Miro, Miro on the plate: why chefs shouldn't be artists
What's good for the artist is not necessarily good for the chef
Quite correctly, many great chefs today are almost revered as artists. They conjure up extraordinary dishes few of us could manage at home, using techniques and skills we can hardly grasp. The gels and jusses, the crusts and caramels, the froths and foams - their art, or at least craft, is in the tastes and textures they get out of stuff we can all buy at the supermarket.
The problem arises when they start thinking of themselves as artists, literally. I'm not sure when this started exactly, but it must have been with the first bit of garnish on a plate, probably an innocent sprig of parsley.
Someone should have nipped it in the bud right there, this fad for dressing up plates. After all, our ancestors were all quite happy and grateful to get meat and three veg on a plate; maybe with some colour courtesy of greens or a nice pile of orange pumpkin. But then those were the days when jus and reductions were gravy, and sauces were served in jugs or "boats".
In the '70s French nouvelle cuisine gave plate decorations a huge boost, mainly to divert diners' attention from the fact that they were getting very little to eat. But it looked pretty.
In the last decade or so, all hell has broken loose on our plates. Pretty is no longer enough. You are not supposed to recognise what you're being served, and the Spanish molecular chefs lead the trend. Foams, freezes, disguises and deceptions presumably add mystery and fun for the bored patrons. Having recently experienced some such food in Spain, yes they do.
But it's the bloody artwork that still bothers me, and it's no coincidence that two of the greatest abstract surreal artists, Picasso and Miro, were Spanish.
Today, chefs think they are artists. Stand in front of one of Picasso's cubist or surreal paintings and suddenly your last lunch comes to mind, becausethere are disjointed body bits all over the place. Look at your trendy seafood platter and there is a Miro: a starfish here, an amoeba there, a fish there, linked by drips and dribbles of seaside mysteries. A simple starter or dessert can now be spread along a two-foot platter with a cube here, a ball there, and a thingy there, all linked by drops and art, with an occasional pea or a slice of strawberry.
It's the dribbles and smears that really puzzle me: do you eat them? How? Scraping them up with a knife or a finger is not done, so I suppose they just have to stay there, looking all too organic.
The trendiest foams look like nothing more than the stuff frogs leave in ponds in the mating season, or that spitting bugs drop from trees. A splurge of dark jus looks like what a Parktown prawn does when you try to pick it up and throw it outside. The worst are the unidentified purées artfully smeared across a plate like a skidmark: I have never seen what a duck with diarrhoea does when landing on a frozen pond, but now I know.
Next we are having "soil" on plates; stuff than makes you think of foraging for fresh and organic food in Denmark, I'm told.
All this is really just playing with food, and my dad always told me to stop doing that. Perhaps he stifled the great artist-chef in me - you can blame anything on your parents - but I just don't get arty platters.
- Andrew Unsworth is the editor of Sunday Times Travel Weekly.