State of Gauteng restaurants

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My wife says I’m too grumpy. Almost on our first date she observed that I treated a dining-out experience with the suspicion and distrust ordinarily reserved for a cross-country hike in the Mekong delta at the height of the Vietnam War. Even before I enter the restaurant precinct, I survey the environment – parking garage, building foyer or suburban sidewalk – ready to hold against the establishment the merest pavement pothole encountered en route to the meal. She says I should be more charitable, an interesting thought given how scary she can be. She reminds me that in most Western judicial systems, innocence rather than guilt is the presumption of the law.

Of course she’s right (she is, even when she isn’t), except that when eating out in Johannesburg, the rules of the street – rather than the rarefied assumptions of academic lawyers – apply. Those whose instincts have not been honed to the sixth-sense sensitivity of a Cold War double agent will never flourish. If you can’t read the signs long before you cross the threshold into the spider-web aura of the waiting maitre d’, you can expect your dining-out life to be as short and dull as that of an infantryman at the Battle of the Somme. Under such circumstances, people who want to have a long and happy war learn augury from the attitude of the parking attendant and divination in the purple prose of the menu text.

This attitude has not really assisted my career as a food reviewer – an incidental inconvenience given that I have no ambitions in this respect. Only occasionally – when I fear that my silence would be construed as consent to some goodie fraud or culinary sleight of hand – do I engage the keyboard in a battle for better dining-out prospects.

THE BATTLE COMMENCES
There is a simple reason for my literary apathy (and therefore also for my verbal virulence). The labours of Hercules would be a walk in the park compared with the task of driving a consumer-led renaissance of Johannesburg’s dining-out scene. This does not mean that we do not eat better now than we did a decade ago, or that our chefs have failed to innovate for want of motivation. On the contrary, Johannesburg offers better and more interesting food today than at any time in the collective memory of the city’s gourmet/gourmand set. We are not, after all, impervious to global trends. Our cooks and restaurant designers read the glossies and doubtless watch the almost non-stop food fantasy world dished up on satellite TV. The trouble resides with us – critics and consumers alike – for buying the big picture and selling out on the detail.
We know – when the coast has been battered by storms and there’s been no tuna catch in the shops for weeks – that the “seared fresh tuna in a pepper and cilantro crust” will have been cut from frozen steaks and taste dry, even if it is still served blue in the centre, as requested. Yet we still order the dish – because it appeals and because we so badly wish to believe otherwise. So when it arrives – tired, a little cardboardy, and with that faintly fishy whiff which confirms every suspicion we repressed when optimistically placing the order – we realise that there’s no purpose at all in kicking up a fuss. What, after all, did we expect?

I once pointed out that it was unlikely that the “fresh porcini”, which comprised the main ingredient of a dish I was contemplating, could be anything except frozen, given the weather and the season. I was told, rather disingenuously by the proprietor of the little local trattoria I used to frequent, that in fact the wild mushrooms had been “freshly frozen”.

THE ARMY RETREATS
We constantly lower our expectations, in the face of reality, to avoid the grumpiness which accompanies most attempts at dining out, in the interests of social intercourse (for unless food is truly inedible it is very disruptive to everyone else around the table to send it back), or out of fatigue because the inertia is bigger than we ever imagined. We delight in a relatively pain-free experience, in a meal which is well served, when all the main courses arrive at the table simultaneously and none is badly off the mark, and when the wine steward does not spend the entire evening trying to top the glasses to force the purchase of another (and unnecessary) bottle on the host.

We turn a blind eye to slightly rancid grated pecorino which is offered as “fresh parmesan”, to the prosciutto served as “Parma ham” to the so-called dry-aged beef that gets to the table wet and sinewy. We do this because we realise that there’s almost no one working in the restaurant who would even understand the nature of our complaint. “Parmesan” has become the generic word for grated cheese, “Parma ham” can be any cured pork product and “dry-aged” is the predictable puff ery which goes with the description of almost all meat served on the bone in our restaurants and steakhouses. We order espresso knowing that when it comes to the table it will – at best – be lukewarm and without the foam which reveals the quality and freshness of the extraction.

We have long ceased to make issues of the everyday erosions which diminish the standards that should be maintained. We let serving staff remove the plates of our guests who have finished eating while there are still people at the table enjoying their food. We are more concerned about having our table space cleared than we are about the implicit pressure under which we put the slower eaters. We want our food served swiftly and the debris mopped up instantly – as if somehow we have been engaged in something illicit, of which all evidence must be made to vanish.

The leisurely pleasure of fine dining has been replaced by a kind of tank-filling exercise. Purity of promise or purpose – food correctly described, correctly served and with the primary object of indulging the senses – has been replaced with cinema, special effects, form but not substance, and we have all collaborated in this transformation. Should we feel any surprise at all when fashion rather than performance becomes the central criterion by which our restaurants are judged?
What else explains the brevity of life of the average eatery in this town? We fête each trendy spot as it opens, discount its culinary disasters as “teething troubles”, celebrate the presumption of home-trained cooks who start their own restaurants, and tolerate the cornercutting of the professionals who should know better. How else can you account for the fact that the country’s leading hotel chain has now abandoned ownership of its own smart dining establishments and either leases them out, or provides pre-prepared foods from its own off-site catering facility? Instead of outrage, we are entirely without a response. The reason for this is simple (and embarrassing) enough: no one seems to notice.

AN UNEASY TRUCE
Can we who think we know better, and occasionally even write about food, offer any argument in mitigation? Only one comes to mind: most of the papers and magazines which publish food reviews tend to avoid well-reasoned – but critical – articles like a red tide. Very few of the quality publications even run regular food slots any more; when they do, they like to direct their readers to places “worth eating out at” rather than counselling them to stay away from trashy food. Often their food writers are columnists whose day jobs involve investment analysis or financial reporting but who are asked by their editors to dine out at the newspaper’s expense and produce a restaurant review. No one would seriously expect the qualified food journalists to try their hand at stock market analysis (though given the performance of asset managers they might do better than the professionals).

The moment you shift your focus from the realm of the few generally credible publications, you enter the treacherous territory of the mercenary glossies. Almost everything which appears there as editorial is somehow linked to an advertising trade-off. Some even publish annual food supplements where restaurants are advised (in advance of publication) that both their presence in the booklet and the quality of their review are directly linked to their ad-spend. Is it any surprise that there are so few hard-hitting reviews and so few writers with knowledge and integrity who even have a platform from which to decry the current state of affairs?

Without a critical press, there can be no watchdog to maintain standards; without demanding consumers who communicate their dissatisfaction to editors and publishers, there will never be space for critical and informed food writing. However, until there are wellinformed and critical restaurant columns, the average diner-out will never know the extent of the con which is perpetrated daily in our fine-dining establishments. Those who don’t know better are happy in their ignorance; those who do, continue to eat out, clutching at “atmosphere” or “décor” to vindicate their decision. But just because nobody complains does not mean that no crime has been committed. The absence of protest is an integral part of the crime itself and there is a certain justice in the punishment, which is that we get the restaurants we deserve.
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