Discussão:Sandbox: Modelo Restaurante

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Nouvelle cuisine was a great invention in its day, serving to liberate French food from its reliance on flour-based sauces and cooking oil. But it’s now completely outmoded. Driven by the pressure to innovate emanating from smarmy restaurant critics, chefs constantly tried to trump one another in originality and forgot their trade in the process. Recently I was in a Michelin-star restaurant for the first time in a long while. One look at the menu and I knew that the nouvelle cuisine apocalypse was at hand. Oyster lasagna? Beer froth carpaccio? And the crowning absurdity: bacon and egg sorbet. I’m not making this up. I ordered the sorbet out of curiosity. What arrived at my table was a scoop of slimy yellow ice cream that tasted, much to my shock and dismay, like old cooking oil.

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A Nouvelle cuisine foi uma grande invenção na época, servindo para libertar a culinária francesa da sua dependência de farinha e molhos à base de óleo de cozinha. Mas agora está completamente fora de moda. Impulsionado pela pressão para inovar vindo de pretensiosos críticos de restaurante, os chefs constantemente tentavam triunfar sobre os outros em originalidade e esqueceram seu ofício no processo. Recentemente eu fui em um restaurante com estrela Michelin, pela primeira vez em muito tempo. Um simples olhar para o menu e percebi que o apocalipse da nouvelle cuisine estava prestes a acontecer. lasanha de ostras? Carpaccio de espuma de cerveja? E a coroação do absurdo: sorvete de ovo ebacon. Eu não estou inventando. Eu pedi o sorvete por curiosidade. O que chegou à minha mesa foi uma bola de sorvete viscoso amarelo que tinha gosto, para meu choque e consternação, de óleo de cozinha velho.

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But what’s most unbearable in restaurants is not the food – it’s the service. Waiters either are rude or, which is even more offensive, over-effusive in their desire to suck up to customers. According to a book by a food critic for Vogue magazine, who underwent a waiter training course, a good head waiter in New York City earns around 75,000 dollars a year in tips. There’s a whole system of tricks used to get better tips. Total servility is apparently not what gets patrons to dig deep in their wallets. The waiter only emerges triumphant if he can keep the patron under his control, beginning with the fact that customers never get the table they would have chosen for themselves, but rather one that he himself has selected. When he comes to take orders, a good waiter will ignore diners who have studied the menu and officiously recommend the filet of red snapper. If patrons should have the temerity to order something they picked out themselves, he acts as if that were an affront to the entire guild.

Going to restaurants is form of torture that many stressed-out holders of employment have no choice but to endure. First and foremost for reasons of time. Their jobs are so omnipresent in their lives that they have no alternative but to head off regularly to horrible eating establishments – be it to quell their hunger or do business over a meal. Those who no longer spend sunrise to sundown yoked to their jobs and don’t have the money to go out regularly to restaurants, have every reason to see this as an improvement in their quality of life. There’s a former colleague of mine, now battling it out as a freelance journalist, who keeps calling me up and insisting that we “go out to eat.” Every time I try to explain to him that this is an area of poor taste, to which we poor people don’t have to subject ourselves.

There are, I tell him, far more stylish ways of catching up with friends. In cities like London, Paris and Vienna, it’s considered perfectly normal to invite people to come round one’s home, no matter how large that home may be. It doesn’t matter whether one lives in a palace in Kensington, a row house on Lavender Hill or in a cheap flat. There doesn’t need to be a special occasion, and the main course can be as simple as spaghetti. One simply invites a handful of friends to dinner at regular intervals. Compulsively going out to eat is a declaration of social bankruptcy. It was only during the short-lived, but no-less-horrid Lady Diane phase of London’s history that restaurants became trendy. Setting a bad example for everyone else, Diana was a fixture at “San Lorenzo” on Beauchamp Place (idiotically pronounced “bee-sham” in British English) because she wanted to be seen, primarily by journalists. For a while everyone who considered themselves someone in London did the same. In the meantime, that trend has been discontinued. People have resumed inviting their friends to dinner, which is not only more elegant, but much more relaxing.

Dinner invitations are only unpleasant when they come from the nouveau riche. New Money dinner table decorations always looks as though the florist was on ecstasy. Clay, sand wood and scattered flowers are combined in monstrous arrangements – in more provincial cities, sprinklings of fake gold dust have even been recorded. Not infrequently, stalks will protrude from these sculptures into your coriander, cucumber froth and pine nut soup, which you are thankfully spared from having to eat because the spoons are designed by Philip Stark and are thus completely non-functional. In most cases, you confronted by a battery of handblown glasses containing expensive, but cheap tasting wine you’re only allowed to drink if you hold the glass by the stem and look your host in the eye during the toast. Often you’ll find a card, written in calligraphy, with your name misspelled on it. On top of that, you have to listen to the host relate a bunch of pointless stories about the difficulties involved in owning a vacation home on Fuerteventura.