AA Gill - Table Talk
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13 Jan 2008, 16:15
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Journals
Been waiting for what seems like an eternity for the Table Talk column to come back to its rightful heir, AA Gill, after like three weeks of mediocrity. Thought it was a good column this week after reading it in the Style magazine this morning. Enjoy!
"At Last I’ve Found a Diet That Works, explained Some Columnist in some paper last week. It was such a moving story, I had to pass it on. Obviously, “Some” isn’t her real name. Apparently, she went to some shop that was called something else, too. Not Something Else 2, though that’s not a bad name for a shop, and better than Selfridges, which is what it might have been called. She went with her husband, who was Someone Else Again, and wanted to buy her a frock for Christmas, or possibly just to shut the whining lard-arse up. She found just the thing, but ran out of the changing room in floods of tears because she couldn’t get into a size 14.
Some was a grown-up. We know this because she had Someone Else as a husband and a column in some paper. She cried proper, public tears onto a label. There followed a long and breathless saga about Some Diet, which meant that, in the January sales, she could take some of Someone Else’s money and buy herself some designer schmutter, made by Who Flung Some, the size-four Chinese machinist. Some was somewhat jollier – and, just to prove how jolly, she’s already put on half a stone. So, happy endings all round. Or, all round endings happy.
What struck me as particularly poignant about this modern odyssey is that it was the clothes that Some felt she’d let down. It was the waistband that she cried for. There was no sense of sprawling, dimpled, adipose guilt for her husband, as her fatted, sweaty bulk schlepped across the marital bed, extinguishing all thoughts of carnality. There was no hint of guilt or regret, certainly not enough to engender action, until it was the jeans that refused to go near her crotch.
How ridiculously pitiful and dysfunctional all this is, how utterly pathetic, how self-pitying and snivellingly vain it is to try to impress your trouser suits, how deeply predictable. Every year, my first and most fervent resolution is: I’m never, ever going to write about diets again. But, by the first week of January, I’m incandescent at some piece of self-serving gastro-crap, or some fat, balding pseudo-therapist bloke saying that all diets fail, and what you really need is a jolly good seeing to from a fat, bald therapist.
So, here is my broken resolution, and a final word on size and food. Pay attention. All diets work. When I taught cooking, people used to say that recipes didn’t work. Well, all recipes work, if you know how to cook. The Kama Sutra works, if you know how to shag. It’s not diets that fail, it’s you, you miserable, spineless, sticky-fingered fridge magnet. All diets come down to the same sentence: more in than out, you get fat; more out than in, you get thin. It’s not rocket science, it’s bicycle science.
And it’s not genetic. Your embarrassing, waddling mother didn’t pass on blubber, just bovine behaviour. And alcohol. Drink puts on pounds. It’s all sugar. The rises in drinking and size are not unrelated, and if you don’t get drunk, you won’t eat the scratchings, the kebabs, the Mars bar and the three footballers. If you really can’t manage on your own, then the best aid to weight loss is the support of friends. Ask yours to point and laugh at you and call you names in public. They should hold a doughnut in front of your face on a string as you walk down the street.
If you want to help the NHS, save taxes and make the country a happier, healthier place, then mock fat strangers in public, in lifts, on buses and in restaurants. One last thing – you might have noticed that the people who care most about their size are the ones whose size is actually the least of it. I looked at the before and after pictures of Some. Frankly, a stone each way wasn’t going to fix it.
Walk through the Dorchester and you’re confronted with a corridor of vast people eating cream teas, their dimpled fingers reaching for more cake. I think they start selling cream teas here at about eight in the morning. These are nearly all people for whom heart-stopping girth is said to be cultural, so it doesn’t count. They’re size 14 on the inside.
There’s a new restaurant here, to go with the ridiculous Brigadoon pastiche over the way. It’s called Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester, because Alain Ducasse isn’t at the Dorchester. Ducasse is the most Michelin-starred of any chef ever. If he ate all of his stars, he’d crap meteorites. The dining room has multiple girls who hand you from one to another, as if you were fragile, or a cretin.
Inside, the room has been decorated with no expense spared. I know this because the interior screams, “No expense was spared here, mate!” It’s the sort of good taste that only money can buy. In the middle of the room, there’s what looks like a circular lavatory, made from the sort of crystal curtains that massage parlours used to have. Within is the private table where they can hide people too fat and hideous to be seen eating in public.
