More than once I’ve been accused of favoring high-end fine dining  over more modest restaurants or unpretentious holes-in-the-wall. For someone who for 45 years has been championing barbecue and taco stands, fish camps and bayou crawfish boils, pizzerias and gyro shops, the charge is baseless, but at the same time I have with giddy delight dined well at, and written in praise of, deluxe restaurants around the world, from New York to New Delhi.
        The beauty, luxury, fine wines and service at posh restaurants may not always be as warm and fuzzy as some easily intimidated diners might like, but the standards such restaurants uphold are to be cherished and reveled in at their best. As I’ve written before, despite the ravages of Covid on the restaurant industry, fine dining will survive and thrive, if its entrepreneurs are willing to change a little to fit a world raring to dine out but to do so with care and an understandable desire to be comfortable.
        What I do not think will survive are the pretensions of a kind of cuisine made more for a magazine photo shoot than to be eaten.  One expects that a dish at a fine dining restaurant will be presented with appropriate garnishes and flair, not just picked up from under a heat lamp and plopped on your table with the question, “Who gets the chili burger?”  But the extravagance of some chefs to create plates of stunning creativity, mounted with extraneous sauces and ingredients not even consumed, now seems ridiculous at best and wholly out of step with what is sensible.
        Part ego, but largely done to grab attention and photo spreads, such pretensions are proffered by chefs who desperately want a Michelin star based on how gorgeously their plates are mounted, even if Michelin insists that all its inspectors are interested in is the quality of ingredients and how the food tastes—a rubric no one in the industry believes, given the exorbitant prices for the fantastical cuisine to which Michelin gives its highest rating of three stars.
      
 Ironically, extravagant food has not always been the model for haute cuisine, except among the royal families of France before so many of them lost their heads in the French Revolution. Even Marie-Antoine Carême (1784-18), called the “king of cooks”  and the “cook of kings” (although the only king he ever cooked for was the Russian Czar), stressed lightness of sauces and digestibility over extravagance. Still, Carême’s dominating influence on banqueting, where scores of dishes would be set on the table, became a game of one-upmanship among aristocratic hosts.
        A century later, however, when the first edition of Larousse-Gastronomique,  the so-called “bible of French cuisine,” came out in 1928,  Carême’s style of cuisine was dismissed as out of touch. “Nowadays,” it scoffed, “we no longer approve of this ostentatious manner of setting out cooked dishes. We have banished display from our tables, as much for the sake of hygiene as for reasons of expediency.”
        The Great Depression and World War II put the kibosh on fine dining—even though the hotel dining rooms of Paris and Maxim’s thrived on the exclusive attendance of German officers in the occupied city. After the war, a sure degree of opulence returned in the form of centerpieces, complex dishes wrapped in foie gras, truffles and pastry, and widespread use of heavy silverware and candlesticks, meant to cater to a new international crowd with money, some taste and expectations of glamor in the dining room.
        But plate presentations were fairly simple. To dine in a Michelin star restaurant in the post-war period was to receive a plate on which there might be an impeccably carved duck with sauce bigarade (right), or a perfectly cooked rack of lamb with roasted potatoes, and then a nice slice of Tarte Tatin.  True, sometimes such dishes were dramatically set on fire tableside, but overall the food on the plate looked like and was intended to be eaten with gusto.
        When the so-called “la nouvelle cuisine” came along in France, its original “ten commandments,” crafted by food writers Henri Gault and Christian Millau in 1973, cautioned chefs to avoid too rich sauces, return to regional cooking, consider diet and health, and invent constantly. Extravagant plate design was never the original intent of la nouvelle cuisine, but its novelty dazzled the media, especially in the U.S., because it was so beautifully, artfully, colorfully photogenic, usually set on Villeroy & Boch china (below) with Christofle silverware.
        Everyone, including myself, was initially impressed by plates on which the main ingredient, say, a fillet of salmon, was set in a pool of sauce that had another sauce spread into it like a spider’s web or brushed to the sides of the plate. Everyone also learned how easy that was to accomplish, simply by putting a ribbon of the second sauce on the plate then using the tongs of a fork to pull it into a pretty pattern. It  soon became de rigueur to add more and more ingredients to a dish in order to increase its novelty (and its price). Even so, the amount of the meat or fish could be disturbingly chintzy, leading Chef Paul Bocuse to define la nouvelle cuisine as “less food on the plate and the higher the bill.”
        Soon there were raspberries and gold leaf atop risotto, kiwi fruit on sea bass, caviar on baked potatoes and truffles shaved on everything. Microgreens with no flavor and flowers no one wanted to eat were placed with tweezers just so on dishes, sometimes by two or three cooks huddled around the plate. So many of those constructions took so long to plate that the food came out lukewarm.
 

