Restaurateur Morgan Lewis begins a series of food and drink columns with ‘cene Magazine with an introduction to the new Kent food revolution

An introduction, and For What It’s Worth; My Opinion.

I have gazed now, at probably thousands of menus in restaurants in a dozen countries, from the cheapest takeaways, to street vendors in the middle east, to some of the most accredited restaurants in the world – as many people have. Though, looking at these menus each time feels new, right? Not like a new and profound life moment, but unrelated to the last time you browsed a menu.

You probably don’t think of reading a menu as an experience in its own right. The act of choosing what you’ll have is not a memorable exercise, it’s usually usurped by what follows, scuffed off from your mind’s record as an insignificance. That’s because on the face of it, it’s just a list, with some numbers, data to be processed, a means to an end. Recently I have been hit with the idea that a menu offers us so much more than just a choice of food or drink, you are being provided with the answer to a question, one struck from our very most basal instinct: “I’m hungry, what’ve you got?”.

By the act of entering an establishment you’ve inadvertently asked a question that the menu you’re faced with hopefully begins to answer, but it can do so in more ways than just the obvious…

The reason I raise this point now is that my journey of exploration really starts with that question “what’ve you got?”, it’s far more insightful than one might initially think, the food on offer and the way it’s presented for you to choose speaks volumes-upon-volumes, they say “a picture is worth a thousand words”, but a menu can truly carry someone’s soul.

More so with independent establishments a menu is the interface, an attaché to the restaurant, connecting client with chef and in turn with supplier and produce. It tells a detailed story of the people in charge, it may read like a list but between the lines there’s a great deal more being divulged: ingredients, style, education and attention to detail. A Story perhaps of sleepless nights, elation, anger, desire, fear and joyous toiling hours – or in some cases none of those things.

In larger, more national places it tells a visitor something of the demographic – what the average person is comfortable eating around here, it can be more introspective of the community eating than of the establishment itself or of the surrounding area’s produce, just think of MacDonald’s menu in France, Japan and London – what does it say about the food culture in those places?

I think at this point it’s worth introducing myself, I run a small restaurant just outside of Canterbury, my name is Morgan, I grew up in the UK, just near Cheltenham on the northern edge of the Cotswolds, I studied in Oxford and moved to Spain for nearly six years, where I became a devotee to a sort of religious cult, Food. Three years ago, I returned to the UK to live in Kent. This is a county that proudly bares the title “Garden of England” a broad county with its own kind of climate, with flats; marshes, ancient forest, coast, cliffs, waterways and upland – a real terroir to get my teeth into (excuse the pun…).

“There is a flame alight here in Kent, that I noticed soon after arriving – there’s a food revolution taking place”

— Morgan Lewis - @WeCookEverything

There is a flame alight here in Kent, that I noticed soon after arriving – there’s a food revolution taking place. It’s formless at the moment, a bit like a stellar gas cloud before gravity shapes it into a star. I think there’s the hum of static in the air with new Michelin stars given, young farmers modernising (usually by being more traditional, ironically) and cool new places opening all the time, but I can’t help feeling like the people driving this revolution don’t have a solid ‘food culture’ to lock into.

Take for example, Copenhagen, before Noma Copenhagen was a place that revered its food, but was not revered for its food, there was a ‘Nordic cuisine’ already there but few outsiders recognised it, now you can see its influence the world over. In the UK, we have a food identity crisis and It’s something that has bugged me a lot, what is British food?

In my search for the answer to this I have started to write about my experiences with our Kent terroir and the food culture it supports. Our food culture, in the hope that my investigation into the subject of what we eat and why, will provoke more people to think of food as a philosophical subject - a story worth continuing, one we’re all writing plate-by-plate.

These articles, will talk about eating in, restaurants, fast food, slow food, supermarkets, local producers, food preservation, seasonality, food psychology and anything really that can deepen our knowledge of the answer to the question we have all asked too many times to count, “what’ve you got?”

Follow me on Instagram for more @WeCookEverything

#foodcultkent