Dishes of olive oil to be banned from restaurants? The EU's gone mad

Those first minutes in a restaurant, the mulling over of the menu, clinking of drinks, collective breaking of bread and enthusiastic dunking into little bowls of olive oil – they are some of the most enjoyable.

Alas, one aspect of that ceremony may soon be no longer thanks to the latest absurd piece of European gastronomic interference: banning jugs and dishes of olive oil in restaurants. From January next year, dishes of oil are to be replaced by bottles, which must be presented, claret-like, at the table with a tamper-proof nozzle and EU-approved labelling.

The law is, somewhat vaguely, said to "protect consumers and improve hygiene". As a consumer, it has never occurred to me that, when it comes to olive oil on restaurant tables, we were ever in need of protection. The Thai fishcake on the specials board, maybe, the free olive oil, not so much.

As pointless – no – moronic laws go, it's a doozie, showing absolutely no understanding or consideration for how restaurants and consumers operate. It's annoying for diners, and galling for restaurateurs.

I asked restaurateur Yotam Ottolenghi for his thoughts. "As you can imagine I'm not a Ukip supporter but this is ridiculous," he said. "What's next? I really don't see the rationale. The whole contract between restaurant and customer is based on trust. If someone's going to break it, they're going to break it. No one says you need to show the pack of flour that the bread came from, so why the oil?"

Sam Clark of Moro seemed fairly distraught in the Telegraph. "It's very upsetting. Haven't they already done enough to damage artisan products?"

Indeed, it is those independent producers who have the most to lose. Mark Dyer runs the Gay Farmer, a small Spanish olive oil company. "I don't do everything on a conveyer belt, I do it by hand. So I can't produce these little bottles – it's just going to be too expensive," he said. "Small cans will cost me £3-4 to produce. No restaurant is going to go for that."

So what will they go for? "I think it's going to just be mass-produced olive oil of a fairly cheap grade. I really think this is going to make things very difficult for small producers like myself."

Ottolenghi is even more pessimistic. "What it means is that there just won't be oil in restaurants any more – no one in their right mind is going to serve a little bottle of olive oil at the table. It doesn't make sense."

I wonder, though, if it's as bad as all that. Could restaurants not simply defy the law? "I don't think anyone will follow it," says Ottolenghi. "It's impossible to enforce – are they going to come into restaurants and check on us?"

In theory, yes, with local authorities expected to carry out inspections on any restaurants barmy and ecologically unfriendly enough to adhere to the regulations. That said, one hopes – even expects – that in the wake of all this hoo-ha the law will go the way of those for bendy bananas and too-fruity jams, and be quietly dropped.

Original Article
Source: guardian.co.uk
Author: James Ramsden