In a 2009 issue of Esquire magazine British columnist David Baddiel said that as kids we never voluntarily choose to eat gourmet food, but were in fact yanked kicking and screaming from restaurants if mummy tried shovelling forest fungi and goose liver down our throats. Instead, he opined, little ones gravitate towards unidentifiable nuggets or edible objects coated with sugar or salt. “As a kid, I didn’t know what a nice taste was.” Somewhere along the way, we ignored our taste buds and idolised the food darlings of the moment, not fully knowing whether we should like it or if we actually do like it.
When I first started writing about food professionally, I was eating out all the time at expensive gourmet restaurants. Nothing short of Peter Lam’s newest haunts or some celeb chef-touted mega-diner would do. I bought into the majesty of the Michelin Guide. For some time, I thought food at high calibre restaurants was actually better food. It is haute cuisine after all. It took more than a few bites for me to realise that a $20 burger was as satisfying as a $300 Kobe beef/ foie gras burger with truffle jus. But at the time I convinced myself that an expensive burger was by definition a better burger. I believed that money equals quality. If I made the same comparison with people, would you see the fault in my thinking? After more time comparing fancy restaurant to their cheap eats counterparts, I decided that this was all bullshit.
The biggest piece of evidence lies in the ingredients. I’ve met a food supplier who has a monopoly on produce in Hong Kong. He sells the same pre-washed mixed salad greens to posh restaurants around the city as he does to the fast food chains. The pedigree of the ingredients is exactly the same. Sadly, what we end up paying for is ambiance and extortionate rent.
Baddiel’s message to his readers was essentially this: expensive food is not better food, but simply another genre of food. If we classified posh food like we do Indian or Japanese or New York pizza, then we see it a whole different way. Fancy food is just that: a classification, not a level.
In Hong Kong is it not uncommon to order from the top two most expensive dishes at pricey diners. When I ask restaurateurs what that is all about, the answer I usually get is “saving face.” So what we are really talking about is who can afford what, or what your expensive choices say about you as a person. It’s not necessarily about good food at all.
This was all very annoying. Is price really the best way of judging taste? Or does status override all other elements? This made me think of all the restaurants out there pushing Wagyu beef, D'Artagnan duck breast, Hudson Valley foie gras, alba white truffles, bluefin tuna, great white’s shark’s fin, and gold-leafing to add extra zeros to the dishes.
When you look at posh food as just being a genre of food, and not better food, then we lose the class status built around it and we appreciate taste. I’ve sat at many fine diners wondering why the dim sum meal I was having would be considered better than one I could get at Maxim’s. Just because something is delivered in a dome and topped with a sprinkling of parsley, doesn’t mean the taste will be heightened one bit. This is why those who visit the supposedly top restaurants in the world are often disappointed. Can you really taste that the five-week old lamb was massaged everyday before slaughter? Or that the bean puree was made with Icelandic water, and not straight from the tap? Or that the shrimp is from the northern waters of Japan? Hand on heart, it all taste the same. These are just devices to load bland nouns (lamb, beans, shrimp) with adjectives or, worse still, with overtones of excessive refinement.
I hear chefs barking. But they would agree with me that there is no such thing as high- or low-brow food, only good or bad. Whenever I’ve dined with chefs, it is rarely in a fancy environment. We are almost always sitting on a plastic stool, sharing a wet-nap, and slurping incredible, cheap meals. They know how to eat well, and they know it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to eat there. It’s time we did the same.
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