I feel guilty even just by typing this.
I believe this guilt will trickle down and permeate my whole piece of writing, and I need to accept that I feel so wrong, even if I might not be.
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away...wait, no.
Wrong starting.
Here we go.
Imagine a situation where you are an incredibly successful and entrepreneurial Chef (she/her), married to another Chef (he/him) of equal skills. One of them is very open and loved by the press (she/her), whilst the partner is more on the shy, reserved side (he/him).
One of them is a woman (she/her), fighting for a star in a male-dominated landscape. The other one is..well, a man-chef (he/him).
They are, however NOT the main characters of this story.
Enter guilt.
And what a guilt! Primadonna guilt.
Because this was the absolute star of the meals I consumed at HER and HIS tables.
As I sat at HER table, my expectations rocketed sky-high.
But bite after bite, I was “nice”, and that was it for me. So much so that I did not go back.
Whilst the number of “nice” in my head rose, so did my sense of guilt, eroding my stomach from below, and shaking my innermost belief of being a feminist.
Was I being a phoney?
Nothing in life is more despicable to me than being a phoney, as taught to me both by Truman Capote AND Audrey Hepburn.
And then, mid-dinner, suddenly a thought came sneaking into my mind.
A reminiscence of the worst-ever meal I had at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Glass Hostaria was my pick for a birthday recently, another woman-led restaurant.
I had carefully chosen it, even cancelling a reservation at Il Pagliaccio to make room for this (sorry, oh so sorry forever) which I hoped to be an amazing feast of feminism, and it ended up in a catastrophic dinner of inane proportions where I lost all faith in eating Michelin in Rome.
My worst Michelin meal of the year, perhaps in years.
We still laugh about it!
From the chandelier, positioned in a place that gave light next to the table, not onto the table - but just in our case.
Till the - fortunately - short sequence of plates (they forgot half of the order anyway, and it was a blessing in disguise).
We ended with the below, terrible and still terrifying, linguine of some sort.
I was not experiencing the culinary and hospitality disaster we experienced in Rome this time instead - far from it.
The dinner at HER restaurant was polished, tasteful and tasty. But I could not help but notice that the premises that brought me to the restaurant - celebrating women - were the same.
And yet, I liked HIS restaurant better. Much better, so much better that it is a restaurant I routinely go, to and recommend to anyone who asks.
I felt guilty for months, thinking of this as a betrayal to the female gender as if I had ignited all copies of any Simone de Beauvoir book in town.
Or something like that.
Where does my guilt come from?
Is this guilt I feel when I do not particularly like the work of a woman, a byproduct of this strenuous and continuous fight that we are experiencing, elbowing our way around?
I found myself suddenly frightened to have lost the possibility of performing in a natural way something that I thought I could be good at: which is, gastronomic criticism.
I felt I could not judge the cuisine, so clouded by this feeling of guilt.
But then, I thought better.
The feeling of guilt came afterwards.
It came as I was tasting, and came as I was trying to rationalise the feelings and the analysis my mouth and senses were performing!
I put the brain, where there should have been taste only. I turned it off again, just for a minute.
As my brain and all its baggage disappeared from centre stage, leaving my mouth and nose alone, my sense of guilt suddenly disappeared, and I could see again the strengths, weaknesses, the good and the bad of a cuisine.
As I sat with my last sip of wine, I recognize that we vibrate with one cuisine or another, as we vibrate with one person or another on different levels and in different ways: I found the cuisine analytically in such and such a way, but I could separate that line of thought from my personal, unique preference.
Maybe after all I wasn’t a bad feminist, betrayer of the sisterhood. Maybe I simply liked the other cuisine better.
And maybe we do a poor job in comparing cuisines as sex and gendered or deciding on a dinner based on something that, I hope, never touches my food.