This is what food blogging looks like. Today, he is trying an experiment, by training his antiquated film camera on a plate of cheese and fruit all the while bobbing to tunes streamed from the internet to his touch sensitive media device that can also make calls, sometimes. Once he exhausts his roll of C41s, a 19th century design, he will digitise the developed negatives, ready then for digital publishing. Welcome to the 21st century. The freedom and availability of the world wide web has encouraged a whole generation to express themselves and it has given rise to the consummate amateur in a bid to announce his average punter’s opinion to the anyone who cares to listen to the broadcast. And boy, did he shout at the top of his lungs. With the advent of Web 2.0 architecture, it brought cheaper and sleeker tools to this very amateur publisher who sometimes thinks of himself as an independent voice, raging against the very system which had chewed him up for so long. The 21st century has also opened up the world of photography and decoupled the learning curve and the burden of developing costs to endow the end user with more image processing capabilities than ever before. Respect for good light is essentially a thing of the past now, as a sleuth of new cameras, equipped with highly capable digital sensors which can quite literally see in the dark. Now, everybody can be a photographer.
Roka is part of an ever expanding chain of zenith-class restaurants owned by German restaurateur, Rainer Becker. He also happens to own the Zuma line of luxury restaurants. Since he opened Zuma in 2002, and then Roka two years later, his highly acclaimed brand of refined Japanese cuisine has gone strength to strength, now Zuma and Rokas have expanded to Hong Kong, and in 2009, a new Roka in Canary Wharf, right in the heart of fatcatland. I was a little sceptical at first, especially since I had only heard nice things being said about Becker’s restaurants, I do love Japanese food (Sushi Hiro is still the best this side of West London, yo), it’s just that I had to experience it for myself, before I started swooning with the rest of town. And so I did.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, the 18th century painter held the view that defining good art required standardisation and classification. He argued in one of his discourses on art that general beauty makes more sense than particularities because it was rational and because that’s how the human mind operates. Of his most famous critics was William Blake who replied to his notion of general beauty that “To generalise is to be an idiot; To particularize is the alone distinction of merit” Yes, I have finally eaten myself to madness. I once held the view that London was the gastronomic capital of the world. I have had some wonderful meals in the last eight years in the city, defending the Big Smoke’s reputation against naysayers. London restaurants naturally become my benchmark when defining a good meal. Generally speaking, there are lots of great places to eat in the city, but I just wonder if we examine the city’s gastronomic landscape through a microscope, would the finer details alter the general aesthetic?
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