Dinner (non)theatre

A meal is successful when the food becomes unimportant. Of course, there has to be food through the meal or it is not a meal at all. The food must also be at least palatable, since if no one is eating, it is not a meal either. However, if the food is the most important thing, it would just be feeding and not a meal. It is a common mistake to think that the food is the most important ingredient of a meal.

I have had horrible meals with exceptionally good food. You can certainly have a bad meal with the finest of ingredient executed with the most expert of hands. I must admit I have served as many such meals as I have received. Once I served a great rack of lamb to my cousin and his family forgetting that they do not like lamb at all. What I did not know then was precisely that the food is not that important. I started apologizing through the evening, feeling shameful and uptight. My cousin and his wife were nothing but gracious and understanding. He even ate some of the lamb cheerfully. It was not the lamb that ruined the meal but my insistence on the perfection of the food that I served. In other words, it was my ego that ruined it for me and to a leaser extent to them. Because they paid little attention to the food, they were able to have an enjoyable time. They saved the evening, not through bravery or tolerance (of both they had plenty), but by seeing what is unimportant as unimportant.

There are many dining establishments, particularly those rated restaurants on both side of the Atlantic, where food and its service are “celebrated.” “Food is theatre” has become the motto of any new “haute” restaurant. It is an excellent trend, after all for the outrageous amount we shell out for a meal these days, there better be something other than the bill that is theatrical. Give food some gravitas and exotic names and we can enjoy even food that usually abhors us. All these are great in restaurants, like Shakespearian language in the Old Vic. Indeed we go to fine restaurants like we go to theatres, to be entertained. We are not necessarily there for a good meal, we are there to experience culture. The hypocrisy of these restaurants shows when they tell us “it is all about the food.” They are not all about the food as Shakespearian theatre today is not all about Shakespeare. They are both about our internal exotic: experience of culture.

The problem that ruins our good meals occurs when we swallow the “all about food as theatre” contradiction and try to apply it to our own cooking and eating. Trying to understand the enjoyment of food in a fine restaurant is like trying to understand Shakespeare in the Old Vic. In the Old Vic, half of the time we do not even understand what words are being uttered; even when we do, their usage and delivery are so alien to us that we can only experience it as the sublime, which, incidentally, has only remote relationship with Shakespeare. It is the same with restaurants. We are so aliened from the production of it that we can only see it as an “art.” If we carry this alienation home, we end up with some seriously unenjoyable meal. One should not speak in Shakespearian or cook haute cuisine at home and not expect ridicule and unpleasantness. These days we watch too much Foodtv, and we are conditioned to learn only from restaurant cooks. Why should we? Indeed how can we? Who want to live full time in a theatre? Who want to go to a party in a theatre with fixed seats all facing the same way? Good food is not theatre, and a good meal is certainly not theatre. Good food leads us towards a good meal, and then we just sit about the table and enjoy everything intimately. During a good meal, the food melt into everything else, become part of the pleasantness of it all. There is no theatre, no gravitas, no ego, just a meal, the most fundamental of human experience.