IN THE MID-1980s, an author named Peter Mayle published a book called A Year in Provence and it became a bestseller. Some ungracious literary commentators accused him of plagiarism, comparing his book to another published in the 1930s called Perfume from Provence written by a woman with the rather unlikely-sounding name of Lady Fortescue.
In both cases the book related the story of a married couple moving from Britain to live in Provence and having first of all to alter and furnish a somewhat dilapidated house. But there the similarity ends. Beyond that, the two books could be describing different planets. Nowhere is this more marked than in their references to food. Peter Mayle revels in it, wallows in it, and delights in it. Lady Fortescue treats the French food rather like she does her Fiat car: it’s a pity to have to patronise this vulgar foreign stuff, but unfortunately the British one will not get up the hills. How distasteful that someone should have put those hills there and upset the sensibilities of her Morris motor car in such a coarse and uncharitable way.
With food, Lady Fortescue finds it necessary to explain to her audience what a courgette is, and her target audience will have been people of money and confidence; she delays a visit to a wedding party in case she is required to eat something containing garlic; and she finds it so very pathetically rustic that the wedding celebration cake is what every office junior in Chelmsford would now recognise as profiteroles, instead of the proper English fruit cake.
But Lady Fortescue was writing in the 1930s. She, like Peter Mayle, was selling a dream. What has changed, in the intervening fifty-odd years, is the dream.
By the late 1990s, everyone in Britain knew what a courgette is, didn’t they?. Everyone, like Peter Mayle, dreams of savouring the finest extra virgin olive oil tasting like liquid sunshine, don’t they? Do they? British tastes in food have been changing dramatically over those fifty years, and this change has been most rapid during the last five or ten of the century, but this has not been consistent throughout the country and it was by no means completed in the 1990s, may not be even yet.
We were most surprised, coming as we did from urbane and cosmopolitan Cambridge and London, how often it would happen that we would serve a dish of courgettes as a vegetable, someone at the table would say to their companions, “What are these?”, and one of the others present would reply, “Courgettes, I think – I don'’t like them”. And that would be that. Returned from the table, untouched.
Surely this could not be 1990’s Britain, this land of pizzas, vindaloos, and doner kebabs gone passé; this land where it is almost impossible to turn on the television and not find yourself watching a cookery demonstration, could it? Oh, yes it could. It was our greatest surprise, in finding ourselves in the catering business, to see the need that a large proportion of the British population seemed to have, to let nothing pass their lips but what their mother fed them.
This phenomenon gives the food-provider a essential problem, because whatever level of detail the books on marketing or management of a business go into, there is one thing so obvious that the experts do not feel the need to point it out, even to the greenest novice. It is that if you want to succeed in business, you should not try to compete with somebody’s mother. This is straightforward, but when half the world both wants and expects that you will, naturally and as a matter of civilisation, present them with exactly that which their mother so expertly did, then you have a puzzle that there is no simple solution to – perhaps that is why the text books avoid it.
Or perhaps the writers of the do not know, because it may be a phenomenon specific to the business of food provision.
We soon learned how to make the archetypal rugby-playing macho male from the north of England go pale and impotent with fear and anger. It is quite simple: you offer to put garlic in his dinner. It is not that macho males from the north of England do not like garlic, indeed, given a hint of garlic in certain dishes they will admit to having enjoyed their meal immensely, provided however, and provided with absolute certainty, that they are not told about the garlic in advance. Mother never used garlic. It smells, she said.
At one time this would have been a relatively straightforward situation to accommodate. Not so long ago, being a mother was a much clearer job than it is now, including what you should feed to your offspring. The younger generation, too, would have had less opportunity to experiment outside of the family table. But the times are changing, and the difficulty is now that it is not always universally obvious what someone’s mother was moved to provide, nor whether the son or daughter of that mother thought she was a good cook or a terrible one.
Everyone, these days, is a minority. It is a prerogative of affluence. But to tell some people that they are in a world of others, different from themselves, in their own beloved county, could be a shock to their system. A plate of courgettes can do this, if you are not careful.
A television series shown in 1998 had amateur chefs filmed taking over professional kitchens for a day. In almost every case the self-appointed mission of the guest chef was to serve more ‘fresh ingredients’, to improve, in their eyes, the quality and authenticity of the fare on offer. One of the establishments chosen for this experiment was an Indian restaurant in Wilmslow, which allowed two women of Indian origin to have a go at the menu, involving an especially marked attempt at regional authenticity.
As with each programme in the series, the customers who were present for the experiment were interviewed at the end, for their views on the change.
“No.”, said a man in Wilmslow, a white Englishman with a local Cheshire accent, “I didn’t like it much. You see I’m not a great one for trying new things. I like traditional food. Vindaloos and that.”
Vindaloos! Surely his mother did not cook him vindaloos! And in any case, does he know what a vindaloo is? If he were presented with something and asked, “Is that a vindaloo?”, would he be able to identify it? Probably not. What he is asking for is that which is familiar to him. Late evenings in the curry shop with a few pints of lager have become as homely an experience as his mother’s bacon and egg. For some people. Not all, for sure, but an increasing number. And the upshot is the same as the need to stick my mother. Familiarity.
It is sometimes said that a chef is an artist. Chefs, indeed, do have a reputation for being temperamental and hard to control, but there is more to it than that. An artist, essentially, moves people on. Art is a difficult subject to try to define because there have been, over the centuries, a plethora of vested interests, each with their own version of a reason, often of the, ‘ah, it’s all in the soul’, variety, which means, essentially, I am bullshitting and please do not probe too deep.
My own belief is that art should be based upon a transaction between the producer and the recipient. The artist uses this intercourse to teach his or her audience something they had not thought of yet. The difference between an artist and, say, a carpet layer, both of whom undertake a transaction with their customer, is that the former is attempting to get the customer to perceive something in a different way, to put a new slant on their view of the subject, whereas the latter is, by and large, trying to lay a carpet. Even this becomes awkward, because in much late 20th century visual and oral arts, art has become self-indulgent, and it is the business of art itself, rather than an identifiable sensation such as an image or a sound, which is considered the key issue, with the resulting effect that many people take little interest, having considerably more good sense.
The chef, though, does not challenge the world’s perception of cheffing, he challenges people’s perception of food. So he will be, not a poseur, but a true artist.
In developing someone’s perception, you have to move them along gradually. To expect a person to switch suddenly from, say, a singular diet of roast meat and potatoes, to a plate of cauliflower baked with yoghurt and black olives (Midnight Cauliflower – a queen of a dish), would be too dramatic a change. They would not know how to enjoy it.
