What’s Your Favourite Cardinal Sin?
Most people cook just because they need to eat. Our bodies need food just like batteries need charging. I don’t buy into the Italian nonna myth in which much of the charm of their food is rooted. It’s about making do with with what you got at hand. People were a bit healthier and a lot slimmer before because they could afford meat only on special occasions like holidays or celebrations. Instead of gyms and barbells they had vineyards and shovels.
My own grandma’s culinary peak was sponge cake sprinkled with caster sugar and a rice pudding. Trust me, emotional attachment was what made this home cooking enjoyable in the first place. With notable exceptions like my aunt whose home-made hummus dips and cakes are the stuff of dreams. But if you believe Instagram and Pintarest, every Italian nonna is Nigella Lawson in disguise. Even the most famous chefs need a break. I can imagine Massimo Bottura eating plain take out with maybe a glass of San Pellegrino sparkling water at home.
That’s why, in reverse, people like me need some culinary pampering by professionals who treat you as the damn Prince of Wales because the bill might as well be appropriate for a royal. Quite literally, you’re going to put your money where your mouth is. Lots of it. The Michelin dinner experience is about pretentious, delicious and highly instagrammable food.
Occasionally our unflattering guts deserve a royal stuffing so I packed up with a group of equally inclined friends and we went to the city of Šibenik on the Adriatic coast. When we finally arrived it was a depressingly rainy evening that made even the magnifficent Saint Jacob’s cathedral look grim. Fortunately the clouds over our appetite were dispelled at Pelegrini, where a table was already set for us. Unlike with dating apps, here you got exactly what you saw beforehand. The game was about to begin and I was eager to play.
Since we are nerds who do their research before travel, we found out that this place was awarded as the best restaurant in Croatia several times. In fact, we’re so pompous about our dining that we reinvented ourselves as a group of gourmands called Food Grinders. None of us fancied themselves as food critic on the rise. The only thing that will be rising here is an impeccable chocolate soufflé.
Though Jay Rayner did mention me once in The Guardian. That little anecdote is closer to my heart than my university degree. After all, he is the man who caused an uproar in Paris after publishing a scathing review of the prestigious Le Cinq. You might say the French issued a culinary fatwa against him. Fortunately, he couldn’t care less. What’s not to like about a critic who’s not afraid of the elite?
Maybe it means we should trust our own impressions more than carefully curated food porn they’re trying to seduce you with. The choice of what you’ll spend a considerable amount of money on is a good indicator of character. If you’ll throw it on Heston Blumenthal’s edible gold bars instead of the real thing, I’ll be friends forever with you. On the other hand, if you can afford dining at The Fat Duck, you probably got a stack at home.
The vocabulary connected to places like these is amusingly juicy. Amuse-bouche rolls around your mouth like a crispy meringue. Are you amused? Translated into language normal people use, it’s not a mouth entertainer. I don’t know about you but my mouth prefers to be entertained in a different fashion. Actually, it’s a bite-size appetizer sometimes dubbed as “greeting from the kitchen”. By the time our main dish arrived I had quite a few. Someone over there must be really fond of us. Either that or really hostile to my waistline.
Then the sommelier started buzzing around us with glasses of whichever the appropriate wine was for the main course. Simultaneously he recited a litany with the brief history of each bottle. I gladly took it all in, you can never learn too much about the finer things in life. If you’d rather send the poor guy away you’re probably an asshole with a silver spoon shoveled deep into your throat. And it’s safe to assume you’ve got a wife somewhere who has no idea about your arm candy.
In the end I hesitantly looked into the plate and the dessert: there are some journeys you don’t want to end. Like life. Or a cup with a mixture of mascarpone, white chocolate, rosemary and orange cream, so luscious and tasty that your tongue sinks to the bottom of that cup of sin, like a rabid, stray dog looking for his treat. The only thing that impressed me more than our epicurean dinner was the city library, a masterpiece of Croatian 20th century modernism. After we recovered our senses from the multiple orgasm the chef exposed our taste buds to, we rewarded him with an honest applause when he emerged from his kitchen. It’s kind of our thing. You can consider yourself lucky if you have friends that prefer to debate on the importance of butter in French cuisine rather than daily politics.
Now that I’m no longer easily fascinated by tourist attractions, it’s the secrets of local food that fascinate me the most when I hit the road to anywhere. And there’s a pleasant discovery every time. Though I’d think twice before eating an insect at a street market in Kerala. Judging by the abundance of offer at La Bouqueria in Barcelona, I probably don’t need to go that far. This looks like a cornucopia of everything you ever wanted to taste, arranged in one place.
Mies Van der Rohe’s modernist Pavillion with its stoic architecture, meditative mood and Georg Kolbe’s art will certainly nourish your hunger for beauty. Your sweet tooth, however, is perfectly nourished at a little joint called Granja La Pallaresa in Petritxol Street. I arrived with a friend for a cup of steaming hot, dark chocolate with soft churros that melted ever so slightly each time we’d dip them into it. I’m no Marcel Proust but his madeleines are no match for this.
The luxuriously fragrant, palate-melting drink leaves you speechless, with a tempting drip down the cup that could no longer contain the bubbly, dark treasure inside. It swept your mind clean of everything apart from pleasure receptors. Every sip was a lullaby. I wish Willy Wonka’s factory was real. I’d apply for a job right away. But since it isn’t all I can do is to satisfy my insatiable hunger for the good things in life by taking comfort in the awareness that even memories of joy are more than many were lucky to experience in the first place.
