May We Suggest

Restaurant Menus and the Art of Persuasion

Alison Pearlman

• Publisher: Agate Surrey
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781572848221
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Graphic Design

An art expert takes a critical look at restaurant menus—from style and layout to content, pricing and more—to reveal the hidden influence of menu design. We've all ordered from a restaurant menu. But have you ever wondered to what extent the menu is ordering you? In May We Suggest, art historian and gastronome Alison Pearlman focuses her discerning eye on the humble menu to reveal a captivating tale of persuasion and profit. Studying restaurant menus through the lenses of art history, experience design and behavioral economics, Pearlman reveals how they are intended to influence our dining experiences and choices. Then she goes on a mission to find out if, when, and how a menu might sway her decisions at more than sixty restaurants across the greater Los Angeles area. What emerges is a captivating, thought-provoking study of one of the most often read but rarely analyzed narrative works around.

PART I

DIRECTING EVENTS

CHAPTER 1

The Privilege of Submission

AFTER ALL TWENTY-TWO COURSES OF THE SET MENU, MY FRIEND Chari and I were finally released from Nozawa Bar—a ten-seat sushi counter, walled off for reservation only, at the back of the walk-in restaurant Sugarfish. We were woozy and bloated.

At Sugarfish, we could have ordered sushi and sashimi à la carte. We would have stopped eating as soon as we were full. Nozawa Bar served only omakase.

It wasn’t omakase, or “chef’s choice,” in the usual sense. Normally, the sushi chef selects for the diner the best from the market while considering her tastes. The more frequent the customer, the better the chef learns them. Finally, the diner decides when to quit. With so much custom tailoring, the price of omakase also varies.

At Nozawa Bar, Chef Osamu Fujita served the same set of dishes to all guests at a uniform price. He determined the course number and sequence and the meal’s pacing. We ate very well—a wider range of seafood and more rarified and complex preparations than we could have had at Sugarfish. In return, we surrendered our wills. Our only choices were between sparkling and still water and from a brief list of sakes, wines, and beers.

What we experienced was actually a tasting menu. This format requires diners to submit to the will of the chef. For the privilege, diners typically pay a premium, and the price, too, is predetermined. Our meal at Nozawa Bar was $212 per person, including the tip (we had no choice in that, either). Since the tasting menu fixes what diners eat in what order and, finally, what they pay, it exemplifies the menu “directing the event” of a meal in the extreme.

As you might imagine, the severe restriction of diner choice, including in matters of cost, makes the tasting menu one of the least popular and therefore rarest menu types. But it does thrive in a small slice of the restaurant marketplace, where chefs with the rare license to be creative constantly and without compromise—a privilege normally hard-won through professional distinction—find support among diners able and eager to pay for extraordinary and surprising culinary art.

Finding perfect agreement between the two parties, however, isn’t easy. As we’ll see, even among adventurous gourmets, including professional restaurant critics and me, fits of discomfort and complaint arise. And, among all but the most renowned chefs, the entitlement to serve only a tasting menu, let alone one that’s totally free of creative restrictions, remains an elusive prospect.

In recent years, the professional culinary world has given restaurants with tasting menus some of its greatest honors. Restaurants with the highest rankings on the world’s most anticipated annual lists have been predominantly tasting-menu-only. In 2017, for example, nine out of the top ten on The World’s Fifty Best Restaurants (TWFBR) were. Even though the more established Michelin Guide differs with TWFBR’s estimation of particular places, Michelin, too, gave restaurants with only tasting menus the lion’s share of top spots.

