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 fte 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 “dcor” 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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Tagged Gauteng, Restaurants Reviews (Magazine)