125. Fiddly Finger Food

I never complain in restaurants.  If the service is poor, I keep quiet and if the food is awful I say nothing.  I just put it down to experience and I never return. 

But, if the waiter or waitress makes a point of coming over to our table during the meal and interrupting the conversation to ask, “Is everything all right?” or, “How is your food?” I will tell him or her exactly what I think of it.

I work on the assumption that they ask because they want to know.  Caroline says that they are just trying to be polite but I don’t think that it’s very polite to interrupt two, four or six people just at the moment that I am reaching the denouement of a very interesting, amusing and always captivating anecdote.

Perhaps it’s because I never complain that I am never embarrassed in restaurants - except once, perhaps.  We visited “The Hoxton Apprentice” in Hackney where Hannah, a teaching assistant who helped me at school, was employed in the evenings.  Part of Hannah’s function at this training restaurant was to look after and supervise the long-term unemployed young men and women who were being given a start in the restaurant business.

Our table wasn’t ready and we were asked to wait in the bar.  I asked the young woman for a red wine and a gin and tonic.  She came back a minute later and put the gin and tonic in front of Caroline. 

“No, that’s mine,” I said.

“You can’t ‘ave that,” she scoffed, loudly. 

“That’s a girl’s drink!”

You will have heard of road rage but have you ever witnessed food rage?  I did once and although it was very funny, it was also embarrassing. 

Some thirty ago, I toured the West Country with Malcontents Cricket Club.  Our scorer was an Irishman called Murty.  After a match at Instow in Devon one evening, some of us were eating in a pub.  Murty ordered steak and chips.  When his meal arrived, along with his steak and fries, there were peas on the plate.  Murty exploded. 

“Peas!” He shouted at the waiter.  “I hate the bastards!” 

The place went quiet and everyone in the pub looked at our table.

“You can’t trust peas,” he roared. “Take them away and put my steak on a clean plate.  I don’t want any trace of the little bastards.” 

I don’t think I have ever seen anyone so genuinely angry.

I love eating shrimps and prawns.  However, the two worst gastronomic experiences I have ever had in a restaurant have been when I ordered them but I stayed very composed and never reacted the way Murty did.

Caroline and I were driving across northern France from Calais to Paris.  We arrived in Amiens at around two o’clock in the afternoon and the first thing we did was to find a bar that served food.  I ordered “crevettes, pain brun”.  I can’t remember what Caroline had and neither can she - but we both remember my shrimps. 

I don’t know where those shrimps came from.  It was probably The Bay of Somme and I don’t know if they were graded into three sizes as are the best shrimps in the world that come from Morcambe Bay. 

Some people - strange people - advocate eating the whole shrimp.  They believe that the head and tail have the most flavour and are “texturally exciting”.  Texturally exciting?  Only if you are excited by having shreds of chitin stuck between your teeth are they texturally exciting.  I know of someone who eats them whole, fried in chilli oil with chopped onion and then served cold with a lime wedge.  I will never eat whole shrimps.

Some shrimps are sold whole and intact to restaurants, but most are shelled.  I have no idea why any restaurant ever wants them unshelled. The bar in Amiens where we had lunch was one that did.

When brown shrimps are peeled commercially it is by machine but the smallest grade of shrimp is difficult and more than half of these smallest shrimps need to have the last obstinate pieces of shell removed by hand.  The women who do this job, and it is always women, need to have perfect, sharp eyesight and the fingers of a surgeon.  I have neither.

My shrimps were unpeeled and whole.  Not one of them was more than two centimetres long and I was presented with half a kilogram, or just more than a pound of the little buggers. 

About 25 minutes after our food had arrived Caroline had finished eating and although I had been peeling and eating as fast as I could, I had made no apparent difference to the level of the shrimps in the bowl.

After another half an hour, Caroline asked me to hurry up.  I thought about abandoning the shrimps and ordering a croque-monsieur but I stubbornly persevered.

“At the rate you’re eating them,” she told me, “I think you’ll be eating for at least another hour and it will be dark by then.”

“Why don’t you help and peel some too?” I asked.

“Because I think I’ll have some chocolate gateau and I don’t want to have fishy fingers.”

I never did finish them.  I was still hungry but I was bored.  We left and I bought a chocolate bar on the way out.

There is a restaurant near to where we live that we have visited many times.  Last Friday evening I ordered something on the starter menu that I hadn’t seen before:

Pan-fried tiger prawns with sweet chilli & ginger sauce.

The first ‘alarm bell’ rang when the waiter brought a finger bowl to our table. 

“Oh no!  I’m going to have to peel them,” I said to Caroline.  “Do you remember the shrimps in France?” 

“I certainly do,” she said.  “But tiger prawns are huge and there’ll only be two or three of them.  Shouldn’t be a problem.”

She couldn’t have been more wrong.  Four tiger prawns arrived at the table still in their shells but straight from the pan.  They were scalding hot.  I picked up one and dropped it immediately.  The waiter came by.

“How am expected to eat these?” I asked.       

He was very polite but no help at all.  By the time Caroline had finished her tuna carpaccio, I had managed to decapitate one prawn and pull its tail shell off but eaten nothing.  They were still ridiculously hot.

“Sorry about this,” I said.  “They’re still too hot to touch.”

“I don’t think they sell Mars Bars here,” said Caroline.

We were eating our main courses when the manager came to our table and said that she’d been told that there had been a problem.  I explained and she came out with the predictable response.  

I have said before in, “Trailblazer”, (click to see) that those responsible for dealing with a problem all seem to believe that the best way to diffuse the situation when someone complains is to feign ignorance of the very existence of that problem. 

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “We’ve had that dish on the menu for five years and no one has ever had a difficulty with it before.”

That was not just nonsense, it was a lie.  It had not been on the menu for years because if it had been, I would have seen it and ordered it before. 

Why do restaurants sometimes serve shrimps and prawns with their shells on and intact?  Apart from boiled eggs and some other types of shellfish, I can't think of any food variety which the diner has to prepare at the table before eating.  I only wish I didn’t like shrimps and prawns so much.

I dealt with those situations very quietly and stayed calm throughout.  I can’t imagine how Murty could have reacted.