If I could have anything cooked for me, it’d probably be something fairly simple. I’m partial to a good curry, and I love most Japanese cuisine, but I’m really at home with a cosy roast dinner – a bit of belly and a spoonful of apple sauce will do me fine. And you? What constitutes the ideal meal? A nice risotto, perhaps? A good pizza? I hear you – I really do. General tastes don’t differ all that much, which is why you’ll probably never hear anyone plumping for a squirting of foamed fish. And yet the city’s chefs are suddenly so keen on foam, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were gaping at a very slow-moving tsunami.
You won’t get it on mid-priced menus, for which you can be entirely thankful, and it certainly isn’t on every top-end menu in town (yet). But, during the past week, I’ve eaten in five different restaurants and three of the chefs thought to round their presentation off with what can only be described as suds.
The first chef approached it in an artistic manner, laying it out across the dish as though he were moulding a hirsute caterpillar. The foam had a vaguely fishy flavour about it, and the texture of hairy air – about as tasty as it sounds, and surely not the kind of food you’d choose to quell the pangs of real hunger. Still, it was better than what the second chef cooked up.
I’ll not name and shame him here, but his restaurant is considered to be one of the best in the city. The fish he prepared that night would have been excellent, were it not for the white foam he finished it off with. Having lost its volume before it arrived at my table, it looked like bubble bath, and to taste, you’d have sworn it was some form of cleansing fluid. I still ended up paying, of course. More fool me.
The third foam, admittedly, was good foam – possibly even natural foam. The waiter didn’t seem to know what it was, which I took as a good sign (chefs who foam generally like to tell people about it). It tasted good, too, so I assumed it was innate and let the situation lie.
Foodies will recall a time when foam was fashionable. As part of the ‘molecular gastronomy’ craze, it challenged perceptions (and shrunk waistlines) for the best part of a decade – a decade that petered out in the mid noughties. If cooking were an art, which it most certainly is, this was part of the avant garde movement; food at the frontier of the creative scene. Like any progressive school of thought, it couldn’t stay this way for long without evolving.
Now, there can’t be many people here who would think Abu Dhabi outmoded, so why on earth are our chefs slavishly regurgitating ideas deemed passé five years ago? Do they think they can get away with it just because the Michelin judges aren’t looking? Do they assume customers here are too backward to have heard of elBulli, The Fat Duck and Moto? Whatever their reasoning, as someone lucky enough to eat out regularly, I can only hope they can stem this foam resurgence before it engulfs us all. ‘More matter,’ a great deliberator once said, ‘less art.’ Less hairy air would go down well, too.
