There is no accounting for taste, but here’s a grumpy man’s guide to the food you are probably seeing a lot of on Instagram.
1. Gourmet doughnuts
I could forgive the silly flavours, the exorbitant prices and the tendency to stuff them full of inedible amounts of caramel, but gourmet doughnuts’ greatest crime is their willful blindness to the fact that a deep-fried doughnut is best when freshly cooked. Letting them sit out for hours to go stale, sweat and weep sugar before an Instagrammer decides to throw their cash away is not doing them any favours. I’ve never had a fancy, gourmet, eight-dollar doughnut that could hold a candle to an old-fashioned freshly cooked cinnamon-and-sugar number.
2. Korean fried chicken
Over the past decade, Korean fried chicken has taken the world by storm and I could not be more baffled. Every time I’ve tried it – even in Korea – it’s tasted cloyingly sweet and over-battered, like something out of a bad Chinese buffet bain-marie. It’s not awful, but neither is it worth the hype.
3. Chocolate cake
Chocolate cake is what you get if you start with a delicious block of chocolate and take away all the good parts – the sharp crack as you bite into it, the satin texture as it melts in your mouth and the bittersweet creaminess it leaves behind. Ninety per cent of chocolate cakes are dry and crumbly, and those that aren’t are either overwhelmed with butter or undercooked to the point of raw flour. Just because you like something doesn’t mean you should make a cake out of it.
4. Barbecue brisket
Here’s a tip for barbecue goers – don’t rave about the brisket at a particular restaurant just because you think that brisket is what ’cue professionals rave about. The reason the quality of the brisket is considered the make-or-break of a good barbecue is that it’s dry and ropey more often than not. Chances are the gastro pub, faux-barbecue brisket you’re raving about is the former.
5. ‘Cool’ Tacos
The western world owes Mexico an enormous apology for everything it has done to tacos over the past 80 years. The hard-shelled abominations of the 20th century, stuffed with minced beef, jarred salsa, processed cheese and wilted lettuce may be excused as the follies of not knowing any better, but instead of righting our wrongs we doubled down, creating a suite of uniformly terrible modern tacos that are now everywhere from hipster bistros in Portland to pubs in outback Australia. Half-hearted pulled pork with sickly sweet pineapple salsa? Deep-fried fish with mango? A few strips of sad “carne asada” with avocado, the wonder drug of the western middle-class? Mexico, we are sorry.
6. Authentic Peking duck
To really experience authentic Peking duck, you’ve got to head to China, and you’ve also got to prepare to be sorely disappointed. It all starts with glassy shards of near-tasteless but potato-chip crispy duck skin dipped in sugar. YES, SUGAR. Maybe 800 years ago this might have been considered a rare treat, like the Tudors eating their jellied peacocks, but food has evolved a lot since then. Modern Peking duck that skips the sugar debacle and jumps straight to pancakes of meat and flavourful skin together is definitely an improvement. Authentic is not always best.
7. Every ‘famous’ sandwich
If you’ve ever been to New York, there’s a decent chance that you’ve been to Katz’s Deli for the authentic New York experience of lining up 10-deep with a hundred other tourists for the Reuben sandwich from the film When Harry Met Sally. Maybe you raved about it to your friends. Maybe you complained about it on TripAdvisor. Either way, secretly inside you were probably a little disappointed it was just an ordinary sandwich. I’m not saying it’s bad, but the US has a track record of turning pretty boring foods into icons. If you don’t believe me, just ask any American about “grilled cheese” (hint: it’s two pieces of bread with cheese in the middle).
8. Bircher muesli
How did soggy muesli ever become a thing? Pouring fruit juice all over your muesli sounds more like a terrible accident than a recipe. Part of Bircher muesli’s appeal is its history as a health food, but then again that’s how corn flakes got started. I’m not sure nutritionists today would agree with the many recipes for Bircher muesli that involve spiking your grains with enough sugary juice to increase the calorie content of a single bowl to around the same as eating a cheeseburger.
9. Bacon
There is no doubt bacon is delicious, if you’re into that sort of thing, but to hear some people bang on about it you’d think Jesus was born wrapped in it. None of us are immune to the appeal of marketing but follow the cultural deification of bacon alongside a graph of the money that was able to be made on pork belly commodity markets from the 1960s to the 90s and you might conclude that your love for bacon is driven more by Wall Street wallets than the tastebuds on your tongue.
