Mark Daniels: Frozen food for thought

I can't help but feel just a teensy bit sorry for Gordon Ramsay this week.

As a smirk of smug satisfaction quivers at the edge of your lips, the pinch of perverse satisfaction at the fact that the childhood footballer has been caught out by his own hypocrisy has entertained many.

But as anybody who knows me will attest, I am not a cook. In fact, I abhor the whole process of preparing a meal, and will go to any lengths not to do it; what happens in a kitchen is, to me, more magical than any trick my uncle used to pull on me as a kid. Even if a machine goes 'bing' when it's ready.

In the kitchen, I get cross: I swear and I shout at people around me - which sounds, from what the television tells us, a bit like Gordon - and I've even been known to sling pots at people in temper. Therefore I am banned, by my wife, from doing anything in the kitchen other than making a cup of tea.

So I am something of a fan of microwave meals. Years ago, struggling to make ends meet in my first flat, my best-friend and lodger would get his mum to prepare meals at home, then portion them up and bring them to us frozen for later consumption. They were great. And when we had a few quid, supermarket ready meals were also a part of our diet, equally perfect for everyday survival between bouts of nipping to the local chippy.

This, of course, is anathema to Gordon. He detests "ready meals" and is vocally critical of establishments that serve them. Which sort of back-fired on him recently when it came to light that, apparently, the meals in his restaurants are prepared at a central location, then frozen and transported for quick preparation.

Many have been swift to vilify him for this practice, one particular example this weekend being Jay Rayner, restaurant critic for The Observer.

With a certain glee, Rayner revels in the undercover inquiries and snatched photography of The Sun newspaper's investigative journalism in to where the meals actually come from for Gordon Ramsay's restaurants, pointing out that "vac-packed braised dishes" are all prepared at a central production establishment, which then freezes and transports the meals to each of Ramsay's pubs and his bistro.

I don't think this is as bad as some are making it, and clearly the majority of Ramsay's customers have never been able to tell. It just goes to show that Ramsay's using savvy business sense, and preventing waste. What is the point in producing vat upon vat of food, only to find that at the end of each night you're pouring it down the sink?

Even the critics concede that this "central production unit" is owned by Ramsay and that the meals themselves are prepared to his recipe, by his chefs. After all, it's not like Ramsay's boxing up Findus Microwave Meals for his restaurants, is it?

What did catch my attention, however, is that Rayner's real beef with Ramsay's frozen operation does not so much seem to be the fact that his chefs prepare meals for warming later, but the fact that what he is doing is legitimising the activities of "shoddier operations further downmarket."

Far be it for me to incur the wrath of a restaurant critic, but just because an establishment might use catering behemoths with refrigerated trucks to procure their food supplies does not mean that such a business is "shoddy".

My pub is a small village local, a place where people can come, enjoy an excellent pint of ale, a glass of wine, and - for want of a better expression - some pub grub. My wife produces a surprising array of enjoyable alternatives, from filled baguettes to Yorkshire Puddings filled with a concoction of wonderful ingredients.

Many of them are home-made, prepared in-house and then portioned and frozen for later serving. And those which she does not make herself are, I have to admit, purchased from the very suppliers Jay Rayner despises.

We have never sought to accredit ourselves with a Michelin star (partly because Greene King would probably stuff our rent up for attempting to do so), but the produce from our suppliers is of an excellent standard, and the cost, time saved, lack of waste and simple fact that our customers enjoy the meals put before them makes using such a supplier simply good business sense.

And so do so many other pubs. Yesterday, travelling back from the wedding of a good friend, we stopped for Sunday lunch at a lovely, busy pub. I had a half-roast chicken, Ali had Rock Lobster. And chips.

Classy, I know, but it was obvious to anybody with half a brain cell that the cook hadn't just plucked a lively lobster from a tank and put it in to a pot to boil. My wife enjoyed her meal nonetheless. Neither of us would have classed it as shoddy.

Shoddy is where somebody slaps a slice of corned beef between two badly-buttered pieces of a Tesco Value loaf and charges a fiver for it. Or my attempts to build an Airfix model.

But just because we don't charge £24.95 for a bit of steak, six hand-cut chips and half a tomato does not always mean that the meals from establishments who rely on the services of centralised food-service providers are of a poor quality, badly made or downmarket.

Pubs are struggling enough as it is right now, and the majority don't have a celebrity figurehead to keep their businesses afloat. I, for one, am quite glad that Gordon's push-button approach to cooking advocates our own.