‘London really is the best place in Britain in which to eat out, and I refuse to pretend otherwise. There are so many more restaurants here. The food is better. The variety is better. The inventiveness is greater … I’m not claiming that it is always the best value … Nor am I claiming that there are no good restaurants outside London. Obviously there are. Certain cities – Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh – are serious contenders. But still nothing matches the capital’s range. One virtue of a crowded city like London is that it forces everyone to raise their game.’
Such candour is refreshing. However much Britons living outside London attempt to deny it, there is a dearth of good eating places outside the capital. Londoners may well have a terrific choice of restaurants on their doorstep, but their good fortune is not shared by the would-be eating-out public elsewhere. It is no surprise that top British chef, Gordon Ramsay, chose to make a television series entitled Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares: the only surprise is that no one thought up such a project sooner since there is no shortage of ailing restaurants in Britain to provide ample fodder. Nor is it a coincidence that the establishments featured were all outside central London in places where evidence of the much-vaunted British Food Revolution is often thin on the ground. Mr Ramsay’s thumbnail sketch of one Essex Kitchen Nightmare might easily apply to thousands of other aspiring eateries throughout the UK:
‘With over 40 dishes to choose from, Philippe’s menu is global both in size and choice – everything from the traditional all-day English breakfast to Hoisin noodles and Mexican platters. And 70 per cent of the food is bought-in, ready-prepared then often reheated and not cooked to order – an expensive, false economy … The Ramsay take? Definitely more confusion than fusion.’
Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares identified the key shortcomings of too many British restaurants: inadequately trained chefs with ridiculously large, over-ambitious, globalized menus, relying on bought-in food that can be either deep-fried or microwaved. Anyone who takes a stroll past a parade of British catering establishments between 10.00 and 12.00 on a weekday morning can count on seeing fleets of ‘food service’ chilled vans delivering supplies. Short cuts for chefs are not unique to the UK – in every affluent country lesser restaurants do buy in labour-saving items such as pre-cut chips – but in Britain such companies can provide a total service for the caterer, to the extent that if you scan the public notices in local newspapers, it is now common to see catering licences that have been granted on a ‘microwave-only’ basis.
When he wrote his Bad Food Guide in 1967 – a book in which he lampooned low standards in British restaurants – Derek Cooper noted the growing trend towards a uniform blandness or ‘untaste’, a consequence of the creep of convenience food into restaurants, and he predicted more to come:
‘The era of technical development that the catering industry in Britain is undergoing will inevitably mean more standardization, less and less food will be cooked in the kitchens of small restaurants, and more and more will be prepared in factories under conditions of the utmost hygiene, and deep-frozen for consumption hundreds of miles away and months later.’
His comments proved prescient. These days, British chefs don’t need to cook at all. There is no need to do a catering course or serve your time as an apprentice in a reputable kitchen. No need to pay professional wages that will interest a serious young chef. All it takes is someone with half a brain who can be relied upon to turn up each shift and not run out of food; someone whose job it is to reheat, deep-fry, plate and assemble. Like lazy domestic cooks who pop out to Tesco or Marks & Spencer for a boxed ready meal, the chef only needs the catalogue and phone number for catering suppliers who will do all the work for him: delivering to the kitchen door every short cut from pre-balled tri-colour melon, hand-tied bundles of frozen haricots verts, olive oil mash, through to ready-poached egg and ready-to-use Hollandaise sauce. In 2005, complete dishes supplied by two such companies – Brakes and 3663 – included paella, Malaysian beef rendang, lamb with dumplings in cider sauce, asparagus and lemon risotto, braised lamb with flageolets, three-cheese pasta and broccoli bake, char-grilled vegetable and mozzarella timbale, pre-cooked omelettes, cod and pancetta fishcakes, moules marinières, peperonata terrine, char-grilled chicken with mango salsa, Mediterranean vegetable bake, Moroccan lamb tagine, pork hock with fruit compote, Thai ginger fish brochettes and mushroom, brie, rocket and redcurrant filo bundle. They were doubtless consumed with reasonable enthusiasm by millions of diners who remained blissfully unaware that they were not fully prepared from scratch on the premises.
The one area where British restaurants really do push the boat out for their consumers is children’s food. Britain is unique in Europe in that it likes to make a fuss of children by offering them an especially bad menu. A separate ‘children’s menu’ is an alien concept in any other country except the US. Restaurateurs elsewhere take the attitude that children will eat the same sort of food as adults, the only concessions being that dishes may be offered in smaller portions, or produced more promptly to pre-empt outbursts from hungry toddlers. Foreign restaurateurs do not live in fear of hysterical children throwing tantrums in the dining room because they can count on the fact that the children have been socialized at home by family meals and can usually be relied upon to sit round a table and eat alongside others. Britain, on the other hand, believes that a dining room is a hostile and foreign environment for a child, a potential war zone. Before contemplating a restaurant visit with their children, the British seem to believe that children must be pacified with a distinct repertoire of ‘child-friendly’ foods (for which read ‘junk’) and bribed with free, non-food gifts. Otherwise, how else can they be expected to sit through an exclusively adult dining experience that is widely considered to be intolerable for a British child? Viewed from abroad, when it comes to food Britain’s treatment of children amounts to neglect, a national embarrassment, even to the British. One Englishwoman told me:
‘We often go to this seafood restaurant in Marbella. We like it because it is chilled and laid-back. You can sit on the balcony and eat fantastic prawns and squid while you look out at the sea. The people who eat there are very international: Dutch, Germans, Belgians, Swiss, Austrians, Canadians, Scandinavians. When they come in a family group, you notice how the kids just sit down and eat the same food as their parents, no nonsense. The British families stand out because the children won’t eat this or that, and so their parents start asking the waiters for something different for them that’s not on the menu. Why can’t they just appreciate food like European children seem to?’
In 2003, the Parents Jury – a group that campaigns for better children’s food – surveyed the food in British restaurants that commonly serve to children, based on responses from 1,400 parents. The judging panel concluded that, because the standard was so low, the idea of children’s menus should be done away with altogether. The children’s menu in one prominent chain was summarized by a judge as follows: ‘No fresh food. Everything is out of the freezer and into the fryer or microwave. I bet they haven’t got a chopping board in the kitchen.’ The Parents Jury went on to highlight one typical children’s menu with a prehistoric dinosaur theme. It consisted of heavily processed foods: ‘Raptor hot dog’, ‘Jungle chicken’, ‘Jurassic sausages’, ‘Bronto burger’, ‘T-Rex pizzas’ and ‘Big Dino breakfast’. All these were served with chips and a refreshing ice lolly with ‘fruit-flavour’. To make the package more attractive, it was available in a larger or super-size version for 50 pence extra. Good children who finished up this assembly were rewarded with a free lollipop. A subsequent survey of 141 children’s meals served in cafés and restaurants in London found that every one failed to meet even the basic nutritional standards set down for school meals.
Almost 40 years