Modern Haute Cuisine and sensory overload

Adam Robinson

The other night, I listened to a live non-stop recital of 23 Rachmaninov preludes.  It was a tour de force by an extraordinary pianist and I knew that I was privileged to be in the audience.  Yet I was drowning in a sea of scales and arpeggios.  Drowning in a sea of sound that I struggled to give structure to.  Drowning in just too much.

It is a good allegory for my experiences of the past ten years or so in top restaurants, both in South Africa and abroad.  And some of the not so top restaurants.

The current fashion, after sitting down is be told that your choice is either five courses or seven.  Maybe even nine.  Do you have any allergies or dislikes?  No?  Then let the chef dazzle you.  Nothing like a menu where you can choose your meal depending on what you want.  This is about what the chef wants to give you.  Somehow the object and subject of the verb ‘to want’ have been swapped.

But I am happy to be dazzled.  A meal cooked by a good chef in a luxury setting is a treat after all.  And I have never flinched at a number of plates set before me.  If eating dim sum, there will many dishes set before one.  Or an evening of tapas.  We can all eat more than five types of sushi and sashimi.

But each of your seven courses in this temple of gastronomy will probably consist of five different and distinct flavours.  One ingredient might be dehydrated, one pickled, one locally foraged.  Each will be explained and you will be urged to distinguish each element.  Complexity and scaffolding in cooking is not new. A beef stew would easily have a dozen different ingredients but they should meld into a whole and if one ingredient, other than the beef, can be distinguished, the chef’s technique is lacking.

Occasionally in our imaginary temple, you will be presented with three or four different dishes that constitute one course.  They might be related; like a course I had in Madrid of eight different types and preparations of tomato.  It was tomato season after all.  Hmmm.

Seven courses each of five different components and you are being expected to taste, remember and compute 35 experiences.  We haven’t even started with the wine.  And the water menu now apparently.  And you’re meant to be having a good time with your companions.  Or are you?  Is this about the companionship of the table or an aesthetic experience akin to visiting an art gallery?

There is no doubt that the craft skills, dedication and passion is as high amongst top chefs as it has ever been, if not more so.  Many current chefs exhibit skills that I would never be able to achieve and an admirable integrity towards their ingredients and their locality.  As it happens, we are lucky enough in Durban to have one of the most skilled exponents of this craft nearby.

But I don’t know any of them that eat the meals they produce for us.  They will inevitably taste components and sometimes whole dishes, but they rarely, if ever, experience the complete meal form beginning to satiated end.

They are not cooking what they want to eat.  It is that personal hunger that I find missing.

There has been an extreme conceptual departure from the point of table, sharing a meal and, most importantly what constitutes a good meal.  This is a global phenomenon driven, partly by Instantgram, partly by TV chef shows but largely by food journalists who are paid to fill column inches waxing lyrical.

Bing back the amuse bouche, the starter, the main, the pudding.  It’s more than enough.