The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Table talk
Our critic reveals the real reason we order egg and chips abroad
Michael Deacon at Manchester’s Tast Cuina Catalana
EVERY LANGUAGE HAS at least one sound that is a nightmare for outsiders to pronounce. The Japanese, for example, struggle with our ‘l’ sound. But we, equally, struggle with their ‘fu’ sound. Pronounced correctly, it’s somewhere between ‘fooh’ and ‘hooh’ – like the sound you might make blowing a small feather off the palm of your hand.
Not that I can do it. I’m hopeless at accents. At school I used to get marked down for speaking French with an English accent. Funnily enough, our French classroom assistant, who was from Paris, spoke English with a French accent. Pointing this out did not earn me my marks back.
I wish I could do accents, though, if only so I didn’t feel so awkward in foreign restaurants. I always get nervous ordering anything with an unfamiliar name – especially if the waiter comes from the same country as the food. I worry that if I mispronounce it he’ll feel insulted. Typical ignorant British pig! he’ll snort to himself. We are all made to learn their language! Yet they are too lazy to learn anyone else’s!
Maybe that’s why some British people in foreign restaurants end up ordering egg and chips. It’s not that they have unadventurous tastes. They’re just scared of offending the waiter. Although of course by ordering egg and chips they’re offending him far more.
There’s one language I struggle with above all others, though, and that’s Spanish. All those endlessly trilling
‘r’s. God knows how Spanish people do it. They must have phenomenally strong tongues. Maybe they exercise them with tiny dumbbells.
This week’s restaurant is Catalan, but my waitress was from Madrid. She made ‘Madrid’ sound as if it was spelt with at least 46 ‘r’s. In desperation I scanned the wine list for a drink with no ‘r’ in it. There was none. Blushing pathetically, I attempted to order a glass of Idoia Negre. Oh, the stammering. The gulping. The clammy-palmed bashfulness. If Richard Curtis had been passing he’d have cast me in a romcom on the spot.
‘You say it just right!’ beamed the waitress encouragingly, in the manner of a teacher congratulating a small child on holding a crayon the correct way up. ‘One glass Idoia Negre!’ The way she pronounced Idoia Negre, of course, was completely different from the way I had. Still, it was very kind of her to pretend otherwise. I left a tip of £20. There’s money to be made, coddling the British ego.
Tast Cuina Catalana – which roughly translates as ‘A Taste from the Catalan Kitchen’ – opened this summer in Manchester. Among its investors is Pep Guardiola, the Catalan manager of Manchester City, and the menu is overseen by Paco Pérez, a Catalan chef with five Michelin stars.
The food is divided between tramuntanades (‘small bites’), tastets (a bit bigger than a small bite), and a few larger dishes. From the tramuntanades I chose the mysteriously punctuated duck’in donut: a combination of duck liver, chocolate and raspberry. Sounded revolting, but somehow it was terrific. Bizarre. My brain felt like a bewildered dog, chasing its own tail and barking madly.
After a slice of coca bread the size of an ironing board, my first tastet was the ou d’ànec, xipirons i salsa tàrtar. It was spectacular. Salty baby squid, potatoes fried so thin they were practically crisps, and the slowly oozing yolk of a duck egg. Next, the anxoves i escalivada: anchovies, served in a dish shaped like an anchovy. Scattered on top were anchovy skeletons: boiled until soft enough to eat. They tasted brittle, crackly, insect-like. It made me feel like a contestant on I’m a Celebrity…
For some reason the restaurant also does bao, which isn’t remotely Catalan. But I love bao – a Chinese dish that tastes like a cross between a burger and a cloud – so I had to try it. The bao itself wasn’t as perfectly, plumply pillow-like as the ones at, say, Daddy Bao in London. The wagyu brisket filling was wet and stewy.
My main was the arròs de bosc i vaca vella: a tin tray of rice, big chubby grains of it, plus plump padron peppers and boletus mushrooms, with little squares of beef sirloin lying on top. The beef was tremendous. And the rice was beautifully soft without going all gluey: you could taste every grain.
Pudding was xuixo de crema i xocolata. I didn’t dare try pronouncing it. I just pointed at the words on the menu. ‘Shoo-shoo,’ said the waitress. I assume she was demonstrating how to say ‘xuixo’, rather than telling me to go away. Anyway, it was great. The xuixo itself was crisp and sugary, like a doughnut but the shape of a fat cigar, and filled with custardy goo. Glistening beneath it was a slick of thick, dark, practically black chocolate. It looked like tarmac melting on a hot day.
It’s good, Tast. Although maybe I’d feel more confident next time if I brushed up on my pronunciation first. The Duolingo app claims that I can learn Catalan ‘in just five minutes a day’. Doesn’t seem to say for how many days, though. Given my talent for languages, I should probably be ready to visit Tast again sometime around my 900th birthday.
I chose duck’in donut: duck liver, chocolate and raspberry. Sounded revolting, but it was terrific