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As I told you a couple of weeks ago, I fell so in love with Next restaurant while in Chicago last month that I was unable to resist booking a Kitchen Table for its current Kyoto menu, which only runs until the end of the year.
One reason I wanted the Kitchen Table, which seats six, rather than the other tables for two or four, is that it’s the only table per seating that gets a few extras unavailable to the other diners. (And you know how much I love my amuse bouche.) And while searching on @NextRestaurant over at Twitter—because I’m hungry not just for food, but for learning more about the food which will be satiating that hunger—I discovered that a fellow foodie by the name of MaryMary had tweeted the following photo.
The pic seemed amazing to me, and not just because the duck made me think, “Get in my belly!” No, it was the caption:
“Duck, served out of a 200 year old duck”
I knew that even the settings on which Chefs Achatz and Beran served their food was mind-blowing, but a 200-year-old bowl? Astounding.
Why am I bringing this up to you, especially since most of you will likely never get to enjoy this meal? Because I’d like to hear from you—is it possible for a meal to be spoiled? (And no, I don’t mean that way. I mean the other way.)
Before my dinners at Next and Alinea last month, I looked at as many pics and read as many reviews as I could find online for both restaurants, feeling as if that increased anticipation would commensurately increase my enjoyment. (And this is from someone who hates spoilers about books, movies, and television!) At the same time, there are other foodies, equally as dedicated, who want to know very little about the meal that will be put in front of them, save the spare basics, so that each dish comes as a surprise.
I don’t believe that for me, food can be spoiled, any more than looking at postcards of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night” would cause me to be disappointed when standing before the original canvas. No amount of advance study could destroy that experience.
The same is true for me with food, which when created at the level of art, is equally as transcendental, taking me out of my body, lifting me above the physical plane. I’ve heard it said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and whether or not you accept that premise, I find the same is true for food imagery and essays. What happens in the brain and what happens on the tongue are two very different things, and those teasers (spoilers, if you will) can only stoke desire, and never lessen the experience when it finally arrives.
Well … for me anyway. Obviously, your mileage may vary.
So which kind of foodie are you? And why?
I think you’re on to something, particularly in your third paragraph, when it comes to my relationship with food. The only thing that could possibly spoil a dish for me … is the dish itself.
Knowing that Next’s Sicily menu would include an amazing pork shoulder did not ruin the wonder of it when it was brought to my table, and understanding what the final dessert course at Alinea would be like didn’t mean I wasn’t going “oh, boy, here it comes,” when the servers approached our table with the jugs of liquid nitrogen. The same way a description of a roller coaster could not take from the the thrill I’d feel the first time I rode the track.
Knowing about Grant Achatz’s famous dish Hot Potato, Cold Potato did not diminish the sensations on my tongue when I finally was given the chance to pop it in my mouth. But I suspect that if I were to go to Alinea for a second tasting menu, the Hot Potato, Cold Potato #2 would be competing with my memories Hot Potato, Cold Potato #1, perhaps (just perhaps) lessening the experience.
Which is why tasting menus work so well. There may be a bite #2 to complete with bite #1, but rarely is there a bite #3, #4, or #5.
Other than examples such as that, I think I’m unspoilable as far as food is concerned.
So I plan to continue searching online and reading all about Kyoto before I arrive to be amazed!
Anticipation. Knowing what’s coming ahead of time, at least for me, heightens the anticipation, especially with food. What I think it will be like and what it turns out to be are sometimes worlds apart, but the anticipation is ecstasy — and agony. I look forward to a meal I’ve known about.
No, I don’t think it’s possible to spoil meal by telling someone about it, or even seeing pictures. I have several reasons for this.
First, it is more like someone telling you about Stary Night but then seeing it for the first time. The two are different. You can’t use one sense to replace another. No amount of seeing or hearing will replace smelling or tasting. Matt Murdock was super functional, but he still never saw.
Second, taste and smell are very subjective senses. What you taste and smell before and during a meal will effect how you perceive it. The organic chemistry of food is very volatile, no too batches of food are exactly the same, and it interacts with it’s environment, changing slightly for as long as it exists.
It is a cliche these days that you eat first with your eyes. The point of Molecular Gastronomy, like the Magic of Penn and Teller, is to screw with this. You see something, you think you know what you are seeing, but then the chef twists it.
Fourth, is that food does not have a linear narrative thread. I hear and read long discourses on how this chef or restaurant achieves this, and I think it’s all bunk.
On a similar note, you can only experience something for the first time once. What should be made of those people who find search endlessly for the next novel experience?
Richard
In order to address your question, I have to distinguish between researching the types of foods & techniques involved in a specific type of meal and the obsessive study of the exact dishes that will presented at a restaurant at a specific time. In the first instance, advance research is entirely beneficial. It allows you to appreciate the meal’s various elements from angles you may not have otherwise considered. I have never been to Japan, nor have I had a formal kaeseki meal, so I am making an effort to familiarize myself with the rules and some of the likely ingredients. Although I won’t have time to do much experimentation of my own, I’ve read about the ways that dashi is prepared, tofu is created, noodles are made, & vegetables are fermented. If I encounter these ingredients, I’ll have a better appreciation of the work that went into them. I treat such a meal the same way as I would a trip. I delay until I’ve had time to gain at least a skeletal knowledge. I know that the experience will pique my interest and will likely lead to further exploration, but I like to have a baseline to work with. This is one reason why I opted to wait a month to sample this menu. I’m sure that opening weekend would’ve been great, but I wouldn’t have gotten as much out of the experience as I will with a month’s worth of proper study.
In the second instance, I think that is possible to spoil the experience by being too familiar with each and every turn the meal will take. I saw the menu and the preview video, but I probably won’t look at them in the last week or so before my meal. I have a general idea of what will happen. I went so far as connecting most of the images in the video with items on the menu, but I don’t want to commit it to memory to such a degree that I sit there picturing the next dish before I’ve even finished what is in front of me. Of course other diners will be at different points in the meal, so there’s some risk of seeing the late courses, but I don’t want the meal to feel so scripted.
It is a slight tangent, but Paris was the only meal I attended twice. The second run wasn’t disappointing per se, but it lacked the giddy excitement of the first. This had nothing to do with the quality of the food or service. Aside from my drink pairing, I knew exactly what was coming around the bend. My excitement was based solely on seeing my friend’s initial response to the dishes. This differs from your examples because I’d both seen and tasted the food, but I think it illustrates the risk of committing the precise specifics of an upcoming meal to memory.