What
makes a good restaurant?
(This
piece first appeared in the Western Mail magazine, Saturday 25
October)
The
Western Mail magazine's wine guru, Jamie Goode, who runs
wineanorak.com, reveals his essential ingredients for the ideal dining
out experience.
Eating out is an expensive business, so you really want to be
sure of a good experience. Sadly, this doesn’t always happen. Here
I’m going to sum up what I feel are the characteristics of a good
restaurant.
Successful restaurants offer a seamless dining experience –
you only notice what good restaurants do so well when you experience
the same things going wrong in bad restaurants. So although I suspect
it would be a lot easier to write about what makes a bad restaurant,
I’ll try instead to pinoint what it is that makes a good one.
For me, part of the fun in eating out is the fact that it’s
an unhurried social experience, with plenty of time to interact with
your dining companions. There’s something about the restaurant
setting that encourages relaxed conversation and enjoyment of food and
wine. For this to happen, though, a number of ingredients must be in
place.
First, the restaurant needs to be appropriately busy. It
doesn’t need to be crammed so full that the noise level becomes
intolerable, but equally there’s nothing quite as bad as being the
only diners in an eerily silent room. And the tables need to be spaced
far enough apart that you don’t feel you are being eavesdropped in
your conversation. What creates the buzz or mood of a place is
indefinable, but it’s an important factor.
Talking of noise levels, I’m aware this is quite a personal
choice, but I don’t like background music when I’m dining out.
Music has such an ability to colour the atmosphere of an evening
it’s very hard for restaurants to get it right, and most often they
don’t.
Service is a key issue. Again, it’s a question of balance,
and it’s another area where you tend to notice it more if it is bad.
Good service is unselfconscious, it’s unfussy and it’s
appropriately attentive. I don’t want waitstaff hovering around,
anxious to interrupt at the slightest nod, but then again I don’t
want to have to sit there for 20 minutes before I can get someone to
bring another bottle of fizzy water. I appreciate friendly service,
but I don’t want wait staff to engage me in too much conversation,
or be ingratiating. And I can’t bear it when the proprietor comes
out and pretends I’m his best friend and most loyal customer. I’m
sorry that sounds a bit mean and antisocial, but it’s true.
As in so many walks of life, timing is everything. The
restaurant staff have can a major effect on the success or failure of
an evening by getting the timing right or wrong. I want a gap between
courses, but it’s got to be just right or things feel hurried or
drawn out. Restaurants have a frustrating knack of slowing things down
too much towards the end of the meal, when it can take an epoch to
order coffee, and even longer to get the bill – probably my number
one complaint about restaurants in general.
Restaurant wine is a contentious subject. Restaurants
typically use the margins on drinks to make their profits. It’s
ironic that while most of the work in a restaurant goes into
preparation of the food, the margins on the raw ingredients are modest
compared with that on drinks, where the only skill required is being
able to pull a cork or twist a screwcap and pour.
I don’t begrudge restaurateurs their profits – they’ve
got to make a living somehow – but it’s a shame that serious wine
nuts are penalized more than most when eating out. A typical mark-up
on restaurant wine is at least three times retail. This doesn’t hurt
too much when you are buying a £5 bottle of wine for £15, but if you
are plumping for something decent that would retail for £20, you’ll
be paying the proprietor £40 plus just for pulling a cork.
The fact that most restaurateurs are a little embarrassed by
their pricing is indicated by the fact that many merchants who
specialize in supplying eateries make ‘on trade’-only brands and
labels. This is so that you won’t be able to buy the same wine in
Tesco or Oddbins and see just how extravagant the mark-up is.
For me, a good restaurant is one where the wine list is
imaginative, with a well chosen selection of wines, and where the
pricing isn’t too rapacious. Credit to any restarateur who has a
sliding scale of mark-ups, with a smaller percentage on pricier
bottles, so that people aren’t put off drinking more expensive
wines. Many restaurants buy just from one merchant. As a result, the
list has a rather formulaic feel, with a few hits and lots of misses.
It’s rare to find a restaurant where much thought and work has gone
into the wine list where wines have been carefully sourced from a
variety of suppliers, but these are the restaurants I tend to award
with my custom. I’m happy to pay a decent mark-up where I feel the
owner has taken some care in choosing decent wines that match her
cooking. If a restaurant can offer mature vintages of fine wines (and
not just off-vintages of famous names – a typical trick to snare the
less wary), then all the better. The glassware also matters: even a
humble house wine can taste much more interesting out of proper
generous-sized glasses.
For many restaurants, the cost of assembling and stocking a
decent wine list with mature fine wines is prohibitive. This is where
BYO (bring your own) comes in handy. I wouldn’t expect every
restaurant to allow customers to BYO wine for free – although this
is usually the case in Australia, for example – but it is a wine
friendly policy to allow customers to bring special bottles by
arrangement, assuming that these are not on the wine list. I’m happy
to pay a corkage fee for this to make up for the restaurant’s lost
profit, which depending on the restaurant could be as high as £15.
But sadly most proprietors won’t even consider this, which is a
shame.
I’ve saved possibly the most important aspect of the
restaurant experience to last – the food. Style of food is a largely
matter of taste. But whatever the style, I tend to value simple
cooking with good quality ingredients over fussy and over-elaborate
food. Some chefs mistake novelty for innovation, mixing in bizarre
combinations of flavours. Not for me, I’m afraid. I also value
authenticity: If I’m eating Italian, for instance, I don’t want
some ersatz theme-park-style mock-up of an Italian restaurant with
fake stylised food, but instead I’d opt for modest surroundings with
genuine Italian dishes made from the best ingredients.
Most of all, I want to go to the sort of restaurant where the
proprietor is passionate about food and wine, and whose primary goal
is excellence, not making a fortune. Decent restaurants should be
cherished and valued, and we should reward them with our custom.
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