Something’s got my goat recently. Kid, curd and little beard. It began as a niggling irritant but has steadily descended into vein-bulging rage. It’s a word, a single word, sneering back at me on every menu I scan, on every restaurant website I shrink from, in every conversation I have about food.
Authentic. Three syllables of grimmest shame. You know the kind of thing: ‘Welcome to Land of Smiles Authentic Vietnamese Restaurant. We make the most authentic Thai green curry this side of a Khao San Road piss-up.’
It’s that woeful attempt to evoke race and nation, and heritage and history, the ribbon of time. ‘Authentic’ is a catch-nothing word, lazily bunged on press puff because it sort of sounds good and, worse, because it exploits the ignorance of customers. In this context, it has no agreed definition; there’s no supervising body hauling restaurateurs before judges and citing the Trade Descriptions Act. You can misuse it with impunity.
The ‘Authentic Food Company‘, a sprawling Manchester outfit supplying ‘Pubs, Restaurants, Hotels, Travel and Leisure, Business and Industry, Healthcare and Education’ with inedible-looking ready meals is, naturally, nothing of the sort. Under its laser-specific ‘Authentic Oriental’ range, it sells ‘chicken battered balls’ with ‘a separate pouch of sweet and sour sauce’. The ‘Authentic British’ series contains ‘hunter’s chicken in BBQ sauce’, while ‘Authentic European’ has a not dissimilar ‘chicken chasseur’. It’s all as authentic as Ray-Bans flogged by a bloke on the beach.
Authenticity is a vacuously daft, divisively partisan, destructively conflicted idea. Palates are ineluctably tied to genes and tradition. Anyone who’s ever been to Thailand and eaten the whopping quantities of chilli they use there will know there’s amost nothing like it in British restaurants, whatever their bogus boasts of authenticity. True ‘authentic’ food is austerely frugal, constrained by logistics of transport, weather and soil, and bridled by memory. It’s only in the spoiled, fattened crucibles of global cities, like London and New York, that these eugenic ideas can surface.
All the great developments in food in recent decades occurred in spite – and not because – of some retrophilic love of authenticity. Nouvelle cuisine was just that: a movement that broke from tradition, from ‘authentic’ high-end French dining, that liberated and electrified eating out, and changed it forever. Fusion, too, unfairly maligned these days, pulses with invention and the inauthentic: and Nobu, which enhanced the cuisines of Japan and Peru by twinning and tweaking them, was the most exciting restaurant phenomenon of the last 20 years.
Knowledge of the history of food is certainly a fine thing, and it’s helpful to appreciate background and context if you change and develop a menu. But it’s insidious nonsense to argue that long-dead people somehow found nirvanic perfection in specific dishes – it’s the province of bores and snobs. To any recipe that runs beyond ‘peel and eat’, improvements can be made – which is, after all, part of the joy and power of food.
Last night, I was taken to Layalina, a new Lebanese place in Knightsbridge. The quality of the produce was so high, the service so friendly and efficient, the skill of the kitchen so unflappably obvious, that to have hummed and hawed over the ‘authenticity’ of the meal would have been pointless and ridiculous. Good food is good food, and we know it when we see it – regardless of heritage tomatoes’ heritage.
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