(First published in The Dominion Post, August 7.)
As I write this, the salivary glands of Wellington foodies
will be working overtime in anticipation of the Wellington on a Plate festival.
But I’m strangely unexcited.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I have no interest in eating.
Quite the contrary.
I love food and regard every meal as an adventure. I’m lucky
to have a wife who’s not only a terrific cook but who doesn’t seem to mind that
my first words to her most mornings are “What’s for breakfast?”
I have sometimes wondered whether my enthusiasm for eating is
a bit unnatural. Is it normal to recall, with vivid clarity, flavours from dishes
eaten decades ago? (The rahm schnitzel from Wellington’s long-vanished Mecca restaurant
lives in my memory.)
But I needn’t have worried. In terms of obsession with food,
I apparently trail well behind the pack – which brings me back to Wellington on
a Plate.
The festival programme arrived with my Dominion Post several weeks ago. It runs to 70 pages.
On page 11 I read that you can experience something called
the D’Luxburger in the Lobby Lounge of the Intercontinental Hotel. “This
gastronomic extravagance,” the blurb reads, “includes a collection of sumptuous
ingredients – Ngawi-sourced crayfish and black truffle mayonnaise; groper and caviar;
slow-poached Wellington South Coast paua.
“This SeaSational burger trilogy is accompanied by a
gold-flaked vodka martini, Krug Champagne and Martinborough Dry River Pinot
Gris.”
The price: $350 per head. For this sum you apparently also
receive “a glittering crystal gift”.
I wonder, is this really about the pleasure of food, or is
it about acquiring social status points that can then be boasted about with
one’s wealthy friends?
Admittedly, the D’Luxburger is at the extreme end of the
scale. But flicking through the rest of the Wellington on a Plate programme, I
can’t help but get the uncomfortable feeling that food has been elevated to the level of a fetish.
The same page invites diners to sample five different cuts
of a cow at Dragonfly restaurant. The hook is that you do so blindfolded.
This striving for novelty strikes me as the culinary
equivalent of “jumping the shark” – in other words, reaching the point where
the simple enjoyment of good food is in danger of being overtaken by
gimmickry.
Heston Blumenthal can be blamed for much of this. He’s the
English chef who built a cult out of dishes such as egg-and-bacon ice cream.
Blumenthal seems an amiable enough character, but his food is described in terms that go beyond mere
pretentiousness. According to an article I read recently, his menus are not
just about taste but about “the ebb and flow of stories: contextual theatrical
narrative-driven dishes that have layers and layers and layers”.
Perhaps Blumenthal is having an elaborate joke at our expense,
but the tragedy is that there’s no shortage of affluent consumers hungry for
anything that smacks of novelty. If it’s expensive, so much the better - it must
be good.
Meanwhile a peculiar faddism seems to have overcome chefs
and foodies, such as the sudden romantic enthusiasm for “foraging”. Evidently
food is much more authentic if it has been harvested from the roadside.
One festival event invites people to forage with the chef from
the exclusive Wharekauhau Lodge, then return to the lodge for a five-course,
wine-matched lunch using the ingredients gathered. That will set punters back a
modest $247.
Among other fads I’ve noted, fish nowadays must be
line-caught and chips must be hand-cut. Even the humble oat must be steel-cut. Such
practices apparently endow even everyday foodstuffs with a powerful mystique.
And of course you must be able to trace the exact provenance
of everything you eat, right to the very paddocks where the ewe that supplied
your lamb shank grazed contentedly on alfalfa and white clover seasoned by
salt-laden winds off Palliser Bay. If you can shake the hand of the farmer, so
much the better.
I applaud the range and quality of food now available in New
Zealand restaurants and cafes. I bow to our farmers and growers and clever
chefs.
But Wellington on a Plate takes the celebration of food to a
level where even I have to ask: has it all gone a bit far? The food business
strikes me as being in danger of becoming almost as much of a pretentious con
as the fashion industry.
Suffice it to say that I won’t be lining up for a D’Luxburger.
I do, however, like the look of the Kapiti Coast Festival of Fish and Chips.
That sounds like me.
