Words

Glamorous night of restaurant awards - 900 guests, mood lighting, mirror balls, black table cloths, glinting glassware, ice-buckets heaving with beer, butter in pretty shapes,  spilt wine, extremely high heels and delicious décolletés.
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Our food was uniformly excellent (900 guests!) with all pregnancies, allergies, glutards and possible phobias carefully attended to. It all worked. How do they do it?
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That said, they must employ a bard of Shakespearian  virtuosity to write the menu. Our main course was a treasury, a plethora, a cornucopia, an abundance, a superfluity, a profusion, a torrent, a deluge, a surfeit of words, words, words.

"Herb-crusted lamb rack with pulled shoulder, skordalia, caramelised beetroot compôte, garlic-fried beans, pumpkin crisps and pinot jus."  (What about  salt and pepper? Which herbs? It could have been even longer!)

​Why do they do this?

All joking aside, I must say the dish was delicious and to use a cliché, cooked to perfection.  

​The hero, a small rack of lamb, was tender, and nicely pink inside, the pulled shoulder  an interesting contrast of texture.  The skordalia, (posh mashed potato with a hint of garlic) was a perfect foil for the beetroot in both flavour, texture and colour. The beans ensured we got our quota of greens as well as a verdant (posh word for green) component. The crisp pumpkin shavings gave a nice crunch. The whole dish was held together by a jus (posh for gravy) of balanced acidity and abundance.

It's a given surely that vegetarians will announce themselves beforehand, as will those allergic to say, seafood, gluten or peanuts.  How much do you need to know?

• ​Are we so afraid of food, we need to know every element on the plate in case we're slipped a stray roasted rutabaga, marijuana bud or devilled kidney?
• Is it to make it seem very, very, special?  No need.  It was delicious.
• Is it exalting the work of the chef? No need.  It was delicious.
• Is perhaps a surprise out of the question?
• If you don't like beetroot, could you possibly just push it aside?
• Does having a shopping list for a  menu, remove the element of wonder and discovery?

I was at one of the legendary dinners of the Symposium on Australian Gastronomy (1993) in Canberra where the menu was a simple list of words.

Eggs
​Flesh
​Bones
Skin
Blood
Heart​
Milk
Fruit

They knew their audience. We sat with an open mind and generous spirit of adventure. It wasn't at all scary and was impeccably produced.  "Bones" referred to a rich consommé accompanied by roasted marrow bones, "Milk" naturally was the cheese course, "Fruit" a course where the table was piled with grapes. I think I remember rightly that "Skin" referred to Atlantic salmon topped with crispy strips of seared salmon skin.

Would it have been too terrifying a challenge for today's food phobics? Would there be a worrying loss of control, knowing so little?

I recently came across the dish below at a local eatery, very different from my lamb rack or the Symposium dinner. Once again it was delicious.  

On the menu, it was "Compost".  Now that's a challenge.  Was it a hard or an easy  sell for a bunch of roasted vegetables sitting on "charcoal brioche soil"?  

This reminds me. We did "soil", in 2010. We got the idea from a book. The dish was called "Terroir". Imagine beetroot and chocolate soil, topped with a goats' curd sorbet, spears of baby asparagus poking through a snow of sorrel granita, assorted freeze-dried berries, and micro herbs (of course).  We thought we were pushing boundaries. You have to be able to laugh at yourself.

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