A creative chef can get someone who has always refused to eat a tomato, to taste one and say, “eee, that were grand!” It might seem unlikely, yet we have seen this happen over and over again. The artistic skill of the chef lies in presenting that tomato, or the equivalent, in a way that makes it appetising to the novice.
Of course, the tomato-shunner will be resistant. If you say to him, “How about a succulent sirloin steak tossed quickly in a herby sauce of ripe tomatoes and onion – steak pizzaiola, mmmm!”. This offer should be followed by a kiss of your thumb and forefinger and a flourish of the hand with eyes raised heavenward below entranced eyebrows. Give him a minute to savour the prospect.
“Just the steak, please, no sauce.” If the man’s wife is with him she will then speak for him, explaining that her husband cannot eat strong flavours, or spicy food, or sauces, or tomatoes, or something. Equally it may be the other way round, the woman refusing the taste and the husband doing the justifying. Then you are back into competing with mother, and the steak will be too ragged for his liking – he’ll have tasted better.
The skill of the true artist lies not only in presenting to someone that which they have not experienced before, it incorporates making them feel pleased with themselves when they do experience it. This is moving forward. This is true art.
Much of the difficulty for a restauranteur in this respect revolves around the concept of choice. Choice, we have been told, is what every self-respecting member of society should be entitled to as a matter of right. The period during which this was especially drilled into us was during the Thatcher years. On the face of it, this might seem surprising. Margaret Thatcher, whose reputation among other things was indisputably that of a controlling authoritarian, put choice as a key part of her public agenda, it would seem she wanted everyone to be given the freedom to choose to do whatever they wanted. But surely not. How does this fit with being an acknowledged autocrat?
In fact, entirely comfortably. A despotic government would want the people to have choice, because they know something that their subjects are not so aware of. They know that Choice is a reactionary goal. They know that given Choice, most people will choose that which they always choose. They will choose No Change. Autocratic governments are wary of artists, of course, for the reason that change might come about outside of their control.
One of the inspirations for our food policy as hoteliers came from our visits to Italy, where we stayed in agritourismi. An Italian agritourismo is in concept somewhat like a British bed and breakfast with evening meal, with the difference that, being Italy, there tends to be a much greater emphasis on the food. In Italian agritourismi we have eaten some of the finest dinners that we have tasted anywhere in the world, food that has loads of homely flavour, variation, interest and style, and very little in the way of choice. How would one know, on being presented with an option of a dish of lasagne, that the pride of the large-aproned lady in the kitchen is to produce sheets of pasta, so fine that you could read a newspaper through them? Choice is for losers.
A television programme showed the preparation for a grand dinner on the eve of the football World Cup in 1998, at which a famous British chef, Gordon Ramsay, was in charge. A couple of hundred dignitaries had paid what was reported to be £1000, more than a month’s pay for a large proportion of the population, for an evening meal. Choice of dishes did not seem to be something they received for their money. Nobody complained about this.
In our first year as hoteliers some carers from a local nursing home asked if they could book in for their Christmas dinner with their workmates – that annual horror that so many of us who work for an organisation are subjected to, and one of the best reasons for becoming self-employed.
In our previous incarnations as middle-class working people in the south east of England, we had to suffer a number of meals with work colleagues in the lead-up to Christmas. It was always a chore, and we had learned to be vegetarians for the day if possible, and so avoid the ubiquitous and mediocre turkey dinner, or alternatively we would ask the waitress for the watercress which usually decorated the turkey serving dish, a request which would be greeted with a look which indicated we were probably already drunk, but if granted meant that at least there was something to eat which had a little taste to it. Most people, though, chomped un-enthusiastically through the turkey.
The work group of carers who came to our door had heard we were a good place to go to eat. They called and asked if we could do their Christmas get-together, since most years they found themselves eating in a pub and this year they would like something a little more special. Yes, of course we could.
We thought it would be impressive to offer our carers’ group the option of something other than turkey and so give them the opportunity of saving that experience for Christmas day, so we presented them with a menu that included a pork dish, a beef dish, and a lamb dish as an alternative to the turkey with trimmings, each prepared in an out-of-the ordinary fashion to give the meal a festive feel. We made it clear, however, that, as was usual with these affairs, or at least it was usual in our in our urbane city experience, the whole group would be expected to have the same thing, that it was not practical to roast a turkey for just one person.
A few days later the organiser appeared at the door again with a big beaming grin. It was all decided: Geraldine would like lamb, Jill would like turkey, Margaret would like beef, Jean would like pork, each member of the group had ordered something different, and finally, “and Maureen will have gammon and pineapple”.
“Er, gammon and pineapple?”
“Yes”, with a big confident grin.
“I don’t recall putting that on the menu I gave you.”
“No, I know, but when Maureen goes out to eat, she only ever has gammon and pineapple. That's all she ever eats, you see, when she goes out to eat.”
We decided to tell them that, once again this year, it was going to be the pub for their annual do. They went away thinking we were pretty pathetic.
“Well, the problem is you see, Geraldine can’t eat turkey, and Jean can’t eat beef, and Jill will eat pork or beef, but her husband can’t eat turkey so its the only chance she gets of a Christmas dinner, and . . .’
Shortly after that
we had the Farmer’s Wives in for dinner and exactly the same thing happened, mercifully without the gammon and pineapple dietary requirement, though in this case we had an ally in the organiser of the event, a recent immigrant from urbane and wealthy Surrey. With some relief we let her deal with Doris who cannot eat pork, Mary who will not touch turkey, Margaret who is sick on beef, and offered our sympathetic ear as she got closer and closer to tearing out her hair whilst vowing that this was the last bloody time she was taking on this bloody job.
The Farmer’s Wives were not all wives of farmers, they were a women’s group who hold events and meetings, a bit like the Women’s Institute. Farmer’s Wives and Young Farmers’ groups operate in this area. The number of people now employed in farming is tiny, and if these groups relied upon the occupation indicated in their title they would fold within weeks, but the tradition is kept alive for the sake of the tradition, and serves a function similar to that for which it was devised, providing social contact and out-of-work activities to people who live in remote and isolated places.
The surprise for us, in our learning days, was the difficulty that so many of these women seemed to have in keeping their husbands acceptably fed. A number of them, who chose the turkey, did so not because they particularly liked turkey, but because their husband would, even on Christmas day, under no circumstances accept a plate of turkey. Others told how they had to do a number of different meats for the Christmas festive lunch. Husband insisted upon roast beef, number one son would only eat pork, she herself felt that a bit of turkey was necessary for the spirit of the occasion, so she had a plate of it in isolation. I learned all this whilst serving behind the bar, rapidly running out of pineapple juice.
