Tasting Menus

[Wilfrid]

Some interesting discussion of tasting menus on the New York board thread about Gramercy Park has raised general issues.

Is it reasonable for restaurants to insist that tasting menus have to be taken by the entire table?  Should you be able to order a la carte, but pick a dish from thre tasting menu as part of your order - even if that means the restaurant has to scale up the portion size?

If the restaurant has several tasting menus, should you be allowed to scoot around between them, essentially customizing your own?

Are these privileges you expect to see only in very expensive joints, or are they reasonable requests to make in any good restaurant?  Or is the chef entitled to limit the ways in which you can structure your meal?

(Personally, I think it's entirely up to the restaurant, and any leeway you get is a luxury.  Sorry.)

[Fat Guy]

Of course it's up to the restaurant. A restaurant is a business and can run itself any way it wants to, so long as it's not doing anything illegal.

I sympathize with restaurants that don't want to open the floodgates and encourage mix-and-match ordering across the board. If everybody does it, it's likely to be a big mess for the kitchen. But is that really a legitimate fear? I think if the kitchen has the ability, it should accommodate such requests within reason.

We used Gramercy Tavern as an illustration. I can only imagine the nightmare that must have been the Gramercy Tavern kitchen for the first year or so that place was in business. It must have been insane, and when the kitchen gets overstressed it does make sense to implement policies to keep things running smoothly. But today's Gramercy Tavern is a strong and confident restaurant. Those regulations, which may have been necessary for self preservation in the old days, strike me as little more than a crutch today. And I think they have pretty much acquired the status of rules meant to be broken, which makes for inconsistent customer experiences. It also punishes the non-assertive and allows the squeaky wheel to get the grease.

That's my general feeling about any restaurant: If it's new, or if the kitchen is in the weeds, sure, fall back on a strict interpretation of the menu in order to ensure that every customer's meal will be at the benchmark level. But if the capacity exists to fulfill a request, and that request is not insulting from a culinary integrity perspective, I see no good reason not to grant it.

[Wilfrid]

I recall being given exceptional freedom at the restaurant at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco.  I think a former Le Cirque alumni was cooking there, but I am struggling to remember their name.  The menu offered a fairly long list of classical preparations, grouped by food type rather than by courses.  I was encouraged to order as many dishes as I wanted, in any sequence.  I would be charged by number of dishes, but the kitchen would adjust portions according to how many I ordered.  This was an expensive, fairly sedate restaurant, with a comparatively small number of covers.  And of course I stuffed myself.

A place in New York which I have always found highly flexible is March, where they not only have several tasting menus, but are enthusiastic about you jumping around between them.

This is all great fun, and I wish it would happen everywhere.  Steven has pointed out some reasons why it can't.  I think another good reason is where unseen parts of the menu like surprise inter-courses (is that the term?  :) ) are structured to occur within a chosen menu.  It used to be this way at Atlas - maybe still is.

My only concern about Steven's closing suggestion, which I as I read it leaves matters to the kitchen's discretion, is that it might promote an appearance of inconsistency.  The table next to me is allowed to order a double portion of the tasting menu risotto, because that makes sense for the kitchen, but then I'm not allowed to pick two beef dishes from different menus because it will insult the integrity of my meal (for example).  That sort of thing annoys people.  I am all for clarity either way:  tasting menus for whole table only, without subtitutions, or order at will.

[Fat Guy]

I don't think a restaurant should diminish itself for the sake of consistency, and I think a waitstaff programmed with the proper language and comportment can keep the dining room under control without people feeling they've received inconsistent treatment. If the occasional person does get annoyed, that is surely outweighed many times over by those who will appreciate having been accommodated.

[Beachfan]

I agree with F-G on rights.  Interesting, as my wife is a vegetarian, I usually get an exception to the same tasting meal rule, as long as I keep a uniform number of courses.

Nonetheless, I absolutely delight in restaurants that are completely flexible. Fleur de Lys in SF will do an all vegetarian menu, all seafood menu, all meat menu simultaneously at a table and delight us all.

