Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in Volume III of B.H. Magazine. For access to future issues, subscribe here.
I have been served tins of Beluga caviar with pearl spoons on freshly made blinis with chopped eggs, crèmefraîche, and chives, with shots of frozen vodka. I have ingested mountainous snowfalls of white Alba truffle shaved over handmade tagliatelle. I have eaten a Hanwoo beef burger in Seoul’s Four Seasons Hotel, in the comfort of one of their suites. I have enjoyed deep-fried shirako (cod sperm sac) in one of the top restaurants of Hong Kong. I have consumed an entire box of Hokkaido sea urchin over the course of a dégustation. I have indulged in ludicrously expensive, aged balsamic vinegar. I’ve tasted a three-hundred-dollar melon.
And I paid for none of it.
As a food reviewer, I’ve eaten things people can only dream of. It was my job to visit restaurants. I could have been dining at the most awarded restaurant in the country on a Tuesday, drinking the finest wines imaginable, with a dish in front of me that took a team of ten chefs a whole week to prepare. And the day after could have involved being part of an exclusive party privy to watching an entire bluefin tuna being expertly broken down with a knife so large it could be considered a sword, then being passed a spoon to scrape the meat from its bones as a snack.
I was present when eighth-generation butcher Dario Cecchini butchered an entire Chianina carcass while reciting paragraphs of Dante’s Inferno in Italian. It was opulence. It was theatre. It was the definition of luxury. And it got boring real quick.
What people don’t tell you about all this luxury, is that it takes a toll on your body. You get palate fatigue. You get meat sweats. Your tongue adjusts to the vast amounts of salt and butter in your food, but your body doesn’t catch up. Every meal results in heart palpitations. You become dehydrated as a baseline. Your mouth always feels fuzzy. Your hands are constantly swollen. Your sinuses, congested. You become uncomfortable in your own skin. You just want to drink a glass of water. Your body cries out for a leaf of lettuce. You just want a night in. But you can’t.
You have another dinner to attend. You have a list to write. You have to choke down at least 10 steaks in the next 72 hours so you can write that article about where the best ones can be found in Melbourne. Everything you chew begins to taste like butter and blood, your intestines scream for you to stop. You begin to research the symptoms of gout. Your meals don’t belong to you anymore. You’re on an eating schedule. When you’re not in a restaurant indulging, you’re fasting, because it is the only way to stomach the next meal.
You’re forced to eat in another restaurant you didn’t choose for yourself. Still, your digestive system rebels. Antacids become a vital tool of your trade, and even with those, you spend most nights trying to quash the burning sensation rising in the back of your throat. Your dentist begins to comment on how the enamel behind your teeth is wearing away at an alarming rate. Your skin becomes sallow despite how well-fed you are. At your yearly check-up with your GP, they ask if you’ve been taking care of yourself.
Somehow, every meal starts to taste the same, every room looks identical, and your palate is so honed, nothing impresses you anymore. You begin to empathise with the fatty lobe of foie gras on your plate.
You slowly become insufferable to your friends and family. The changes to your palate are incremental, but one day, you find yourself saying to the sommelier, “Oh, no, I’ve tried that grower. I know they’re new to the country and while the flavour is amazing, the beading is too aggressive to be enjoyable,” after you ask them for a recommendation for Champagne. When your gaze shifts back to the table, you realise your friends are staring at you in horror like they don’t know you, or at least don’t want to know this version of you.
When food arrives, all you can think is that the plate is the wrong temperature for the dish; you spot technical flaws before you can taste them; you think about how the structural integrity of an element on the plate could have improved the dish dramatically. You bite your tongue because your friends are enjoying the meal. They say words like, “wow” and “yum” and “the best,” and you wonder if they’ve ever eaten a truly incredible meal in their lives. You stop and check yourself. You realise you’ve become the type of person you hate, so you pull the handbrake. You step away from the title, the perks, and the freebies, and do the thing you’ve wanted to do for years: restore yourself to factory settings.
When Confucius said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life,” eating was not yet a profession. When I hung up my critic hat, I realised that I no longer enjoyed going to restaurants. So, I went cold turkey.
I peeled myself out of bed on Saturday morning and made sure I was the first person at the farmer’s market. I ignored the pre-made products of pies, pastries and condiments and went straight to the growers. I sniffed fruit and judged the weight of them in my hands. I bought fistfuls of herbs, trays of eggs, and picked out the firmest, sweetest limb of daikon. I inspected locally made butter for its fat percentage, bought a sack of oats, and a log inoculated with mushroom spores. I snagged the ribs of a Berkshire pig. I, for the first time in years, had the luxury of purchasing raw ingredients and cooking for the week.
I was in control of my own diet, so I hunted down fruits and vegetables at the peak of their season and realised I derived more pleasure from an heirloom cherry tomato than I ever did from caviar. The smell of roasted chestnuts excited me more than the prospect of wagyu. Worcestershire sauce made by the oyster farmer’s surplus of bivalves brought me more joy than being served white Burgundy on allocation. I slowly found my love of food again.
These days, luxury means something entirely different to me. It isn’t the most expensive, exclusive, or fattiest items; it’s the most carefully articulated expressions of food that have been handmade with experience and passion. It’s appreciating the artistry and labour behind overlooked ingredients.
It’s locally made fish sauce that has been fermenting in the back of an inner-city restaurant for the last two years, house-made ferments, small-batch soys, and premium Taiwanese rice.
It’s smallgoods that have been produced by the farmer who raised the animal, handmade cheese, and the flavour of butter made from milk in spring. It’s produce that I have grown and preserved myself, and a grain grown an hour away that I’ve milled and turned into sourdough.
It’s a family recipe of assam laksa made by my friend’s mum, the perfect taro puff, and Hainanese chicken rice with a thick layer of gelatine underneath the skin. It’s the exterior crunch of a canelé created through copper moulds and a brush of beeswax juxtaposed against the rum-spiked custard interior.
It’s the warmth of freshly made tofu, and the sweetness of a Kensington Pride mango in the height of summer.
It is all the little things… all in moderation, of course.
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