CONTRIBUTOR The New Gastronomy Jeremy Wayne, Restaurant Editor of Tatler
True gastronomy involves every sense: taste, touch, smell, sight and sound. If you have ever listened to the sound of Laurent-Perrier Grande Siècle poured from its cradle, or aiguière, into a Murano goblet, you will know how sound and sight contribute to the experience. If you have ever stroked a puff-ball mushroom, the size of a football but smooth as alabaster, or kneaded bread, or eaten Heston Blumenthal’s triple cooked chips with your fingers – the only way to eat them, of course – you’ll know the part that touch plays too.
Gastro-tourism is on the rise. We travel to eat. Not only to the two and three Michelin-stars temples of gastronomy, in Paris, Rome or Copenhagen, to Tokyo, or to Yountville, California, but to restaurants where local people regularly eat. In Menton, Memphis, and Maputo, Mozambique, we want to know what only those-in-the-know can tell us. The old gastronomy was grand but the new gastronomy can be altogether humbler. Small is beautiful, seasonal is key, local is non-negotiable and the real thing is king.
Thanks to the Internet, we’ve never been better informed, better equipped or better prepared. The word is out. These days, the gastro-tourist often knows the territory he’s moving in on better than the locals know it themselves.
How has gastronomy changed? Once, it was the preserve of the rich. Now, it’s the preserve of the discerning. Gastronomy is no longer about eating in a room where Garibaldi may once have parked his bottom, or a chef de rang’s epaulettes, or flaming torches, although these may still come into it. It is about the pleasures of the table, the excitement of the new, and the almost Proustian delight of a classic dish properly done. For these three things we will always be ready to travel.
OCTOBER2011
25
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