The ratings organizations offer little insight into why their contributors disproportionately celebrate the form. TWFBR’s website claims no standardized criteria for judgment. It reveals only that, each year, TWFBR relies on seven nominations for best restaurant from each of its over 1,000 sources, comprised of “industry experts”—meaning, chefs, restaurant owners, food writers, and other distinguished gourmands. They must have dined in the restaurants they choose in the past eighteen months and they may not nominate their own restaurant. No genre—not even the casual bar and grill—is off-limits. Michelin does have exact criteria for judgment, but keeps them close to the vest. Nevertheless, Michelin’s general methodology, which is common knowledge, is totally different from TWFBR’s. Anonymous staff “inspectors” must repeatedly visit the restaurants they rate. According to Michelin’s website, what distinguishes a three-star restaurant from a two for Michelin is that the cuisine is “exceptional” as opposed to merely “excellent.” Given the divergent rules, it’s no surprise that TWFBR and Michelin have different lists of the best restaurants. But it makes their agreement on the value of tasting menus only more mysterious.

Because it gives them maximum creative control, perhaps the tasting menu serves the interests of chefs especially, at least those who want their cuisine deemed “exceptional.” If so, the willingness of diners to cede so much power to chefs arose fairly recently. Several decades ago, restaurant chefs couldn’t assume so much authority over our meal experience. Their use of the tasting menu for artistic expression is inseparable from their rise as tycoons, celebrities, and heroes of innovation.

Their path to total creative control began in the early to mid-1970s, as international media heralded the French revolution known as nouvelle cuisine. Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, Alain Chapel, brothers Jean and Pierre Troisgros, and Roger Vergé were the first in a long line of revered French chefs to own their own restaurants and become a fascination of mass media. Some, such as Bocuse and Guérard, even expanded their business portfolios to include other products such as wine and health spas. These precursors to today’s brand-building “super chefs” established what we now recognize as a tasting menu: a prix fixe (“fixed price”) multicourse menu dégustation (“tasting menu”).

Nouvelle cuisine’s chef-controlling menu format was strongly influenced by the centuries-old Japanese formal meal known as kaiseki—specifically the luxurious variant served in restaurants that may consist of as many as fourteen seasonal courses. French chefs were exposed to kaiseki when they traveled to Japan after Chef Tsuji Shizuo opened Japan’s first French culinary school in 1960.

Nouvelle’s version of the multicourse menu was typically half of kaiseki’s length and more idiosyncratic in the types of dishes, revealing an even greater creative license for chefs. According to kaiseki historian Eric C. Rath, contemporary and historical kaiseki chefs—about the latter we can only guess from the scant evidence of old menus—have had a lot of latitude in creating individual dishes; however, diners can expect certain preparations: for example, a sashimi dish and a simmered dish. The order of these is also traditional. Nouvelle chefs valued breaking with the past in more ways and more rapidly—using new cooking methods and drawing on international cuisines to an unprecedented degree.

Those borrowings included one more aspect of kaiseki: the chef’s composition of food on the individual diner’s plate. The idea of serving dishes in a sequence had been the norm for fine dining in Europe since the medieval period. However, the composition of the individual diner’s plate was largely left to either oneself or fellow diners, who took for themselves or served each other helpings from nearby dishes. With plated dishes, nouvelle expanded the chef’s dominion.

In the United States at the same time, some of the most esteemed of the new breed of chef-proprietors also specialized in tasting menus. Arguably the most important was Alice Waters, who, with the help of chef Jeremiah Tower in the midseventies, quickly became the most influential chef-owner in America for a novel paradox in restaurants. At her Berkeley, California, establishment, Chez Panisse, Waters combined relaxed service and homey décor with a formal menu—the main dining room served a single tasting menu only.

In the 1980s and 1990s, some of America’s most internationally reputed fine-dining chefs, including the late Charlie Trotter in Chicago and Thomas Keller in California, distinguished themselves first and foremost through the conceptual and aesthetic brilliance of their tasting menus. Trotter’s introduction of an all-vegetarian menu now seems prophetic, as does Keller’s use of the tasting menu for witty storytelling. Keller’s notorious amuse-bouche of smoked salmon and crème fraîche “cornets” in the shape of ice cream cones—an ironic nod to childhood wishes for dessert before dinner—added meta-commentary on the meal to the chef’s growing toolbox.