The Blonde and I took a Tracey and the new editor of this column, Camilla. The menu’s novelty is that it’s written in English, then translated into French, presumably to be culturally droll (culturellement drôle). The food is effortful French bijou objects (objets bijoux), made of ingredients whose foremost quality is their expense and rarity. They are then tortured into little piles that resemble deconstructed Fabergé eggs with worrying froth. The flavours are pastel-pale, and reach your palate with an aristocratic ennui (ennui), each mouthful expiring on your tongue like an exhausted haemophiliac. It’s clever and fiddly, as tepid as a royal handshake and as utterly forgettable as dabs of diplomatic small talk. There are the usual interruptions of small samples of things you haven’t ordered, or even considered, and couldn’t invent. The waiters have accents so thickly frogged that they sound comic and indecipherable, but they do offer you the one intense pleasure of the place when they ask: “What would you like?” You can look at your watch and say half past one, and see how they like it.
Altogether, lunch took an unconscionable two hours, but that’s by the by. The point of this gaffe is the bill. For four of us – one person only had two courses – with a bottle of £40 wine chosen by the snail-mouthed sommelier, it came to 435 of your English pounds, including £48 for service. That’s sickening. The fixed price for three courses is £75, with a £10 supplement for a snivel of black truffle. I have always said that value depends on what you start off with, but I’ve changed my mind. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, this place would deafen you with the tearing sound of being ripped off.
And I’ve got a new definition of value and worth and hospitality: if the main course costs more than the waiter who serves it makes in a shift, then I don’t want to eat it, or support the restaurant that tries to get away with it. That sort of radical divergence of society – the sort of envy and resentment that it encourages – is immoral, and bad for a city and for everyone who lives in it. And if that doesn’t spoil your appetite, then nothing short of the chef pissing in your soup will.
As I looked round, I realised that nobody in this room was actually paying for their food: it was all on expenses. And, ultimately, all expense accounts are paid for by people who use goods and services. I hope it’s scant joy for you to know that, although you will never eat, nor be able to afford to eat, at Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester, you are still able to pay for those who do."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/a_a_gill/article3150287.ece
"At Last I’ve Found a Diet That Works, explained Some Columnist in some paper last week. It was such a moving story, I had to pass it on. Obviously, “Some” isn’t her real name. Apparently, she went to some shop that was called something else, too. Not Something Else 2, though that’s not a bad name for a shop, and better than Selfridges, which is what it might have been called. She went with her husband, who was Someone Else Again, and wanted to buy her a frock for Christmas, or possibly just to shut the whining lard-arse up. She found just the thing, but ran out of the changing room in floods of tears because she couldn’t get into a size 14.
Some was a grown-up. We know this because she had Someone Else as a husband and a column in some paper. She cried proper, public tears onto a label. There followed a long and breathless saga about Some Diet, which meant that, in the January sales, she could take some of Someone Else’s money and buy herself some designer schmutter, made by Who Flung Some, the size-four Chinese machinist. Some was somewhat jollier – and, just to prove how jolly, she’s already put on half a stone. So, happy endings all round. Or, all round endings happy.
What struck me as particularly poignant about this modern odyssey is that it was the clothes that Some felt she’d let down. It was the waistband that she cried for. There was no sense of sprawling, dimpled, adipose guilt for her husband, as her fatted, sweaty bulk schlepped across the marital bed, extinguishing all thoughts of carnality. There was no hint of guilt or regret, certainly not enough to engender action, until it was the jeans that refused to go near her crotch.
How ridiculously pitiful and dysfunctional all this is, how utterly pathetic, how self-pitying and snivellingly vain it is to try to impress your trouser suits, how deeply predictable. Every year, my first and most fervent resolution is: I’m never, ever going to write about diets again. But, by the first week of January, I’m incandescent at some piece of self-serving gastro-crap, or some fat, balding pseudo-therapist bloke saying that all diets fail, and what you really need is a jolly good seeing to from a fat, bald therapist.
