Dec 10th, 2023

Author: donich_admin

What makes for good food… Not this…

I may get shot down as a philistine for this. But having watched MasterChef both amateur and professional versions for many years I am afraid that my tolerance for any more of the wank they have been turning out of late is now at an end.
Last week was the finals, and the contestants were taken to a restaurant called “Alchemist” in Copenhagen. This is a kind of “experience” restaurant where you get served loads of tiny courses in a setting where the ambience and service is supposed to complement the food. In this case it involved sitting in a kind of planetarium with a giant screen over your head showing select scenes of things like blood vessels, disembodied eyes, and jellyfish surrounded by plastic bags. And further on the plastic bag front – the food…

One of the dishes (I am not kidding here) was cod served with a chopped up plastic bag on the top. Other gems were a “perfect omelette” which looked like a giant spot filled with pus, and a “battery” cage with a whole chicken claw poking out of it. Apparently this was all supposed to make us “think about the ecological impact of what we eat” while we were eating it. Well, personally, I don’t want to think about anything while I am eating apart from having a tasty, substantial meal. This delight costs nearly £600 not including wine.

Count me out. A quote from their website is “The alchemists aimed to purify, mature and perfect physical objects” – here’s the thing though – they didn’t succeed, and their attempts made for bad science in the same way as this kind of approach makes for unsatisfactory food.

I think MasterChef and I will have to part company – I didn’t think that food could become “woke” but it appears to have.