Role-play! Of customers in gastronomy
From hedonism to Instagram: how does the experience at a restaurant change, and what if not for the better?
The table is set.
You are about to sit down at a restaurant.
There is a subtle, recognisable tension in the air: you are about to eat, of course, but also to be served, to be poured drinky, and to find food on your plate that you did not prepare yourself or lift from a takeaway container.
Someone has prepared the food, and someone will serve it to you. Cutlery is being laid down; you straighten your napkin.
It is time for a meal, we go on stage!
Far from being a passive actor in this play, the customer plays a key role and an active one in the restaurant ecosystem of a meal.
First and foremost, the customer must exist: there must be a market for the specific consumer the restaurant is trying to attract - not only to enter its doors curiously but hopefully to be hooked for future and repeated visits.
Some things do not work well in specific environments: some cuisines do not appeal to the people living nearby, and some ways of consuming food do not encounter local favour.
One could say thank goodness for the tourists; they will eat whatever is laid out in front of them as long as the narrative around it is understandable (either in the form of a pancake or a Gastronomic Guide favourite or appealing pseudo-local food).
What happens when tourists are just not there?
We saw it in the pandemic: those who were hurt the most were those restaurants made for tourists by design or because their target shifted from locals to affluent visitors.
Once it is established that the customer must exist, restaurants must ensure that their chosen customers find space to eat and think the space offered is pleasant.
The word must go out via brilliant advertisement campaigns via media or pass parole, and customers shall trickle in.
Lately, places have to be Instagrammable, too. Video killed the pictures, but it is still a mediatic interface through which the restaurant measures their perceived value one against the others.
The restaurant shall be ready to receive a customer: it must have seats (or not), menus (or not), waiters (or not), beverages, lights, furniture, plates and cutlery, and an atmosphere. All must be deliberate and thoughtful choices by those in charge. It is a design, a targeted design that conveys a message.
Sometimes, the message is lost: the customer does not interpret the restaurant, or the restaurant does not explain itself to a specific customer, and disappointment arises, lingering on the whole “experience” like an unpleasant Christmas ghost.
However, restaurants are just one small part of gastronomy, contemporarily and historically.
They are a relatively recent affair and a French one.
On the other hand, street food is much older, and home cooking is probably born with the Sapiens type of our species, able to chop, mix, cook, and invent recipes, techniques, and tools to make it.
The message is lost when the messenger is also lost.
And what happens when an aspiring foodie/self-defined gastronomist in training has no personality, no curiosity, and no other instinct than following the leader of his own cult?
As I tell you repeatedly, the most important organ for a gastronomic writer is not the tongue. It’s the brain. It has to be connected.
To sound as intelligent and intellectual as his peers, a foodie visiting Cañabota in Seville, uttered these sentences that I liberally translated from the original language.
Cañabota is touted as the restaurant with the best fish in Seville - a gastronomically relatively unremarkable city despite being in a region, Andalusia, that is extraordinarily exciting.
The problem is that Cañabota is a restaurant for tourists, with the catch on display, the overly scripted staging, an inexplicable service squeezed in the tiny space between the tables, and the snooty attitude when booking.
It would have all been legitimate except for the first phrase.
They are accustomed to being revered at home and treated as another annoying nuisance elsewhere. I am always fascinated by the foodies' insistence on being necessary for restaurant gastronomy.
They need to feel somebody all the time. They need the chef's attention, the service, and even their fellow foodies' attention.
Now, the first error is, however, of course, thinking that Cañabota is an expression of gastronomic Seville instead of the expression of gastronomic consultants (such as I imagine this guy - because it’s ALWAYS a guy) probably dreams of becoming.
Then the dishes, starting from the comforting-"good" and land on the disastrous, with the passage on terrible fried fish and a meagre as a main that gives nothing and takes nothing away.
The foodie does not seem to understand that, today, Cañabota is a non-place, similar to Smoked Room in Madrid and Langosteria in Milan. A bunch of trainees and sous-chefs handle a kitchen designed for its Michelin performance and because of it, producing food adapted to the tastes of the limited array of “crucial Spanish gastronomy influencers.”
You know who they are, that bunch of middle-aged, larger-sized white males.
The food has to be mediocre by design: it serves the purpose of conspicuous consumption for its affluent and up-and-coming customers without caring for quality, technique, history, or anything else that is a corollary to the plate.
The showcase of fish being obliterated by bad frying techniques demonstrates that it can be pretty remarkable for the worse in the city that fries the best. The reviewer and I mainly agree here.
Dessert is curry ice cream. Why?
Why, you ask. And suddenly, à la Richelieu, your inability to comprehend the Iberian gastronomy is showing.
Because there’s at least another restaurant serving (a much better version of) a curry dessert - incidentally, on the same peninsula. Almeja in Porto, Portugal, has done so since 2020.
Because there’s a (true, this time) gastronomy intellectual that put this ingredient back on the map. It is “avant-garde” in this context, and, of course, it makes all the sense when you think of the desperate need for Cañabota to have a link with the past.
This is not only because of the weight of Al-Andalus but also because the spice route narrative is literally happening in the frenemy city of Cordoba.
But also because “curry” means nothing.
In a nutshell, the difference between foodies and gastronomers is all in the interpretation of a meal.
Or in its misinterpretation and adherence to a prefabricated mental evaluation pattern. Life is beyond Instagram, but the foodie is clustered firmly within its boundaries.
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This was fun to read! Maybe not fun sitting in there to eat obliterated fish...