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I remember back when I was a teenager, nouvelle cuisine was almost a laughing stock. These tiny plates of food, arranged in some sort of pattern, almost invariably involving cubes or squares. It was considered as a big con, to make you pay lots of money for almost no food, just because the chef had the presence of mind to arrange it to look like a box. Well, times have moved on, if not progressed.

Consider current popular food culture, e.g. Professional Masterchef¹, and that restaurant show (I forget the name, possibly “The restaurant”). “True” restaurant food has all gotta be tiny portions and geometric shapes or it just doesn’t fit the bill. Well, honestly, I’ve been to a couple of these places, normally on Hugh’s bidding, and I’m yet to be truly impressed.

Particularly dreadful was a certain supposedly fine-dining restaurant located in Edinburgh’s largest museum. Now this was bloody shameful, we order a meal like, 4 weeks in advance, (they say they’ll charge us extra (beyond the deposit) if anyone doesn’t show). When we get there, they make every effort to make us feel we’re not good enough for the place, sell us cold soup², a bland and stingy (if terribly neatly arranged) main of chicken, and some thoroughly forgettable dessert. They also blithely charge us £8 per glass of wine.

Compare this with a nice local restaurant: for between one tenth and half the price, you get much more food, some of which is actually hot; the staff are friendly; you can have a glass of wine for less than the price of a mortgage and you leave the place full, satisfied, and able to pay your rent that month.

Now, I’m not saying that all “fine dining” restaurants are as bad as the one I’ve mentioned above, I’ve been to a few where I’ve thought, “that was quite nice”, or “scallops are edible, I never knew!”. The thing is that I’m not really seeing this tremendous difference in quality of the food which should go along with the price. Expensive, so called fine-dining restaurants regard themselves as being on a completely different scale to your average pub or chinese restaurant³, they seem to reckon that just by making food in this style, they’re automatically better than others, regardless of whether they actually bother to put any effort into making their food is cooked correctly, or actually tastes good.

Well, it’s a matter of perception, and I’m not fooled, good food tastes good, whether it looks good or not. Bad food doesn’t, and I’m not going to go on about how good it is just ’cos it was presented well and I paid far too much for it.

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¹ Or as I liked to call it, “Bad-skin Challenge”. Every episode – Who do you want to win: the one with pale skin with ominous brown scars; the one with good old fashioned acne; or the one who looks like he hasn’t slept in the last 3 years?

² I don’t give a flying rat’s arse if it’s called Compote; if it looks and tastes like you’ve emptied a bag of Morrisons value fine-chopped frozen mixed vegetables, then covered it in lukewarm salty water, you’re doing it wrong.

³ The best meal I ever had was in a chinese restaurant in Leeds, yeah, it wasn’t very subtle, but it tasted great, looked good, there was tons of it and they’d got just the right green tea to go with the meal.