Choice has no synonym. There’s selection, or pick, which are close, but no matching valance. Of all the words you’d have thought would offer you a choice ... What the limited vocabulary of choice is trying to say is that choice is a chimera, a basilisk, a cockatrice, a Hydra — a mythic multiple that doesn’t exist. One of the great lies of freedom and democracy and the marketplace is that they give you choice. Competition is choice.
Well, how do you imagine that competition in business is going to be the opposite of competition everywhere else? The FA Cup doesn’t end up with everyone a winner. It finishes with multiple losers and one winner. The business of capitalism is to defeat the opposition and become the biggest — ultimately, the only — choice, so choice is no choice at all.
The greatest change of our lifetimes has been the smoke and mirrors of choice. And in food, the implied choice is wearying: the number of ingredients and flavours, the combinations available from across the world, which can be picked and mixed into a dizzying kaleidoscope of fusions. It would be possible to eat three meals a day in London and never repeat a dish for an entire lifetime. So, how come you never find anything you want to eat on the menu? How come you choose the same three things: rogan josh at the Indian, chicken and cashew at the Chinese, American hot on your pizza?
Choice is disappointingly unliberating. The promise of endless variety savours of sameness, and we blame ourselves for being spoilt or ignorant, unimaginative, ungrateful and unfulfilled. We grow depressed. Turn to degrading self-abuse and mortifying religious cults. And, finally, we move to Notting Hill Gate — the hospice of slow euthanasia.
Don’t despair. Relax, as Peter Mandelson always said, don’t do it. It’s not you. The truth is, there really isn’t much choice. You are being offered the same thing over and over. If it tastes like brown mush, it’s not because your palate’s blown, it’s because it is brown mush. The vast index of menus is, in fact, like someone shouting the same limerick over and over, but in different comedy accents. The variety of raw ingredients that restaurants offer is getting fewer and shallower. Most London restaurants use one of half-a-dozen specialist wholesalers to deliver their raw materials, so the type of potato or fish or meat is one size fits all.
Have you considered why there is so much sea bass on menus? Well, it is farmed to portion size, it is relatively cheap, supply is guaranteed and it is seen by customers as being a luxury. And why do you think every salad you order is the same mixed shred of multicoloured crunchy stuff, which tastes only of the astringent, mustard-thick dressing squirted over it? It is because that’s how salad comes, ready-made, in bags. Fish is already filleted, vegetables are peeled and chopped, meat is butchered in three easy-to-cook shapes, either from anonymous carcasses or from trendy, value-added named breeds. This month, we’re mostly eating longhorn; last year, it was dexter.
And, of course, everything is organic. The great thing about organic is that nobody can tell on the plate, and nobody is bothering to check. Yet it adds a couple of quid to the ticket. The reasons for all this are many — economies of scale, lack of technical skill in kitchens, fashion and the great motivator and engine of all free markets, expedience.
On the streets, restaurants look like the perfect model of free enterprise and freedom of choice. But you should look at them as outlets or franchises of demi-monopolies, run and supported by suppliers, producers, importers and restaurateurs. I reckon the Victorians ate a wider variety of food than we do.
One of the best, or worst, examples of the no-choice choice is Cocoon. It is tough picking on them just after New Year. I don’t know where they get their ingredients. They may be out with rod and hoe, collecting it with dew on, but I doubt it. A waitress leant across to the Blonde, as she laid down a plate of sushi, and said helpfully: “You should come back tomorrow. It’ll be fresh.”
The hiatus between Christmas and New Year, when I was here, is difficult for restaurants. Suppliers take extended holidays, as do many kitchens. Those that are open rely on frozen and foraged ingredients. Cocoon is on the site that was once the BA office on Regent Street. It was converted, at huge expense, into the Odeon restaurant. Bruno Loubet cooked here briefly. Now, it’s had a makeover, both cosmetic and exclamatory, like one of those nonsurgical face-lifts, which has left the room looking like a cross between a Miami health spa and an Austin Powers set. Not a look that does much for me. Yards of wafty curtain obscure the long, low room’s one feature: its windows.
The dining experience is all concept. It’s leapt on the back of the already overcrowded bandwagon of cosmopolitan holiday orientalism. It’s a bit Nobu, a bit Roka and a touch Hakkasan. The menu seems to have been designed by a committee, for whom the most important consideration seems to be what has worked somewhere else. As a dining choice, it’s more of the same, but slightly worse. The food is poorly made, imprecise and coarsely seasoned: less good than you’d expect from the chill counter of a supermarket. Thai green curry, a dish whose main ingredient comes in bottles fresh from Thailand and is distributed to every orientalist restaurant that needs it, was an insipid gruel with a muddy, farinaceous bottom that didn’t invite investigation. Like paddling barefoot through a hot duck pond. Blow-torched tuna was fish treated like unwanted wallpaper, and reminded me of the best line in Desperately Seeking Susan, when a cab driver says: “What’s all that sushi stuff? I bought some, took it home, cooked it. Don’t see what all the fuss is about.”
There’s going to be a new menu tomorrow, the waitress stressed apologetically. I know this is a difficult time for getting deliveries, getting motivated and the staff to turn up, but the catering industry is always bitching about something. I’ve yet to come across a restaurant that said: “We’re taking 20% off the bill due to boring vegetables, frozen fish and an inexperienced commis chef.” Cocoon isn’t cheap — £223 for three people, three discretionary quid added for the tsunami fund. They’d have been better off giving it to the cook not to murder the cuisines of countries that have already suffered so much. And they charged me £13.50 for two gay bottles of still water. Now, bottled water. There’s the ultimate mermaid of no-choice choice.
Cocoon
65 Regent Street, W1; 020 7494 7600
Mon-Sat, noon-3pm, 5.30pm-1am; Sun, noon-4pm, 7pm-11pm
