My war on garnish: why chefs should throw away the tweezers

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jul/15/restaurants-war-on-garnish-jay-rayner

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Recently I was asked by a belly-obsessed friend if I would help mount a war against tweezer food. You know the sort of thing: ingredients so eye-wateringly delicate, that they could not possibly be placed on the plate using anything so blunt and clumsy as fingers. My friend certainly made a good argument. Anything in this known universe worth eating, he said, would always be of a size that would render tweezers redundant. If you can't stuff it into your gob with your hands what's the point?

He's right. A while back I stood in the kitchen during service at Dabbous, the latest lava-hot, flog-your-granny-for-a-booking London restaurant, and watched mesmerised as each of the cooks withdrew from somewhere deep inside their aprons, a pair of tweezers. The way their fingers moved, those guys could have performed keyhole surgery on me; if ever I elect to get the snip I won't bother Bupa. I'll just book a table there and get one of the commis to do it. The thing is, none of the food I loved at Dabbous – the asparagus with the rapeseed oil mayo, the soupy umami-rich squid broth, the slab of barbecued Iberico pork with a sweet-salty toffee mess of praline – was improved because of the tweezer thing. The tweezers were merely used to place edible blooms and micro herbs and tiny shards of this or that which I didn't give a toss about.

In short they were used to garnish. Oh dear. The G word. That is the real problem. The use of tweezers is just a symptom of the garnish disease. Garnishing is the art of the superfluous. It is an expression of prissiness in food, an attempt to make the gloriously knuckle-dragging business of preparing good stuff to eat – put meat on fire, throw fish in frothing butter – look delicate and considered. For here is a universal truth. Nothing classed as a garnish that is sprinkled on to food just before serving is ever necessary. That doesn't include flakes of sea salt, or a grind of pepper. That's not garnishing. It's seasoning.

It does include a chiffonade of parsley. Or of basil. Or any other bloody green herb. Have you ever had to do it: chop, chop, chop, turn, scrape together, chop again, until you have both a green dust and have lost the will to live? Then you throw it all over the food so that it looks like you placed it right in the path of a Flymo run amok. It doesn't even improve the presentation. Don't believe me? Go get a copy of <em>Larousse Gastronomique</em>; not the new "modernised" version but the old one with all those repellent pictures of food slathered with aspic and roux with the texture of old man sputum. Go look at pictures of pike du meunier. Or the pork chops charcutiere. Or frankly, of anything. It's all sprinkled with so much redundant chopped parsley it looks like it's been infected by a virulent mould. You know it will add nothing to the experience of eating the dish.

But perhaps the most shameful crime is the placing of a basil leaf – or "dessert parsley" as I heard it called recently – on top of a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Especially if placed there with a pair of tweezers. I know it shouldn't make me so cross; that there are worse crimes in the world. I know I should probably get out less. But I can't help myself. Garnishing is the biggest waste of time there is in the kitchen. Take this as a declaration of war.