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In the past two or three years, several managements here in Cyprus have had to re-consider their approach to “Fine Dining”. Diners decided that the food and wine were either too expensive, or not to their taste, or both. This happens in other countries, too, where chefs have become “Stars” – Kings or Queens of their kitchens – who decide what new concepts of cooking or scientific processes they will use to create different looking and tasting food; dictating to the customers what they will have. Now there are signs that the trends are not being well received. Below, I print an extract from a restaurant review in a leading British epicurean magazine.
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It's the year of the French: First came Alain Ducasse, mounting his third sortie on London, this time at the Dorchester, then Jean-Christophe Ansanay-Alex from Lyon at Ambassade de l'Ile, bearing two Michelin stars. Now Helene, Darroze, with two stars in Paris, is taking over a former Gordon Ramsay outpost at the renovated Connaught.
Her cooking has been called 'lively' and 'gutsy', 'done with flair'; that may be an understatement. For openers, there's an amuse-bouche (one of many) of Foie Gras crème brûlée with apple sorbet and peanut emulsion. Then a five-ways plate of different pork bits swamped by roast pineapple and a spicy, very sour dolce forte sauce; spit-roasted pigeon rubbed with Indonesian peppercorns and flambéed, served with lime-and-ginger-marinated turnips; tandoori-spiced lobster ravioli with a tarragon sauce; and l'escaouton, another un-amusing amuse-bouche, of grainy polenta and funky cheese. Hard to tell which was more unappealing, the flavour or the texture.
There is also a plate of young vegetables, griddled in Sicilian olive oil and lardo (spiced pork fat) that tastes more of the fats than anything else. This is today's ultra-modern restaurant cooking, resolutely not about food, but about a chef whipping it into new shapes and sizes and flavours. Everything is laboured, nothing tastes like itself. It does not come cheap, of course. Dinner begins at £75 (€95.45), whether you have two or three courses. Several dishes attract a supplement of £10 (€12.73) or £20 (€25.46). The wine list is long, mostly French, mostly in the three-digit price range. (£100.00 / €127.30)
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This is pretty stern stuff, when you realise that the restaurant being reviewed is at the very heart of one of the world’s great gastronomic cities, in which culinary innovation has been the norm and where there is a large market of ‘trendy’ potential customers. The magazine circulates to a very wealthy audience. What can managements in Cyprus learn from this? I think they should consider four points:
1. Despite there being a few wealthy customers who will try anything new, most diners want to be able to recognise what they are eating, and enjoy it.
2. One Amuse Bouche is OK, but more detract from the flavours of the food you have ordered. A correspondent of mine wrote of a restaurant here that served no less than four, and that they were unwelcome and destroyed the balance of her meal.
3. OK, you may have a few patrons who will pay anything for anything, but most of us can’t – we want good food at a fair price, whether it is Taverna or Five Star. If you note the prices for the meals at the Connaught’s restaurant, you will realise that similar prices are being charged for meals in some restaurants here. At this point, I have to mention that the Connaught, situated between Berkeley Square and Grosvenor Square in London’s Mayfair is one of the most beautiful city centre hotels anywhere, in the heart of fabulous shopping districts.
4. But the real point is in this crucial sentence:
“This is today's ultra-modern restaurant cooking, resolutely not about food, but about a chef whipping it into new shapes and sizes and flavours. Everything is laboured, nothing tastes like itself”.
Let us not fall into this trap in this country. Let us always remember the customer who pays us.
Patrick Skinner
