On Culinary Fashion: a Tale of Two St John’s: St John’s in Clerkenwell and the Oslo Court in St John’s Wood
Posted: 5th November 2018
I don’t eat out much anymore; frankly, I can’t afford to. To some extent I have lost the thrill I used to feel about picking up a menu and deciding what I’d like to eat. Other considerations tend to weigh in: such as the fact that I am invariably someone else’s guest, and if I am actually paying I need to be aware of just how much we can afford to spend. We eat pretty well at home and on the rare occasions we go out many things have changed, not least in the sparse presentation of food, the peculiar syntax of the menu, the nature and degree of seasoning and the surroundings: luxury is out, restaurants are often just bare boards and blank walls. There is a hell of a lot less ‘comfort’ than there was back in the old days.
I remember visiting Paul Bocuse in Lyon a few years back, probably around the time of the millennium. His restaurant was ‘plush’ to the degree of vulgarity. To get three stars then you needed pictures on the walls, carpets, good silver and tableware. Marco Pierre White was a case in point. When he was looking for his third Michelin Star he used to show me all the paintings he’d acquired that week: ‘Nicholas, show Giles my paintings!’ They were frightful things, but he thought they’d help.
To be honest, I wasn’t very concerned about Marco’s pictures or Bocuse’s ringard interiors, I had come to eat. Bocuse’s waiters laid out various things that had justifiably brought him fame since the sixties and I ate, with gusto. I had truffle soup and sea bass with potato scales, and lots, lots more, and my host sat before me with his arms folded across his chest and his big chef’s hat on the top of his head. When he took it off, he was about a foot shorter. It was one of the most delicious meals I’d ever had. And yet, in culinary terms it was all well out of fashion, even then.
