Luxury dining: when degustation becomes punishment for a glutton?
The New York Times reports on the latest World's 50 Best Restaurants list:
"When it comes to parsing the annual dining survey known as The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, though, you really have to open your mind. Forget asking whether these establishments are the best in the world. The bigger question is: Are they restaurants?"
🤔 But wait, doesn't it say restaurants in the title of the list itself? Ah, that depends on one's definition of the same now, doesn't it?
"Now, among the 50 Best are a number of establishments where they let you see a menu written in real words and order things you actually want to eat. Some of these, like Asador Etxebarri in Spain and Schloss Schauenstein in Switzerland, are hard to reach. Nearly all are very expensive. Still, there are places on the list where a relatively normal person might eat a relatively normal dinner and go home feeling relatively well-fed.
But the list is dominated by places that normal people can’t get into, where the few diners who will go to almost any length for reservations will go home feeling bloated and drunk. They are not restaurants, or not just restaurants. They are endurance tests, theatrical spectacles, monuments to ego and — the two most frightening words in dining — “immersive experiences.”"
This is ironic given the origin of the list:
"The World’s 50 Best Restaurants and its spinoff awards, by now almost too numerous to count, weren’t always so rarefied. In the early years, when the list was being published by Restaurants magazine, the editors saw it as a kind of anti-Michelin, and took pride in recognizing spots that would never, ever make Michelin’s little red guidebooks."
Oh well, resisting the Degustation Borg is futile:
"Today the list is dominated by tasting-menu restaurants, and every year those menus seem to get longer and more unforgiving. There are more courses than any rational person would choose to eat, and more tastes of more wines than anyone can possibly remember the next day. The spiraling, metastasizing length of these meals seems designed to convince you that there’s just no way a mere 10 or 15 courses could contain all the genius in the kitchen."
Which raises the question, are you paying for a meal or investing in your cardiologist's/hepatologist's retirement home? A while ago, Bloomberg reported (https://lnkd.in/gXaZNqua):
"The hospitality industry is increasingly focused on high-net-worth individuals."
The result?
"Now, the most democratic of luxuries is once again becoming the province of the new elite."
Perhaps one of the most amusing examples? Gaia, London as reviewed in The Guardian (https://lnkd.in/gjXS8rmp):
"The prices force me to call Rex Goldsmith of the renowned Chelsea Fishmonger. He tells me his kilo price for mackerel is £12.50. I tell him at Gaia it’s £100. Rex gasps. “Christ,” he says. “At that price the fish should give you a blowjob.”"
https://lnkd.in/gWj_zM-A
