A couple of weeks ago I mentioned here, en passant, how upsetting I find it when people (whom I assume to be mostly food bloggers) take photographs of their food in restaurants. And the internet caved in on me.
I had no idea how many of my Twitter followers were food bloggers (who else would they be, I guess). I had no idea there were so many food bloggers. I had no idea that so many of them thought it so fundamental to the art of reviewing that photos of everything be attached to each piece of prose. I had no idea that, at the merest hint of huffiness about the practice from me, so many of them would go utterly m-m-m-m-m-m-mental. Even The Guardian dropped an orchestra, calling me “the curmudgeon-in-chief of restaurant criticism” and declaring food-snappers harmless.
Apparently, I am a snob. I am anti-democratic. I am jealous. To the first two, well, maybe. It is only natural that an entrenched medium-sized cheese of the old media should fear the onrush of potent online pretenders to his position. But “jealous” I don’t get. If The Times wanted photos of the food that is reviewed on its pages, it would have them. Many newspapers and magazines do. But we’ve tended to rely on whoever’s writing the review to describe what he’s eaten more or less faithfully, in three dimensions, and with smells, tastes and sounds into the bargain.
A photo gives you almost nothing. Everything looks shiny and greasy in a photo (especially me). All food looks disgusting. Anything even vaguely tubular looks either phallic or turdulous. Blogs are a terrific resource for the lazier sort of restaurant bum, and I follow many of them. Some are written well, many are very informative, but almost all are illustrated with assorted photographs of todgers and bigjobs in various exotic contexts.
Just now, I was looking at a blog about Brasserie Joël, where I’m going tonight (and which I’m reviewing next week), by the estimable “Dos Hermanos”. The brothers enjoyed their food, but the pictures almost had me cancelling my reservation. Praise for the stuffed courgette flower, for example, was illustrated by a slick, green, shiny penis with a terrible inflammation of the scrotum. Below that was a delicious slab of pork belly on which, so far as I could see, a dachshund or some small terrier had moments before left its little calling card – nor did the text offer any alternative interpretation of the glistening bronze tube uncoiled upon the meat. It was thus fortunate that the “small roasted banana”, served brown and whole with the dessert, had been captioned, because it looked most awfully like the dachshund had been back to finish what it had started.
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Food photography is a largely fraudulent science. Much of the great food photographed in recipe books has been trixed up with all manner of adulterants to help it survive and show well under lights. It’s not stuff you can eat, any more than you can have sex with one of those airbrushed, tinted and re-boobed fantasies of womanhood you see in magazines. But they are images to which we have grown used and, by comparison, a straight snap of a plate of grub looks revolting.
I have broadcast a photo of food only once, when, overexcited about eating Pierre Koffmann’s cooking for the first time in years, I took a picture of my/his pig’s trotters and tweeted the pic. I got a chorus of “Yuk”s in reply (for what I had tweeted looked like a poo with tusks), and it took acres of prose to correct the impression I had mistakenly given of M Koffmann’s savoury repertoire.
But it’s not the existence of unpleasant food photographs on the web in itself that really bothers me. It is a mad new media world we live in and if that is how it is going to be, then that is how it is going to be. The gruesome thing is the act of taking the photos, there in the restaurant, when other people are trying to have a nice time. It’s so vain, craven and self-important: “Look at me, look at me, I’m taking pictures for my blog with my runty little camera-phone. I’m not some shlub spending his hard-earned money trying to have a nice time with his wife. I’m worrrrrking.”
Food-snappers turn what should be a place of pleasure into a place of work. One minute you’re having a glass of wine with an old friend, the next you’re in somebody’s office. You’re talking while they’re trying to knuckle down.
And it puts unnecessary stress on the restaurant. The poor chef, informed by his staff that a flock of clicksters is in the house, will now spend hours trying to make their platefuls look like pretty pictures. Photo-blogging puts all the focus back on presentation, ahead of flavour and integrity – it throws us back to the bad old days of the early Eighties. The chef may well panic, he’ll ignore other orders, the waiters will start to tremble and drop things.
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Crucially, there is a version of the “observer effect” (usually described in particle physics) at work when you carry a camera: by the very fact of its being there, the nature of the experience is changed, delaying things, cooling and spoiling the food, jittering the staff, irritating other diners, making the occasion you plan to write about far more of a lie than it needs to be.
As it happens, I went to Koya because it was all the rage among the bloggers and tweeters a few weeks ago, who were unanimous in declaring it cheap, authentic and brilliant. And they were right, it is. They also warned me that it would be rammed by one o’clock and the queue would be immense (you can’t book), so we went at 11.59 (great Blondie song) on a Wednesday, and found it nicely empty. We had ordered from the short menu by 12.01pm, were served our first food by 12.05 and were out by 12.23 (roughly – I didn’t take a picture of the clock).
The clean, well-lit, canteeny little room filled slowly, and of the first 20-odd lunchers, all but two were Japanese. That’s good. The Japanese are fussy, sophisticated and smart. The only cultural downside is a tendency to slurp and gobble like pigs while eating noodle soup. I know we are told that that is the way to do it, to aerate the soup. But that’s balls, if you ask me, and quite revolting to behold. The women don’t do it. Not ever. So why should the men?
I did it once, in Wagamama nearly 20 years ago, because the menu told me to. I was with a Japanese friend. He looked horrified and said, “What on earth are you doing?”
“I thought you were supposed to eat noodles like this,” I said.
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“Only if you’re a f***ing fisherman,” he replied.
It’s only udon noodles here, made as well as I’ve had outside Japan, and you can have them in the soup or served cold on the side. Much better that way, outside, and dipped in the soup as you go, giving you the lovely, cool, al dente subtlety of the pasta in blameless harmony with the hot, rich soup (mine had pieces of soft gamey duck, but there’s the usual choices of beef, chicken, tofu, all that).
The tempura is impeccable. A plate of mixed veg – okra, broccoli, red pepper, asparagus, mushroom, courgette, something else I forget – was beautifully dry and sparky. Better still, they do “fish and chips”, which is fried lotus root slices and little tempura cod chunks. A gentle joke, and a true improvement (in terms of lightness and restraint) on our national dish. Shame it’s ten years too late to eat cod without feeling like a right bastard.
They served the braised pork belly in cider rather too cold for me – I didn’t like the sour tang of the alcohol still on the dish. And I’ll confess I was surprised to find the runny poached egg in broth stone-cold as well. But then something a bit gross and weird is necessary in any Japanese restaurant to give it that “authentic” feel. And if you’re struggling to imagine what a cold poached egg is like, then find a photograph of a hot one on the internet, and wait for it to cool.
Koya
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49 Frith St, London W1 (020-7434 4463)
Cooking: 8
Service: 8
Water: 10 (Filtered, bottled, free. At Inamo, reviewed last week, they have the almost criminal temerity to serve the same stuff at £1.75/bottle.)
Score: 8.67
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Price: out for £15/head or less. Same as Wagamama but utterly different class.