St Valentine's Day massacre
Let's face it, St Valentine's day is a bit of a mess. There were three martyrs called Valentinus in the late 3rd Century and nobody is quite sure which one the day was supposed to commemorate. There's no recorded association with romantic love before the Middle ages and 1969 the Vatican took the saint's day out the calendar altogether as part of an effort to remove saints of only legendary pedigree.
Although there are relics of one or other of his bodies conveniently available in Roquemaure in France, in the Stephansdom in Vienna, in Blessed St. John Duns Scotus church in Glasgow and in Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, they don't see a particular upsurge of visitors on the 14th. Like many old festivals, St Valentines day has gone the way of all flesh and been turned into a commercialised orgy by purveyors of insincere cards, garage forecourt flowers, uncomfortable underwear and, above all restaurant owners - because, on St Valentine's evening we feel we have to go out for dinner.
Why we get this atavistic herd urge, no-one can be quite sure, but it's become deeply engrained - Valentine's day has become all about eating out and failure to secure a reasonable booking on the 14th can be cited, if not as grounds for divorce, at least for weapons-grade recrimination for the rest of the year.
And so, for one blissful night, the balance of power shifts away from the whiney, demanding and unpredictably fickle customer and firmly into the hands of the restaurateur. Along with the week prior to Christmas and Mothering Sunday this is a time he can be sure of filling every available seat several times over. If you can't fill a place on Valentine's night you have no right to call yourself a restaurant. In fact, in most towns the UK you could stick red napkins in the mugs in a soup kitchen and sell tables. Shove a rose in a jam jar and you'd be sold out six months in advance.
It's not just the quantity of customers that's different on this, the catering trade's most magical night of the year, it's also the quality. Over recent decades we've become, as a nation, more comfortable with restaurant going. The 14th of Feb, ('VD' as it's known to the trade) is no longer likely to be our only annual visit - but, as far as the restaurant trade is concerned, it is the time when they'll get the most inexperienced diners.
I don't want to make the restaurant industry sound too cynical. There are, of course, considerations of shareholder profitability and competition in a tough market but the combination of guaranteed demand and undiscerning, desperate customers doesn't show their best side in them in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, it brings out a sort of crazed, vulpine bloodlust.
The big name restaurants and the small, romantic independents are, of course, booked up months, sometimes years in advance leaving the ordinary human being, who only got their brain into gear to book by December, entirely at the mercy of the chain restaurants and the Conranised gastrobarns .
A request for a table for two at 8 is met with a startled and contemptuous snort but if, by some twist of good fortune, you've managed to find a place that's either so entirely unknown or just flat-out awful that it still has a couple of vacant places, you'll be subject to a bewildering list of mean-minded restrictions and contractual boilerplate.
"We can fit you in at 6.30 or 10.30". "We'll need the table back in 90 minutes. "You'll need to order from the set menu... in advance... online". "Confirm by telephone on the day... and we'll need your credit card details so we can exact a charge if you cancel or don't show".
To be fair, these restrictions didn't all come from the same restaurant - just the first three I called in late January - The fourth was kind enough to offer me a consolation table "elsewhere in St. Valentine's Week".
And once we've secured our inconveniently timed and strictly limited tenure of the table by the toilet, what's on offer? In the early C19th, aphrodisiac menus were popular. “Turtle soup with ambergris, sole à la normande, reindeer fillet in cream sauce, salmis of veal, roasted young pigeon, watercress salad, asparagus in hollandaise sauce, bone marrow pudding, port; Bordeaux, coffee and coca" was one suggested option. Not, I admit, the kind of thing likely to instil anything other than unromantic lethargy and flatulence in the modern diner but at least it showed flair, imagination and a degree of choice.
There's no choice available to participants in the modern 'Valentine's Experience'.
As one high-end chef, anonymous for obvious reasons, put it "Everything shitty, clichéd, and horribly 80s gets wheeled out. Duo of lamb chops, cut to resemble hearts. Coeur a la fucking crème. There will be at least one nancying, ninnying chicken dish, especially for the ladies, and steak, which will be ordered by 80% of the men. Well-done, of course - medium if you're lucky".
It's pleasant to know that, as you enjoy your romantic dinner, catching your date's eye in the candlelight, your thoughts turning lightly to love, there's an entire kitchen brigade, in a murderous sweating, loathing rage separated from you only by a flimsy MDF door.
Your experience is unlikely to be enhanced by your busy server, as the Valentine's evening shift isn't exactly an unalloyed pleasure for them either. Most of the waiting staff I spoke to agreed that while "no-one wants to look a cheapskate by under-tipping and ruin their chances of copping off" they'll spend a fair part of their evening fielding ill-informed complaints from men who believe it "makes them look forceful and educated in front of their date".
Dining out on the 14th of Feb is an experience that doesn't reflect well on any of the participants. We go be cause we feel we have to, we're served by people who'd rather it was any other day of the year, with food that the chefs are ashamed of because they know they could do better.
Apart from the proprietor, nobody in the restaurant is having much fun on St Valentine's evening and any tiny hint of romance in the air is easily overpowered by the naked aggressive commercialism of the occasion. If St Valentine deserves to be patron saint of anything it should be catering industry shareholders.
Unless we collectively turn our backs on restaurants on St Valentine's Day, things will only get worse. This is not necessarily as unromantic an idea as it might sound. There has to a better way to say 'I love you' than getting industrially fed in an environment where the one nod to atmosphere is a tealight, a wilting rose and an intrusively sleazy soundtrack. Why buy into a Disney date or a Grand Guignol parody of a candlelit dîner à deux? Since the Vatican have relinquished it, St Valentine's day is up for grabs. You and your partner can choose any other day of the year to go out, get treated well by a decent restaurant and create your own romance.