To be sure, not all innovative or celebrated chefs since the seventies have expressed their ideas solely or even mainly in tasting menus. As I demonstrated in my book Smart Casual, there was an increased tendency among the most venerated restaurants to borrow features of décor, service, cuisine, and—yes—menu structures from “casual” eateries. In this way, the line between fine dining and everything else blurred and the gourmet style spectrum got wider.

It’s fair to say, then, that the tasting menu became the ultimate incubator of chef innovation only at the more formal gourmet restaurants. That’s where we find what continues to separate “fine” from “casual,” even as other marks of that distinction—such as white tablecloths and concealed kitchens—faded: intricate and precisely composed dishes with greater refinement of ingredients, more ritualized and exacting service, lengthier meals, and higher-than-average checks.

Over the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, the tasting menu was once again the eye of the fine-dining brainstorm. Chefs of a new culinary revolution made it their format of choice. The international innovators of “modernist cuisine”—from Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal in Europe to Grant Achatz and the late Homaro Cantu in the United States—were the most radical since nouvelle.

Modernist chefs used the tasting menu to experiment with meal structure. Some stretched dinner to thirty or forty briskly paced and tiny courses. Or they upset the conventional order of sweet following savory.

The chefs’ structural provocations were part of a larger project to rethink—and, by default, expand control over—every possible dramatic and sensory element of a meal. This included inventing new kinds of service ware for unconventional food forms—airs, foams, and flavors or temperatures or textures for the diner to encounter in a prescribed sequence. Vessels and implements were sometimes so strange that servers would have to instruct diners in their use, thus coaxing them into novel performances.

Modernist chefs played with the ways other senses affect taste. They augmented dishes with visual and olfactory stimuli, such as captured and released smoke or steam, even sound. In 2007 Blumenthal created a dish called Sound of the Sea, which paired seafood with a recording of lapping waves and seagulls. Diners heard it through earbuds coming from an iPod lodged like a hermit crab in the accompanying conch shell.

In essence, the modernists threw themselves into gastrophysics. In their books on the subject, Charles Spence and Betina Piqueras-Fiszman define gastrophysics as the multisensory science of how we perceive food and drink. Perfecting a meal, they say, is an ongoing object of research that takes into account the full range of cognitive, sensory, and contextual factors affecting the diner. From the modernists’ gastrophysical perspective, the chef’s artistic reach over their guest’s experience knows no limits.

Proclaiming allegiance to modernist cuisine is no longer in fashion. But the modernist idea that the chef’s art extends to every facet of a meal still prevails. And, while not all top restaurants serve forty courses, the tasting menu’s status as the chef’s crowning Gesamtkunstwerk in fine dining remains.

It’s easy to see from this history how the tasting menu serves the occupational interests of today’s fine-dining chefs. But how does it appeal to diners?

“Does it, even?” I might have answered, if asked, as we exited Nozawa Bar and re-entered Sugarfish at the peak of its evening din. In that moment, the energetic room and the breeze from the front patio were a relief. Not just for me. Chari, who for years had been game to go to whatever restaurant I suggested we try next, gave me a look at once pained and bubbling with laughter: “No more tasting menus.”

We took a stroll in the soothing August air outside the restaurant and compared notes. Our stomachs are robust, but we both found every bite after course fifteen painful.

We knew we’d have no choice in food. But we didn’t anticipate the mismatch between the chef’s plan and our appetites. Discomfort only intensified with the trappings of fine service. The mindful rituals of presenting, explaining, and clearing away dishes; intervals for changing dishes; and pauses for topping off water glasses and wiping away spills all seemed to protract the experience. We endured out of respect for the chef’s skill and ingredients; out of curiosity, of course; and so as not to disturb other diners by the scene that leaving early would have made. That we were spending a lot might have also factored in; although, I like to think we wouldn’t be so foolish as to aggravate our condition mentally and physically just because we paid monetarily.

