The unappetising truth about tasting menus

The tasting menu has fallen from fashion, and this is good. They are a curio – a window to the chef’s soul – and they have always incited more pity in me than awe. They draw the chef’s subconscious on the plate, and it isn’t always palatable; or, rather, it is too complex for joy.

In their own words, they are unhappy. In The Devil in the Kitchen, Marco Pierre White writes that he was haunted by the loss of his mother, and his kitchen was an attempt to recover her. ‘I suppose,’ he wrote, ‘I was trying to kill myself but sacrificing your health for your career was all the rage.’

Bernard Loiseau (three Michelin stars) killed himself in 2003. Anthony Bourdain killed himself in 2018. François Vatel, hero to chefs, stabbed himself in 1671, as he was preparing a banquet for Louis XIV, because the fish was late. White writes: ‘Why aren’t I happy?’ He gave his Michelin stars back in 1999: he got better.

Bourdain became a chef to spite his mother because she once went to a famous restaurant and left him in the car. ‘Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay,’ he wrote. ‘Gastronomy is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness.’ They are, ‘in some fundamental way dysfunctional’. Of course, food is capable of tenderness: it is capable of anything. I’m just not sure how much of that the chef extends to himself.