The limited diet. How limited can you get? We were quite shocked.
But then, if someone feels they want to live solely on roast beef and potatoes, why not? Surely roast beef and potatoes is perfectly good grub and if that is what they choose to do, what right do I have to criticise?
No right, of course, but perhaps a duty. The geographic area in which we now found ourselves had a record of heart disease six times the national average, a figure made worse by the fact that Cumbria itself contributes to the national average. The local paper would have you believe that this is due to consolidation of hospitals, so that someone in this area of relatively sparse population gets medical attention less quickly than their counterpart in the city. This is actually the opposite of the truth, our experience is that the doctor arrives much faster around here because the workload on the health centre is considerably less pressured. The reason for the higher level of heart disease could be all sorts of things; genetics, damp air, coincidence, lack of exercise (oddly enough, it is often more difficult to organise regular exercise in a rural area as the distances are that much greater and using the car that much more appropriate). None of these sounds half so plausible, though, as diet.
FACED WITH A VARIED spread of meats, fish, vegetables, fruit, cereals, preserves, marinades, sweets, stews, pickles and sauces, you might think that someone who limited themselves to just one or two items was being rather stupid, seeing the rest of the population tuck in enthusiastically in a way more privileged than themselves. Why, then does such a significant percentage of the population choose to do this? And why is this significant percentage more concentrated in the north of the country? And how, if you are a restaurant, do you deal with this?
The answer to the first part of this lies in the observation that common sense is one thing, but it does not get very far in competition with fear of the unknown. Coming to a rural area of northern England as we had, we made the assumption that we subsequently notice is made by so many people who live within waving distance of Notting Hill Gate, that the dramatic change that has been taking place in British eating habits since the second world war has been equally distributed. It has not. In the cosmopolitan south east it has been accelerating and overwhelming. In many areas distant from the big cities it has happened barely at all.
This can lead to some vignettes in the supermarket that, were they not so tragic, could be regarded as amusing. Leading up to Christmas, the fruit and vegetable department puts on opulent displays. A waterfall of oranges, spilling from their tilted boxes into a sunny bright skirt looking like it might envelop the floor, inviting you to dive in and buy, buy, buy. The effect is rather like coming out of the cold, austere, post-war Eastern Europe, into an Italian street market.
“Ooh, look! Doesn’t that look lovely?”
“Oh, I can’t be doing with all them. All them pips!”.
The great heroes in this broadening of the diet for the majority of British people have been the Chinese, Indian and Italian restaurants, and the supermarkets.
Those people who complain that large out-of-town supermarkets are wrecking the old ways and putting all those nice little friendly village shops out of business may have a point, but for the health of the nation generally such people are being less than public spirited. There is something much more valuable to the nation’s wellbeing than the friendly welcome in the village shop and that is the range of different foods you can buy in the supermarket at an affordable price. There is nothing wrong with a pound of sugar, a loaf of sliced bread, and a tin of mushy peas, but if that is all you eat you will probably drop dead too soon. Go into the supermarket and the signs shout at you, “Five a day – have you had your five portions of fruit and vegetables today?” The supermarket is doing the job of the Health Education Authority and probably, if anyone can have any effect at all, doing it better.
This is all very well, but in the less-privileged parts of Britain, ethnic restaurants and supermarkets have made considerably less of an impact than they have in the more populated parts. Only just now are they beginning to make their mark. The effect is that many people are still frightened of what they have to offer, and they will tend to justify this by insisting that they do not want anything fancy, just ‘plain food’.
“We’re simple folk, we like plain food.’ For me, a delightful meal might consist of a piece of fresh cod, grilled, together with some red capsicums, also grilled until their skins have blackened and can be peeled away, and some slices of raw starfruit. What heaven! And so simple. Not even a hint of a sauce. But I fancy it would cause some level of anger and rejection by the ‘plain food’ advocates. Not British, perhaps. OK then, some cubes of leg of lamb, grilled fast and dark on the outside and left pink within, together with some chopped raw onion mixed with an equal amount of fresh raw parsley. Yeah!. What! not welcomed either? But what could be plainer? The fact is that plain food actually means what my mother cooked me, it’s a euphemism.
It can make life difficult for someone trying to run a restaurant.
We occasionally serve sweet potato at dinner in place of the traditional potato, partly to give long-staying guests some variety:
“What is it?”, asked a woman.
“It’s sweet potato.’
“Where do you get it from?”
“I buy it from the local greengrocer, he occasionally has a box in – and we try to take advantage of that.”
“No, no, no. I mean which country does it come from?”
“I have to confess, that I forgot to look.”
”Well, it’s not grown in this country is it?”
“I’m not sure. I believe you can grow it in this country, it appears in quite ancient recipies. But I suspect this lot may have been imnported, quite probably has been. The USA or Israel I suspect”
“Well, it’s not good enough, is it?”
“I’m sorry. What isn’t good enough about it?”
“When we have all this food we grow in this country, and we are importing so much from overseas. We’re farmers, you see, and this is very important to us. It’s our livelihood.”
&Ldquo;I take it then that you don’t grow sweet potatoes?”
“No, we keep sheep and cattle, and we’re not happy about all this food being imported from overseas.”
At this point one of the other diners chimed in with a description of how, if every country had no imports then every country would have no exports, that with no exports farmers would be in a sorrier state generally than they currently find themselves, that the matter has to be looked at in a Europe-wide context with so much of the agricultural subsidies being based on European policy, and that the European Community is a net exporter of food. He was in the food business himself, so he knew these things.
I didn’t know the exact details about whether he was right, so rather than becoming embroiled further I left the farmers to the diatribe, returning at the appropriate time, to ask the lady if she would like some dessert.
“What is it?”, she enquired with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
I could not do the next bit with an entirely straight face, but I tried. “We have a very nice orange and raisin tart. The oranges are from Stevenage and the raisins grown in Gateshead, I remembered to check that with the greengrocer.”
“Ooh, sounds lovely.”, she replied, and evidently she meant it. She certainly ate the tart without any sense of hesitation.
The man with the expert export knowledge was grinning his head in half.
Two of our regular guests, Howard and Karen from New York City, were in the dining room at the time. They were visibly sinking into their bodies with sadness and embarrassment. Howard and Karen are Anglophiles, they make two or three trips to this country annually, to look at, talk about, admire and buy, British pointer dwargs, or, in translation from the New York, pointer dogs. “How many dwargs do you own, now, Howard?” “Don’t ask me, already.” Howard and Karen were well aware of the backward-looking attitude of many of the great British population at large, but still they were sad to see it in action.“Sweet potato, is one of our favourites”, they assured me quietly, and I wanted to cry for them.
