“This was made by somebody who hates vegetables,” my daughter said, over a bowl of undercooked beetroot chunks. Then Tom Kerridge explained, without meaning to, why so many kitchens taste like that.
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The pub near us has a reputation as a good and fancy pub. On our visit less than a year after it reopened under the new management, the menu was offering several kinds of meat, a pie containing meat, sausages, and every one of them arriving with potatoes in some configuration: mashed, roasted, chipped, dauphinoise. Reading it felt like being slowly upholstered. Somewhere near the bottom, alone, was a salad of beetroot and carrot.
My daughter is not a vegetarian. She simply gets tired, the way I do, of menus dominated by meat and starch. And she loves beetroot, and she loves carrots, so she ordered the salad with real hope.
What arrived was a bowl of chunks. Beetroot and carrot in pieces so big they looked prepped for a stockpot rather than a plate, given a few minutes of heat and no more, so they came out hard in the middle and unmanageable in the mouth. Not thinly sliced, not shaved, not roasted properly, not pickled, not seasoned in any way worth the name, and with nothing on them you could honestly call a dressing. We both like vegetables cooked lightly, barely touched by heat. This was not lightly cooked; it was briefly acknowledged. You could not get a piece into your mouth in one go, and once you had, you were committed to several minutes of work.
She chewed for a while, set the fork down, and said: this was made by somebody who hates vegetables.
She was right, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. You could taste it. It was not incompetence; it was also not about economising, because the meat was competent and the potatoes were plentiful. It was indifference. Somebody had been told a menu needs a vegetable option and had duly provided one, the way a building provides a fire exit.
That kind of indifference is easy to spot. It announces itself, in chunks, on a side plate.
What took me longer to recognise was the same absence dressed considerably better. Because I have eaten the expensive version many times, and everything about it is done well. The lighting is low and flattering, there is a fire in the corner, the plates are that speckled clay everybody bought in 2019, the bread is very good, and the butter is introduced by name, and somewhere in the middle of the menu a brassica is being blackened over embers. Nobody has been careless – every element has been considered by somebody competent.
And still I finish it and feel nothing. Not the same restaurant as that pub, but the same pattern, the way pop songs are not the same song and yet are all built on four chords. I am out on the pavement, full and untouched, trying to name a single mouthful and finding only a general impression of smoke and comfort.
That is the version that unsettles me, because you cannot blame it on laziness. Somebody worked hard on that meal. The question is what they were working towards.
Four Answers
For years I had three explanations, and I was fond of all of them, because they let everybody off.
The first was the crowd. This is what people want. A chef looks out at a room of happy faces and gives them more of what made them happy, and who am I, one woman with opinions, to argue with a full booking sheet?
The second was money. Ambition is expensive – fermenting something for eight months, employing the kind of obsessive who will fuss over a single garnish, buying a vegetable nobody has heard of from a man in Kent who answers his phone twice a week: none of that pays rent. The safe plate is just the economical one in a nicer apron.
The third was fashion, which is the most human of the three. Something works somewhere, spectacularly, and then it is everywhere, because we are herd animals with knives.
Then I watched a clip of Tom Kerridge being asked a simple question. What do you love, the people or the food?
He did not hesitate, nor did he choose the food. He chose the people in the kitchen. The energy, the space, the noise, the heat, the fear. Yes, he said the fear. Being a chef, he said, has nothing to do with food. It is your ability to operate in that room. And most chefs, he reckoned, would tell you the same. They came for the charge, not the cooking.
He was not confessing anything; he was simply being honest about a life he plainly loves, and I believe him completely. I should say that I have never eaten his food, and that the pub at the start of this piece has nothing to do with him. I am taking one sentence he said in public, and holding it up against a pattern I keep meeting in rooms he has nothing to do with either.
But there it was. A fourth answer I had never seriously considered. Not the crowd, not the accountant, not the fashion, but the chef, at the stove, in love with something that is not the food.
I follow him only halfway, because “most chefs” is a very large word. Cooks arrive by every road – some because school had nothing for them and a kitchen took them at sixteen without asking about their grades. Some finished a degree in law or physics and then, to the horror of everyone at the graduation lunch, picked up a knife. Some came to cover one shift and never left. And some came for the noise and were ambushed, somewhere along the way, by the thing the noise had been hiding. Not the heat but the change. The Maillard reaction, which is just a chemical fact until you watch it happen and understand that browning is not a colour; it is a hundred new compounds that were not there a minute ago. Fermentation, where you leave something in a jar and time does the transformation for you. The moment butter turns the corner and smells of hazelnut. What salt draws out of a tomato in twenty minutes. That plain, slightly deranged little miracle where some usual ingredients become something nobody saw coming.
Those are two different loves, and they run on different fuel. The first is a drug, and like every drug it needs the room to supply it. It fades on the walk to the bus stop, and by the time you are home it is gone, and you cannot have it again until service tomorrow. The second has no off switch. It follows you home, sits down, and keeps you up at three in the morning wondering whether fig leaves would give you that almond note if you infused them in cream, and whether you could get away with it in November.
Two loves, one stove. And you can taste, on the plate, which of them did the cooking.
Authenticity
The line between the meals that leave me cold and the ones I still carry around years later is not luxury, or cleverness, or even ambition. Besides love for cooking, what counts is authenticity, and I mean something wider by that than the word usually carries. Not always rustic or traditional. Not sourdough and reclaimed timber. I mean a kitchen and the one who runs it being true to themselves instead of true to what is working elsewhere.
It looks like opposite things, which is why it takes a while to see.