[robert brown]

Wilfrid, thank you for doing what I wanted to do or hoped someone else would do. Here's a little background according to what I have observed. It would be interesting to know when the idea of a "prix fixe" came into being. Regardless, I first became aware in the late 1960s of the "prix fixe" menu (talking about France) within the context of other (either less or more courses) fixed-price menus and a la carte dishes. The first "degustation" menu I would guess appeared in the mid-1970s, preceeded by fixed-price menus with a bit of choice. In fact, I remember in France one or two restaurants that would treat, say, a four-course meal that one chose a la carte by putting it on the bill as a "menu" and charging at a fixed price. The practice of making the table take the "degustation" menu is something I first saw in France as well. It annoyed me from that very moment. (It was in the window of Restaurant Gerard Pangaud in Paris in the mid-1970s. Pangaud later moved to the USA, by the way). Whether or not a restaurant in France made the whole table take the tasting menu varied from one to the other. In higher-end restaurants that offered three or four tasting menus, most would, as I recall, would let your party choose whichever one they wanted and some even would let guests order a la carte if they wanted. When the restaurant was rigid, the stated reason was that it would create uneven service due to people receiving courses while others did not:something I never understood and still do not today when this happens.

I am not a big devotee of tasting menus. If I order one, it is usually because it shows the restaurant off at its best. If in France, a restaurant offers the dishes that are listed as the specialties in Michelin or mentioned in Gault-Maillau, say,  as ones you should have, I wlll often order it if the restaurant makes it easy on everyone.

I give this background because I think the primary role of the tasting menu has changed from a way to offer the best a chef has to give into a tool of restaurant efficiency. I think in a lot of restaurants, GT for one, the tasting menu is for the kitchen something akin to a single dish lots of people order. The more clients they can direct to ordering it, the better off it is for the bottom line and the division of labor or tasks that each person in the kitchen performs. Tasting menus make it possible to get to the ideal place of a chef: either the single-menu format of a Chez Panisse or a catered affair. Getting as close as possible to that means,to a bottom-line type, hiring less kitchen help; getting closer to anticipating what people will order, therefore avoiding extra waste; being able to prepare more in advance; and even creating a better flow in the service. In other words, the tasting menu has transformed the restaurant business into more of a business, and the more a restaurateur can get people to order it in a rigid ordering environment, the more he can buy a second home, stock his wine cellar, or send his kids to good schools (at my expense, of course).

[Wilfrid]

Interesting to ponder the historical background.  There are a whole bunch of different approaches.  In France alone (and my experience dates only from the late 70s), I recall it being quite typical for restaurants to offer several menus at different prices, as well as a carte.  The most expensive menu would often be called something like menu gastronomique, or indeed menu degustation - which is the closest akin, I would say, to the New York/London concept of a tasting menu.  In less expensive French restaurants, one also saw formules which presented different ways of combining bits and pieces from the menu at various set prices.

I wonder if this doesn't, very broadly, have its roots in the concept of a table d'hote?  As I understand it, this was originally the one meal on offer in an eating house, served at a communal table.  It came to mean a basic set menu, to which, if you were lucky, there might be some a la carte alternatives.

Robert, my recollection accords with yours to the extent that I remember sitting around the table in ordinary French restaurants where one person would eat the 50F menu and another the 150F menu.  It was not beyond the wit of the waitstaff to deal with different numbers of courses.  I have no idea when the concept of the whole table eating the same menu came in, and no reason to disagree with you.  Am I wrong, though, in saying that - however objectionable - it has become fairly standard practice in New York (and indeed London) to state that tasting courses are for the whole table only?  I really am open to correction on this; I just have the impression that the restaurants which do offer flexibility are the exceptions.