So, here is my broken resolution, and a final word on size and food. Pay attention. All diets work. When I taught cooking, people used to say that recipes didn’t work. Well, all recipes work, if you know how to cook. The Kama Sutra works, if you know how to shag. It’s not diets that fail, it’s you, you miserable, spineless, sticky-fingered fridge magnet. All diets come down to the same sentence: more in than out, you get fat; more out than in, you get thin. It’s not rocket science, it’s bicycle science.
And it’s not genetic. Your embarrassing, waddling mother didn’t pass on blubber, just bovine behaviour. And alcohol. Drink puts on pounds. It’s all sugar. The rises in drinking and size are not unrelated, and if you don’t get drunk, you won’t eat the scratchings, the kebabs, the Mars bar and the three footballers. If you really can’t manage on your own, then the best aid to weight loss is the support of friends. Ask yours to point and laugh at you and call you names in public. They should hold a doughnut in front of your face on a string as you walk down the street.
If you want to help the NHS, save taxes and make the country a happier, healthier place, then mock fat strangers in public, in lifts, on buses and in restaurants. One last thing – you might have noticed that the people who care most about their size are the ones whose size is actually the least of it. I looked at the before and after pictures of Some. Frankly, a stone each way wasn’t going to fix it.
Walk through the Dorchester and you’re confronted with a corridor of vast people eating cream teas, their dimpled fingers reaching for more cake. I think they start selling cream teas here at about eight in the morning. These are nearly all people for whom heart-stopping girth is said to be cultural, so it doesn’t count. They’re size 14 on the inside.
There’s a new restaurant here, to go with the ridiculous Brigadoon pastiche over the way. It’s called Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester, because Alain Ducasse isn’t at the Dorchester. Ducasse is the most Michelin-starred of any chef ever. If he ate all of his stars, he’d crap meteorites. The dining room has multiple girls who hand you from one to another, as if you were fragile, or a cretin.
Inside, the room has been decorated with no expense spared. I know this because the interior screams, “No expense was spared here, mate!” It’s the sort of good taste that only money can buy. In the middle of the room, there’s what looks like a circular lavatory, made from the sort of crystal curtains that massage parlours used to have. Within is the private table where they can hide people too fat and hideous to be seen eating in public.
The Blonde and I took a Tracey and the new editor of this column, Camilla. The menu’s novelty is that it’s written in English, then translated into French, presumably to be culturally droll (culturellement drôle). The food is effortful French bijou objects (objets bijoux), made of ingredients whose foremost quality is their expense and rarity. They are then tortured into little piles that resemble deconstructed Fabergé eggs with worrying froth. The flavours are pastel-pale, and reach your palate with an aristocratic ennui (ennui), each mouthful expiring on your tongue like an exhausted haemophiliac. It’s clever and fiddly, as tepid as a royal handshake and as utterly forgettable as dabs of diplomatic small talk. There are the usual interruptions of small samples of things you haven’t ordered, or even considered, and couldn’t invent. The waiters have accents so thickly frogged that they sound comic and indecipherable, but they do offer you the one intense pleasure of the place when they ask: “What would you like?” You can look at your watch and say half past one, and see how they like it.
Altogether, lunch took an unconscionable two hours, but that’s by the by. The point of this gaffe is the bill. For four of us – one person only had two courses – with a bottle of £40 wine chosen by the snail-mouthed sommelier, it came to 435 of your English pounds, including £48 for service. That’s sickening. The fixed price for three courses is £75, with a £10 supplement for a snivel of black truffle. I have always said that value depends on what you start off with, but I’ve changed my mind. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, this place would deafen you with the tearing sound of being ripped off.
And I’ve got a new definition of value and worth and hospitality: if the main course costs more than the waiter who serves it makes in a shift, then I don’t want to eat it, or support the restaurant that tries to get away with it. That sort of radical divergence of society – the sort of envy and resentment that it encourages – is immoral, and bad for a city and for everyone who lives in it. And if that doesn’t spoil your appetite, then nothing short of the chef pissing in your soup will.
As I looked round, I realised that nobody in this room was actually paying for their food: it was all on expenses. And, ultimately, all expense accounts are paid for by people who use goods and services. I hope it’s scant joy for you to know that, although you will never eat, nor be able to afford to eat, at Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester, you are still able to pay for those who do."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/a_a_gill/article3150287.ece
totally agree