How The “Ratatouille Curse” Has Been Poisoning Haute Cuisine

-Essay-

PARIS — Anton Ego, the sullen food critic in the 2007 Disney film Ratatouille, is a real person and I once cooked for him. He is a French food critic — perhaps the most important one — but I’d rather hide his real name because he doesn’t like being associated with the movie. Ten years ago, he came for dinner at the restaurant I used to own in Paris. No one knows what he looks like. But a loyal client told me he would come, and I don’t want to say that I was expecting it, but at the very least I allowed myself to hope he would.

One evening, there was a reservation for four under the name “Vincent.” He showed up a half an hour ahead of his fellow diners, a distinguished, very elegant and courteous gentleman with a camera in his hands. By pure chance, his table was next to the kitchen — just 5 feet from where I was working.

I understood. He understood that I understood. I passed my colleague a note on a piece of paper, and he almost fainted.

I still remember what he ordered: rigatoni al sugo finto, or “fake sauce,” a vegetarian ragù of chopped celery, carrots, onions braised in red wine. The flavor of the vegetables caramelized in red wine is reminiscent of meat — although there is none in the sauce. He loved the dish and its structure, and he told me that it was a bit like the ratatouille of pasta, which had me shaking.

He never reviewed my restaurant because, for several reasons, my restaurant didn’t have a name at the time. And it never had one because it failed.

Parisian restaurants are often sieged by rats. Nothing can be done about it besides trying to hide them from the customers. Sometimes you have to tell your colleagues that there’s a rat in the kitchen without the clients noticing. In secret bistrot language, the code phrase was “careful, Vincent is here.”

Gastronomic event

Ratatouille is probably the most prominent gastronomy-themed cultural product of the past 20 years. When it came out, Masterchef only existed in its British version, and the best restaurant in the world according to World 50’s Best Restaurants was Ferran Adrià’s elBulli, in Catalunya. Massimo Bottura, one of the most renowned chefs in the world today, was only known among haute cuisine fans, and only in Italy.

Meanwhile, the movie has been interpreted in every possible way. And it is still, a seemingly inexhaustible source of memes. Yet it seems to me there is, a detail of the plot that few have underlined. Before discussing it, it is worth reading the review that Ego publishes the day after his visit to Gusteau’s at the end of the movie:

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new, an extra-ordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source…”

Finding novelty in tradition

Now, as we all remember, the “new” that Ego writes about is a ratatouille, a traditional homemade French dish. Yet this dish catches the critic off guard. It excites and upsets him — not because of its taste, but rather because it reminds him of his childhood.

It’s unusual to think that the “new” is what we ate when we were 5 years old. Whether Ratatouille is to blame or whether it was just portraying a new trend, for at least the past 15 years, what is “new” and exciting in cuisine, that dish that we feel obliged to try, is very often a dish we have always known.

This wasn’t the case before, and it hasn’t always been like this.

Perhaps what he couldn’t stand was that his idea was no longer provocative.

In the 1990s, Fulvio Pierangelini was the most renowned Italian chef worldwide. Pierangelini was, and still is, an irritating character who cared little for trends. His restaurant was called Gambero Rosso, meaning “Red Shrimp,” and it was located in Tuscany. It closed in 2008, and since then Pierangelini went into self-imposed exile, occasionally consulting for prestigious hotels.

Pierangelini is famous for several simple yet poignant dishes, which influenced Italian contemporary cuisine, but which at the time baffled the upper-class clientele who frequented Michelin-starred restaurants in Italy.

The 1990s and early 2000s were a period of great experimentation in haute cuisine: there was this widespread idea that a dish must surprise, disturb and shock, all at once. Pierangelini never meant to disturb with odd flavors, and ambitious or exotic matches.

In a way, though, his cuisine was provocative, but subtly so: one of his most famous dishes was spaghetti al pomodoro (spaghetti with tomato sauce), which he would sell for 50 euros and which he said only he could make. From his point of view, claiming to make haute cuisine with simple, unrevised, recognizable and abundant spaghetti with tomato sauce was the greatest possible provocation.

Different times

Gastronomy has changed a lot since then. But of the many changes, I have the feeling that many of the dishes and restaurants that people discuss the most, that influence public debate and young chefs’ ambitions, suffer from what could be called the “Ratatouille curse.”

Many of the most desired, tasted and photographed dishes, the ones that cannot be removed from the menu because otherwise people would get mad, are oftentimes simple, made with few ingredients, and openly recall a form of domestic comfort that takes customers back to their childhood.

