The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: Why fancy restaurant trends are ruining good food

Modern culinary is increasingly relying on flashy presentation over taste, with trends like insect ingredients, and the tasting menu culture growing popular.

Being married to a fellow journalist can have its drawbacks. Over the last weekend Brunch published my wife’s (Seema Goswami, since you ask) column on what annoys her the most about the poncy nonsense that chefs get up to. Since then, everyone I meet has asked me if I agree with her column/ diatribe.

People don’t say this aloud too often, but the difficulty in introducing a new audience to a cuisine is that chefs have to find ways of making the food more familiar. (Representative image by Pexels)

It’s exactly to avoid this kind of situation that my wife and I have agreed that she will give restaurants a miss in her column. Yes, Brunch has lots of foodie content outside of my Rude Food column but since none of it has anything to do with me, I am never required to express an opinion. Moreover, it must be clear to people who know that we are married that we do most of our eating out together and that her palate and nose are far better than mine . So, it’s reasonable to ask if I agree with her.

Last week the entente cordiale broke down because my wife declared that I was too goodie goodie in my efforts to encourage chefs (which may be true) and that somebody needed to tell it like it really was. Hence that guided missile she disguised as a column.

If you missed the piece, it said in the second para “I am going to share with you some food trends I absolutely loathe” and then went on with the gentleness of a weapon of mass destruction to tear into what chefs are doing to food.

While I would never be as hard hitting as she was in her column, the problem was that, in general I agreed with her.

Let’s run through some of the criticisms and add a few of my own.

Flavour: People don’t say this aloud too often but the difficulty in introducing a new audience to a cuisine that it may be unfamiliar with is that chefs have to find ways of making the food taste more familiar.

For instance, when Nobu opened his first ‘modern Japanese’ restaurant in New York in 1994 (his original Los Angeles restaurant called Matsuhisa was more traditional) he made Japanese cuisine more appealing to Americans who thought that Japanese food was often too bland and often too raw.

Nobu is a genius, so he was able to take flavours that Americans liked and amplify them. His signature black cod miso used sweetness and crispness to lure in Americans. For people who hated raw fish he found ways of gently cooking the fish he used: Often he would pour hot flavoured oil on thinly sliced fish, so it did not taste raw. (When Masaharu Morimoto who had been executive chef of the first Nobu opened a restaurant in Mumbai he recreated the dish as white fish carpaccio.)

There is nothing wrong with this, but you need talent to pull it off. And most chefs do not have Nobu’s talent. So, they amplify a limited range of flavours.

Why do you think that so many talentless Indian chefs put so much cheap and nasty synthetic truffle oil on all Oriental (and some European) dishes. Partly it’s because they think the punters are clueless idiots who don't know the scent and flavour of real truffles. So, they can fool them into believing they are eating something rare and expensive. But mostly it’s because the chefs don’t have the skills required to make flavourful food. So, they rely on the smell (stink?) of truffle oil to see them through.

With European food which depends on the flavour of high-quality ingredients the situation is more complicated. Chefs can’t fall back on soya sauce and chilli. So, they smoke everything. Nine times out of ten they over smoke the dish so you can taste nothing except for smoke.

Do guests like this? Do they enjoy spending good money on a meal of over smoked everything when they could just go to the bar and lick the bottom of an ashtray at virtually no cost?

I don’t know. But I do know that so-called European restaurants where they over smoke all dishes and drown them in truffle oil are to be avoided. Speaking for myself this is why I will resist going to a fancy European restaurant in India if I can help it.

Presentation: I am not over keen on fancy presentation. The trend for pretty plates is a holdover from the glory days of nouvelle cuisine and is about 25 years out of date.

But what does a chef, who is not very good, do to make his food seem better than it tastes? Instagram and influencers are the answer to his prayers.

You can’t taste food on Instagram, and most influencers can’t tell how good it is anyway. So, restaurants with no-talents in the kitchen rely on hype and pictures. If you pay enough influencers to post photos you can say that your restaurant has now gone viral. And as long as the pictures are pretty enough the scam works.

That’s why presentation has now become a substitute for taste and flavour: Just make it look good and influencers will do the rest.

As with all such things there are subtle distinctions. I agree with Gaggan Anand when he says that taste is paramount and that presentation can be distracting. He also says, about the growing tendency of chefs to put edible flowers on plates , “if God had wanted us to eat flowers he would have made us cows.”

On the other hand, I have been to great restaurants where presentation has been intelligently handled and where even edible flowers have added to the experience. So, there is no simple black and white on this issue, just a lot of black (I hate over pretty presentation ) and a little room for gray (there are exceptions).

Shock Bugs: Two decades ago such chefs as Alex Atala attracted attention when they began to put bugs (ants and the like) into their food. But it only really became a trend after Rene Redzepi started doing it. Noma was the trendiest restaurant in the world, so everyone assumed it was okay to raid the insect world and Indian chefs rushed to find bugs and creepy crawlies. (If the Cockroach Janata Party had been founded in Mumbai ten years ago then it would have been a gourmet event organised by former Noma interns.)

Noma is still boldly going where no civilised man has been before and to Rene Redzepi’s credit he has made me eat ants and parts of forest animals that I never imagined that I could ingest. But to be able to do what Noma does there has to be an internal logic to your cooking and a cuisine philosophy where insects find a place. And it has to taste good.

Sadly, chefs are now using bugs and insects as gimmicks to shock. I would much prefer it if they just made tasty food instead.

Tasting Menus: The idea of a set menu is not new. Throughout my growing-up years I

ordered set menus at modest French restaurant because they represented good value. The same dishes could be ordered à la carte, but the meal would end up costing twice at much. And even when I grew older, I got to eat at such three-star London restaurants as Le Gavroche and Marco Pierre White at The Hyde Park Hotel ( both now closed unfortunately) because I would order the reasonably priced set lunch.

So, I am not against set menus provided that guests have a choice What I object to is the tasting menu culture fostered by such restaurants as El Bulli where interminable meals went on for hours before you passed out as they were serving the 25th course. I love food but everything has a limit. Something must be missing in your life if you want to go a restaurant that has a fifty-course tasting menu and takes seven hours to serve it.

I do not dispute that there are restaurants where the chef is extremely talented and space is limited (Gaggan, Tresind Studio, Papa’s etc) so it makes sense to

eat tasting menus there. However, these are, if not quite, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, then restaurants where you can hardly ever get a place. And any meal will linger in your memory for years afterwards.

But at the average restaurant run by over-ambitious chefs of limited ability, I would rather break a wine glass and slash both my wrists than sit and pretend to enjoy the rubbish tasting menu for three hours.

I reckon that tasting menu restaurants are dying anyway and when they collapse and fall, I will dance joyously in the ruins

No More Mr Nice Guy: I have actually gone much further than my wife did in her column. But I think it needs to be said. There is too much crap being served at prices that are way too high by chefs who don’t know any better.

A fall is coming as guests get more discriminating and decide that they may have a better time by staying at home and watching Netflix.