Who doesn’t love a good rant, right?

Last week we wrote about one of the most scathing restaurant takedowns we have ever read, coming your way from notorious food critic Jay Rayner.

He was not a fan of London-based Farm Girl Café, and I think we can safely say that Peter Goffe-Wood feels the same about many Cape Town restaurants.

Writing on Rossouw’s Restaurants, his latest ‘Pinch of Salt’ column is titled “The Emperor’s New Clothes“.

Let’s tuck in:

Or should I say, “The Emperor’s recently acquired hand-stitched, interlocking, sustainably, hydroponically and organically grown organic attire”?

Menu speak gone mad!

“48-hour cold smoked organically farmed, hand-reared, pole-caught Monrovian yellowfin tuna, compressed cucumber, sous-vide heirloom tomatoes, air-dried fennel, Kalamata espuma, lemon granita, green bean emulsion, confit of new season’s potatoes, and anchovy soil.”

Salad Niçoise by any other name, but not in today’s uber cool menu speak.

Chefs seem to have lost the plot entirely – whatever happened to simplicity? This kind of nonsense has replaced the old 80s style descriptions when ingredients were “nestled on a bed of …” or “floated in a pool of …”, but I don’t think that we are better off.

Just keep it nice and simple, please. As for those ‘creative’ ways of serving the food, Peter gets it:

Why can’t restaurants just deliver a good, properly cooked plates of food without trying to show how clever they are (and don’t get me started on what constitutes a plate any more — if i wanted to eat off of a bathroom tile I could do so at the staff canteen at Tiletoria, and having my medley of foraged rock-pool creatures  delivered on some dodgy bit of drift wood does not make me more inclined to be at one with the ocean even though I’ve just been sprayed with smelly sea water and my eating utensils have been crafted out of reclaimed seaweed).

That fact that you can now buy bits of slate at Woolworths to serve your food on is an indication of a world gone wrong. Do yourselves a favour and go down to your local garden centre – they’ve got loads of them there, laying around on the ground.

My personal pet peeve – why must everything be deconstructed? If I wanted something served in all its individual parts I could go to the shops, buy the ingredients, and empty them into my mouth myself.

Anyway, I’m not here to steal Pete’s thunder:

Between you and me, I don’t care if my cucumbers are compressed, depressed or just having a bad day and I certainly don’t want to eat anchovies (or any ingredient for that matter) that have soiled themselves.

I find it enormously annoying if a waiter has to come and explain what each element on my dish is. I read the menu, thanks, and I know what I ordered.  But instead I’m now filled with dread in case I either eat an important element in the wrong order, or God forbid swallow something without gleaning the full gist of the man hours and expensive equipment that went into freeze-drying and curing whatever those three drops on the side of the reclaimed dustbin lid were.

Also, when did palate cleansers become a theatrical production? Was the last course so diabolical that your palate now needs to be cleansed like an oral exorcism, lest it offend the next course?

Preach.

It’s not all doom and gloom, because towards the end of his lengthy diatribe there is a ray of hope:

So is there hope for us here in Cape Town? I certainly think there is reason to be joyful. There are a number of local chefs who are being driven solely by the ingredients, because let’s remember that when ingredients are at their peak, the less done to them the better. That is the art of true simplicity – letting nature speak for itself with just a small slight of hand and deft pairing…

In the meantime I will have to make do with “Puffed & Glazed Edible Grains, Homogenised Aryeshire Mammary Secretions, and Dehydrated Sugar Cane”.

Rice Crispies by any other name.

Peter, you have made some very good points.

Sometimes less really is more – unless we’re talking about the potato wedges served with a burger.

[source:rossouwsrestaurants]