It’s a very specific first-world problem: You go out to eat at a tasting menu-only restaurant that’s touted as a life-changer by all the food publications. You jump through hoops to get the reservation. The day has arrived. You show up. Maybe you even flew to get there. The procession of courses begins, and suddenly, you’re on hour number two, tackling the tenth course out of thirty, and you’re already tired and full. It dawns on you that you are being held hostage, and, maybe worse, fed to the point of illness. Do you stop eating, or do you partake in it all, then pay for the privilege of feeling like you want to die?
It’s easy to be resentful when these are the options. That may also be why tasting menus have been steadily moving away from the captive-audience, foie-gras-goose style of feeding, what the food writer Corby Kummer has referred to as fine-dining tyranny. (Bourdain has called it being “Food-fucked.”) “If you didn’t feel dead after a meal it was as though something was wrong,” says Mitchell Davis, executive vice president of The James Beard Foundation, of the traditional tasting menu experience. “You wanted to see your money’s worth. Often, that’s butter and meat. But I do think we’re pulling away from that.”
These days, there are appealing alternatives for diners who’d like to try the best of what a chef has to offer—which is, essentially, what a tasting menu is—but who don’t want to submit to the price, the time commitment, or the sheer quantity and richness of the food. Even Grant Achatz of Alinea in Chicago, one of the foremost practitioners of the over-the-top tasting menu, rethought his approach when the restaurant turned ten last year, cutting the number of courses back from thirty to twelve. It’s a thing.
“I think that we’re sort of leaving behind the last-meal-of-your-life tasting menus,” says Amanda Cohen, chef-owner of Dirt Candy, a vegetarian restaurant in New York City that offers a 7-course tasting menu for $78. “The best tasting menus either show off what a restaurant does best, or leaves the diner wanting more.” Her seasonal tasting menu might include tiny tomato tartelettes, pad thai made from spiralized pumpkin, or her signature Brussels sprout tacos. Cohen counts how many bites each course amounts to in order to keep the portion sizes in check—and to keep her customers comfortable. “We have a new generation of eaters coming up, and they’re not used to those grand tastings,” says Cohen. “I think our customers are eating less than they were years ago. They’re more price conscious, they eat out more—they’re probably eating out tonight and tomorrow night, and probably the following night.”
A general shift toward vegetables, foraged plants (ahem, noma) and sustainability at fine-dining restaurants takes the emphasis away from rich luxury ingredients that can be overbearing, like foie gras and Wagyu beef, by default. Jeremiah Stone and Fabian Von Hauske, chef-owners of Contra, a tasting menu-only restaurant in New York City, say that’s one way to keep diners feeling good after a 7-course meal, and it helps keep the cost at a reasonable $74. “The influence of sustainability and eating responsibly affects the way we cook,” says Stone. “The fact that we’re not using heavy reduced stocks, not cooking with tons of meat and having all these bones and trim that end up going into the food. Our food is lighter because maybe the sauce is made from turnips instead of the fat of foie gras.”
Tasting menus are lightening up in more obscure ways, too. These days, humor is a currency as important as taste. Usually, the most memorable dish in a multi-course menu is the one that makes you smile. When Matthew Lightner was cooking at Atera in New York City, he served a trompe l’oeil starter that looked like a razor clam but had an edible shell that was a crispy baguette painted with squid ink. Noma—where Lightner worked and which is now closed, to be reopened in a new iteration—is the Iron Throne of edible puns. See the famous potted plant course, which looked like decoration but was flatbread in disguise as branches, with vegetables buried in edible “soil.” “Humor is really important in the food and in the interaction of the staff,” says Davis. “I had a meal at a two-star restaurant in London that was incredibly popular. It was a lovely place and the food I remember were among the most beautiful dishes I had ever seen in my life. But the staff and the atmosphere were so serious and dour, we hated the place even though we loved the food.” A great meal should feel like a party, not a funeral.
Not taking things too seriously extends to an informality that has infiltrated even the fanciest restaurants. According to Blaine Weitzel, the chef of Willows Inn on Lummi Island in Washington, that’s the most interesting change he’s observed in the fine dining scene. “Over the course of my career, I noticed the best tasting restaurants venture away from what is considered fine restaurant fare and introduce the best elements of eating from a taco truck or street cart or a bucket of fried chicken,” says Wetzel, a veteran of Noma and two-time James Beard Award winner. “It incorporates more experience into the fine-dining setting.”
As such, tasting menus are no longer sedentary affairs. Wetzel starts off guests who have signed on to his 25-course, $190 dinner with cocktails and finger food on the deck, then moves them into the dining room, to fend off monotony. At the revamped Alinea, the meal is a choreographed dance that shuttles diners from the Gallery Room (the restaurant’s parlance for the dining room) to the kitchen and back, at times transforming spaces with a theatrical set change of sorts. Even at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, chef Dan Barber’s fine dining locavore haven, diners are often brought to a refurbished manure shed (yes, you read that right, and no, it doesn’t smell like shit) for a course or two. In even more extreme cases, the restaurant itself relocates—think Noma’s pop-ups in Sydney, Tokyo, and Tulum.
Despite all the ways that chefs and restaurants are keeping tasting menus relevant, ultimately, their success hinges on the satisfaction of the customer. “When diners put themselves in our hands, they’re the ones who have the best time across the board,” says Cohen. “Our best reviews are from people who’ve had the tasting menu. Because they feel like they have really got the experience of the restaurant.” And when you don’t wake up clutching your belly and cursing that meal in the middle of the night, or when the credit card bill comes a few weeks later, that’s at the very least a step in the right direction.
