The taste of food, or appealing to the masses?

Had a really interesting conversation with a good friend the other day. She LOVES eating, and eats out (as in: at restaurants, cafes, and people’s places) at least 4 times a week. She’s a great eater too, which is good when you cook for her, because she loves everything you put down in front of her, and praises you to high heaven. She also hates cooking for herself.

She ate recently at Piccalilly, an experience she found reasonably lacking.

Our conversation covered the food she ate, the ethos behind the Piccalilly food, and chefs in general, plus what we all want when we go out for a meal, and lead to a long discussion about tastes and flavours, and food and money, as well as expectations generally.

The reason I found it interesting was that once again it illustrated to me the differences in all of us, and the difficulty chefs have traditionally always had in their efforts to please many of their customers.

Even at home, one of the main daily issues to be addressed when I was a young wife and mother, was the fact that it was really difficult to encompass everyone’s likes and dislikes for the evening meal. There seemed to be something wrong with everything I made, according to at least one of my “customers”. Either I’d served the food with Brussels sprouts, which a few of my offspring claimed tasted like farts, or spinach (which they always said was gritty, and they hated the taste of it anyway), or they didn’t like the meat touching the veges, or something! The nightly meal always seemed to be a source of much dispute, either before, during or after it.

I suppose that’s how I approached my career in hospitality. If I could tolerate and approach my customers in a restaurant scenario with the same amount of tolerance and patience as I had with my own children, then rest assured I would naturally be a huge success! No one can be as clear as one of your children telling you precisely what they think of your food at home – whether it’s fabulous or disgusting!

One of those moments came one winters morning after my son Jamie insisted he could breakfast on nothing but porridge that particular day when I’d already prepared scrambled eggs for everyone. After some nagging from him, I made the porridge and put it down in front of him. He refused to eat it with the reason that he now wasn’t feeling like eating it! At that pronouncement, Rita calmly picked up the bowl of porridge and neatly upended it on the top of his head! As porridge dripped down his hair and face, it then fell to Rita to have to deal with the upshot of that foolhardy action, and take him back into the bathroom to have a second shower, and get into another set of clean clothes.

But – I had previously thought that through, and decided that the satisfaction of actually demonstrating what I, as another human also entitled to possess an opinion, thought of his decision to not eat the porridge, was justified.

I think that’s why I am convinced that the most universal favourite, food-wise, is the humble roast. It is the one meal that I can guarantee everyone will enjoy, no matter who they are, or where they come from. Even my vegetarian daughter, whose predilections mean she can’t even front up to a fish product, loves a tray of baked veges and gravy.

So – when all’s said and done, I think my message is simple: you really can’t please all the people all the time, so don’t think for one moment you can. At the end of the day, you can really only take a good hard look in the mirror and if you can justify everything you’ve done that day, you’ve done alright.