Being greatful for it is one of most important skills one should learn to practice. It creates a reassuring warmth that can sustain and comfort your soul in the darkest night. When you close your eyes, your nostrils fill with that familiar smell once again, from your olfactory archive hidden deep enough to forget it’s there right until you need it again. And it gently eases your ache.
Mark Mylord’s 2022 movie The Menu with Ralph Fiennes in the role of chef Julian Slowik dwelves deep into the psyche of people whose fame over time rose beyond the kitchen walls. It created a whole subculture with channels like 24Kitchen and elevated Gordon Ramsay and Ferran Adria to superstar status. Their aprons are decorated with coveted Michelin stars like a king’s parade uniform with medals.
Slowik’s got the prerequisite superior attitude. He’s confident, cocky and arrogant. He treats his guests as an audience who paid a heavy buck to attend his performance where all of them certainly get their money’s worth though not in the way they might have had expected. His exclusive restaurant is located on a small island where an assistant with the charm of a prison warden acts as a receptionist for the arriving guests, wealthy and famous people from showbusiness, technocrats, young entepreneurs, food critics and Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) who ends up at the dinner party purely by chance.
In a carefully planned evening where even coincidences aren’t what they seem to be, she’s the bug in the system. In true Michelin style, each course is designed and presented as a short story with a twist. It’s only Margot who’s unimpressed by all the effort put into making the food on her plate look as inedible as can be. And when Slowik indeed throws in a twist, it unravels a sequence of events that turn the exclusive island into a death trap.
His freezing persona sends the occasional chill down your spine because you feel a subconscious spark of Neeson’s Amon Goeth from Schindler’s List. A ruthless lunatic, obsessed with perfection and revenge, he’s taking no prisoners and none of his guests are in on the cruel joke. Once they realize the joke is on them, only Margot keeps her cool and confronts him.
She doesn’t want a caramel origami but an old-fashioned cheeseburger. Maybe it’s because of her irreverence to the gods of the culinary Mount Olympus that she gets a burger to go. Plain, honest and fulfilling. Mylord’s movie is a poignant criticism of today’s obsession with food as a lifestyle and velvet rope dining where you pay for the experience, the white gloves, the sommelier and meatballs that look like a scruffy scrotum. That would truly be a joke, unless if it were served by Julian Slowik. I’m sure were that indeed the case laughing would be the last thing on your mind. You’d run away screaming and spitting because the hair would turn out to be real.
If Menu depicts the profession as a slightly deranged obsession, Campbell Scott’s 1996 movie Big Night approaches cooking as a passion. Tony Shalhoub (Primo) and Stanley Tucci (Secondo) play Italian brothers trying to save their restaurant in New Jersey from ruin by throwing a dinner party for potential sponsors with the popular singer Louis Prima in attendance. Primo and Slowik share a similar sentiment. For both of them food is a ritual, an experience and an invaluable part of social life.
Their kitchen is the only place where they feel truly in charge, the world outside has its own rules and standards that barely acknowledge their values unless they can be translated into cash. The difference is that Primo is a dreamer, an artist whose cooking is about emotions and honesty. Secondo, on the other hand, doesn’t care that much for any of it and is all about turning their restaurant into a success. He wants the American dream and puts all his hopes into the party where, in the end, the guest of honor doesn’t bother to show up.
If you ask me, even Margot’s cheeseburger would taste like a steak with Isabella Rosellini who attended Secondo’s rescue mission party. Primo’s luck may have been a bitch but the truth was always on hos side. Because food is about nourishment and connecting with ourselves and others. It’s a labor of love. There’s nothing romantic in a soup can. Cooking one from scratch is a different thing. It demands attention, devotion and purpose. If Big Night were a 21st century story, I could imagine Primo throwing out a guest who asks him for the wifi password.
Stanley Tucci provides a brilliant antidote to Shalhoub’s neurotic chef. He’s calculating, rational and pragmatic. He’ll have and ear for you as long as your idea is music for his ears. Appropriately, the director and the most famous soup in art history share the same name. I don’t think his main protagonist would ever use it. Food is a powerful means of seduction. If you really want to wow someone like Isabella Rosellini, better go for a tiramisu. When it comes to food, the simple stuff tends to be the most difficult to pull off if it’s meant for someone complicated.
There are seven cardinal sins but there’s only one which I thoroughly enjoy: gluttony. I’m back at the gym and it feels good to finally sweat out all those excessive holiday calories. Carbs are not your friend, I keep telling myself. Treadmills are your friends. They know what’s good for you. No, a chest press has nothing to do with Oxford University Press but there must be a gym somewhere over there. No, kettlebells don’t grow in your garden, those are called bluebells. Don’t embarass yourself by exercising with bluebells, you’ll look as thick as a kettlebell. On a serious note, I don’t do intermittent fasting. It’s too fast for my taste.
I’m trying to change my habits and the fact that cheat days is every other day in my house. The increasing self-control gives me a mental and physical balance which is just what I needed because sometimes it feels I’m losing the plot and I don’t see anything when I look in the distance. It keeps me grounded and accomplished. That inner glutton needs a leash.
At least until the next visit to a diner where the only affordable thing is the complimentary cookie with your espresso. The good thing about those places is that the chef comes over to greet the guests. After all, with the money you’re bleeding into his cash register, he better show up. If he does, keep your fingers crossed it’s Massimo Bottura instead of Julian Slowik and just to be safe, pray for cheeseburgers on the menu.
