Delia’s got it wrong about our restaurants

Was restaurant food better in the 1970s than it is now? Delia Smith thinks it was. The "gifted amateurs" who opened restaurants in those days were more in touch with what people wanted than today's leading cooks. "If I am in a Michelin-starred restaurant and they have done this beautiful little smoked haddock souffl in a thimble, I would like to order a whole big plateful. No, I'm not for four-course tasting menus," she says. In the 1970s, you got simple, classic meals and knew what you were getting. She's especially fond of the Wiveton Hall Caf in Cley next the Sea, in Norfolk: plenty of fresh food (it's on a farm); plenty of fresh fish, too. Nor does it cost much, as I discovered when I rang it: about £14.50 for lunch, much less if you just have a bowl of mushroom soup or lobster bisque. Other dishes include crab salad, poached salmon and broad bean and Parmesan tart.

Michael Winner agrees. "In the 1970s, food was indeed simpler," he wrote in the Daily Mail. "There were wonderful dishes that are considered antiquated today. Shrimp cocktail was a favourite. Juicy shrimps on a bed of lettuce with a pink sauce. Main courses were simply described as roast lamb with vegetables' and that's what appeared." The best food Winner ever ate was at Wiltons in London's Jermyn Street, then run by a "wonderful" cockney called Jimmy Marks. "Everything at Wilton's in those days was so fresh that Jimmy wouldn't keep it in the fridge overnight. Another nearby restaurant, Prunier's, would send for [his] unsold fish at close of business and serve it the next day." There were no celebrity chefs then, as Winner says. No one knew, or cared, who the chef was. "Now every twit who thinks he can fry an egg is giving interviews all over the place, and appearing endlessly on TV, and food has suffered because of it."

He may have a point, but I'm old enough to remember the 1970s and I'd say most restaurant food is better now. There are places where, as Winner puts it, the food "often resembles dots on a plate, amid coloured squiggles", but there are also lots of good restaurants, many more than there used to be, and plenty of them don't have celebrity chefs the Wolseley in London's Piccadilly, for example. Is the food as fresh as it was in the 1970s? I've no idea. But the sole I had in Wilton's last week was delicious, and tasted perfectly fresh to me.

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