I may have mentioned before that I like to cook, although I would call it culinary creativity.
As a bloke, you see, I am allowed to take everyday chores and reinvent them with clever and exotic new names to make them seem to be clever and exotic activities.
The same goes for the meals I create.
I do not cook “spag bol”, rather fresh pasta in a rustic Italian tomato and basil sauce.
I don’t cook steak and chips, I create pan-fried Wagyu fillet in a pepper and cream sauce served with air fried potato wedges and asparagus tips.
This is a phenomenon you also find in many pretentious restaurants and is a great favourite of the high society charity dinner, usually attended by some distinguished guest.
I thought I was posh with my description of steak and chips above, but listen to this one for the exact same dish: “Roasted fillet of Australian Kobe beef, nestling in a Kent garden pea puree, temptingly accompanied by a succulent spinach and onion compote, to-die-for triple-cooked Maris Piper chips and Indonesian long pepper sauce.”
This was on the menu at a function in London, at which Prince William and Kate were the royals on duty.
For Pete’s sake, it’s steak and chips!
The difference is that steak and chips would cost you BD8.900, while the “roasted fillet etcetera, etcetera” will set you back BD49.950++.
Take my word for it, if you want a great steak and chips learn to cook them yourself.
It may take you a few attempts to get them right, but there is nothing more satisfying than a home-cooked steak with a nice red to accompany it.
Pretentious menu descriptions do seem to be a recent invention.
There have always been flowery descriptions, but the ability to string together a few sentences to describe a meal that no-one understands came from the same numpties who invented nouvelle cuisine.
They are the ones who conned us into paying a fortune for a mouthful of food in the nineties.
Modern menus do seem to have invented a new vocabulary and there are a few words that are regularly used, which I either detest or find too ridiculous for words.
Chief among them is “foraged”, usually used to describe mushrooms and herbs.
Did the kitchen staff really go out and forage for mushrooms, or did they just pop down to the central market?
Then there is “deconstructed”, a word used to describe a dish that started life as a shepherd’s pie, but ended up with minced lamb, mashed potato and carrots all served separately on a plate.
If I wanted that, I would have asked for mince and tatties!
But I asked for shepherd’s pie, which would have cost me BD5, whereas the “deconstructed” version is being charged at BD15.
So BD10 extra for not actually putting the pie together.
They probably need the extra money to pay someone like my daughter, who uses her two degrees in creative writing to come up with these stupid menus in the first place!