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Why Good Food is Worth Waiting for......
I once sat in a simple harbourside taverna in Greece where the old waiter – resplendent in vest, shorts and half-moon glasses – seemed to be waiting on more than my table. He kept looking anxiously along the shore, until finally a tiny fishing boat arrived and his son ran up the steps with that day’s catch.
“Now,” said the old man proudly, “you can have small fish or calamari.” I waited until he cooked my meal over a charcoal grill – a wait suffused with relaxation and the pleasurable anticipation of a seafood dish which just minutes ago was in the sea.
Waiting while a meal is cooked is becoming something of a lost art in Britain. In a fast-paced society, where instant gratification is the order of the day, it is only to be expected that the concept of a leisurely meal will come under assault.
Many restaurants have succumbed to customer demand that the meal should be on the table before the waiter has finished folding away the menus. Dishes are designed for ease of preparation rather than culinary competence. And the microwave is kitchen staff’s best friend.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. It is still possible to square the circle of freshly prepared, individual dishes with a pace of service which doesn’t allow cobwebs to gather on the diners.
When we opened Paperino’s West End in Glasgow – a new venture born out of our traditional Italian restaurant Paperino’s – I insisted that the food we served should be the freshest possible and that it should be constructed in our kitchens from first principles.
Scotland is blessed with some of the finest fresh produce in the world, from fruit and vegetables to beef, fish and shellfish, and it is almost criminal not to take advantage of it where possible.
Our original restaurant has always been associated in the minds of our regular clientele with good Italian food, reasonable prices and speedy service. I found in the new venture that, initially, we were getting a few complaints about the length of time it took for a meal to reach the table – though these complaints usually evaporated when the quality of the food became apparent.
I am not going down the road of saying that we have to educate our diners to accept longer service times for freshly prepared food – that would be the height of arrogance. I believe, instead, that properly prepared fresh food will be its own advocate.
We have 185 covers in our new Byres Road outlet – nearly 100 more than in the original restaurant – and we have had to increase our staff from 24 to 48 within just over six weeks of opening, so the recipe appears to be working.
Our pizzas, for instance, are started from scratch as soon as the check hits the kitchen. The chef will have prepared dough and a base sauce, but each pizza is spun separately and the fresh toppings added just before it goes in to the oven.
All our meat is cooked from raw – there is no stock of part-cooked items – so someone ordering a steak can have it any way he wants, from blue to well-done. Apart from a base tomato sauce, no sauces are prepared in advance, so each sauce can be tailored for individual diners, with more or less of particular ingredients.
For instance, we had a large party in one busy Saturday night, six of whom wanted our penne alla crema. But three of them wanted it with bacon, and three vegetarian – which wasn’t a problem since the sauce wasn’t pre-prepared, and we could accommodate their choices easily.
Even oven dishes like lasagne, which by their nature have to be prepared in advance, are warmed up in the pizza oven rather than in a microwave. This takes five or six minutes, as opposed to two in the microwave, but I believe it keeps the authentic flavour of the dish, which makes the extra few minutes wait worthwhile.
And that’s really at the root of it. Good food is one of life’s great pleasures and having it served diligently in companionable surroundings can, just for a short while, apply the brakes to the frenetic pace at which most people lead their lives.
The value of this I leave to the philosophers. But I’m sure the old man in the taverna would agree with me.
Stefano Giovanazzi is a director at Paperino’s West End
