Egotarian cuisine and it's a very male thing

Tim Hayward, an Financial Times Weekend contributing writer and winner of the Fortnum & Mason and Guild of Food Writers’ awards for food writer of the year, has an insightful piece this morning drawing attention to a new trend in restaurant cooking. Egotarian cuisine is the name coined by Alan Richman writing in the US magazine GQ and Hayward wishes he had written it. As he says, egotarian cuisine "ties up all the irritants of modern dining into one neat package and then punts it neatly into a bin."

So what exactly is the irritant? Richman described the new and pervasive kind of cuisine in this way:

... obscure, often foraged ingredients, weird combinations, tiny portions, tableside “narrative” from the server, tasting menus, it is simultaneously “intellectual … yet often thoughtless” but, above all, it centres on the chef, whose ideas, creativity and personality it’s all about. “The job of the customer is to eat what’s placed before him, and then applaud.” And because there’s no name for this trend yet, he handily coins one, “Egotarian Cuisine”.

What Hayward adds is an insight he gained from a series of discussions he hosted recently on women in food.

Each night I read out Richman’s assertion and each night, the reaction was similar.
“Well yes! Obviously,” was one of the repeatable responses. Sometimes followed by “ … and you’re remotely surprised?” or on other occasions with a sort of weary and indulgent chuckle.
I could not find, among panel or audience, anyone who would disagree that the kind of cooking we’ve grown to accept as the cutting edge of our national cuisine was anything other than an elaborate competition between idiotic boys. Nobody actually used the term “pissing contest” but that was solely because they were too polite.