the majority who pay for dinner, though, so does having a disposable income high enough to eat wherever you want whenever you want. Would I trust the views of someone who spends their money on food at an almost shockingly profligate rate yet hasn't bothered to develop any sort of ability to truly understand the sourcing, preparation and production of what they eat? No, I wouldn't. They have no concept whatsoever of value because while they may settle the bill personally, their ability to pay it without a blink means they cannot judge it for those unable to do the same. Their opinion is based, not on value or fact, but on a very narrow range of highly personal criteria shaped by an experience of dining out that could hardly be further removed from that of others. They judge a £100 meal on the same basis as a £400 meal. They judge a turbot based on a thousand other turbot. Punters don't. Oh and, by the way, that's the same punters who don't get freebies.

So who can we trust to judge restaurants? Chefs, surely, have more subject-matter knowledge than anyone else and must be routinely employed to tell us where to eat. Please. God. No. While they may grasp how most of what they eat is cooked and be able to roughly judge ingredient quality, working fourteen-hour days five days a week with the other two reserved for managing their "life" and catching up on sleep, a chef's basis for comparison outside their own restaurant is almost shockingly low and vastly skewed by such huge professional investment in their own cooking. If a pundit manages five weekly meals out to a chef's one, who has the best point of comparison for what should happen in a dining room and be on a plate for punters to want to come back? Chefs don't feel right critiquing their peers, they don't feel confident about doing something that isn't their job and - in most cases - they're not the best writers. Just like most writers aren't the best cooks.

The point is, all this should demonstrate that you simply can't generalise. Just because some blogger takes a freebie and you, as a punter, would be biased if you got one, doesn't mean they will be. It doesn't mean they're ripping anyone off, either. If they are, then the entire process of getting a restaurant into the press a fundamental rip off, which it can't be because, via PR agencies and entertainment for journalists, restaurants continue to pay to be in the press. And if they didn't pay to be in the press, we'd all have far, far less restaurant writing to consume and we'd all moan. So please, stop complaining about freebies - they're an institutionalised aspect of long-established, mutually profitable relationships between restaurants, PRs and content providers, they have been around far, far longer than bloggers and blaggers, and they are doing you absolutely no more harm than the rest of our entirely imperfect food media is.

*of course I'd love an editor, but as well as spelling, tone and grammar they'd also correct my opinions which would be really boring.

Wastrels

A chef on telly bins a load of food and people go nuts. People are stupid. The chef has been hired by a restaurant because he is a northerner with previous Michelin form and the Manchester tourist board want a Michelin Star for their city as the icing on the cake of a "food resurgence" they felt it necessary to engineer in the race to drive money into Manchester. Why have the BBC helped? Because now the BBC is based in Manchester it would prefer Manchester to be good.

Hence, Aiden Byrne is engaged in the business - and if you think it's anything but a business or has anything to do with feeding people you are a naive fool - of winning a Michelin Star. Do you think for a minute that any restaurant with a £3m investment and a cook the fat white man likes isn't going to have lobbed mountains of food in the bin by the time it opens? Recipes must be tested. Who eats the tests? Suppliers must be assessed. Who eats the useless product? Chefs must be trained. Who eats their cock ups? Food must be small and fiddly. What happens to the rest of it? The answer is landfill. Landfill eats the waste that is an inescapable part of operating a restaurant whose high-investment business model encompasses the need to win one or more Michelin Stars.

Eugénie Brazier was a stickler for waste. She scraped the scraps from her customers' plates and fed them to her pigs. All parts of an animal were used and used in the most cost-effective way while peelings and bones went into the stock pot. This was The System. An idea, long practiced by independent French restaurants held in high esteem by Le Guide Michelin, that chucking anything away was fundamentally wrong. But Brazier personally owned both the restaurants at which she won 3 Michelin Stars and had an incentive to economise. She wasn't working for a cash-rich leisure group who were themselves in cahoots with a state-funded media conglomerate and the local tourist board. She didn't do tastings, she made food that people wanted to eat and flogged it for a profit. She didn't try to invent a dish based on Acid House because it would have been really, really embarrassingly stupid to do so. And, if she had, Michelin would have ignored her because they were yet to routinely commend food so fiddly, so disparate from nature, so meddled and messed with that to produce it without considerable waste would be impossible.

