Why this extended piece; and why now?
Well, it’s partly been prompted by having just finished watching the whole 2023 edition of Master Chef: The Professionals. In this — their last week — the 3 remaining finalists went to eat with (& cook for) Danish cook Rasmus Munk at his The Alchemist restaurant, located in a cavernous, old red-brick warehouse, right in the middle of the former industrial docklands area of Copenhagen (how “edgy”, how “daring”, how “street”, eh darlings?).
NOTE: and more than a little ironically, they seem to have gobbled up the space that used to be where the restaurant Ammas was located. Which is very sad, if predictable, as this one, run by Matt Orlando really WAS about sustainability, about re-use, recycling and the whole nine yards of doing right by people and planet. They walked the walk that Munk merely talks. Case in point: Orlando worked with outside analysts to assess Amass’s carbon footprint and then made changes to the menu & the restaurant working practices based on reducing the bad numbers.
After sitting through that whole TV hour, with Egg & Monica & Wareing waxing insanely lyrical and heart-throbby fan-boy about the place and the food, my view of Munk — one albeit that was never high but that he was merely just another white, male big dick type — had headed downhill at speed and rapidly solidified into the total conviction that he’s guilty of doing the exact equivalent to food and the food eating industry as what Val earlier described being done to fine art.
His is simply called Dining Bollocks. Just read his pretentious word-salad “Holistic Cuisine Manifesto”…
…which, like some sub-Hirstian Shoreditch-trendy gallery-owner apologist, some protein-Emmins’ clone, attempts to pretend that he’s not simply just yet another chancer, out to separate the gullible from their money.
This particular emperor of the pans is definitely naked however.
Owned by — alongside yet another Copenhagen based, Michelin-starred place, Geranium — multi-millionaire rich-kid “I can buy anything I want to spoil myself”*, Lars Seier Christensen. And his latest idea of what to to invest in? Blockchain. Yeah. Right. So, just another grifting Musk-wannabee.
* he is quoted as adding Cafe Dan Turell to his ‘portfolio’, “as it was his favourite hang-out in his youth.” Because he can, you know?…
Is the whole obscenely rich circus of the Michelin-stars juggernaut, in reality, just a complete plague on the food industry? Munk would disagree, (of course he would, Mandy Rice-Davies applies here) and he claims — via some vague hand waving — to be “sustainable”, “innovative”, “iconoclastic” whilst “making the guests think about things deeply”. Frankly, that’s bollocks. Complete, utter bollocks. He charges (inc. the drinks, whether wine paired or not) thousands per head. That torrent of money doesn’t go to support environmental projects or social or community actions in his local area.
The people paying these bills aren’t going there to be “sustainable”, they don’t come away — a generalisation possibly there are one or two who might have after their 45 courses “impressions” (“impressions” eh? Uh huh, pretentious, moi?) — been changed, transmuted somehow by this religious experience into caring deeply about doing something to reverse global warming, micro-plastics, over-fishing, food waste, more and more refugees caused by land loss, crop failures and drought. No, they go to pay a small fortune to eat; to be seen to be able to afford such conspicuous consumption.
Burn it down, burn it all down. Today. “It’s the only way to be sure.” 1
I also recently finished reading “Raised By Wolves” and Jess Ho’s writing helped inform my thinking for this post. It’s a tough read in places. Descriptions of abuse (notably by their mother) and in their personal and work life — both sexual and psychological — alternates with frankly laugh-out-loud funny and very, very smart writing about the food business. And they’ve worked it all. Born of Cantonese Australian immigrants their love of food is centred here — along with their laser-like focus and diamond hard prose — on the realities of the punishing physical demands (“work though the pain”), cultural blindness on the part of fellow workers (“Chink woman”) and extreme “recreational behaviour”.
Highly recommended; it’s quite a short book and I read it almost in one sitting, only going back to re-read the couple of chapters where they described the death by suicide of their close male friend. The writing is both movingly eloquent yet almost matter-of-factly analytical.
I wanted to quote the final paragraph — in full — from their book as it perfectly sums up where I am in terms of “dining” (absent, obviously in my case, the industry insider stuff they’d been privy to). The whole Michelin or S Pelligrino “World’s 50 Best Restaurants Awards”, thing is a barrier; it’s another false border. Another “us” v. “them” dichotomy. It needs to be removed, along with all the other awards.
“Mr Michelin Man, tear down this wall.“
Food should be democratising; community building. It needs to be inclusive, not rarified, to be easily available to all, not impossibly aspirational, always quotidian, never unreachable.
Think canteen not cathedral…
“I love this. This is exactly the experience I am chasing. I’ve done fine dining to death. I’ve had access to the most inaccessible experiences, met industry legends who I used to idolise, side-stepped lotteries for exclusive meals, but this is how I like to dine. I don’t need the smoke and mirrors. In fact, I don’t want them. I don’t need flashy service in architectural rooms, a view, or carefully curated playlists. I don’t need perfectly temperature-controlled spaces, open kitchens or toilets with designer soaps. I don’t need a unicorn-studded wine list or house cocktails made from distillates that can’t be categorised. I don’t need a reinvention, reinterpretation, refining or deconstruction of a dish that is perfect enough as it is. I don’t need food trends, caviar, blown-out livers or truffles from Alba. I don’t need plates made by the chef on their day off, bespoke cutlery or a neon sign. I don’t want an elevator pitch or a brand identity; I just want some really fucking good food. Thirty years later, I am still sitting next to the fish tank around a lazy Susan, getting sassed by waiters in my first language, having my bowl filled with herbal soups, roasted birds, tofu and seafood. Only now, I’m stable, content and safe. I’m with the family I’ve chosen – the ones who have brought me back home.”
Jess Ho 2023
And a couple of final notes; here’s some marvellously executed hams, by Eric Ravilious
And finally, a fascinating long-form investigation into why and how crisps have different flavours, for different markets across the world
‘How do you reduce a national dish to a powder?’: the weird, secretive world of crisp flavours… © Guardian 2023
And finally, finally, as a reminder of how we really don’t like this whole Christmas thing…
1 Let’s remember that Alien so excellently showed our inhumanity when faced with ‘others’ who are simply trying to survive. That they came from outer space isn’t the point; we’ll merely export our war-like methods with us if and when we go off-world, it would seem.