THE GOVERNMENT AUTHORITIES make noises about improving the nation’s health and they produce glossy booklets telling people how to eat. There was a programme of health checks in the mid-1990s, selecting people to go to their doctor for a heart check-up. I was one of the people selected at random, so I went along and was interviewed by the nurse.
“Do you eat lots of saturated fats?”, she asked.
“What’s a saturated fat?”
“Red meat and dairy products contain lots of saturated fats, you should try to eat more fish and chicken and less red meat and dairy products.”
“I have heard that venison, too, is low fat, of an equivalence to chicken and fish, do you know if this is true?”
“Ooh! I dawn’t knaw, I’ve never tried it.” Needless to point out, she was from north of Peterborough.
“Mostly, I eat what the guests leave behind of an evening, which means I tend to be largely vegetarian”, I volunteered. She looked at me even more suspiciously.
“And you should cut down on sugar. Do you put sugar in your tea?”
“No, and furthermore I happen to particularly dislike sugary savoury foods such as tomato ketchup and tinned baked beans, I never eat them by choice.”
“Hmmm, I suppose they do contain hidden sugars”, she looked increasinly uncomfortable about my observations, then changed the subject, “And salt, you should put salt in the cooking or on the food, not both.”
“It is an extraordinary phenomenon, that many people pour salt on their dinner before even having tasted the dish first. Why do they do this?”
“Some people put salt on their food before even having tasted it.”
“Yes, why? What makes them do this? My researches suggest that there are two types of people who are prone to this behaviour: the first are those who believe that it is what you are supposed to do at dinner, their father did it before them and his grandfather before him and so it is a custom that reinforces their value to the world; and second there are those for whom it is an I-am-important statement, in effect covering up what has been put in front of them as a not-too-subtle insult to the chef, by putting him down they are subconsciously attempting to build themselves up. Some people have both of these motivations together, which makes it doubly difficult to deal with. We don’t get upset, though, because we see it as their problem not ours, though we have not yet quite worked out how to discourage them from doing this as it doesn’t do much for them and acts as a hindrance to their enjoyment of their dinner, on the whole.”
She looked at me again with suspicion, then switched from diet to my mental wellbeing, “Do you suffer from stress?”
“Yes, I’m in a stressful job.”
“When you get stressed, do you have a strategy for dealing with it?”
“Yes, but unfortunately the telephone rings or a guest wants to borrow an iron, so I don’t get the opportunity to implement it. That’s one reason why I’m so stressed.”
“That’s all right, the problem comes when you get stressed and you do not know you are getting stressed, that’s when it can make you ill, it’s when you don’t have a strategy for dealing with it.”
“I have to say, that I only know I’m stressed when I recognise it. When I don’t recognise that I am stressed then I don’t recognise that I am stressed. It may be that I get stressed much more than I know, but since I don't know it I don’t know whether I am getting stressed more that I know I am or not.”
“So long as you have a strategy for dealing with stress, you should be all right.”
She then weighed me and took my blood pressure, told me to go swimming more often, and gave me a couple of glossy booklets to read, the aim of which was to improve my health. In these was some extraordinary advice:
EAT MORE STARCH AND FIBRE, the headline shouts, followed by:
Eat more bread – especially wholemeal breads. Chapattis are a good choice. Eat more potatoes. Try baking or boiling them, instead of having them chipped or roasted. Sweet potatoes, cassava, and plantain are also good choices. Try dishes based on rice or pasta, particularly brown rice and wholemeal pasta. Eat plenty of raw or lightly cooked vegetables – also fresh fruit and salads.
There is a song by the 1960s West Country singer and songwriter, Adge Cutler, part of which goes:
‘When George comes home from milking, he’ll get a big surprise. When he sits down expecting Irish stew. And his wife says, “Gearge, I’ll ged'ee, a gert dollop o’ spaghetti”. When the Common Market comes to Stanton Drew.’ (That final phrase is the name of the song)
Adge Cutler’s motor car ended up wrapped around a tree in 1974. Had he lived, he would have been in a better position to advise the well-paid government advisors on the reality of life, based upon his sound technical knowledge and understanding.
With the poet dead, and the government health advisors too involved in their day-to-day business to stray to far from Notting Hill Gate, it is up to us, the proprietors of food establishments, to try to do something to improve the health of the nation. If it were possible consistently to buy sweet potatoes, cassava or plantain in our part of the country, then they could create a strong marketing advantage for us, providing a talking point which we could utilise to our benefit, though in fact we have found that when moving people, it is most effective to push them gently, otherwise they have a tendency to simply stop moving. To write a pamphlet telling people to eat things they have practically no chance of getting hold of (except of course in spitting distance of Notting Hill Gate), is a disgrace, and the people who write these things get paid far more than me!
I ASKED ONE MAN if he would like a glass of wine with his dinner.
“Nooo”, he relied, “I’m diabetic, you see. Nurse says I’m only allowed sugar once in a blue moon. So I can't drink wine, you see. Noo. I’ll have a pint of shandy.” Shandy, beer mixed with lemonade, is about the sugariest drink he could have asked for, though as often happens, for him the sugariest drink he could imagine is anything he is unfamiliar with, as is the bitterest, the fattiest, the most injurious to his perceived wellbeing in any way.
It is not for us to advise the man on his health directly, but we can observe that the doctor is going to have a long and frustrated battle if he has to get the man to eat and drink more healthily by a process of elimination, one ingredient at a time. We have tried to do it more enthusiastically, “Have you tried sparkling mineral water with a squeeze of fresh lime juice?, It’s ace.” Sometimes it works.
“I can”t eat xxx”, does usually not mean, “I am allergic to xxx”, or “xxx makes me ill”, though that is what will be claimed. It is usually the good old fashioned a fear of the unknown. Of course, sometimes someone will have a true allergy, they will become unaccountably sick when they eat a certain type of food. It might be nuts. It might be wheat flour. It might be all manner of things but the clue to whether their allergy is of the medically allergic kind or the psychologically fearful kind is usually fairly easy to establish. Just ask yourself whether the contentious substance was something their mother might have fed them. If the answer is yes, it is probably an allergy that they have.
As it happens, I sometimes have difficulty with seafoods; oysters, mussels and the like have been known to make me wake in the night with vomiting or fantastic dreams. I also find tea difficult to hold in my stomach if it is strong, and I can feel nauseous with anything holding a detectable volume of liquid cows milk. This does not stop me from eating and drinking these things, as I do not object to paying for the pleasures in life. There is no such thing as a free lunch, but then I come from London, which has been blessed with one of the most rapid broadenings of diet in the world, probably, during the latter half of the 20th century.