Of course some restaurants run on a shoestring by their industrious owners, who probably either cook or serve in them personally, do manage to win Michelin stars, but these same kitchen slaves will never be the Adria, the Rocas or the Atxa of their day. They will be forgotten chefs in backwater restaurants who ran profitable operations serving nice food at the price it cost them to produce. They should be superstars but, because pundits favour artistry, trends, innovation and award ceremonies over simply eating well for a fair price, they never will be.

You cannot, in one breath, bemoan food waste, and in the other spend obscene amounts of your seemingly bottomless cash pit on food endorsed by Michelin because the businesses that sell you this food are not in a position to concern themselves with food waste if their goal is to feed you the fiddly little morsels of widely-fêted culinary art you routinely commend.

Let us imagine a kitchen in a large hotel. Perhaps it has two stars from Ms Burr and her semi-anonymous chums. One of its dishes features tuna. On the plate this tuna comes as a small disc. In the kitchen, to create this disc, the sous chef cuts cylinders from a bright pink slab of tuna, rolls each cylinder in cling film to shape, freezes, then breaks out the £3k meat slicer for his pretty little discs. Then he throws the 30% of tuna leftover in the bin. Why not use it to make a tartar on the lunch menu? Because this kitchen has a budget to win the two Michelin stars its guests expect it to have and that budget factors in waste.There is no requirement and no time to make money back at lunchtime so it doesn't try to.

Venison is bought on the bone to ensure uniform cylinders can be cut from each loin. Some deer are big, some deer are small; Michelin only like deer that are the same, hence, Chef buys the whole thing and whittles it down. Half the meat and all the bones are fried in 50% of their weight in butter and go in a sauce.

The quail dish only uses breasts. The legs go in the bin. They can't go for stock as the dish doesn't feature stock and they would taint the flavor of any non-quail stock.

The kitchen buys in cavolo nero but only uses the tiny heart as the leaves are too big and can't be cut into a suitably delicate shape. Bin.

Field mushrooms are in several stocks but the gills would discolour them so rather than take any chances 50% of each mushroom goes to our old friend Mr Bin.

And on the subject of stocks ten new sauces are made each day, 70% of which Chef knows he will never use but, hey,  those are the recipes and its all in budget!

He's got 20 portions of decent turbot in and wants to do it with a nice vin juane sauce but the recipe makes twice as much as the dishes need. Well, he's not taking a punt on scaling it down - the inspector could be in! - so his brigade make the normal amount and bin the rest. And who cares about that molehill when the 50+ recipes used across six canapes are all for different quantities so it's a routine part of the canape-making operation to sling at least 40% of what's made away.

He bakes five types of bread but can't predict which one customers will grab and bread doesn't keep after a day so 70% of it goes in the bin. No wonder the waiters can be so bloody generous with it.

Customers love their duck breast and, guess what, it's cheaper to buy whole ducks than the butchered breasts. But with no confit on the menu... yep, you guessed it. 


And, oh those bloody veggies. Twice a week the kitchen slaves over ten portions of a seven-course vegetarian tasting menu then chucks the lot away. Well, can you imagine what would happen if a veggie turned up and they couldn't feed them? Not that any of them ever bloody do turn up. The wastrels.

Waste in corporate-owned, high-end restaurants is endemic for two reasons. First because you visit them when they get a Michelin star because you like to eat Michelin stars more than you like to eat food so they try to get Michelin stars, and second because you are an over-monied brat who believes the customer is always right despite not understanding what's involved in allowing the customer to always be right

The customer is not always right. In fact, as you can see based on how these restaurants must think about food in order to please her, she is utterly and routinely wrong. Particularly when she condemns food waste with one corner of her mouth while filling the other with a foie gras parfait that saw a hell of a lot of corn shoved down the gullet of a duck that didn't need to eat it and that duck's legs, skin and carcass chucked in the bin because only its liver and magret had any commercial value.

