Things that frost my gourd (Part 1)

One thing that has annoyed me increasingly since they first started appearing in restaurants with pretensions to god-knows-what are the Giant Pepper Mill People.

This insidious species shows up at your table 0.01023 seconds after your plate is placed in front of you with The Giant Pepper Mill, and their signature vocalization "Would you like some fresh pepper on that?".

How am I supposed to know if I want pepper? The aroma from the plate hasn't even had time to reach my nose, so how can I have tasted it yet to see if it is in need of pepper?

Equally annoying are the subspecies of the Giant Pepper Mill People (homo idiotus phalusspapaver); the Parmesan Cheese Shakers (homo idiotus fromagus) and the new to science Giant SeaSalt Grinder Grinders (homo idiotus sel-de-mer-oh-merde).

When I attended the Stratford Chefs School, we were taught the importance of tasting the food we were preparing (always with a clean spoon! and at every stage of the process) to insure that the seasoning was balanced and appropriate. (Which was hard for me to learn: years of low-to-no-salt cooking for someone with blood pressure issues had made me highly sensitive to salt, with the result that I under salted things as a matter or course, and found salting appropriate for the general public taste was highly over-salted to my taste.)

But I digress ...

This pouncing on you, armed with giant condiment dispensers, before you have even tasted a bite and identified what, if any, deficiencies in seasoning exist in the dish, means that these restaurants do not trust the food coming out of the kitchen to taste the way it should (assuming the kitchen staff actually prepares it, which is a subject for a future rant).

Another way to look at the Giant Pepper Mill People (GPMP) is that they know that fresh ground pepper tastes better than anything ground more than 4 hours earlier. And that restaurants were going broke replacing pepper mills that people had swiped. Fine ... I could almost buy that, except that these things are so huge that I cannot imagine them walking out of restaurants in any great number, so why not just leave them on the table until the diner is ready (or not) for extra pepper? It might entail them standing up to pepper their food, but I believe that freshly ground pepper is worth a standing ovation every now and then.

Still, a pepper mill on the table may not be seen as an optimal (from the restauranteur's point of view) solution to the problem of presenting diners with freshly ground pepper. But that still leaves question about why the GPMP pounce on you mere micro seconds after your plate was delivered, and why the GPMPs, or restaurants owners, feel this is appropriate or fitting to 'a fine dining experience'?

I have noticed, though, that restaurants that could or do rate 1-3 Michelin starts rarely, if ever, employ GPMPs (or either of the subspecies). And when they do, these homo idiotus have obviously been through extensive behaviour modification by trained professionals, so that a suitable interval (approximately two mouthfuls worth of time) is allowed to lapse before approaching a diner with the Giant Pepper Mill. This is infinitely preferable to the Pavlovian response most of the species has to seeing a plate go onto the table in front of a customer.