Regan: What need one?
Lear: O, reason not the need. King Lear – Act 2 Sc.4
Reason and need make good bedfellows for Regan when she tells her father that, after getting rid of ninety-nine, even the single servant he has left is one too many. King Lear wants his servants; Regan sees the want as irrational: she has enough servants in her household to manage him.
Ninety-nine! Did I hear you correctly? Of course Regan’s right. This is a classic case of someone whose wants must be corrected by his doing a needs analysis – and if he can’t then someone else must, like Regan. Shakespeare’s hitting on what you’re seeing today: these CEOs of big companies who earn a country GDP more than their lowest-paid workers whose earnings do not allow them a decent life. Lear’s “O, reason not the need…” is his pathetic attempt to deny the reasonable conclusion that Regan comes to.
But Lear says more: “Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life as cheap as a beast’s.” What “nature” is Lear talking about? It is not the nature of beasts. A beast’s life is cheap because it has little consciousness of altering or improving on what lies before it. An animal’s existence is subject to a world that calls the shots to which the animal reacts, adapting itself in order to survive. Human beings, though, stand upon the world and find ways to impose themselves on it. Simply having enough to eat, sufficient clothing to stay protected and a space for shelter is flatlining, not living. Human nature requires more than having its needs met. Human nature is creative, expressive, envious, delusional, ambitious, destructive and excitingly extravagant, as can be seen in a number of ways, from high-end luxury cars to shoe design.
As a need, food is basic. Apart from a response to hunger and the pleasure of taste, one eats for the body to grow, maintain its health and functioning capacities. Through years of habitual eating, the actual need of food is forgotten in the aromas, tastes, textures and novelties which come in the form of food. People become interested in food for food’s sake – what matters then is the experience.
People go far to find that experience, but not as far as those who create it. Their task is to make food no longer seem normal but extraordinary. Their understanding of how food works may give you an experience you never have had and might not ever have again, not because you do not want it – you simply can’t afford it.
When you go to a restaurant and pay two thousand rand for a set menu, you know you could have satisfied your hunger more cheaply at home, especially as there are leftovers. Having polished off those leftovers, you would know that supper was over, and done whatever you do after supper. But when you have paid 2K and leave the restaurant more than three hours after arriving, you don’t even know that you’ve eaten. What you do know is that you have been at a performance, a floorshow without dancers or music, but a cast of many playing various roles over a number of acts.
I speak from experience. It would be impossible not to.
One of the keys to unlocking the money chests of those who seem foolish, extravagant, decadent and insensitive enough to pay for this production is contrast. Because eating a meal is one of the commonest things one does in life, when that mundane action is turned into something unrecognisably different from the norm every sense is suddenly awakened.
At La Colombe an elegant young lady welcomed us in the ante-foyer, led us down to where a tall man stood behind what looked like a bain-marie of trailing orchids and greenery. Inlaid among the exotics were small, vividly green balls which he invited us to pluck, pop into the mouth and immediately bite. “How do they do that?” Taste buds which have lain dormant since the Middle Ages spring to life. This, the man informs us, is a citron liquor in a shell of white chocolate glazed with mint – a palate cleanser.
The taste buds’ question was the theme music of the evening. To go through the menu is pointless: an explanation does no justice to an experience. Rather look at what was not on the menu. See that as the tip of an iceberg experience. It’s also what is brought which you did not order that matters, not a chocolate-on-the-pillow sort of thing, but, to take one example from a number: a double-tiered pottery container coasts to your table, vapours rising from the lower level and wreathing the mini-forest of the upper level in which are found two frozen, hollowed-out granadilla casings. These have had their tops removed: a chilled saki mixed with a berry water fills the fruit. Sipping with the hand-made rice paper straw your taste buds meet another palate cleanser of immediate and fresh effect. With so much care taken to clear the palate, both body and mind are perfectly disposed towards the approach of any course.
In keeping with the effect is the manner in which the significant item is brought. The whole evening could be seen as a floorshow, with melodramatic moments as a fresh dish arrives and the creator flourishes his cape to explain the turn. Then the sommelier takes up his station with the changing courses and explains the reason for the marriage of this particular course to that particular wine.
Contrast, surprise and performance. These are the ingredients which end up providing more than a sufficiency: more than the stomach, it is the spirit which is satisfied. Ironically, you might think that, having paid such a price to eat, you would be aware of the cost and its relative value, but that is forgotten as all you are aware of is that you have never eaten like this before.
King Lear’s protest “O, reason not the need…” finds expression in a place such as this restaurant. Of course food requires no fanfare: it is simple human need. But when habit dulls the palate to the living quality of what can be eaten, the inventive and creative urge is there to awaken the sleeping beast to an unexplored world of taste, aroma and service.
