Pretentious menus are a feature of modern restaurant life. As Tom Parker Bowles says in the Mail on Sunday, "heinous crimes" are committed daily against grammar and good taste, with tomatoes routinely described as "heritage" or "vine-ripened" and steaks described in excruciating detail. But the menu for the annual dinner of the children's charity, Ark, was an outrage even by today's standards.
The dinner is always a gala event and last week's, hailed as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's "social debut", was no exception. Ark is a laudable charity. It raises huge amounts of money for underprivileged children. So the actors, socialites and hedge-fund managers who cough up £10,000 a head to attend its yearly jamboree may not be over-fussy about the food. All the same, one wonders why they put up with a menu which reads, as Parker Bowles put it, like "a masterpiece of the satirist's art".
For the main course I'll spare you the starters or puddings guests were given a choice. One option was "Pacific Ocean black cod fillet: hand-glazed with a Japanese tamari and manuka honey reduction. Delicately balanced on a sumptuous organic pearl barley risotto, hand in hand with a delightful English courgette flower beignet, teriyaki jus". If you didn't fancy the cod and risotto "hand in hand" with a courgette flower beignet, whatever that is, then the alternative was "roasted fillet of Australian Kobe beef, nestling in a Kent garden pea puree, temptingly accompanied by a succulent spinach and onion compote, to die for triple-cooked Maris Piper chips and Indonesian long pepper sauce".
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It's hard to know where to start with this. Can a compote really be "succulent"? Why does it matter that the peas came from a Kent garden? And why did the beef have to be flown all the way from Australia? Don't we have cows in England? I'm sure the food itself was delicious. I have some advice for the caterers, though: get a new menu writer. As Tom Parker Bowles rightly asks: whatever happened to the concept of trusting the chef?
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