Instagram, foam and crouching waiters: 16 things which should be banned from restaurants
It is news that will be applauded and cheered by some, but will prompt wailing and the gnashing of teeth in others - a restaurant owner in the south of France has banned the use of mobile phones at the table. Hean-No?l Fluer, who runs the Petit Jardin eatery in the village of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, has even gone as far as to impose a football-style system of yellow and red cards on diners - with repeat offenders who earn the latter being asked to leave. Oh, and for good measure, he has banned Coca Cola and ketchup, on the basis that "we have good local fruit juices here that people can drink instead of Coke - and we have moutard a l'ancienne instead of ketchup."
Commercial suicide or sensible policies for a happier world? The latter, obviously. And here are a few further things we would ban from the culinary experience. Feel free to leave a comment below that is either full of agreement and smiles, or promises of vengeance, depending on age and temperament.
1. Instagram
Yes, yes, if you are banning mobile phones at the table, then you are also effectively ejecting social media from the dining process. It doesn't need saying twice. But then, actually, it does. In future decades, when archaeologists are sifting through the hot embers of what was left of civilisation when Washington DC Toddler and Pyongyang Toddler had used it for the deadliest ever game of The Toy Cars In My Garage Are Better Than Yours, And Anyway, You Smell, the following conversation will occur between two people clad in radioactive suits while fending off glowing green wolves:
Person 1: The thing I don't get about the pre-destruction world is the obsession young people had with photographing their dinners and posting the results on Instagram. I mean, look at this stream of drivel I've just unearthed from chloe_eats_stuff_21...
Person 2: To be fair, evidence suggests people over the age of 30 were doing it too. And that's what's unforgiveable, really. Where was their dignity? Their self-respect?
Person 1: Yeah, that's true. But the point is, the whole thing was just photos of salad.
Person 2: Yep. Just salad.
2. Foam
There is, of course, great joy in culinary diversity - and a diet which stretches beyond meat and two potatoes is to be commended. But, at the moment of his or her death, the chef who came up with the concept of serving flavoured foam to diners, and charging them a fortune for it, should be canonised, before their corpse is cold, as the new Patron Saint of Snake-Oil Salesmen. It is bubbles. Bubbles which cost ￡18.50.
3. Menus with a "philosophy"
Philosophy? Excellent. Then I'll start with the Plato, then have a slice of the Socrates - and let's go with Foucault for the dessert. What's that? Oh, you just meant that you serve the occasional bit of raw stuff, most of it is bought within a 100-mile radius - and you're trying to make it all sound way more impressive and exciting than it is. Oh.
4. Menus which require Google Translate...
There is a time and a place for poring over a menu, trying to decipher what the words swimming in front of your eyes mean. An evening in downtown Tokyo where the possible meals on offer at your eatery of choice are described in a wholly different alphabet. A sophisticated French restaurant in a chic city where the ingredients in the entrées are so haute-cuisine that not one of them is familiar. But when you're reading a menu in your home country, in your own language, or something approaching it, then it shouldn't be too much to ask that you might, you know, be able to understand it. Corrugated rendering of zander cheek with a mint-bubble side of white asparagus and a cornflake coulis of blue-red Lincolnshire sausage? Erm, yeah, sounds tasty. Maybe.
5. ...or gild the lily to ridiculous levels
Hand-cut post-heat Wensleydale and unpasterurised chevre bleu de Bretagne on char-warmed artisan sourdough with organic haricots in jus de tomate? For ￡14? Come on mate, it's cheese-on-toast with a side of baked beans. Let's say four quid with a coffee.
6. Menus written on portable blackboards
You know, those small portable ones, on which you can write all the desserts in arty chalk, and carry from table to table so that each diner can peruse in person. Except that you can't remember which table you left it on, it's now half past 10 and the writing has gone all smudgy. And, yeah, the tiramisu is finished. Sorry about that.
But you haven't crossed it out.
Yeah, I know. Apologies.
OK, the apple crumble then.
Ooh, hang on, I'd better check in the kitchen if we've any left. Yeah, sorry, we just sold the last piece.
7. The price of cheese courses in 2017
Seriously, why has there not been some sort of urgent inquiry into this? Order the congealed-cow-product option in a modern restaurant these days - particularly one that happens to sit in London - and you will find that three pieces of mildly interesting cheddar/stilton/something camembert-esque will cost you a) at least a fiver more than the most expensive pudding and b) an amount well into double figures. This is ludicrous. You could do a supermarket sweep in the dairy aisle of your nearest corporate grocers, hoofing numerous nuggets of wensleydale and brie into your trolley with a wild scoop of the arm, and still discover that you are spending only ￡2.70 more than you would in choosing the a la carte restaurant cheese option. And woe betide you if you order the dessert wine to go with it. Then you're probably going to have to remortgage.
