Tartare of Tuna

Such a nineties thing, the fish tartare. That’s rather like saying that tarragon chicken was a sixties thing, steak au poivre a seventies, viennoise of cod an eighties. A bit of a recurring theme in this book is the foolishness of the fashion-conscious, who seize upon a dish and put it on a pedestal so everyone of lesser talent feels bound to imitate it; the dish becomes devalued and bowdlerized and is consigned to outer darkness. This has happened to squid ink risotto, and it’s happened to