One of our personal market-research events took place in an Indian restaurant near Lancaster and at the table next to us sat a family who seemed to have a northern branch and a London one. The waiter brought in one of those sizzling dishes, where they put the meat and onions on a burning hot metal plate in the kitchen then pour a cool sauce over it just before the waiter wheels it out on a trolley, so it sizzles as the sauce cooks. Very impressive – everyone in the restaurant turns their head to see what is going on. Then the waiter ladles it out onto the customer’s plate.
“I don’t want any onions”, cried the northern branch, fear and trepidation in her eyes, she had been expecting what it said on the menu – chicken.
The waiter picked out the chicken from the sizzling metal plate and went to place the hot dish back on the trolley. “Here, don’t take that away”, chimed in the London branch, “I’ll have them.” Waste not want not, that is supposed to be a Lancahire characteristic isn’t it? Not when it comes to vegetables, clearly.
The episode reminded me of one evening when I was in one of those Chinese takeaways where you stand around in front of a high counter waiting for the meal you have ordered, trying not to watch that television with the badly adjusted colour. This shop was in London and the other waiting diners apart from myself, consisted of two West Indians, two Indians, and two white Londoners. On the television there was a cookery demonstration by an Italian man, who was rolling thinly beaten pork into a tube and cooking it in white wine, garlic and butter, which on this particular television with its emphasis on a bright orange-yellow tinge to everything lost some of its intended appeal, with the sauce a gaudy yellow, but it still looked pretty delicious to me.
Each of the different cultural groups in the takeaway behaved in character. The two West Indian girls giggled, grimaced, and mouthed, “yeacchhhh!”. The two Indian boys took no notice of the demonstration whatsoever, the Chinese family whose takeaway shop it was watched with gripped interest but absolutely inscrutable expressions, you got the feeling they were taking it all in for use when the revolution comes, and the white Londoners, what did they do? They said just what I would have expected them to say. In their archetypal front-of-the-mouth Tottenham accents they said to each other, “Well, it”s all right if you can afford all that butter, ennit?”
IT IS FROM OBSERVATIONS of this type that we quite quickly became able to tell, from the moment of the initial telephone call making a booking for the hotel, what someone was going to order for dinner. A whole lot of clues would give us the answer, ranging through accent, age, geographic location, intonation. We were seldom wrong – it is delightful when we are, but most times were were boringly accurate – and it seems that many other people in the hotel restaurant business can perform this trick pretty successfully, too. Some hotel proprietors with an interest in wine say that the ‘wine list’ is a complete charade, they know exactly which wine a person is going to order and they might as well choose it for them, most of the time, and we can do this fairly accurately, too.
So if we know what someone is going to order for dinner, why give them a menu? Ah, that is different. We give them a menu so they can exercise their Choice. Choice is an important human right. Margaret Thatcher said so.
And indeed, we have choice. When we, the great people of the developed nations, go out to eat, we can choose simple, complex, Spanish, Russian, Eritrean, budget or expensive, or at least if we are in the right area we can. What we cannot expect to do, is to obtain all this great variety of things, in a single restaurant.
Sometimes, the system backfires. We happened to be in a small town in California in 1988 and had stopped for lunch in a MacDonald’s hamburger restaurant. At a table nearby sat a man wearing a white suit and a large white hat, one of those hats which protrudes for quite some distance front and rear, and has considerable up-turns at the sides. He was accompanied by a young boy, who, we gathered, was his son.
Still wearing his hat, the man took a large bite of his hamburger, then spat it out over the table with a loud, “Pteugh!”.
“What is this shit?”, he questioned the world in general. “Is this food? Does someone expect me to eat this crap?”
“Dad. Please!”
“And this is what the world is going so crazy about? Who are these people?”
It was clear, that White Hat was not immediately taken with McDonald’s hamburgers.
While White Hat fumed and fidgeted angrily while his son tried to demonstrate how cool and enjoyable it was to eat a hamburger, we were able to muse on the fact that, while White Hat did not like what he was being fed by McDonald’s, a large proportion of the world’s population clearly do. He was sitting in one of the most successful restaurant chains ever, so White Hat was in a minority, but he may never have to eat a Big Mac ever again. He can choose to eat somewhere else, and the fine thing about it is, he is most unlikely to stumble across his dreaded style of hamburger by accident, thinking he would be expecting something else. A McDonald’s restaurant is not hard to mistake.
If White Hat had found himself in a small country hotel in England, on the other hand, and had disapproved of what he was being fed on, his chances of avoiding the same situation in future would be considerably less sure. True, there are the guide books, but they are obsessed by something called quality and deny the existence and need for something called style. The guide books are for the most part stuck about thirty years in the past.
NOT EVERYONE SEARCHES for a high class restaurant. Many people are intimidated by it.From the theatre wings that was our front door, there appeared one day a man who asked whether we had a double room available for this evening. Yes, we had. Right, then, I’ll just go and park the car and then the wife and I will be with you in no time.
Sometimes this would happen, and that would be the last we would see of them. Perhaps we were too expensive, too formal, not formal enough, too down-market, too up-market. The potential guest would have seen something different from what he had hoped for, and would have chosen to go elsewhere. Fair enough.
We assumed that this was the case with this caller, since twenty minutes elapsed and he did not reappear. Then the door opened again, and in walked the man lugging a suitcase, accompanied by his wife, who looked rather travel-worn, pale and huffing and puffing, with shoulders hunched.
“You look like you could do with a cup of tea”, I ventured.
“Oh, yes!. I do need a cup of tea,” She looked as if she really did need a cup of tea.
“I’ll make you one then. Have you come far today?&rsdquo;
“Ooh, yes.” With a sigh.
“Really? Where from?”
“Rotherham!”
I tried to look impressed, but actually Rotherham is at most two-and-a-half hours drive away.
“We put car in car park”, announced her husband proudly, omitting to mention that he had knocked down the car park sign on his twenty-minute journey from the front door – twice as many minutes as paces, though he quite possibly had not noticed the sign, since it was in fact a fairly regular occurrence than someone flattened it, we had erected it because, although we had a large car park which looked to us considerably like nothing else but a car park, many people had, until we introduced this prompt, tended to leave their car at the front door, so blocking anybody else from arriving or leaving.
We settled the visitors into their room, which they seemed to like, and told them that dinner would be served from 7.30, which they did not like very much, preferring in general to eat at 6pm, but 7.30 it was going to have to be. They arrived for dinner looking extremely apprehensive. A glance at the menu and the lady said, “I can't eat any of this!”
“I’m sorry about that. Why not?”
“Well, you see, I don’t have any teeth, so I can’t chew anything. I can only eat a piece of fish, and there isn’t any fish.”