End of the Trend

Who the hell ever claimed that local, seasonal produce tasted better? It doesn't taste better. It might sometimes, but so might an apple flown in from New Zealand at the height of British growing season. When it comes to food grown when the weather's right not too far from where it's eaten, taste really is beside the point.

The trend that local/seasonal has become is an example of good intentions being twisted by marketing hyperbole. The media's love of food trends as drivers for sales, viewing figures, restaurant traffic and flogging books is as negative for British eating as the Ministry of Food's systematic elimination of our food culture was, and it must end. The at least slightly obvious idea of eating food grown without too much mucking about and transported without too much mucking about has been buried beneath the shamelessly ill-informed advertising of countless formula pubs and hotels who wouldn't know a good ingredient from a Brake's meal solution.

Why must pubs and hotels proffering identikit menus composed via an intricate collaboration of flipchart and factory, reference ingredients they don't actually use? Because "foodies" don't really care about eating. Food, of course, is essential to their sense of self, so they do care about that, but only to the extent of what it says about them, not to the extent of what it tastes like or whether it's good value or whether it's seasoned properly or whether it's just ten, 50p-sized morsels served up for £95 in a country house hotel by uncomfortably suited Eastern Europeans brainwashed into believing that Chef is God (he isn't, he's an idiot who has lost touch with his vocation). The media know no better and, fed by PR and the need to follow the gravy train themselves, cycle trends that give the people what they better bloody well want.

So fine dining is on the way out, burgers are encountering a backlash, foraging is a cliche, and now local, seasonal food is about to be exposed as a great big swizz fit to join plate swipes, sun dried tomatoes and cocktails in a jam jar in the giant food trend landfill in the sky

There are innumerable reasons, though, why eating seasonally and locally is not a trend and why labeling it as one will only serve to suck what little variety is left out of our pitiably uniform food supply.

Supermarkets are horrible places to shop. They sell the same crap all year round. All of it is average and all of it exists in the place it does and in the way it does to drive profit for the supermarket. It doesn't exist for the grower or supplier and it doesn't exist for the buyer. Food grown on a small scale fundamentally excludes supermarkets, and, funnily enough, most of the food we might once have enthusiastically dubbed seasonal and local is grown on a small scale. Small scale production allows those of us who care to, to pack variety into our mealtimes at the behest of the weather and soil rather than at the behest of a vast food retail conglomerate or a man selling a recipe book. I like buying seasonally because it inspires me. It dictates my meals and has new ingredients keep me enthused all year round. Whether the same stuff tastes better is beside the point. It's fun, for goodness sake.

I don't need some buck-toothed, curly-haired toff off the telly to sell me a lifestyle concept as a reason to get down the farmers market in my Barbour and 4x4; I go automatically and without the overpriced coat and every middle class twit's favourite pollutant because I can't get unique, short-season ingredients anywhere else. And I certainly don't need the same idiot to dictate to me what I should do with my edibles once I've bought them because half the point of seasonal buying is food freedom. Unless you can't cook. Which, let's face it, is a sad fact of reality for 99.9% of the same brainwashed drones willing to enter a pub because of a blackboard containing the word "local".

Once at the market, I don't care who sells me this stuff. If he's a farmer, fine. Good for him. But I'm not going to chit chat with him about terroir because he'll think I'm a jumped up white-collar cunt who's never so much as sprouted cress from an egg shell. And he'd be right. But the point is, he grows kohlrabi and purple broccoli and all sorts of quirky chillies and multi-coloured aubergines; he sells chard, beetroot and radishes with the leaves and stems on; he has these tiny little celeriacs and swedes in winter with amazing flavour, watercress in huge, huge bunches for bugger all, and these bloated bags of tiny apples for kids that have more apple taste in one bite than there is in the whole of New Zealand. His mate sells me game for silly money, and her friend sells me raw milk from Jersey cows that lets me avoid the vilely exploitative, antibiotic-laced mess that is the UK dairy industry. I can get pheasants the size of chickens for £2.50 or a hulking great hare for a fiver. I can even get a bloody turkey egg for goodness sake. I cannot buy these things anywhere else and I love them and I don't want to lose them.

