Long Live the Prawn Cocktail

Dissatisfied guests complain, but too often it is a cover for ignorance and social insecurity or a device for expressing self-disgust. I still hear people say that going to a restaurant is like eating pound notes. Attitudes to children are as repugnant, mean and hostile among some British hoteliers as they are among their customers. Where one will bar the admission of children below a certain age, the other’s refrain is: ‘I wouldn’t waste good food on my kids.’ What hope is there for the future, if we actively conspire to deprive our young of one of life’s most noble joys? And then there is our apparent, and hugely publicized, obsession with health, diet and vegetarianism. The good old British ‘blow-out’, however, gets no publicity but all the customers. The nation’s favourite restaurant meal remains prawn cocktail, steak and Black Forest gateau. At this level, gastronomy becomes as confused a definition as the difference between a chocolate bar and the Milky Way in the night sky. For the palate takes on the role of gateway to a heaped plate. Satisfaction is a loaded belly. And value-for-money is measured by the degree of your indigestion.