“OK, don’t go away, I’ll just nip into the kitchen and see what we can do for you.”
Hilary was cooking that evening – an unexpectedly busy evening, it was inevitably the chef’s night off.
“There’s some salmon in the freezer, see if she will accept a piece of salmon cooked in something unchallenging – say, a lemon and butter sauce.”
I gave it a whirl.
“Aye, that sounds nice.” So I settled them into the dining room, in a position where there would not feel too vulnerable by being in the line of sight of the other guests, and left them to their apprehension. As the evening wore on, they relaxed considerably. The lady with no teeth enjoyed her salmon – that was the main thing.
Next morning, when they appeared for breakfast, I followed the rules for being a good host, remembering the individual needs of my customers, and suggested, maybe some scrambled egg, baked beans, soft fresh bread?
“Oh, no, I want the full works, sausage, bacon, make it crispy, ooh, I love a nice bit of crispy bacon. And not bread. Toast!”
Suddenly, her choppers had re-materialised.
What is happening here, is that the dinner scene was frightening, the breakfast scene familiar. The no-teeth ploy worked quite well, at least with us, since it was effective in avoiding an I-don't-know-the-rules situation for the couple. At breakfast, there was no need for her to be gummy any longer. She had relaxed a lot under our informal approach, and in any case she knew what you are supposed to eat for breakfast.
The hotel guide books’ definition of a ‘good restaurant’ is one which this particular couple, and we have met plenty of others like them, would not think was good at all. They would find it stuffy and intimidating. They would be much happier, it would be their 5-star rating, if the restaurant of the hotel were a MacDonald’s franchise.
Other guests, eg Mr White Hat, would, we know, be less keen on this idea, but for this particular couple the familiarity would have made them much happier from the outset. Fortunately we managed to salvage the situation with them in a way that McDonald’s clearly and spectacularly failed to do with White Hat, but that was largely good fortune. And we shouldn’t have needed to have to do it. If the information is clear, people know what to expect and can avois it if they prefer something else. The real challenge is getting the information to be clear.
We struggled on with this for quite a time. How can you have an identifiable style in the hotel restaurant, when the received wisdom is that you must be one of the crowd? If you focus on a particular style, you will upset those people who become agitated if the pattern is tampered with. It is not so bad if you are in Castroville, California. Castroville, a banner announces as you approach, is the Artichoke Center of the World. There is (or was - maybe still is) a restaurant in Castroville where you can start with artichoke soup, then have a main course of deep-fried artichoke leaves, followed by sweet artichoke pie with cream. The restaurant is called The Globe what else? Even if you do not like artichokes, you have to admit this has style. But artichokes in Cumbria?
The problem with our restaurant when we took it on was that it had no identifiable zing. People would arrive with expectations, and whether these expectations were fulfilled or not would be pot-luck depending on what those expectations were. At a time when the abilities and adventurousness of everybody’s mother was diverging exponentially, we were being advised by all the professed authorities on the subject to provide a mythical something that was universally ‘good’. It cannot be done. Mothers have become too unpredictable.
WE THEREFORE HAD CHOICES. We could have closed the restaurant altogether, and told our guests to eat in the café next door. The problem with this, in a rural area, is that there is no café next door. Out in the sticks, even the most basic bed and breakfast usually has to provide an evening meal, because there is nowhere else that their customers can eat. We were in this position. A mile down the road, there were a couple of pubs which did food in the evenings, but to have taken this option would mean that we could no longer call ourselves a hotel. We would become a bed and breakfast. This had immense difficulties because to many people in Britain, bed and breakfast means low cost, homely. It does not mean small country hotel. Furthermore the two pubs where someone might get their dinner could not accurately be described as recommendable. We would have been faced with an uphill struggle to change perceptions, even more so than keeping on the restaurant.
Alternatively, we could have changed from being a hotel to becoming essentially a restaurant with rooms. This way, one can give the restaurant an identity, and your customers come for the style of the restaurant, rather than because they want ‘a hotel’. The style that is fixed upon does not matter too much provided it is clear. It could be Indian, Old English, Expensive Nouvelle, anything, as long as what is on offer is made obvious to people before they arrive.
It began to seem that the second of these options was the only sensible one to take. Choose the style and go for it. But this was never what we intended to do. Are we getting locked into a loop here? Or is there another way?
PERHAPS THE ANSWER LIES in the ducks. They can teach you a lot, them ducks. Every February, our ducks go wandering. They march across the adjoining fields, causing the farmer to come knocking on our door complaining they are flattening his grass, they stand about in the middle of the road, causing concerned passers by to knock on our door worried they might get run over by a car, (which, most years, one or two do), and they appear in other peoples’ gardens, with a welcoming, aah!, from normal people, and an indignant tutting from members of the local Wildlife Trust, who believe that all wandering animals should be wild ones, and ours are only mildly wild.
By May, this behaviour is finished. The females are finding nesting sites in ridiculous places, and the males are standing around looking despondent, wondering where all the girls have disappeared to.
Come July, many of the chicks that have been born have perished from cold or been eaten by crows, and the ducks are back together as a group again. The springtime abundance of food has been eaten away, and they stand about on the doorstep from early morning, leaving sticky droppings on the path, and tapping on the door with their beaks, demanding a handful of corn. At this time of year, most of them will happily feed out of your hand.
August/September, they have grown offish. They keep themselves to themselves, no longer running along the drive with slippy-sloppy noises underfoot whenever there might be a possibility of a few seeds. As the nights draw in they spend more time on the pond, or sit quietly, looking morose.
By October, the fighting and squabbling begins, the start of a period of serious bonking in earnest. This is the time of the year when elderly worthies, on their daily constitutional, keep their eyes straight ahead as they walk past the pond, and can be heard occasionally to announce, that of all God’s creatures, they do not really feel a great affinity towards mallards.
Then the pattern starts all over again. We know this, because we can watch it. We think it is highly improbable, however, that the ducks themselves are aware of it. We are clever, we are not ducks. But are we that clever? Are there patterns that we are not aware of, in the same way that the ducks are involved in an unconscious string of behaviours, thinking at any given time in the year, that all the world is always like that, isn’t it?
Our observations of the ducks became a useful lesson as we eventually decided that, if we were going to run a centre for training courses and meetings, we had better do just that. You cannot mix this business with being a hotel, the disciplines are different. Many hotels we have visited for business meetings attempt to do it, and it seldom works very well. If they have a purpose-designed section of the building, then maybe, but we were too small for that. We would have to be one thing or the other if we were going to have any pretensions of being professional. So we stopped operating as a hotel. We watched the ducks and we told ourselves that we are superior to ducks. We know how to reinvent ourselves; to break out of the loop. At least that is what we liked to believe; quite possibly the ducks were believeing about themselves, much the same thing, or at least some of them might have been.