Sometimes it is restlessness. A chef who follows his own obsession wherever it leads, and never once asks what the successful place across town is doing. Noma is the purest case I know. A kitchen that is never the same twice, that has moved on without you since your last visit and expects you to keep up. You could go every month for a decade and never reach the bottom of it.
Sometimes it is the exact opposite, and just as authentic. Kronenhalle in Zurich has not changed in decades and never should. It did not follow the trends that came and went around it. It stayed exactly what it always was, and its character belongs to nobody else. The dish of your childhood arrives precisely as your memory filed it, cooked by people who have made it ten thousand times and still make it as though it matters.
You find the same thing in the family trattoria, where the recipes came down through three generations, and nobody has ever seen a reason to change the concept. Where the work is obsessive in a different direction, not inventing but perfecting, every single day, the best possible version of the same dish. In the taverna where the olive oil comes from the trees behind the building, and tastes of that hillside: the soil, the heat, whatever grows wild between the roots. In the dish that exists in one valley and nowhere else on earth, because it was built out of what that valley had. Terroir is a wine word, but it belongs to food just as much. And the hospitality in those rooms is honest for the same reason the cooking is: there is nothing to perform, because nobody is pretending to be anything.
The restless kitchen and the unchanging one look like enemies, but they are allies. Neither is copying anybody. One is true to a person, the other is true to a place, and both are worth crossing a continent for, because what they do cannot be had anywhere else.
Which is exactly what makes the middle unbearable.
The Formula
A template that works, run again and again. Come October, the tomatoes become squash, and everyone calls it a new menu. The clever ones fool me the first time; I go home certain I have seen something singular. Then I return, and find nothing has moved. A few new dishes, the same formula, the appetite long gone. Lampedusa’s Leopard in an apron: everything must change so that everything can stay the same.
So I have stopped trusting first visits. Some of them can astonish you once. Novelty can do it, spectacle can do it, a beautiful frame around somebody else’s ideas can do it. The real examination is the second visit, and the question is brutally simple. Is anything left when the surprise is gone?
How You Can Tell
Which brings me back to my daughter’s beetroot, because vegetables are where I look first now.
They are the widest part of the entire palette. Meat and fish hand a cook a short and familiar vocabulary. The plant world hands them hundreds of ingredients and every texture from silk to shatter, shifting with the season, again with the fire, and again with time, if you are patient enough to ferment them. A cook who genuinely loves food cannot leave that alone. It is too interesting. So when the menu is protein and carbohydrate with one apologetic green thing slumped at the side like it wandered in by mistake, I know something about who is cooking, and it is not flattering. You cannot fake enthusiasm for a carrot. That is what makes it such a reliable witness.
I am not a vegetarian, and the all-green room leaves me just as restless from the other direction, usually with a sermon attached. The best vegetable cooking is rarely in the vegetarian restaurant. It is in the kitchen that reaches for a vegetable out of desire rather than doctrine and puts it in the lead beside everything else, the way I have eaten at Septime, at Noma and luckily some other places.
None of this is an argument against fun, or against warmth. The most moving rooms I know are often the warmest. But there are two warmths, as different as the two loves. There is the natural kindness from people who actually care, and there is the overwhelming kindness that is a business decision, switched off the instant you stop being useful to it. Anyone who has spent time around restaurants has watched that second one turn. Real warmth is a by-product. Performed warmth is a tool, and it runs on exactly the same logic as the formula on the plate.
The Wrong Rules
Even the professionals cannot agree about any of this. When a genuinely singular restaurant opened in London a few years ago, the critics split straight down the line I have been drawing. One of the most-read in the country gave it three out of ten and led on the charge that it had forgotten that eating out is meant to be fun. Another gave it nine. Same room, same food, same week, opposite verdicts, and the disagreement was never about quality. It was about whether a meal owes you a good time, or is allowed to move you instead.
Neither of them is a fool. Most people go out to enjoy themselves, and most writing serves most people. But when the food-first voices are outnumbered even among the professionals, you can feel the whole culture leaning, chefs and critics and diners together, towards the night and away from the plate.
Cinema worked out something food never did. Nobody walks out of a Tarkovsky film complaining it was not fun enough, because a film is judged by what it set out to do, and the whole apparatus is built to keep it that way: separate festivals, separate awards, separate audiences who know exactly what they came for.
Food has one review page and one unspoken standard: did I have a nice time? So the demanding kitchen does not lose an argument. It loses on a technicality, judged by rules written for a different sport.
What I Remember
I am one of the odd ones out, and I have made my peace with it.
This was never a plea for difficulty. I do not want to be challenged, or lectured, or made to work for my dinner. I want to be delighted. I just want the delight to be real, to survive the second visit, and to have been made by somebody who could not have made anything else.
That is the whole of it. Food cooked by someone who loves food more than the heat in the kitchen, against food assembled from what is known to sell. One of them moves you on the first visit and on the fiftieth. The other feeds you well, or dazzles you once, and then repeats. And when the same owners open a Spanish one, then a Thai one, then an Egyptian one, the same engine in a different national costume each time, even if all three are relatively good, I stop feeling anything at all. The accent changes, the formula does not.
Most restaurants are built for people who want a good night out, and thank god for them. But I wish London had more of the other kind, built by people who could not stop thinking about the food if they tried. Those are the only ones I have ever remembered. And it took a bowl of undercooked beetroot to work out why.
Andreja Lajh is the founder of Haut de Gamme, a London-based agency working with chefs, restaurants and food producers worldwide. She writes about food, wine and the restaurant world at hautdegamme.net.
Photo of Tom Kerridge: Horst Friedrichs/Alamy