Addressing the Table
Jake O’Brien Murphy waxes lyrical on the power of flavour, the folly of bar top tribalism, and the eternal, unwavering charm of meat & potatoes
words by Jake O’BRIEN MURPHY
Our sense of smell and taste that together create our experience of flavour are registered in the oldest parts of our brains. These are the primeval bits of hardware that we share with lizards. It is in the deep recesses of our ancient faculty that memories are made. Our sense of taste and smell have the ability to trigger great thunderstorms of firing synapses that catapult us back to our most cherished memories. Flavour is part of our genetic baggage, it fundamentally changed the brain of early man. We swapped the security of the canopy for a life on two feet and hot dinners. It was our evolutionary trade off for higher thought.
Food and drink are now inexorably tied up in our sense of self. We find ways to define ourselves through the narratives of what we consume; it has become much more than simple sustenance. It takes societal meaning beyond the sum of the parts. In my career behind bars I have seen this typified by the ritualistic behaviour of bartenders. A mob of tiki-clad, sleep-deprived bartenders drinking shots of something mouth puckeringly bitter, over proof, or ironically gauche is modern day tribalism. There is a predilection for extremes. A challenge to the conventional tastes of the ‘uninitiated’.
The equivalent of our long lost monkey relatives pulling on their genitals and howling into the wind in an effort to be noticed. Is it annoying?
Of course. Is it needed? Probably not. Does a small part of my immortal soul wither everytime I witness it? Certainly. In all honesty, I’m probably no better sat here drinking my vodka sodas and looking down on it all. But I do understand where the deep need to belong to this behaviour stems from.
‘For me, Scouse will always be a Tuesday afternoon on Essex Road, with a loose school tie and dirty knees. Sat in my grandparent’s kitchen on a rickety stool from a pub that was closed well before I was born. Elbow to elbow with chaos.’
For me, Scouse will always be a Tuesday afternoon on Essex Road, with a loose school tie and dirty knees. Sat in my grandparent’s kitchen on a rickety stool from a pub that was closed well before I was born. Elbow to elbow with chaos. My entire extended family teeming over their seats, in the din of frantic conversation. Condiments and laughter being traded up and down the table. All orchestrated by careful hands with paper thin skin and overseen by pale blue eyes full of love and generosity. This is the real power of food and drink: In the most primeval way, it brings us back to being human. JOB
@jakeobrienmurphy | @presentcompany.bar