With our feelings, we weren’t alone. In fact, our reaction to that night’s meal echoed what others had been saying about tasting menus. Especially in the 2000s, as dinners reached extremes of over thirty courses and three hours, newspaper critics and bloggers alike had been questioning their value for the diner.

After noticing a wave of top restaurants nixing à la carte offerings and a set of intrepid chefs opening places with nothing but tasting menus, Vanity Fair critic Corby Kummer published, in late 2012, the now-infamously cantankerous “Tyranny—It’s What’s for Dinner.” It began: “The reservation was nearly impossible to get. The meal will cost several hundred dollars. The chef is a culinary genius. But in the era of the four-hour, 40-course tasting menu, one key ingredient is missing: any interest in what (or how much) the customer wants to eat.” In his article, Kummer aired every common complaint to that point about the contemporary tasting menu: It’s too often too much food for too much money to bolster the self-expression of the chef over the satisfaction of the diner.

But is it fair to demand that a tasting menu satisfy the appetites and tastes of us all? Isn’t incompatibility a hazard of anything that standardizes? And gastrophysics aside, the success of the tasting menu from our point of view depends on factors outside any chef’s control. Appetites and tastes are variable and unpredictable. It’s worth mentioning that, nine days before our visit to Nozawa Bar, when I checked the site, the biggest complaint of Yelp reviewers since the restaurant’s opening wasn’t that there was too much food (our feeling), but rather that the pace of the meal was too rushed (which we didn’t sense at all).

My experiences have differed from other diners’ accounts of the same tasting-menu restaurants on plenty of occasions. A year later, for example, after dining at Maude, one of the buzziest debuts on the Los Angeles restaurant scene at the time, I thought that, unless all of the reviewers were just brownnosing its celebrity-chef owner Curtis Stone, Jamisin and I were surely in the minority when we felt alarmingly underfed after its nine-course menu. I hate to admit this—for it doesn’t reflect my appreciation of the restaurant’s gorgeous interior design and warm, knowledgeable, on-point staff; nor does it duly credit the chef’s imaginative concept of featuring one seasonal ingredient each month that made a surprising appearance in every course—but, after the prolonged progression of sparse plates, Jamisin and I came to a swift agreement. Thirty minutes after leaving, we were at Five Guys rushing into the arms of a cheeseburger. Shamefaced, but with zeal, I ate the entire thing. He did too.

Was our lack of satiety the chef’s fault? Not unless a critical mass copped to the same truth. If one had, Stone may have rethought the trade-off I assume he made with substance in pricing his menus relatively low. Ours, featuring berries, was $95 per person. This was on the high side for the restaurant’s monthly menus that year, but a hundred dollars less than other, more filling, tasting menus in town at establishments of equal vanguard stature, with comparably competent staff, serving a similar number of courses.

You might think that, if a restaurant offers a choice of tasting menus, varying in length or theme, the likelihood of incompatibility goes down. But such a choice can only make matters worse if there’s more than one person in the dining party and, per the usual rules of restaurants with tasting menus, the entire table must choose the same one. It only invites conflict among companions.

When we visited Providence, an elegant seafood-focused restaurant then ranked number one on Los Angeles Times critic Jonathan Gold’s list of best restaurants in the greater LA area, Jamisin and I had to wrestle toward a consensus. The restaurant had just turned tasting-menu-only. Jamisin was, as usual, motivated by a desire to save me money while also hoping to get out of spending three hours in a fine-dining restaurant. He saw the three choices of tasting menus on the menu and immediately fixated on the six-course Signature and Seasonal Menu—by far the shortest one. I think I gave him a look of impatient incredulity and made an ungracefully stern suggestion that we order a longer one, either the Providence Market Menu, at nine courses, or the Providence Chef’s Menu, with eleven. I reminded him that we were there for research, and it was imperative that we witness the restaurant’s fu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Directing Events
• Part II: Selling Items
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author