Incidentally, I often eat tasting menus.  The main reason is that I miss the days when any dinner in a good restaurant might be expected to be a protracted, several course affair:  appetizer, fish, meat, cheese, dessert, petits fours.  Not so much from greed (although let's not exclude that ;) ), but because I like the idea of a meal being the focus of a long, leisurely evening.  I hate being back out on the street in an hour!  Also, I need lots of courses to go with all the wine I've ordered.  :)

[John Whiting]

My first experience with a menu degustation was at an obscure Lorraine restaurant which immediately became a favorite of ours, Le Mas in Longuyon. There it was an unspecified menu with an unspecified number of courses, based on what the market had to offer that day. My wife and I have been back again and again over the years, once staying two nights and having the menu degustation both nights. It was entirely different the second night; both nights were supurb.

On another occasion I was with a party of eight at Andre Daguin's Hotel de France in Auch. I was the only one at the table who wanted the menu degustation. M. Daguin came to our table and explained that it would make the tempo of service irregular and awkward; however he would adapt it and shorten it in such a way that it fitted smoothly into the pace at which others were being served -- they did not, for instance, have to watch me being brought yet another plate while they waited for their own next course. In the end I had virtually a menu degustation, but was charged substantially less because it was not complete.

This occasion was also noteworthy because two of our party were vegetarian, back when such eccentricity was not gracefully accommodated in French restaurants. M. Daguin came out from the kitchen and consulted with them at length about their likes and dislikes, ultimately providing them with meals (different from each other) which were as complex and as interesting as those of us carnivores. In other words, he improvised dishes not on the menu and successfully juggled four different tempi, like a virtuoso conductor performing a Charles Ives symphony!

Finally, I have no interest in a menu degustation which is merely a fixed assemblage of all the most luxurious ingredients in the kitchen. If there is no improvisatory element, it's as boring as a jazz riff which is read note-for-note off the page.

[tommy]

oh great.  another thread of novels.  allow me to be concise:

it seems obvious that an equal number of courses for the table is easier for the restaurant and for the customers.

GT has taken a lot less heat on egullet than it has praise (my opinion).  i'll be going again next month.  perhaps with a refreshended (refreshed?) outlook.  perhaps expecting too much.  perhaps with no more expectation than i've had the last few times i've been there.  at the end of the day, i look forward to it more than ever before, and i'll be sure that the table orders the same amount of courses, just because.   :)

[Fat Guy]

I like tasting menus, when they're good.

Tasting menus vary a lot from restaurant to restaurant. Some of the typical arrangements and permutations are:

-- The tasting menu is basically a bunch of half-portions of dishes that are on the a la carte menu, typically the most famous ones. I'll definitely order such a menu if I've traveled a long way and probably won't get back to the restaurant anytime soon, and I appreciate having that option.

-- The tasting menu is organized around a seasonal or other ingredient theme, or even a wine theme. These are for me the most joyous tasting menus, because if done well they offer a very deep and memorable experience. Anytime a menu is a coherent whole, that's a plus for me, because it elevates the meal.

-- The tasting menu dishes appear in a style that is somewhat different from the standard appetizer and entree plates at the restaurant. Some restaurants have very elaborate entree plates, with perhaps three preparations of lamb plus several garnishes; whereas their tasting menu plates are a single piece of protein in a single style with much less elaborate garnish. Here you really have to make a choice: Do you want that long progression of five or more focused tastes that a tasting menu gives, or do you want the mega-elaborate combinations of tastes in two big savory courses? I lean towards the latter.

-- The tasting menu includes ingredients that the restaurant couldn't get enough of to place on the a la carte menu, or that aren't particularly desirable or economical in large portions. Especially at a large restaurant, the main a la carte menu has to be designed with long-term (usually quarterly) availability of ingredients in mind. Garnishes can be changed, but you can't be sitting around on pins and needles every day waiting to find out if you can get good possum or whatever. But if a purveyor calls late at night and says, "Hey, I just trapped three possums, you want 'em?" then those can be incorporated into a tasting menu. I suppose they can also be made into daily specials. But it's also possible that the strong taste of possum is just too much if you serve half a possum on a plate, whereas a two ounce portion of possum on a tasting menu might really hit the spot.