8. Ice-cream masquerading as a main course
Ah, wonderful. An 11-course tasting menu. What better way to celebrate our joyous sixth wedding anniversary? I mean, it's expensive, and a little pretentious, but... What's this? Two of the courses are sorbets? And one of them is mango flavour? Never mind cleansing my palate. How about you cleanse them off the bill completely?
9. Restaurants which don't take reservations
What could possibly improve my evening at this inconceivably hip hipster haven - with its chance to spend ￡89 on three courses prepared by a chef who has multiple tattoos but only one name (lower case, obviously) - more than the opportunity to stand outside in the rain for over an hour while the waitress decides whether she can be bothered to serve me/tries to think of an excuse as to why she can't ("Today is our Bring A Minimalist Cat Day. You have not brought a Minimalist Cat")/chats to her mates perched on the four stools at the counter which, ridiculously, comprise half the available seating/pops out for her eighth cigarette and a frosty glare in my direction?
10. Plates which are not plates
To be fair, the good people at We Want Plates (wewantplates.com) have already mentioned this, filling their Twitter feed with images of restaurants which serve food not on the plain pragmatism of a nice plate ceramic item, but on, and in, things which are anything but - hollowed-out books, upturned pieces of pipe, slabs of driftwood... But the main point is worth repeating. Eating steak off a piece of slate is not progress. Caveman used to eat his steak off pieces of slate, but he also used to wear his dinner's skin as a coat, and if anyone tries to offer that as a menu option in Shoreditch, there will be many, many riots.
11. Waiters who crouch down to table level
We get what you're doing. You're trying to introduce an air of informality to this discussion about our dining choices. The sort of matey affability which disguises - or tries to disguise - the fact that the lamb chop is ￡34 (sides extra). And while we admire your effort - and its attempt to prove that you are not a mere waiter, but an expert on the restaurant's many gastro-flourishes who is personally involved in the three-hour culinary journey that we are all set to embark on together - all that bending down like that really achieves is the nagging concern that you might be constipated.
12. Loud music
There are times and places for tunes played at such volume that they could be echoing on the inside of Miley Cyrus's head. There are nightclubs. There are gigs. There are over-cool cocktail bars where pounding slabs of grime hammer out of the speakers as a conversational contraceptive, designed to make customers spend less time on speaking to each other and more time on ordering drinks - or, at least, testing out the bar staff's ability to read their lips while they point at various bottles in the spirit rack and shrug. But this list of locations does not include restaurants. I do not want to have to draw a pretty picture of what I want to eat because a) Stormzy is bellowing in my ear and b) the poor waiter went deaf many tinitus-cursed shifts ago.
13. Waiters who pour the wine too slowly
This is a very simple thing. I have ordered a bottle of wine. It is nice. It is a bit on the pricey side. I want to drink it, and I want to drink it at a pace of my choosing. I do not want it placed in an ice bucket half a postcode away, from which it can only be retrieved by a staff member once every half an hour. I do not want to wait an extra six minutes while said staff member drapes a damp white napkin over their arm before they pour it. And I do not wish to be tutted at when I stand up and fetch the bottle myself.
14. Polite Parisian waiters
Listen, I don't come to the French capital to be treated with graciousness and a smile. I want to be ignored for half an hour, smirked at for my GCSE vocabulary, laughed at for asking for my steak to be cooked a certain way (even if it is the very way Charles de Gaulle would have asked for his steak to be cooked), ignored some more, have my plate left in front of me until long after the gravy has congealed to a sickly brown tar, be ignored even more, be completely forgotten about when it comes to ordering a dessert, still be charged a fortune for the privilege, and cursed at audible volume when I do not leave a tip of at least three figures. I know times change, but some things are sacrosanct, and Surly Sebastian is one of them. If I want politeness, I'll go to Germany.
15. Children NOT using iPads at the dinner table
Yes, I know that, back at the start of the feature, we agreed that the banning of phones - and therefore tablets - at the table was a good thing. But there are limits. And one of them is a child of five shrieking for "ice kweem" at the top of their shrill voice when everyone else in their group is still on their starter. There is a theory that parents who plug their children into technology in lieu of raising them to behave in a public meal setting are somehow failures. They are not. They are realists, they work hard, and they deserve to eat their cod-loin with chorizo in 10 minutes of peace while Little Walter works his way through a catalogue of CBeebies downloads. Although for God's sake give the kid some headphones. No-one wants to hear the theme tune to Justin's House.
16. That signing gesture for the bill
It is 2017. Chip-and-pin has been around for about a decade. Contactless cards have been A Thing for a good five years. No-one signs anything to pay for their dinner anymore. Not a chitty. Not a cheque. Nothing. Nada. You may as well perform the amateur sign language for "I will make sure to send my batman over within the week, good sir, and he will arrange prompt payment of my debt for these fine victuals" or whatever it was Mr Darcy would have said after taking Elizabeth out for dinner. At least that way your waiter could be confused into thinking you are a fictional Georgian gentleman on a hot date - and not an irrirating idiot who cannot say "could I have the bill please?".