The Cranky Connoisseur - Part One

I nearly got punched out by a Cockney produce vendor in the Borough Market in London recently. All I did was ask if the asparagus was from England or Spain.

I should have known the answer. Borough Market, like a lot of markets in the foodie-West, has become in recent years a temple to local ingredients. Mid-Devon Fallow Deer. Wild Lakeland rabbit. Beef and pork identified by breed and farm, just as a wine might be by varietal and appellation. Over the fishmongers slab, a sign reads “Inshore Whitby Dayboat Monkfish”. Species, sea of origin, point of departure and time of day. Surely all the information required by even the most demanding locavore.

So, good chance the asparagus would be English. But still I asked the question, infected as I was by the spirit of the place, the amped up awareness, the agitated need for reassurance that one was buying what was in greatest demand. Where’s it from? – my brow no doubt creased into an anxious wrinkle – Is it from Gloucestershire?

My cockney vendor had apparently been answering the same question every three minutes since opening. She reddened slightly and said: “It’s English, yeah? It’s all English. The lettuce. The rhubarb. Or not, not the… Where’s the rhubarb from Jack!?  And the carrots. I mean OK, the carrots are Scottish. And the broccoli. But it doesn’t really matter where the broccoli comes from, does it? Because the broccoli is like the strawberries and THEY ALL COME IN A DUTCH BOX!”

Wow, I found myself thinking, this business of connoisseurship is making us all very cranky.

And not just in England, clearly. Who in the Western world isn’t a “foodie” now? Just think of your own social scene. Beyond the oenophiles, who seem to have been around and cranky forever, all these new categories of taste refinement seem suddenly to be blossoming. The guy who swears by a $40 bottle of fruit vinegar or the $15 pound of butter. The woman with the artisanal goats-milk yoghurt habit or that couple with the kid who’s slurping Malpeques at the age of five.

Maybe you’re thinking: but hey, these people are just being picky not cranky. But I’m starting to think that one leads to the other. And you might agree if you’d been on rustic Saltspring island last year, watching the American tourist, who was provisioning his evening barbecue, eschew a beautiful organic chicken because it wasn’t from the island but from Duncan, barely 10 kilometers away.

Even the icons of food connoisseurship in our culture seem to have taken this turn, moving from the pleasantly diverted (Elizabeth David, MFK Fisher) to the fanatically opinionated (Marco Pierre White, Mario Batali) to the existentially dissatisfied. Consider Heat, in this last category, wherein Bill Buford roams the Italian countryside searching out an authenticity that eludes even the masters under whom he trains, and at the end of which he capitulates anyway and decides he’d better go to France. Or Observer food critic Jay Rayner’s new book The Man Who Ate the World, which describes his apparently life long quest for the perfect dinner, including a seven day gorge through Michelin-starred Paris which – of course, like there was ever any doubt – leaves him as insatiate as when he began.

Perhaps all this is merely the product of what high-brow food magazine Gastronomica calls “the acute culinary sensibility of the moment”. But that doesn’t explain the restless, dissatisfied spirit that seems to characterize the actual experience of connoisseurship in our day, as if our investment in refinement were no longer producing the same returns in pleasure. As if, in the words of University of Calgary sociologist John Manzo, taste itself might be better understood as “the burden of being disappointed all the time.”

Barely 10 years ago it would have been no social dishonor if you couldn’t distinguish a grain of basmati from jasmine, flank steak from onglet, tap water from Bling. More likely, you would have been considered a bit of a freak to grow irritable in the pursuit of one over the other. Which begs the question: what drives this process? If it isn’t pleasure, pure and simple, what else is motivating the Cranky Connoisseur?

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St John wouldn’t necessarily seem like the best place to answer this question. Established in 1994 around the corner from the Smithfield Meat Market, the dining room is an undecorated white room with simple wooden tables and chairs. But despite the distinct lack of foodie vibe, the place has serious reputation. It was ranked 16^th on Pellegrino’s 2008 list of 50 best restaurants in the world. It was also named by Anthony Bourdain as the place he’d rather eat than anywhere else on earth.

 “Nose to tail eating” is what St John is all about, an approach that involves making use of the whole animal: heads, feets, innards etc. The St John menu reflects this in studiously anti-pretentious language: Ox tongue and beetroot. Deep fried tripe and chips. Or in the restaurant’s signature dish: bone marrow and parsley salad.

Henderson describes this approach as just “common sense and being polite”, a matter of respect for the animals we slaughter. But it’s also distinctly about finding pleasure beyond the tenderloin. “I mean,” he tells me, gesticulating as he speaks, “the head alone has cheeks and little tongues and unctuous snouts, and then you have trotters and hearts! Hearts, which are the essence of the animal when it comes to taste.”

Thirteen years ago, all this throw-back meatiness, this hands-on farmer-friendliness was highly eccentric. (“Yes,” he muses, “You would be safe saying there was no tripe on London menus in 1994.”) Since then however, and in only slightly modified form, it’s become ubiquitous. You find brawn, trotters, sweetbreads, cheeks on literally all the hottest new menus in the city. St John didn’t invent them, obviously. But there’s no doubt that a rare breed, the middle class diner with a taste for this kind of thing, has replicated to the extent that it is now a genuinely popular foodie phenomenon.

