| The Art of … (Part 1) |
| Wine and art go back a long way. Whereas wine used to be consumed by impecunious artists, these days it is served by hard-up galleries. Of course the well-off galleries also serve wine, but they nevertheless behave like their impoverished colleagues, for the wine they pour is seldom fit for human consumption. This is odd, as you will see for yourself if you do the math. Simply jot down the surplus charge per bottle of somewhat more palatable wine and multiply it by the number of bottles used up at the average opening, at, say, 50 guests half of whom pour, say, three glasses down the hatch. This works out at 20 empty bottles, tops. A tenner for a cheap bottle versus twice that for a nice bottle works out at an additional outlay of a mere two hundred for a much more agreeable beverage. While you're serving wine, you might as well bear in mind that a good-natured customer might just decide while still "under the influence" to purchase a minor work of art, enabling the gallery owner to break even wine-wise as well as recouping his or her own intake. I would therefore take this opportunity to call upon all my fellow gallery owners to switch to serving good wine at openings - a worthy theme, perhaps, for the next National Gallery Days. |
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"The art of cookery" is one of those expressions that are bandied about from
time to time. Of course this has nothing to do with symbioses such as that
of art and fashion, or art and street furniture. Which makes it all the more
likely that something along these lines is about to burst upon the scene.
Impressionist Cuisine is what I'm talking about. Impressionist Cuisine: an amalgamation of food fighting, action painting and sports such as paint-balling, with a generous helping of emotionally involved choice, of course. You heard it here first: soon restaurants will be popping up all over the place where you will be treated to a sensational food preparation show, preferably while you are looking on. Of course the eco tax will be a little higher due to the greater production losses, but if you scrape together the leftovers you'll still be able to come up with a delicious array of crispy finger food. As I myself am seldom found slaving over a hot stove, chances are that you will catch me out, misrepresenting things. However, give it some thought and you're bound to agree that it doesn't make any difference to the principle of the thing, so let's get busy. Whenever there's a celebrity chef on the tube, you always see them chopping up masses of onions way before their pots and pans start hissing and churning. What we do to these onions is fling them with all our might against a grid of knives suspended on the wall, preferably in a room filled to capacity. The cleverer the cook, the greater the distance between him and the knives and the smaller the grid, and the more sensational the effect as the onion meets the knives in an upward curve and has itself juicily sliced into sixteen cubes. Novice onion flingers are to be placed in front of a clean white wall featuring narrow integrated drains at hip level, to catch the juice of misdirected and thus, partially squashed (or worse) onions and channel it into a small reservoir. We will see at a later stage that it is this post-flattening juice which represents the best part of the onion. Pureed tomatoes are made using a modified office chair featuring a dual seat in between which tomatoes are wedged. The idea is to run up to the chair, launch oneself and land seated, at right angles to the platform, following which one should aim the pureed tomatoes through a sideways spout onto a round table covered in a pristine white cloth. Clearly this is mostly a visually stimulating happening. Tricky as the aiming bit may be, it does yield colourful abstract compositions provided you get it right. In between proceedings the more practised among chefs will operate levers suspended from lengths of rope using which salt, pepper and other condiments are added to the airborne ingredients from little boxes with silk screen bottoms dangling from the ceiling. Although the rules of the game allow the use of standard beaters and blenders when whipping up a sauce, a higher score can be obtained using the old-fashioned artisan approach. To this end the cream should be hurled against the wall, experiments having borne out that a circulation factor of five (i.e. you should scrape the cream from and redirect it at the wall it a total of five times) should be enough to secure the appropriate degree of firmness, the wall being validated as a prominent kitchen utensil. We also have a method for distributing sauces prepared in advance, in the shape of the sauce harmonium: what you get, how much and, most importantly, when depends entirely on the music, and only the regulars know which flavour goes with which libretto. Abandoning the kitchen for now, we take cover behind the wine waiter. He has been dispensed with. Choosing the wine is now done on the basis of sensory perception, without any additional information being provided. A contraption is suspended by pulleys from the ceiling, holding several small vats of wine. Ropes are used to lower this apparatus and manoeuvre it over the appropriate table. An audio signal is produced - which in the higher-end restaurants could be that of a harp or a flute, but most expressly not that of the sauce harmonium - following which a squirt of wine is released from each of the vats, at two-second intervals, from about three feet up. Each vat has an in-built infrared sensor at the bottom which - targeting the punter's open mouth - enables the wine to be aimed in exactly the right direction. Unfortunately the software still needs a bit of work, with much of the wine currently ending up off target. Otherwise this ground-breaking wine-tasting method, which does away with soiled glasses as well as with the dreaded spittoon which inexorably causes wine-tasting sessions to degenerate into a series of failed Breughelesque tableaux, does considerably greater justice, and with much greater accuracy at that, to differences in taste while curtailing the painful staring at the wine list, thus freeing up more time to sit back and enjoy. Water is dispensed through the air from a low wok-shaped vessel, to be caught at the targeted table using a second vessel. By contrast to the fruitless hailing of waiters (one of my special talents), our new system has no sympathy for tables whose mind happens to be elsewhere whenever the staff seek to draw attention to an impending delivery. They simply take aim and let go, without a moment's hesitation. |