Of course, if one picks up a recipe book because one aspires to look like a model and raise the perfect child in the perfect house, all the while stuffing one's perfect face with perfect cakes and breads, and one writes a shopping list that enables one to do so, well then farmers markets are a really awful place to shop. They're going to suck the money out of you because you are shopping based on a lifestyle statement rather eating well, and only a supermarket is going to let you do that because it is designed to let you do that.

For those who can cook, though, farmers markets close to farmers farms are not overpriced money pits keen to snare the middle classes into paying 50% extra for the mud to be left on their vegetables. Come with an open mind. Select the best products. See what is good value. Buy those things and learn to cook them. You will quickly see your shopping bill drop vastly below the rigid, celebchef-dictated hell that was your supermarket shop. Cook every meal from scratch because you love cooking. Don't use a recipe book, just learn to work with ingredients. Visit a market because it gives you something unique that a supermarket never could. Strive for the media not to drive people away from buying locally and seasonally because, if they do, the arse will fall out of small, local supply chains that offer special varieties of fruit, vegetables or animals that we will never be able to buy from any other source, because all our other sources, from Waitrose to Lidl to Londis, are only interested in produce that can be grown on a large scale, look perfect and withstand transport requirements. All of them.

Creative eating should not depend on a TV show, a marketed lifestyle or a glossy book but on what one can buy that is at its best. A supermarket will never, ever tell you what is at its best. How do good chefs know what's at its best? Their suppliers tell them. These butchers, grocers, farmers and such-like take a proactive view of ensuring their customer knows which ingredients are about to hit peak. Not season; peak. And when an ingredient is at its peak, Chef will be notified. "Alright guv, I've got some of them nice radishes in from France, fancy a sample?", or perhaps, "mate, can you take these massive Dovers off me hands? They're spanking fresh but no other bastard knows what to do with 'em."

But Chef won't buy on a whim. He looks at the product. He pokes it, squeezes it; he might even taste it. He attempts to cost it into his menu. Consumers should follow his example, but without the link to what's-growing-best-now that farmers markets and all-to-rare local veg box schemes offer we are left roundly in the dark. And even if by some miracle we do know what's in season when and have been following the local farming news channel to check everything's on schedule this year (put the SkyPlus remote down you moron, there's no such thing), our supermarket overlords will still be flogging Peruvian asparagus in a plastic tray from April to June because they don't care. They are entities not people and as entities strive only to ensure one thing: profit. Local, seasonal buying is our chance to buy food from people rather than entities, and we should avoid buggering it up by labeling it as a trend that has evilly fooled us all.

So learn to cook. Stop blindly following trends that you think say something about you and grasp the fundamental difference between good food and bad food. If you are a journalist stop making ridiculous generalisations that have a negative impact on something you know is good just because you think a book by Jay Rayner called The Single Biggest Crock of Shit Ever Written About Food gives you some sort of factual license to do so. Newsflash: it isn't, it's a sad, sad, misguided attempt to raise the profile of an author who is happy to proclaim his day job as "selling newspapers" among the sort of joyless, right on puritans who'd have us all eating ready meals of braised sackcloth were they ever given the chance.

Yes, local, seasonal eating has become an over-blown trend but don't let those responsible for making it one lead you into attacking it. Instead, attack the very idea that something we eat could become an over-blown trend; for trends, not vegetables and fruits and meats produced on a small scale close to your home, are absolutely at the root of this problem. Blame trends, blame journalists, blame PRs and blame supermarkets. But most of all, blame yourself for being completely and utterly unable to think about food for yourself.