Restaurant review: Learn how to cook

Clearly it is education. But most people refuse to go to cooking classes with a myriad of excuses, all of them relating to their time. Bullshit! It is simply a matter of their embarrassment at not being able to compete with their best friend in the kitchen, or being exposed to their partner as being a social dunce. Well help is at hand.
Switch on your TV to Pro TV each weekday at 9.10. You will find the English hit series Ready Steady Cook. This is a contest between two professional chefs. “So what?” you may well say. But the difference in this program is that they each bring a bag of food ALL OF WHICH is available in Romania: and then turn it into something magic in front of your eyes.
So tune in at the beginning of the program. And you will invariably see the same food in your kitchen.
The downside of the program is that it is hosted by a camp presenter called Ainsley who skips around the set and tries to dominate the two chefs. Listen to the chefs, not the presenter!
Please trust me on this issue – if you have no confidence in the kitchen, take your lessons in privacy from this program. Now let's look at their competition.
Discovery Style and Living channel has two assaults on the Romanian television audience – both of which fail.
There is the Take Home Chef program in which an idiotic Australian who knows nothing about food masquerades as a chef, busting in on dumb, unemployed, illiterate Americans in their trailer homes. He cooks them a meal by opening a can and heating some meat on a bbq. The beneficiaries think a tin of beans cooked by a moron who they can't understand is haute cuisine.
Worse still, this idiot has an irritating grin permanently plastered over his face. You will want to put your hand into the screen to remove his imbecilic grin by either slapping him, orby slamming a lemon into his mouth.
On the same channel there is Anthony Bourdain. He is a Canadian comedian who professes to have a restaurant in New York. He is my kinda guy because he is a consummate piss-taker. He drinks copious amounts of alcohol throughout his allegedly critical food program, and smokes cigarettes all through the show.
But the problem is that Discovery sells him as a food critic – and he never gives a critical comment about the food he samples, other than “fantastic, superb, wonderful!”
He is fun to watch, but you will learn nothing from him. Go back to Pro TV.

Michael Barclay
mab.media@dnt.ro