     Not that any of it necessarily tasted any better than something less fanciful, and some chefs, like the canny Spanish self-marketer Ferran Adrià,  would deliberately create dishes to confuse the guest, from using Rice Krispies on some dishes and making ice cream from Parmigiano cheese. Dishes at such restaurants arrived under glass with dry ice fumes pouring out of them; a dish would be “inspired by Miró” and shrimp was paired with white chocolate. The $180 menu at San Francisco’s Atelier Crenn doesn’t even tell you what the dish is, instead listing only items like “A gentle smell. Oceanic, of yummy feeling” and “Birth which gives its morning mystery.” The so-called “Modernist Cuisine” required equipment like centrifuges and test tubes just to reduce sauces.
        Some of it was meant to shake up stultified kitchens, even to the point of recommending live ants be introduced on the plate by Copenhagen’s Noma. But, whatever else it was meant to achieve, it was the publicity value that made getting a reservation nearly impossible at some of those restaurants, even a year in advance. Yet, somehow the anonymous Michelin Guide inspectors managed to pay multiple visits to such places before awarding them three stars.
         Now, with Covid closing every restaurant in France down tight, Michelin has just issued its 2021 Guide, somehow researched when most restaurants were not even open. In France one new three-star restaurant was announced, AM in Marseilles. When it’s open, for a prix fixe dinner it charges 872 euros for two persons, or 694 euros, or, the least expensive, 536 euros, which includes two glasses of wine, coffee and water. From the photos (I have obviously not eaten there) the food looks more like the inside of a kaleidoscope, with many dishes puzzling as to what any of the ingredients might be. Of the food, served within a remarkably spare, inelegant dining room, Michelin raves, “In this chic and residential area of Marseille, the talented Alexandre Mazzia is following his path, refining his culinary personality along the way. There is an emphasis on vegetables, fine fish and seafood ingredients, a smattering of African influences (the chef lived in Congo until the age of 14), and only one rule – audacity!”
         But one has to wonder: Even when dining out gets back to some kind of pre-Covid normalcy, is this the kind of food and experience people will want? Is all that frou-frou on the plate anything other than gimmickry? I’m sure there are plenty of wealthy curiosity-seekers who may make a special journey (which is how Michelin defines a three-star restaurant) to Marseilles just to dine at AM, but it is difficult to imagine that most people, including inveterate gourmets and gourmands, wouldn’t prefer to have a beautiful bouillabaisse down by the old port in Marseilles.
        

Le Gavroche, London

Again, I am wholly optimistic that fine dining, albeit expensive, will return robustly in the future, and I am  among many who look forward to sitting at a well-set table with good linens and china, charming flower arrangements, well-trained, pleasantly dressed professional waiters, a fine wine list and array of cheeses, and a menu of dishes I will find nowhere else at such a high level of quality and execution.
        I crave that experience. What I will not be eager to do is to pay $500 for a meal that has some dishes that delight me and others that confound me. I’m not asking or expecting imaginative chefs to hold back on their creativity, but they’d better re-assess if it’s the kind of cuisine anyone is willing to pay so heavily for any more.
         I always roll my eyes when people are presented with a dish they say “is too beautiful to eat,” which is like saying a fully equipped Ferrari is “too beautiful to drive.” If that’s the case, you have to wonder what the chef was really thinking when he put the food on a plate.