First the heart, now the eyes
My day was hijacked a little today, after a late night out in London I was hoping for a lunchtime train home and an early finish.
This plan was disrupted when I was asked to join a mini food “trawl”, specifically looking at two of some of the most talked about new restaurants in the capital.
This isn’t to go into a detailed review on the places, more to highlight a key difference, an element to food that is often talked about and more apparent than I’ve ever experienced before - the fact that you eat with your eyes and that visual appeal is incredibly important to how you feel about the food you are eating.
First stop was Pitt Cue, a “bang on trend” meat based fast casual restaurant, just off Carnaby Street that takes meat from their farm in Cornwall (happy coincidence but where else!!) then lovingly prepares it with flavour and passion, giving it a real ‘low and slow’ experience in an oven, often smoking it gently too.
Awesome food, incredible textures and depths of flavour, with a clear American influence, examples are pulled pork with sourdough and a green chilli slaw, braised ox cheek on “toast” - it has a really small menu that changes frequently and the staff were some of the best informed in terms of ingredients, flavours and methods that I’ve ever come across.
The place is cool, very male orientated (but this is “dude food”), busy, buzzing and full of thirty-something’s with cool beards (I now have the beard but no longer a thirty-something!)
I loved it, I’d recommend it to everyone (perhaps with the exception of my vegetarian friends), awesome food.
The second place was Meat Liquor, just north of Oxford Street, on one of the roads that is perpendicular and feeds into Wigmore Street.
Meat Liquor has had pretty much the same levels of food press coverage as Pitt Cue but has a slightly different focus. It’s still American but more “American burger”, using good quality meats (in the main), steak, chicken and burgers, quite traditional but modernised I’d say.
The taste and flavour was ok, nothing special, quite fatty, a bit less sophisticated.
That’s the style of the place too, it’s got a similar age profile, a few more women but definitely about blokes, still cool but a different type of cool.
I’m not a film buff so forgive the analogies but I think Meat Liquor is a blues brothers / reservoir dogs type of place and Pitt Cue is a bit more “ocean’s” franchise.
I’d say Pitt Cue is “cool, cool” and Meat Liquor is “dirty cool”.
That’s not the important bit and what I wanted to write about.
The big thing is that Meat Liquor was dark inside, really dark. Our table was so dark we had to use the light on mobiles to read the menu. There was a red strip light above the table that totally changed all the colours in the room.
When the food arrived, it was all one colour, all looked the same. It wasn’t until someone took a photo that we realised that there was a yellow sauce on the chicken wings (very yellow), coloured peppers with the shaved steak sub and a red cabbage slaw that was a really vibrant purple.
The food was ok, nothing I’d recommend or want to go back for but our perceptions of the food were also changed significantly by the fact we couldn’t see it very well and certainly couldn’t see any of the vibrancy that it had.
I’ve never seen a clearer example of how important the look of food is, it also affected the mood of the group, this was supposed to be exciting, cutting edge but the mood was far from upbeat, totally different to Pitt Cue where we could see what was in front of us.
So my point?
Whatever you cook, however you present it, try as hard as you can to make sure it looks attractive and colourful.
Food is colourful, it should be interesting and vibrant (I know I’ve written along these lines before) but it should be exciting and appetising. Make sure that when you eat it with your eyes before your mouth, that they like it too.
Oh, and turn the bloody lights up!