It’s good to love food, bad to be an ethical hipster
Hipster is the sort of word that summons up images of middleaged men in dark glasses who listen to John Coltrane, even when nobody is looking. When it appears in the same sentence as “chef ” and “Brighton” there are likely to be tears before bedtime, and this week the blubbing could be heard far beyond the lanes of that preening coastal city.
For there is, wouldn’t you know it, a hipster chef in Brighton (three cherries!) who thinks the place is beneath his dignity. Douglas Mcmaster is his name, and he’s in quite a bate. “I want to serve crazy dishes that are fit for the world’s 50 best restaurants”, he told a catering magazine. “Brighton is not the town for such a forwardthinking restaurant.” Boo hoo.
Perhaps he should take his hat to Hove, a much more agreeable place. Or perhaps he should reflect on his extraordinary desire to establish “the most ethical restaurant in the world” and remember something that Bertholt Brecht said, possibly the only sensible thing to pass that man’s lips: “Grub first, then ethics.”
What is it about chefs and world domination? Once upon a time they were happy enough to chop away in the kitchen, and take the praise that came their way if they were lucky. Now we have a generation of culinary artists who expect to see their names in lights before they are 30.
Not surprisingly, the folk of Brighton have been swift to return fire on the onion-slicing malcontent. Not everybody in that self-consciously diverse city is quite so keen on ethical sourcing and treatment of waste as Mcmaster. They have a point. When the restaurant opened two years ago diners were expected to drink out of jam jars! Even in Brighton that was considered a bit pretentious.
The criticism, says the artichokepeeler, has been “cruel, unfair and unjust”. But he has rowed back a bit, claiming that Brighton is the best place in England to wage this cultural war. And a war it is, to be fought until the last diner is impaled upon a corkscrew – ethically of course.
Was this food tribalism what Elizabeth David had in mind when she wrote those books after the war that changed forever our attitudes to food and cooking? Did the Roux brothers, who trained a school of superb chefs, imagine their love and skill would lead to such fanaticism?
It is good to love eating, and eating well. It is unhealthy to be obsessive.
When I was growing up in Bolton there was a technical college where students learned many useful, practical things. There is now a “university”, which has just been ranked 125th out of 129 in a reputable guide to the country’s institutions of higher learning. The vice-chancellor, Professor George Holmes, takes home £222,120, which will buy him an awful lot of meat pies.
When he is not driving his Bentley, or sailing his yacht, Prof Holmes travels the world, to persuade young men and women to come to Bolton where the courses include Community Development and Youth Work (the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides used to do that pretty well), Games Design, Strength and Conditioning, and Retail Business Management (adding up, in plain English). Advanced Tripe Theory cannot be far away.
“More will mean worse,” Kingsley Amis said in 1961. Too bloody right. If you want to know what is wrong with the wretched expansion of English education, and the so-called benefits it bestows upon the educated, the words “University of Bolton” will take you halfway there.
However, should you want to know what is right about English education, take a peep at the new book about Michael Kidson, the history teacher at Eton, who died two years ago. “I wasn’t quite dim enough to be up to him,” an Etonian pal told me, waspishly, “but he had quite a following.” Other pupils tell a different tale, queueing up to praise a natural educator.
His methods were unusual, which is often the way with teachers who change lives. Kidson clearly had a feeling for, and an understanding of, those boys who didn’t fit in. But there was no cotton wool approach to these teenagers, no “feeling your pain”. He didn’t talk down to them. Instead he challenged their intellect and raised their spirit, which helped prepare them for the world beyond those gilded cloisters.
Alex Renton, who left Eton after his O-levels, has just written another, less flattering, book about the other side of public school life, and that is worth reading too. But the Kidsons of this world are the ones who warrant our consideration. Sadly, only public schools seem able, or willing, to let them loose.
The Duke of Edinburgh concluded a lifetime of public service last week in the appropriate manner. As the Captain General of the Royal Marines, he saluted two soldiers who had completed the 1664 Challenge by running 1,664 miles for charity. At least he would have called them soldiers, or men. Lt-col Gary Green, their commanding officer, called them “guys”.
Joe Root, the captain of England’s cricket team, was also at it before the Test match at Old Trafford. Wash your mouth out, skipper. Soldiers are men or, in this context, “chaps”, an English term of affection. Cricketers are chaps too, or “lads”, or, better still, “boys”. If Prince Philip, a distinguished naval officer in his youth, had ever let slip the word “guys” on or off duty he might have been up before the Admiral of the Fleet on a charge. “Guys” indeed!