Tim Hayward who is the food writer/critic for the FT has a recent piece on fine dining tasting menus. This is a gift link but unlike the NYT it can only be used a set number of times.
I am not a fan of 3-4 hour tasting menus. Did a lot of them for both work and on my own dime. The final nail in the coffin so to speak was a dinner pre-covid at Eleven Madison. It was like a marathon and we finished our meal around midnight when we had started at 8. Very little was remarkable about the meal which went through more courses than I can recall. I think there were 4-5 amuses before the formal meal even started. Dinner for two plus cocktails and wine pushed us into 4 figures. As we walked out my wife said to me letâs never do that again.
An omakase sushi dinner on the other hand I adore and think of it very different than the standard western tasting menu. Most times youâre done in 2 hours max. More likely an hour an a half. I recall once reading a critic that noted that a sushi omakase is likely the most expensive meal per hour that you can do. $200 in 1 1/2 hour in a mid tier spot works out to $133 an hour without drinks. Go to high end and you can easily double that.
IMO, banchan is not a course anymore than the veg that accompany your main is a course. Trying to fit western meal terminology to other cultures doesnât always work. Frankly in Korean dining, Iâm not sure there are even courses. Go to a traditional place and either everything hits the table at the same time or you canât figure out why one dish comes out when it did.
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Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
22
Haywardâs take seems to be that âfine diningâ only applies to the very high end places. But you can go quite a way down the pecking order and find restaurants making the claim about themselves. Itâs a phrase Iâve never been comfortable with - mainly because I donât really know what it means. âFineâ in contrast to what? I think I first came across the phrase on Chowhound, maybe 15 or so years back in the context of upmarket American restaurants . Itâs only in much more recent times that, as often the case, weâve adopted an American idiom in the UK.
âCourseâ is thus a restaurant measure word, meaning anything from amuse-bouche, to that pork sandwich I had in Iowa.
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
24
Perhaps you could make clear which bit of my eight posts to this thread you regard as absurd. Iâm sure you didnt intend your remark to come across as simply a gratuitous insult, so a bit of clarity would help. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing the FT fine dining article, enjoyed it. Would like to read more of his adventures on this subject with other venues.
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
29
That dish is the sort of example that now puts me off long tasting menus. If itâs fantastic, I want more than just one/two bites. Or, often, itâs too small to get the full sense of flavour.
Exactly! I do get tasting menu fatigue at times, there are just too many of these small bites, at times itâs just a random of tastes from few dishes jumping from one to other without much connection. At the end of the meal, the impression was meal was good but couldnât recall anything.
I always considered the amuse gueule/bouche as a course, although it seems to be a newish trend to actually list it on the menu.
Back in the day, when we walked 5 miles uphill in the snow to all the restaurants (and back home), the amuse was just brought out & maybe 'splained / announced by the server as a âgreeting from the kitchen.â