Anyway being no longer a hotel meant that we had to inform our regular customers, people like Howard and Karen from New York City, who had become almost personal friends and had bought us delightful and expensive gifts whenever they came to stay, that they could come to stay no longer. It was harsh and hard and unkind. It was our business at stake.
From now on, our guests would arrive as a group. They would have exclusive use of the house for their meeting, training event, celebration or party, no other guests around to be embarrassing in front of. They would have the benefit of coming to a specialist venue, with a product specifically designed to fulfil the needs of a requirement such as theirs. Service by The Professionals.
Whereas before, we had been shown by our informative duckies that there must be patterns to peoples’ behaviour that the people themselves were unaware of, now, when we saw groups of people in fairly coherent combinations, we were presented with these patterns as a neon-lit billboard. And nowhere so much as around the subject of food.
TO START THE DAY, breakfast. There are rules around breakfast which make the presentation and ordering of food so much easier, when you know what they are. Here are the most significant ones:
1. The amount of orange juice consumed at breakfast, is in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol consumed the night before.
2. People under fifty do not eat prunes. The poor old prune, he has had a bad press. No matter how young a prune may be, he’s always full of wrinkles, and so are his consumers. It is time for a re-imaging of the prune. Prunes mixed 50–50 with cubes of fresh green melon, is a fine combination in the morning. Where is the marketing agency for prunes? Dried fruits generally including figs, apricots, peaches, etc. suffer much the same rejection, which is a pity since baby prunes look like their dad, just not wrinkled quite as bad.
3. When they have children, people stop eating cereals. A young-ish pre-offsprung group of people will consume handfulls of cornflakes for breakfast, there will be a large pile of hard-to-wash milky dishes to be collected and cleaned. When the children of these milky-cereal wolfers come along, it is the tots who take over the milky mix – preferably in their opinion doctored with synthetic chocolate or coated with a sugary glaze – and the parents switch to toast.
4. The rule concerning cereals also applies to sweet, vinegary sauces and ketchup, the parents abstaining while the offspring wallow.
5. The rule concerning ketchup, also applies to canned baked beans.
6. The rules concerning cereals, ketchup and baked beans do not apply, if the adults are what is known in the finest circles as hairy-arsed fitters; men whose work is manual labour or semiskilled trades. The rule tends to apply to their womenfolk, but not to the men.
7. The volume of sausage and bacon consumed for breakfast on the second day of a person’s visit, will be less than on the first, continuing thereafter until, if they stay long enough, they eat in the hotel what they have on most days for breakfast at home, which is probably a few slices of bread. Consumption of the ‘full English/Scottish/Irish/Welsh’ breakfast; sausage, bacon, egg, fried bread (though this is becoming rarer), tomato and mushroom, with toast, marmalade and tea, is a study in itself. It is probably an example of rich-person emulation, since it would have been too expensive for most people until fairly recently. It shows what a big important chap you are, to be eating a full British breakfast. It also shows, if you are a boy, what a good little piggy you are. If you can put away four sausages and three fried eggs, mummy will say, “ooh, what a good little piggy, finished up all his breakfast, and what a lot it was!” This is only for the boys, and only certain types of boys, being those whose mummy would say that sort of thing and who subsequently align themselves with peer groups whose members reinforce each other’s image in this way. They usually grow out of this by the time they are fifty.
If you are a real man, according to this culture, you also skip the mushroom and tomato, for they are vegetables (yes, a tomato is a fruit, but for these purposes it is a vegetable), and real men do not eat vegetables. Why do real men not eat vegetables? They probably have a point, because neither their mother nor their school catering staff knew how to cook them. It is hard to ruin a sausage, very easy to make a cabbage taste like part-washed underwear. Mother’s cabbage was awful, ergo, all cabbage is awful. It must be, because to claim otherwise would be a slight to mother, and nobody calls my mother a bad name. Mother also wanted you to eat the cabbage, not because she thought it was anything other than awful, but because she felt it was going to be good for you. She would get agitated if you were not eating your cabbage and a good way to wind mother up, to assert yourself as a real adult, was to leave your cabbage untouched. It seems extraordinary that a big tough guy should be frightened of a tomato, or of a wilted spinach leaf, but there you go, many are.
Those people who had adventurous cooks for a mother, or better still erratic and experimental cooks, or those people who had the good fortune to be dragged around to eat in places varied and peculiar, are placed at a great advantage in later life. They can take their dinner for what it is, a dinner, rather than an opportunity to exercise their hang-ups. Here’s to erratic-cooking mothers, which it seems there may be an increase in the number of, for the good of the nation.
ANOTHER WAY TO BECOME more eclectic about your diet, is to live in a place where eating out is a multi-faceted experience. If you spend time with your friends and colleagues in a variety of cafés and restaurants of different styles and qualities, you are better placed to eliminate the past. For this to be put into effect, however, your home needs to be somewhere where a variety of cafés and restaurants exists, which has been a tall order in Britain until recently and still is in many areas of the country.
Not long after we had arrived in our hotel, a man booked in for a few days holiday. On the first evening I showed him the menu at the start of dinner.
“Oh, just give me what’s good today. I’m sure it all tastes fine. I’m on holiday. I spend my life taking decisions. I spend my life eating in restaurants with clients. I don’t want to make any decisions for once. I’m on holiday. You choose for me!”
So I did, giving him whatever was the best that day, and I asked him if he would like me to choose what wine he drank, too.
“Yes, perfect, just what I’d like, a surprise.”
“How about this? It’s a Lebanese wine, made from grapes grown in the war-torn Behar valley, its flavour will surprise you, being . . .”
“Oh, no. Not that. I mean, it’s very nice and all that, but many of my clients are from The Middle East, and I’m constantly being plied with Lebanese wine for lunch and I have to say how bloody good it is. Anything. Anything, but Lebanese wine. I’m on holiday. You choose for me.”
This man had experience of eating out in a variety of cafés and restaurants. He was not afraid of trying Lebanese wine, just a bit sick of the sight of it. Perfectly understandable, and in general a very easy customer to please. As might be guessed from his frequent involvement with Arab clients, he lived in London, and we came to find it quite reassuring to hear a Home Counties accent on the telephone making a booking, because we then knew that the food was not going to be too contentious an issue. When you live in a city which has fifty-three different types of ethnic restaurant, some good, some awful, you become used to winning some and losing some. And if you don’t like it, don’t eat it. Odd as it sounds, the aggressive Londoner can be the least demanding customer, in a restaurant.
