Mar 23, 2010
Cool Restaurant Idea: Stolen Supper Club
Monday’s “fish menu” which offered a chance to taste Stolen’s take on Nobu, E&O, the Ivy and Marcus Waering. Our verdict was a resounding ‘more please’ as we were impressed not only with the food but equally with the ambiance. A candlelit conversation across the table with friendly folks from a variety of backgrounds and postcodes was most accommodating to the gorgeous courses of new style sashimi, chilli salt squid and Thai baked sea bass with fragrant rice. A peach and Champagne sorbet for dessert and a generous sampling of Akashi-Tai sake rounded out the experience nicely.
This seems like an obvious idea. It’s the way I try to run my dinner parties.
How many good dishes do you need to make a good restaurant? 10? 15? Is there are restaurant in the world that wouldn’t be improved by removing its weakest courses?
Why doesn’t someone build a restaurant that serves only the best dishes from the best chefs in the world? Food cannot be patented, copyrighted, or protected as trade dress. Chefs have cribbed recipes for each other, or stolen them outright, for years. What beyond bragging rights are the rewards for novelty for novelty’s sake?
Human nature is a funny thing. Our egos reward novelty. We would like to imagine that we can do things first, better, bigger, more memorable. We take pride in our creations (even when they’re demonstrably worse) because they’re ours.
We also tend to love complexity. We add more courses and more dishes to a menu in a quest to demonstrate our versatility or satisfy our curiosity or meet the expectations of the marginal customer. That way disaster lies. Not only does that mean putting mediocre food on the menu, but it dramatically increases the complexity of prepping and firing the food, or stocking the inventory. It’s not for nothing that Gordon Ramsay begins nearly every episode of Kitchen Nightmares by dramatically shortening an over fattened menu.
I forgot which great mid-century modern figure urged it, but this person was right to advise: “Don’t worry about being original. Just be good.” Or as Picasso said, “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.”