October is one of the most exciting months to be eating in any good restaurant in Europe, although the reasons for this are not immediately obvious. There are no Christmas decorations; the tables that have been laid up for customers to eat outside over the summer have been put away; and this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau has still to arrive.
The change in October is subtle and is confined principally to the menu. The game season has arrived in earnest and kitchens from Scotland to Austria are busy preparing pheasant and partridge, hare, rabbit, wild duck, venison and wild boar and demonstrating another good reason for eating out rather than preparing these fiddly and often bloody birds and beasts at home.
The game season opened in mid August when the guns on the moors of Scotland and North Yorkshire brought down the first of this year’s grouse, and these invariably expensive but highly distinctive birds will be on menus until early December, when the grouse-shooting season ends.
But from October onwards Nature provides not just a wide range of different game but also an abundance of them at a reasonable price for what they represent. Game birds are one of the few wild foods city dwellers can readily enjoy. They are low in fat and so ideally suited to anyone worried about their weight. The best way to serve them is invariably to roast them simply and to present them whole and on the bone, so that for anyone who likes to eat with their fingers, polishing off a roast partridge with game chips is one of the few ways they can still get away with this satisfying practice in public.
And while the arrival of these game dishes provides a new, seasonal pleasure for the diner, they also represent a series of different challenges for the chef and the restaurateur.
Firstly, game tends to be expensive, not just because they are wild but because they have to be laboriously prepared by the game dealer. As a result, restaurants tend to charge a fixed cash margin for their game dishes rather than multiplying their cost price by three as they do with a breast of chicken or a sirloin steak.
To compensate for this, the best chefs will be looking to supplement what they can charge for a breast of pheasant or a saddle of rabbit by putting on the menu cheaper dishes such as a terrine of rabbit, wild duck and prunes or jugged hare, an old recipe in which the jointed hare is slowly cooked in a litre of good red wine. The key is not to waste anything.
The other distinctive attraction of game dishes is that however good they taste on their own, they are always much better with a bottle of gutsy, red wine. Something from the Rhône or Languedoc-Roussillon in France, Piemonte in Italy or Rioja in Spain; wines from areas that are also synonymous with hunting are often the most suitable choices.
Restaurants in the countryside invariably offer the best value because there is no need for a middleman – Tom Lewis of Monacle Mhor is not only a chef and restaurateur in a delightful part of Scotland – but also an excellent shot. And in London, while game used to be confined to the more expensive hotels and restaurants of the West End, it is now also on the menu at much more reasonably priced restaurants such as St John, 32 Great Queen Street and Smiths of Smithfield.
But the chef who has exemplified game cooking for the past 30 years is Gérard Besson, who, with his wife Martine by his side, runs the comfortable restaurant named after himself close to Les Halles in the centre of Paris. The right-hand side of Besson’s menu in early October simply states, ‘The hunting season has started’ and then goes on to list 20 different game dishes from grey-leg partridge to wild boar braised with Corsican herbs.
Game’s final attraction is the immediate link it provides to our past, when we were all hunters. It is something we should cherish and enjoy.
