Yes, sous vide is fabulous but can we please move on?

Reading about the sous vide cooking method in yesterday’s Good Living, http://tinyurl.com/qejzuo, reminded me of a dinner date I went on back in June. Inspired by Simon Thomsen’s review of Oscillate Wildly in Newtown (also published in Good Living, http://tinyurl.com/mgnzq3), my new friend J had surprised me with a table for two the following Friday night (courtesy of a last minute cancellation).

Oscillate Wildly is a fabulous little place that offers an eight-course degustation menu for $95, an absolute bargain for a restaurant that boasts a hat at in the SMH Good Food Guide. Chef Karl Firla spent time at Marqee and Est. and his food is both innovative and very, very good.

My one small niggling problem with Oscillate Wildly is the service. Not because it’s bad – the staff are exceedingly friendly and efficient – but because every dish is served with a lengthy, detailed explanation of exactly what it is and how it was created. Interesting in it’s own way but also very disruptive to free-flowing conversation. Not to mention repetitive when more than one dish is cooked the same way.

On the night J and I dined at Oscillate Wildly three of the dishes were cooked sous vide and yes, we heard the cooking method explained three times. If I wasn’t such a well-brought up girl I might have been tempted to say, “yes, I get that sous vide is low-temperature cooking in a sealed bag - you told me the first two times” when the venison, cooked sous vide and served with baby beetroot and a chocolate mille feuille, arrived at our table.

This trend of over-explaining dishes seems to be on the rise in Sydney restaurants and I can only imagine it is in response to a perceived increase in the general public’s interest in cooking. Far be it from me to quash anyone’s interest in where their food comes from or how it arrives on their plate, however I question whether delivering this sort of information as a mini-lecture is the most effective way to communicate it. No one wants to think they might receive a pop quiz with their bill at the end of the night.

Instead restaurants could look at “adding value” to their menus, perhaps with more detailed descriptions of the dishes – from memory the venison dish at Oscillate Wildly was listed as “venison, beetroot, chocolate”. Or by providing information on produce suppliers, as Peter Gilmore does at Quay. Diners who are genuinely interested will read it and those who aren’t will simply choose what they want to eat and quickly get back to their conversations. Seems like a win-win to me.