Tasting notes
Top restaurateur Russell Norman gives you all the insider’s tips on how to avoid a menu for disaster
Restaurants can be minefields of misunderstandings and misconceptions. Here, then, is The Oldie’s guide to the five most common restaurant myths – and whether they’re true or not.
1. Never order fish on a Monday The thinking is sound: most commercial fishing boats sail on weekdays only and take the weekends off. Therefore, if you order fish in a restaurant on a Monday, the latest it would have been caught, in normal circumstances, is very early on Friday morning. That’s around 84 hours dead, if you order your halibut at 7 o’clock on a Monday evening. But modern refrigeration is excellent. Additionally, some independent fishermen might fish over the weekend. North Atlantic cod and West African tiger prawns, for example, are frozen at sea. And much of our domestic shellfish, such as south-coast clams and Cornish lobster, is usually alive in the kitchen’s large walk-in fridges, just waiting for you to order them. VERDICT Partly true – so it’s always best to ask how fresh the fish is.
2. The second-cheapest wine on the list is the poorest value The massive overheads involved in any restaurant mean that, if the place is doing very well, it will bank about 7p of profit for every £1 taken. So that £30 bottle of Mâcon-villages will net the owner a paltry £2.10. A good restaurateur must find other ways to improve numbers – and one of them is by playing to natural human psychology. We instinctively don’t want to appear cheap – so we often skip the house wine and opt for the second cheapest. The margins on this wine will be particularly good for the restaurant but not so great for you in terms of value. It makes much more sense to go further up the list and choose a wine above £35 or £40. The margins will be smaller and the wine will be much better in quality and value. Or stick to the house wine (always very carefully sourced by the restaurateur or sommelier, in my experience), or bring something excellent from your own collection and pay corkage. VERDICT True – avoid the secondcheapest wine and splash out on something decent.
3. The ‘special of the day’ is just something the chef is trying to get rid of This one troubles me. The assumption, often from more cynical punters, is that the restaurant’s default setting is one of trying to rip customers off. In 30 years of working in London restaurants, I have never experienced this. I have never witnessed a chef making a daily special with leftovers. I have never come across a kitchen putting on cheap cuts at inflated prices. If anything, the opposite is true. The chef may have been unable to resist a last-minute offer of new-season English asparagus from the greengrocer, or been delighted by some diver-caught scallops at the fishmonger. This is what makes it to the specials board. Chefs like to show off, and their default setting is loving good produce and making good food.
VERDICT False – if anything, take my advice and make a point of always ordering the special.
4. Drinking spirits with oysters makes you ill I used to manage a restaurant in Soho with a very popular cocktail bar in the basement. We also served oysters. Occasionally I would receive letters of complaint from people who got ill. They would blame it on the oysters. My due diligence involved checking the itemised bills of the complainants. They were all remarkably similar: several rounds of cocktails, Champagne, a few bottles of wine and a couple of rounds of brandy, followed by more post-prandials in the cocktail bar. But they always blamed the oysters! VERDICT False – drinking enough booze to kill a small horse makes you ill.
5. You can send back the wine if you don’t like it One of the rituals of dining out is ordering the wine. We check the label and vintage, we watch the sommelier open the bottle, and then we try a little before nodding our approval. The reason we do this is to make sure that the wine is still in good condition. Occasionally it may have reacted with the cork and turned musty and acrid, or oxidised to become flat and sherry-like. In these circumstances, the sommelier will replace it. If, however, you don’t like it, it’s rather too late. You see, the choosing part – the selection according to region, preference and grape variety – was done when you named the wine or pointed to it on the list. The sommelier may show leniency and decide to take your perfectly good wine away and sell it by the glass, but I’m afraid, once the bottle is open, if it’s in good condition, it’s yours, and you shouldn’t be sending it back because you simply ‘don’t like it’. VERDICT False – so choose carefully.