Food

The New York Times recently released its annual list of America’s Top 50 restaurants – and the perfectly predictable honorees highlight just how beholden the restaurant industry is to the tastes of a would-be cosmopolitan class. The casually refined, vaguely ethnic-fusion cuisine that you stumble upon even in America’s most provincial places is rife. From New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in between, America’s restaurant industry has never been more diverse. Yet somewhat counterintuitively, it’s also never offered more of the same. Often, these restaurants propose some mix of French staples (think mother sauces, patisserie) or Italian comfort food (pasta, pizza) fused with Latin, Asian and/or Middle Eastern flavors.

There’s a famously untranslatable expression in Virgil’s Aeneid: lacrimae rerum. Latin scholars, always fond of threshing things out, have devoted reams of analysis to proving just how untranslatable it is. As is typical of academics, however, they go to lots of trouble to establish its utter untranslatability – and then turn around and translate it anyway. When pumpkins aren’t being cozy, they generally denote a sense of emptiness or artifice Word for word, lacrimae rerum means “The tears of things” (or, depending on your school of thought, “The tears for things.”) But each scholar has his slant on the sadness.

The name can’t help but invite mockery. When Sainsbury’s launched its ‘Taste the Difference’ range 25 years ago this autumn, I wasn’t alone in noting that the phrase almost begged for a question mark at the end. But the British public are (mostly) more concerned with dinner than with sarcasm. The Taste the Difference range now extends to more than 1,200 products, from Pugliese Burrata with Sunsoaked (sic) Tomatoes and Bacon Wrapped Halloumi Sticks with Hot Honey Drizzle to Anya Potatoes and Nocellara Del Belice Olives. I admit to having eaten most of the above products, despite being a keen ‘cook from scratch’ sort who loves to ramble around Electric Avenue in Brixton to buy fish, veg and lamb chops.

I’m driving a dirt road in the wilds of central Sardinia. And I mean what I say by ‘wilds’. This rugged region in the sunburned Supramonte mountains was called ‘Barbagia’ by Cicero – i.e. ‘land of the barbarians’ – as even the Romans never quite managed to subdue it. Centuries later it became famous for bandits, kidnaps, local mafias – and casu marzu, the infamous ‘Sardinian maggot cheese’. I turn to my resourceful local guide, driver and interpreter, Viola, as she negotiates the olive groves and goat tracks. ‘Do you really think we will find casu marzu?’ My voice is slightly falsetto with tension. Viola turns: ‘I hope so, there is a pretty good chance. And maybe we will find something even more unusual…’ But first, let’s rewind 30 years.

Eleven Madison Park, perhaps the finest of New York’s fine-dining establishments, is adding select meat dishes back to its prix fixe menu after an ill-fated foray into veganism after the pandemic. Chef Daniel Humm announced the move in the New York Times, citing all the predictable reasons for ditching a plant-based menu. First and foremost: the finances. “It’s hard to get 30 people for a corporate dinner to come to a plant-based restaurant,” Humm told the Times, noting the negative feedback from diners over the years. Still, he framed the move in moral terms, explaining how he didn’t “realize that [the vegan menu] would exclude people.” To this, I can only muster an eye roll.

Long Compton is in the Cotswolds, but to the east, where there are no boutique hotels or shops selling artisan candles to tourists. Banburyshire and its surrounds are actual countryside. Fields roll away in the manner Germans call Kulturlandschaft, meaning landscape shaped by centuries of human care. This is the sort of country that makes people write poetry about hedgerows and choral music about sheep: lovely to live in but, by long British tradition, a dismal place to dine out. Discovering a truly great restaurant in Long Compton – population 764 – feels like finding in rural Warwickshire one of those bucolic la France profonde dining experiences that seemed nostalgic fantasies even when M.F.K Fisher described them.