catpuccino

I woke up this morning and read Jay Rayner's review of a Sichuan/Hubei restaurant near me. At first I was excited because tasty Asian (not including South Asian e.g. Indian, Sri Lankan etc. and) food is difficult to find in London (probably true for the UK and Europe more broadly). Due to the more limited migration, people here are more familiar with Cantonese Chinese food, and mostly an anglicised version that is a bit oilier, sweeter and that bears only a slight resemblance to actual Chinese food. That happens in Australia too, but as the east and south east Asian population is so much larger, you get a lot more restaurants that cater to them, meaning you get more food that is like what you'd find in Asia.

For me, that's a good thing. I can eat the fake Asian food, and sometimes I do because I'm lazy and I'll have bursts of optimism that it has improved and tastes better than the last time (never works out for me). I also prefer tradition over fusion. Mostly because I think so many people get fusion wrong. It's not really fusion if you don't understand the flavours in the first place. That's just chefs recreating, using a bit of soy sauce, getting it wrong, marking up the price just because they can and marketing it as "fusion".

I'm not saying you can't cook food you're not familiar with. People should experiment all they want to with food. Just don't try to sell it to me. I'm not your target market.

I've gotten off topic slightly, but it's all context really showing that I have Strong Views on Food. I felt uncomfortable reading Jay Rayner's article. It's great that he goes to places that the average person doesn't. It's great that he's trying something he doesn't try often. It's great that he liked it. But it was all a bit patronising. If I was the restaurant I'd be grateful for any extra customers the review brings in. But I'd also be thinking, did he have to be such a pompous wanker when writing about the food? I mean it's kind of Jay Rayner's M.O. He is a bit of a twat. I read a book of his a couple of years ago and he was like that the whole way through.

But it has an added dimension of ickiness for me because he is one of the "adventurous eaters". And he treats this food like it's this strange, fetishized food adventure. It's not.

My review for Mr Rayner: no stars. Go back to your fancy restaurants and French food.

So I started filling in the looking back at 2017 meme that dolorosa_12 shared, but I left it for a few hours to go do something else and when I came back none of what I'd written had saved. Not the best start to my new blog, but in keeping with one of my resolutions for 2018, I'm choosing to not let it bother me and posting a much condensed, non-meme retrospective of 2017. And a hello to the blogging world again!

2017 was an interesting year. And I mean that in both the regular sense of it, as in, it had lots of things out of the ordinary happening and was far from boring, but also in the English sense, where it means bad things but one is far too polite to say so.

It might take me awhile to get back to "peak" blogging form where the words just flow and my words say what I want them to say. Or they write themselves, sometimes I'm not really sure.

Turns out tonight I don't have quite all the words to say what 2017 was for me. So instead, for now, I'll just look forward to 2018, a year of restoration, where I don't let the seconds, minutes, days, weeks and months blur into each other.

Hello new year and hello dreamwidth blogosphere and my audience of... not very many!