-- The tasting menu is a surprise; the customer doesn't get to see an actual printed list of dishes beforehand. This is the biggest gamble, with the biggest potential payoff and the biggest potential for disaster.

-- You have no choice or very little choice: The restaurant only does tasting menus, or tasting menus are so much a part of the greatness of the restaurant that you'd be an idiot not to order one.

Are tasting menus just cynical mechanisms by which a restaurant makes additional money by restricting choice and streamlining prodution? Surely the can be, but I'm not sure that's a phenomenon unique to the tasting menu. Some restaurants view every offered item or choice as an opportunity to make more money. Other restaurants look a bit more at the big picture and figure the best way to make money in the long term is to have immensely satisfied customers. I don't think tasting menus are inherently corrupt, and even if you streamline them they're still harder to produce than a la carte menus -- and often they don't cost the customer a whole lot more.

Historically, set menus of course predate the concepts of a la carte ordering, individual plating in the manner of service a la Russe, and Escoffier-inspired modern kitchen organization, mise-en-place, and a la minute cooking. If you had a meal prepared by a great chef in the 19th Century, the whole table would get the same meal, many, many, many, many, courses, and not individually plated at that. This thing of everybody ordering something different would have seemed quite radical in the early days of fine dining.

Again, to get back to the original question here, I do think restaurants should accommodate reasonable customer requests. If there's a white truffle tasting menu available, and I don't want that menu but I want the scallop dish from it, I say just let me have it. So I won't get the whole truffle menu experience. Big deal. Maybe that's not what I want. Maybe I had it yesterday, and today I just want the scallops. It's not like I'm asking for a hamburger. And I'm willing to pay, so give it to me.

[John Whiting]

"If you had a meal prepared by a great chef in the 19th Century, the whole table would get the same meal, many, many, many, many, courses, and not individually plated at that."

In fact, at a banquet you usually got portions only of the food that was near you. The serving dishes were so enormous that passing them, or even having them carried, was out of the question. Under such conditions, the seating arrangement took on a gastronomic as well as a social significance.

[Wilfrid]

Yes, I have pored over table plans for those old style banquets, and it is just hard to imagine how they could have been pleasurable.  The concept still survives in some grand hotel buffets today, where a lot of work goes into the architectural aspect of the presentation.  But at least you visit the buffet with a plate, wander around it, and carry your bounty away.  I find it hard to imagine being seated for such a meal (as John correctly described).

I do once recall pulling my chair up to what was intended to be a standing buffet, and digging in mightily.  I think that was in the days when people would offer me funny but appetite-enhancing cigarettes.

[yvonne johnson]

Around 20 years ago I attended a grand buffet at the Kuwait Sheraton. Maybe the idea was new there then, but the locals didn't use the dinner plates to help themselves; they went up to buffet table and lifted the entire huge platters and tottering with the weight, carried them back to their tables. By the time my parents and I reached the buffet table, it was completely bare. A novel approach to the buffet.

Never liked buffets in the first place, so it was a good excuse for us to do a runner and get a decent sit down dinner somewhere else.

[Wilfrid]

I get a warm nostalgic glow on the rare occasion these days that I am confronted with a table bearing platters of curly triangular sandwiches, little sausage rolls, cheese and pineapple chunks on sticks, and bowls of crisps.  But it is a nostalgic glow, not a gastronomic one.  When one was a child, it all tasted great.

[Andy Lynes]

The practice of making the table take the "degustation" menu is something I first saw in France as well. It annoyed me from that very moment. (It was in the window of Restaurant Gerard Pangaud in Paris in the mid-1970s. Pangaud later moved to the USA, by the way).

Robert - I now understand why you were so disappointed with your experience at GT.

[Peter B Wolf]

Here is a place in France, I was there in 1998 on a trip from Spain via Andorra, remembered the name and called it up, the site:

http://www.hostellerie-horizon.com/carte.html

distinctly indicating on the "carte", that the menu "Degustation" is for the entire table only. BTW a nice place, enjoyed everything at the time.

