Greedy people like me are not, by nature, terribly fastidious when it comes to food. The imperative of eating just doesn't allow for it, not when you are the kind of person who picks the crispy bits off the bottom of the greasy pork roasting tin. The morning after the dinner of the night before. Or who, when they think no one is looking, will steal the folds of bronzed chicken skin left behind on the plates of others cursed with meaner appetites and picky habits. I work on the assumption that food – and, by association, the restaurants that serve it – has to be trying bloody hard to kill you. Eating is not something you need insurance for. So denying yourself an edible pleasure just because you couldn't safely remove someone's appendix in the room in which it was prepared, seems just plain foolish, not to mention self-defeating.
In the decade or more that I have been eating professionally I have never been struck with food poisoning, and that's not because I restrict myself to the sort of velvet-swagged, gastro palaces where intense young men in box-fresh latex gloves prepare roast swan. When I am eating on my own dime which, as a greedy man, I do an awful lot, I am far more likely to be drawn to the sort of joint that obsessive compulsives would call scuzzy and I would call characterful.
An example: I gave a glowing review to a dirt-cheap Szechuan restaurant which did marvellous things with piles of rustling dried chillies, salt and peppercorns. It turned out that the dirt in dirt-cheap was spot on. Readers made of less stern stuff than I immediately sent me links to stories about the restaurant's conviction under health and safety regulations.
I don't make light of the damage acute food poisoning can cause. Death really is no fun. A vigorous health and safety regime is vital. But I would also be lying if I claimed this revelation made me change my view of the restaurant. Indeed, I think it added to the experience. Certainly, when I'm out of the country I know full well that if I want the real edible thrills I'm not going to find them in the places heavy with starched linen and glinting crystalware. I've spent a slab of time in Los Angeles recently, which is an extraordinary food town – but only at the bottom end of the market.
For the good stuff you have to go the smoky barbecue restaurants in Korea Town, where someone in dirty overalls may well be trying to clear the overflow from the ceiling pipes, but where the charcoal-grilled sliced short rib will taste like nothing you have eaten before. Or you have to visit the tacqueria in the Grand Central Market in the heart of Hispanic-dominated Downtown, where heavy set guys with tattooed forearms will load shreds of seared pig kidney into tacos, slather them with hot sauce and a spritz of lime juice and watch admiringly as you down the lot.
Am I boasting about this? Absolutely, for the picky eater needs to know what they are missing; that because of some childish compulsion they have narrowed their experience of the world. It comes down to this. When greedy people like me have a mouthful of a blistering Thai curry from the cafe on the corner, or nibble a black and crusted Tandoori lamb chop from the Pakistani eating house down the street, the very last thing we are thinking about is whether it will kill us. Instead, we feel completely and utterly alive. OFM