One needs to be aware, however, that when this booking from the metropolis comes through, and the caller says that he expects to be arriving late, and will therefore get something to eat on the way, so you do not need to bother with saving any dinner for him, then it is important to prepare an impressive plate of sandwiches for when he arrives. This is because, contrary to his beliefs, there is not a charming little café on every corner of his journey north. Once this is understood, it becomes a simple business to please the customer on arrival – always a good start.
But back to breakfast. Informal research by ourselves indicates that there are few if any people who at home eat a breakfast of sausage, bacon, egg, mushroom and tomato every day. Occasionally, maybe. When these same people go to a hotel, however, and the idea of anything other than this particular spread is offered to them, they can become exceedingly agitated. And most resistant. Big, important people eat sausage and bacon for breakfast, it is the Way.
Sometimes we negotiate with the organiser of a group that breakfast should be varied, the expected sausage and bacon etc. one day, something for a change, perhaps kedgeree (in fact no less traditional British) on the following day. If we can get the organiser to agree to this then it pleases us as we like our guests to believe that we can cook more than one thing.
When we succeed in arranging this, while it gives us great pleasure in principle, we can expect trouble. On the days that the bacon and sausage are not on the list, we notice the phenomenon of people knocking on the kitchen door demanding more toast, which is usually on its way anyway, and which is taking no longer to arrive than on days when bacon and sausage are cooked, in fact probably less time since the amount of kitchen effort has been greatly reduced. But the customers get agitated. Something is not right. We must have some redress. Demands are increased.
Since we recognise this, we can deal with it. It would seem an easy solution to give the customers a choice, to allow them to order sausage and bacon if they want it, and kedgeree if they want that. In reality, though, this is no easy solution at all. The number of people who would request kedgeree would be so tiny that it would be uneconomic to prepare any, the effect would be that which prevails in most small-to-medium sized establishments – everyone has to be fed on sausage and bacon, even if they are sick at the thought of it. By forcing kedgeree down the throats of those who are just a bit resistant, we gain an artistic result, we move people on just a little bit, help them to go away feeling good about themselves and their achievements.
Does this seem fanciful? It is not. We’ve it in action over and over again. The key lies in knowing just where and how far to push. In judging this, though, we have to gauge the mood and authority of the organiser of the group. Can the organiser really speak for the group? Sometimes we predict that they can, sometimes we predict that they only partly can, and sometimes we get it hopelessly wrong. In dealing with the organiser of a forthcoming party, there are some rules of thumb that may be followed to help ensure success:
1. If it is a wedding, then it is only necessary to consider one person, and that is the bride’s mother. If ma-in-law-to-be is not happy, you can prepare for trouble. Weddings are promoted by the arbiters of society as being for the benefit of the happy couple, but that is not the wedding, that is, or should be, the marriage. Weddings are undertaken for the benefit of the bride’s mother.
2. If the group is a family, the person the organiser will be most afraid of upsetting, is grandma. The organiser will try to look for a lowest common denominator solution so as to avoid upsetting grandma’s sensibilities. “Nothing too spicy and, oh!, no, I don’t think we'd better have any sauces and, er, can we'd have it without the dressing.” The effect of this is that the rest of the group finds the food too bland and dull, and grandma will complain if she is the complaining sort, and be accommodating and jolly if she is a jolly type of person, so nobody wins. What you feed to grandma, actually, does not usually matter too much. Grandma’s mood will be set by grandma’s mood. Be democratic. Rule of the majority. Tell your group organiser this.
3. Discourage democracy. Or more to the point, promote democracy. Democracy is not, as some people imagine it to be, rule by consensus. When the group organiser tells you he or she will ask all their friends which of your suggested menus they would be prepared to accept, say very firmly, “Don’t!” Getting an agreement by everyone is practically impossible and you will end up with something akin to the supposed tastes of grandma – a lowest-common-denominator disappointment. Somebody must take responsibility. Democracy is about electing a representative to take complex decisions for you.
4. Beware of projection. When the group organiser says something to you like, “That salad of roasted peppers, black olives, rocket leaves and lamb’s lettuce sounds wonderful. We all love Mediterranean food and we eat a lot of salads, we’ll all go for that. Can’t wait!” Beware. Find out where the caller’s friends come from and what their background is. The first time we fell into this trap we were at first delighted, the woman organising the group sounded so appreciative of what was in store and we were looking forward to a weekend of adventurous cooking with suitable praise and lip-smacking from our guests to round it off. What we omitted to find out in advance was, that although the organiser and her sister did indeed relish the type of food they were encouraging us to promote, most of their friends were large Welsh rugby footballers. The plates came back to the kitchen with a ring of olives and lettuce leaves decorating the rims and the customers were left feeling dissatisfied. Beware of projection.
In principle, we have found in the restaurant that we can usually please most of our guests most of the time provided two conditions are fulfilled. The first is that the guests, before they arrive, are made aware of the style of food the are going to be presented with. This can be less than straightforward if the forthcoming party is a large and diverse group, but so far as possible we try to get the organiser of such a group to be liberal with their dissemination of information and we try to remember to impress upon them that, in life, there is more than one Way. The second condition is that the eaters are pushed a little. Pushing is not always possible, since there will inevitably be some people whose eating experience, forced or voluntary, is more eclectic than it is possible to offer for the occasion, but in fact such people as these are usually not going to cause a problem, they are likely to be experienced enough to take it as it comes and if they don’t like it, they don’t eat it. The customers who need pushing, are the conservative and frightened ones. These are the best candidates for feeling good about themselves afterwards, to their and everyone else’s surprise and relief.
We learned a lesson before taking on our hotel, the significance of which was not apparent at the time. We had taken Auntie Mary and Uncle Harry to visit some relatives and upon returning to our house, we offered to make them a beef sandwich, which we rightly guessed would be eagerly accepted. In preparing the sandwiches, I began to slice a tomato very thin with a sharp knife.
“I’ll have a bit of that tomato in my sandwich, if you don’t mind”, said Uncle Harry.
Auntie Mary interjected: “But, you don’t like tomato.”
“Noo, noo”, replied Uncle Harry, “But I like that tomato!”
For decades, Uncle Harry had been presented with tomato-free food, because among a million things he had once said he did not like, was tomato, so Auntie Mary never served him any. But if you present it appealingly . . .
Uncle Harry died of stomach cancer, (not, we hope, as a result of eating a tomato – it was some years later), so we cannot push him any further, but the lesson was a good one.
Don’t give the people what they want, give them something more than they thought they wanted.
Standard business philosophy really. We are beginning to get the hang of this.
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