THE BIG IDEA Tasting Menus Fade Out
Prior to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, albums were largely an afterthought in the music industry. The single was king. But the commercial and critical success of that 1967 Beatles LP represented a paradigm shift that made a coherent collection of songs the path to musical (and financial) immortality. A decade later, French nouvelle chefs led a similar revolution with the tasting menu. They moved meals away from a few big courses toward multiple tiny ones that, taken together, comprised the chef's full artistic vision. Each course was a track, the entire tasting menu the LP. And in the same way that great albums separated elite musicians from mere onehit wonders, tasting menus are where the legends of chefs such as Bocuse, Keller, Adriá, and Redzepi were forged.
The album eventually ran into the buzzsaw that was Napster, and the digital-music revolution has turned us back toward a single-dominated world. Recent ominous signs point to a comparable fade-out for the tasting menu. René Redzepi announced the closing of Noma, calling his model of laborintensive fine dining “unsustainable,” while three-Michelin-starred Quince, in San Francisco, has closed for remodeling this year and will reemerge with an a la carte experience that joins its prix fixe. And after crisscrossing the country in pursuit of this year's best new restaurants, we encountered far fewer tasting menus than in previous years—and only one made our top 10.
The mechanisms of demise for the album and the tasting menu differ—there's no streaming equivalent for food. Instead, multiple factors are curtailing the prix fixe.