Replication is the key here. It’s what Jeremy Strong was writing about in Gastronomic in an article titled “The Modern Offal Eaters” when he described how offal and related ingredients had become “…largely the preserve of an affluent culinary cognoscenti whose cooking and eating habits are significantly determined by what they see and read.”

A cognoscenti whose desires, in other words, are copied from the observed world around them.

It’s not a new idea. French philosopher Jacques Lacan argued that all desire was fundamentally the desire of “the Other’s” desire. Retired Stanford cultural anthropologist Rene Girard wrote in a similar vein: “All fads and fashions operate dynamically because they operate mimetically.”

Girard, interestingly, was writing above about the strange social contagion of eating disorders. But the comment speaks to the broader reality of appetites, tastes and the project of self-refinement that is connoisseurship. All of us are involved in these pursuits, but none of us arrive at our desires by acting on an objective standard, not for fruit vinegars or bottled water or old school cuts of meat. Neither do our desires reflect qualities within us that are innate.

Instead, we copy our desires from each other. Girard called this mimetic desire, which exists only because of the model by which it was inspired and which, then, transfers from person to person like a gene (or, if you prefer, a virus). In which case, you might say London is now teeming with the evidence of St John’s influence and the fecundity of its ideas.

There’s Hix Oyster and Chop House, just around the corner from St John, where you’ll find beef flank, oyster pie, ox cheek and grilled kidneys. There’s 32 Great Queen Street, where the walls are hung with pictures of cows and the menu tends towards large joints of meat intended for table sharing. Here you’ll find rabbit brawn and sweetbread terrine, cured mackerel with cucumber and Middlewhite Ploughman.

You even find evidence of this mimetic replication in posh places like Tom Aiken’s casual joint in Chelsea, Tom’s Kitchen, where the décor might evoke a pub as rendered by Ralph Lauren, but where this new haut-carnivorism forms the heart of the menu: pork belly, charcuterie, pig’s knuckle and pea soup. All served up under the gaze of enormous pig photographs. Pigs stacked or hanging on hooks. A pig’s head split it two. Or one in which a man wears a pig’s head as if it were his own.

These foodie Mapplethorpes may not be “common sense and polite”. And in the details, each of these rooms may boast their distinguishing demographic features: tattooed hipster staff at 32 Great Queen, City types hanging at Hix sipping cava. But they each ape the aesthetic, if not the ethic, that made St John (and Fergus Henderson) so eccentric in 1994. And doing so, they reveal the mimetic process that made St John magnetic to foodies, who then became magnetic themselves to other foodies, ideas and enthusiasms and desires spreading until today, when a striking resemblance may now be found between the hottest new dining rooms of the city: a throw-back meatiness, a hands-on farmer-friendliness.

“It’s a pig,” the twenty year old waitress at 32 Great Queen tells me when I ask what’s in the Middlewhite Ploughman. “A pig from Essex.”

And at the next table (I couldn’t make this up, honest) a couple is talking, excitedly, about St John. “They use the whole animal,” the man is telling his date. And I can tell from his accent that he’s from Germany.

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“Flavors are embedded in the fabric of the time and space they occupy and cannot simply be wrenched from them,” writes Jay Raynor in The Man Who Ate the World, then proceeds to illustrate how right and wronghe is, saying so.

Eating at a restaurant he used to frequent as a young man, he is dismally disappointed, noting among other things that “…hardly anyone was there.” At a fancy-schmancy place in Mayfair with his wife some years later, the same hovering gloom. “Who in this room,” she asks, “would you really want to know?” Stripped of people whose desires he might once have cared to copy, these rooms now leave Raynor adrift, wrenched free of the “time and space” that had lent those flavors their long-ago brilliance.

But Raynor is also wrong about the rigidity of time and space, and in those passages, the magic he is missing may be found. At another old bistro, a place where he used to eat with his original model for the gourmand life, he sits opposite his father, dipping bread in the out-moded garlic butter, and has a simply wonderful meal. The model in place, and the desirability of Raynor’s desires confirmed.

The Gordian Knot of connoisseurship, in this passage, is at least temporarily cut. That rampant, agitated quest through the time and space of fashion set aside, rendered irrelevant.

It’s a parallel feeling to the one I had eating at Tom Aiken’s flagship restaurant and St John two nights in a row. At the first, the originating concept of which, Aikens tells me, was to earn the approval of Michelin, I find a room with hushed and reverential air. And after seven courses and a cheese tray, they serve you two desserts and then petit fours, a course consisting of a dozen obscurely inventive sweets plus a bank of test tubes with straws and a little rack of shot glasses full of flavored jelly. If you desire the desire of Michelin, this place will be for you. If not, you may leave craving a plate of brown rice and lentils. Feeling just a little bit cranky.

The next night, however, I went to St John, which Henderson founded with little culinary experience other than that which he’d inherited from his mother, recipes that included, at one point, included something called Boiled Egg and a Carrot, and another dish called Tripe with Onions. Copied, yes indeed. But in way that was not born of rivalry, but of blood.

Raised on the nasty bits myself, I left feeling full and fortunate. Not particularly refined, but happier for it.