Eating out in fancy restaurants can be a tricky business if you're feeling hungry, as one fine diner found out in Thornton's restaurant in Dublin last week, writes Tom Doorley
A few years ago, when I was dining with chef Kevin Thornton and talking of this and that, he told me, "I think food should be theatre". I had no idea that he was going to turn it into rather controversial performance art.
The story of Thorntons And The Chips is now well known, thanks to a very public airing on RTÉ Radio's Liveline.
Now, this is a restaurant where the tables have never been known to groan beneath the weight of the grub. Your food will not overlap the plate; instead, it may look rather lost in the middle of the plate. Restaurants such as Thornton's are not about quantity. Anyone can do quantity, they would argue; it's only people like us who can take food and turn it into a form of art. Or, in certain circumstances, theatre.
It seems that one of the diners, who spoke to Joe Duffy on the radio, ordered loin of venison with fondant potatoes, roasted parsnip, herb gnocchi and port sauce. But when this rather substantial-sounding dish arrived, he was dismayed and felt that he needed to order something extra. And so he casually asked the waiter if he could have a portion of chips and the obliging chap headed off to the kitchen to see about it. I'd quite like to have been a fly on the wall in the kitchen at this point in the story, but I have no doubt that such creatures don't exist in those spotless environs. In any case, the diner should have been told how long the chips would take - and perhaps offered an alternative. How about some more of those fondant spuds?
THE NUB OF the story is that the chips, lovingly prepared from scratch, peeled, sliced and fried twice at different temperatures, took 40 minutes to arrive. And by that stage our friend the venison eater had finished and was perusing the dessert menu. It seems he thanked the waiter for the chips but stated firmly that they were surplus to requirements. Which brings us to two points. Firstly, our friend must have found the venison dish adequate in the heel of the hunt; otherwise, surely he would have fallen upon the chips with glad cries and stuffed them into his gob with his fingers (the cutlery having been cleared at this stage)? And secondly, the explosion that followed. Thornton has apologised for calling the customer a "d***head", which is gracious of him, but the fact is that chefs have no business bursting out of the kitchen, like crazed and scatological supernannies, and instructing diners to eat up.
Look, eating out in the sort of restaurants that garner Michelin stars is fraught with enough angst in the first place. For most of us, there is the worry that we will only be able to afford the bill (a) if the plastic refuses to melt at the very sight of it and/or (b) if you can do some creative accounting on the domestic budget for the next couple of months.
And then there is the whole unfamiliarity of it all. How often are you faced with the possibility of ordering a main course for €80? How often does the bloke from the off-licence follow you home and insist on topping up your glass every five minutes? How often do you spend €8 on a bottle of water? Do you actually have linen napkins, let alone know where you put them? And surely you don't keep big, fancy plates on the dining table just so you can take them away and plonk down what you are actually going to eat in their place? Such is the bizarre world of the upmarket restaurant, where everybody pretends that everybody lives like this all the time.
AT LEAST THE fashion for the cloche has passed away, like an embarrassing old relative. There was a time - I think it started in the 1980s - when all "serious" restaurants (and some hilarious ones, too) insisted on bringing the mains concealed beneath silver domes. These would be whipped off in unison by a phalanx of waiters and customers were expected to murmur little ejaculations of joy. Michelin, it was said, wouldn't even look at your restaurant if you weren't doing the cloche shtick.
About 15 years ago, when I was lunching in the old Shelbourne dining room overlooking the Green, and marvelling at what a fine room it was and dreading the food that was to come, I saw our mains bobbing towards us sous cloches. The waiter was elderly, fat and bound in a cummerbund that may have doubled as a surgical truss. He waddled up to the table bearing the concealed delights and addressed me thus, "Err yew de prawns?"
Tom Doorley's restaurant review appears weekly in The Irish Times Magazine