ARE RESTAURANTS TERRIBLE NOW?

Look up ‘#food’ online, and you’ll be greeted with a dizzying wall of fried, cheesy, and trendy dishes. That doesn’t sound too bad. Like many others, I actively crave this genre of cooking that can only be found online or at overpriced food trucks. The issue is trendy, but frankly impersonal, cooking. A bacon biscoff burger or bubble-gum freak shake does little to tell me about the food culture of European cities but speaks volumes on the Americanisation of our global food culture. And no, adding haggis to a burrito doesn’t make it Scottish - it makes it gross.

It’s the tendency to want everything to be new, popular, now that hints at a distinctly American style of consumerism. Food trends, like every other, are cyclical. This cycle is speeding up, and microtrends of foods are becoming obvious. What was once a process of diffusion of ingredients and ostracised food cultures into the mainstream has started moving too quickly to follow. But food isn’t clothing or furniture. In the everyday it shouldn’t be styled and modern, because sometimes you just want breakfast. At those points of simple craving, the lack of simple restaurants becomes abundantly clear. Maybe I’m naïve, but I want to eat something plain, but even that is impossible now.

A couple of years ago, I heard about the Cereal Killer Café in London. The thought of a café that served only cereal was intriguing, until I found out they charged £4.50 for a bowl! Then I got a bit angry. It was almost boring, yet they fell at the last hurdle. How could a bowl of cereal ever cost that much? Obviously, they must make profits but still... £4.50? And everything is priced in the same way; skill doesn’t matter, taste doesn’t matter, even location doesn’t matter. But does it have a churro in it? That’ll cost a weekly shop at Lidl. So even when the concept is fine, and there’s no cheese stuffed anywhere unholy, and no unnecessary modifications made to classic dishes (I’m looking at you rainbow bagels), it still costs your right kidney because in its absence simplicity has become a trend.

It would be a disservice to say that every restaurant is trying to create the newest most gimmicky dish. Many of them simply follow in the footsteps of their stylish counterparts. Either they’re stealing a recipe from another cuisine and making it incorrectly or blindly drizzling everything in hot honey. They won’t stop until every cheesecake in the country has Oreos in it, which is messed up because I don’t like Oreos that much. By copying each other and trying to ‘keep up’, we, in a way, get the opposite of what they hope to do. Rather than everything being fresh and exciting, it’s just stale and like every other restaurant.

Despite everything I’ve just said, please don’t think I hate all new foods. I’m actually a little obsessed with them. The cronut - a cross between a croissant and a donut for anyone not on the forefront of food science - blew my little food-obsessed mind. Dominique Ansel, the creator of the cronut, didn’t try to make a new genre of cooking. He just wanted to cook something delicious, incorporating the skills and experience he already had.

This is how new foods used to be created, before it was about making something new for the sake of having the ‘new thing.’ Cuisines and techniques would be combined naturally, and everything we eat now is the result of thousands of years of this kind of human ingenuity. Maybe it’s because new foods now are the product of abundance rather than resourcefulness, but they don’t impress me as much and simply don’t bring the same joy.

Restaurants and the whole food industry need to stop trying to do something new and start trying to make something tasty. They’ll find something interesting in the process and if they don’t, who cares? I’ll still probably eat it.

[Jenny Macdonald - she/her -