[markabauman]

Had an interesting experience recently while visiting Chicago, although the principle could apply to NYC. Friend  and  I dined at Rick Bayless' Topolobampo, "haute cuisine Mexican". They have a  tasting menu (with optional wine pairings for each course) that changes daily. I was looking forward to trying the tasting  menu (as I would in most restaurants that offer them)-there's an interesting discussion of same in the book "Culinary Artistry". However, when I heard  the  evening's selections, I had a slight problem-one of the dishes was a pork dish and I don't eat beef, veal or pork. I respectfully asked the  server if  a  substitution could be made based on my dietary limitations, since I  didn't want to contravene  the  whole concept of what the  chef  wants to give  you, not what  you are chosing. He  returned  shortly and said there would be no problem if he could subsitute another dish as long as both of us made the switch, which my friend was happy to do. We had a fabulous duck dish in instead. Everyone was happy. I wouldn't have made a fuss or been resistant if  the  chef didn't want to make a  change. As long  as the diner  and the establishment are  courteous and reasonable, it can work out.

[John Whiting]

Beautiful! When a civilized diner meets a civilized chef, nothing is impossible.  :)

[robert brown]

The difference between me and you cats above is that I would not as a matter of principle agreed to change my first choice. I would have carried on in order to carry through the situation to an ultimate conclusion. In the end I may well have caved in, but not before testing the resolve of the chef and the captain. Let's start a discussion or a thread on restaurant rage!!!

[jordyn]

In my experience, high end restaurants tend to be fairly flexible about making modifications to tasting menus, or mixing and matching different kinds of tasting menus.  A frequent dinner companion of mine is a quasi vegetarian (she'll eat fish and sometimes fowl when we go out, but not most shellfish).  To the best of my recollection, no place that we have been to in any of the cities we have eaten in recently (New York, San Francisco, Washington, and Toronto) have refused our request to serve her a version of the tasting menu conforming to her fussy eating habits.  Two restaurants stand out in my mind as being particularly accomodating:  at both Susur in Toronto and Charles Nob Hill in San Francisco our server engaged us in a fairly detailed conversation about her likes and dislikes, and the kitchen produced a fairly customized tasting menu around these requirements.  I don't know whether this is coincidence or not, but I've found that places that provide a significant amount of flexibility around the creation of a tasting menu invariably serve excellent, memorable food.

In New York, our experiences have also generally been good:  at places that offer both vegetarian and non-veggie tasting menus (Grammercy Tavern and Verbena spring to mind), we've had no problem combining the two, and on other occasions it's been possible to substitute fish for red meat for her meal but not for mine.

Generally, restaurants have something printed on the menu indicating tasting menus are not to be combined with a la carte ordering.  I tend to think if they want to make this requirement, it's their business, and have never challenged it.  In fact, I've been over conditioned to believe that this is how it always works.  Recently, at La Couronne in South Africa, I was eyeing the tasting menu, but my dinner companion, who had gorged at the place where we ate lunch, was having none of it.  Since the usual "required for all at the table" rule was not printed on the menu, I asked whether it was possible for me to have the tasting menu and for her to order from the a la carte selections, and was pleasantly surprised to be answered in the affirmative.  Although it was slightly odd to be served courses when my companion was not receiving any, it didn't make the meal particularly awkward, and everyone ended up happy.  It's certainly great when restaurants are this flexible, but I can understand how managing different numbers of courses for different participants in the meal could be a more complicated endeavor than the kitchen wants to undertake.

[cabrales]

On restaurant inflexibility, I'd be interested in hearing whether members have had experiences similar to mine at Pierre Gagnaire last year.  The restaurant refused the *addition* of dishes to a tasting menu.