In Italy, this usually happens with pasta dishes, in most cases topped with cheese, tomato or both. And some of the most skilled Italian chefs provide good examples of this. These dishes are usually very good and often extremely technical.

In addition to the technical and gastronomic elements, I also respect — perhaps even more so — the intelligence and the capacity to understand the time we live in, that instinct that leads a chef to create and propose dishes that meet praise among customers and critics in such a blatant yet natural way. As if we were waiting for nothing but some pasta al formaggio (pasta topped with cheese). Because evidently we are.

When he closed his legendary restaurant at just 54 years old, Pierangelini said that, among other things, he was tired of seeing parents ordering his tomato spaghetti for kids. He said he couldn’t stand that his very serious gastronomic provocation was not understood.

That was in 2008, one year after Ratatouille. Perhaps what he couldn’t stand was that his idea was no longer provocative, but was slowly becoming a trend — if not orthodoxy.

(Un)like koalas

Cooking and proposing food ideas is my job, which means that I find myself stuck in a weird paradox. I have the ambition to create and propose dishes capable of generating cultural emotions, dishes that stand out in people’s minds and in their Instagram feeds as the thing to eat at all costs.

At the same time, I feel the urge to ask myself where the message and content of those dishes will lead us: I wonder what the underlying idea of food is, because an idea of food is also, to a certain extent, an idea of life.

And the strong nostalgic tendency of these ideas of food worries me.

This is obviously not limited to cuisine: contemporary culture has been heavily influenced by nostalgia for a while now and in multiple ways. And there is nothing new nor disturbing about the fact that most of us want to eat pasta and cheese.

But being omnivores doesn’t mean having a good palate.

Yet there is an important difference between the food we want to eat at home and what we establish, through a complex system of influences and intermediaries, as a contemporary culinary trend.

Koalas only eat eucalyptus leaves: If that plant disappears, then they go extinct, which is exactly what is happening. That is not the case for humans because we are omnivores: we can find nutrition in almost everything because of the multitude of cooking and transformation techniques that we have mastered. But being omnivores doesn’t mean having a good palate.

We do not have a particularly developed sense of taste and smell. Our palate is not refined. What is fine and developed is our capacity to build narrative and cultural structures that allow us to find interest in the most basic and unlikely foods.

I don’t have a solution to the Ratatouille curse, because a curse, by definition, is impossible to get rid of. You cannot avoid or escape it, because it will come back in different, increasingly relentless forms.

But I do not want us to become koalas.

With every power comes responsibility

I am aware that not everyone will agree with this, but cooks and chefs are the ruling class of those who cook and those who eat. We, each in our unique way, manage to influence habits, tastes and desires.

But with every power comes responsibility.

I am experimenting with a solution to this paradox, which is to propose, in a somewhat forced way, reassuring dishes that a child might appreciate but that do not necessarily evoke childhood memories. Specifically, simply because I like them, I have proposed Arabic, French, Persian, Creolian and Canadian dishes, just to mention some of the places I’ve been inspired by.

The pasta dish that I’ve served for the longest time is Tunisian spaghetti: a spiced pasta topped with sauce, one of the most cooked dishes in Tunisia, which is the country that consumes most pasta in the world after Italy. It was a way of showing that we Italians do not have a monopoly on pasta, and that it is possible to eat it without feeling the urge to rant on how great our nation, our grandmothers and our tasty tomatoes are.

When I was a child, I used to hate and fear minestrone soup.

The unwritten rules of contemporary cuisine dictate that, among other things, a restaurant always has to have one or two signature dishes in the menu, regardless of what happens (unless, in exceptional cases, the chef is not in the kitchen). I had in my mind all these cheese and tomato pastas — dishes that are trendy today, but would only be featured in the kids’ menu 20 years ago. And I decided that my signature dish would be a minestrone (a soup made of vegetables, pasta and beans), warm in winter, cold in summer, and somewhere in between when it’s hard to understand the weather.

I chose it because I like it, and because I like cooking it. But also because, when I was a child, I used to hate it and fear it. Too many weird vegetables, and, like other kids, I wouldn’t eat vegetables. Proposing it in the first line of my menu is a way of saying that we were all kids once, but then we grew up.

Almost no one orders it.

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La maledizione di Ratatouille (EN version) by Tommaso Melilli/Worldcrunch is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International