Our entire table of 4+ people ordered the tasting menu. I then sought to order two dishes from the a la carte menu (full size, to be shared presumably) in addition to the dishes included in the tasting menu. (As background, I did this not because I like Gagnaire's cuisine, but because I wanted to sample more of it to be sure I dislike it.) The waiter looked at me with a serious frown, and said that including the dishes would disrupt the progression of the meal. I did not press the matter further.  ;)

[tony h]

I've only tried the tasting menu 3 times - Le Manoir, Le Gavroche & Salt (in Sydney).  I'd happily recommend all 3.  However, one of the problems I do have is that there is no tactile interaction with your dinner partner - there's no tasting of their dishes because we both have the same.  So it's a little less fun.

What about wine tasing menus that are sometimes offered?  Are these worthwhile or not?  I don't know enough about wine to judge - also they seem to be served in miniscule amounts but cost the earth (& I hate paying lots for wine).

[cabrales]

What about wine tasing menus that are sometimes offered?  Are these worthwhile or not?  I don't know enough about wine to judge - also they seem to be served in miniscule amounts but cost the earth (& I hate paying lots for wine).

Alain Senderens' Lucas-Carton in Paris has wine by the glass paired with each dish. The chef engages in extensive research on the pairings. He also has a degustation menu, which can be taken with or without wine pairings (the latter is not inexpensive). I have tended to sample the chef's pairings. I can't say that Lucas-Carton is a restaurant that suits my tastes particularly well, though.

At Lucas-Carton, the wine was refilled for me after it was depleted. I felt the restaurant was being generous with the paired wines. In some cases, I drank 2-3 glasses with a single dish (not deliberately, but the sommelier kept on refilling my glass).  Note I have never had the Canard (Duck) Apicius, and have wanted to try that (in two servings) with Banyuls.

Here's an article Patricia Wells (also not my favorite critic, BTW) wrote on one example of Senderens' wine pairings, in this case to celebrate 100 years of Michelin with other three-star chefs:

http://www.lucascarton.com/page-une-annee1-us.htm

And here's an indicative menu, with wine pairings:

http://www.lucascarton.com/page-carte-entrees-us.htm

I liked my two meals at Picasso, in Las Vegas (Bellagio Hotel), considerably. The degustation comes with wine pairings (total price not inexpensive), and the decor is wonderfully vibrant and yet stylish.  (It helps to have multiple Picasso paintings and ceramics from such artist.)  For me, the restaurant was better than, for example, Aureole Las Vegas (incl. Swan Court section) and Renoir (which has less art work and less interesting food). The wine pairings at Picasso were of average size when I went. I did not drink enough to test the "refills" hypothesis.

http://www.bellagio.com/pages/din_picasso.asp#

(limited information)

While not my preferred place to stay, the Bellagio has Cirque de Soleil performances of "O" (including interpretative synchronized swimming) that are worthwhile, in addition to Cirque's Mystere at the Mirage (all not inexpensive for non-comp'd guests). I am even thinking of going to see the other permanent Cirque performance in Florida sometime, as well as to explore the cheesey Paul Bocuse "restaurant" within the Orlando theme parks.  

[tony h]

Las Vegas ... Renoir ... Cirque de Soleil

What a perfect combination - a work of genuis putting these 3 together.  Who's the 4th - Emeril?

[cabrales]

blind lemon higgins -- Admittedly, Vegas is horridly artificial and commercialized, but Picasso is a good restaurant and, for me, markedly better than others in that city. It's handled by the same group as Masa's, in San Francisco (a generally well-respected restaurant that is not among my preferred facilities in SF).  The other place that is good is Nobu Vegas. I never tried Palladin's (RIP) place in Vegas, unfortunately.

Emerils has at least 2 places around Vegas -- Emeril's New Orleans Fish House (terrible) at the MGM hotel/casino, and a steakhouse called Delmonico (bad) at the Venetian hotel/casino. Vegas is quite ablaze with spin-offs from various restaurants all over the US.

http://www.emerils.com/restaurants/delmonicolv/

Do members have input on Aqua, Vegas (yes, from SF as well)?