Sam Kaplan
December 3, 2023
Smoky vapor slides across the rubber tablecloth as a chef violently cracks a liquid nitrogen supercooled vanilla sphere. With this final step, dessert is ready. The table resembles a work of art. Broad strokes of banana, strawberry, and chocolate syrups combine with the vanilla and an assortment of smaller cakes and gels.
This is the final dish at Alinea, but it could also be considered the final dish of Modernist cuisine. In the mid-1980s, Ferran Adrià at elBulli laid the groundwork for an exciting new generation of chefs. Sometimes called molecular gastronomy, the food at elBulli pushed the boundaries of cooking. Like many post-modern movements, the old focus on simple taste, quality, and technique, was replaced by creativity, experimentation, and above all a focus on the emotional and psychological. Just as impressionism was born from the exhaustive pursuit of photorealism in painting, the mastery of creating delicious, refined food led to a need for something more. Or, in the rather coarse words of Alinea’s chef Grant Achatz, “flavor is for pussies.”
The style started by Adrià soon metastasized and spread all over the world. Achatz and many other chefs like Wylie Dufresne or René Redzepi directly staged at elBulli. But, Adrià’s influence is now universal. Foams, which were first explored in the 1990s, are everywhere. The same is true of gels using modern ingredients like agar-agar, carrageenan, and xanthan gum. At Lazy Bear in San Francisco, you can see these tools in full display against the backdrop of a thoroughly emotionally designed experience. Little camping notebooks and pencils fit in nicely with foraged ingredients prepared with a wide range of sophisticated modern cooking techniques. The menu is composed of a series of small delicately assembled plates, another elBulli innovation. Across the world, in Provence, you can go to Fanny Rey and receive the same long march of delicate, pretty, tasty little dishes.
Creating these types of menus and experience is difficult, and requires true creativity and grit. At the same time, the world has converged to a culinary consensus about what constitutes a great restaurant. Just follow the Michelin stars and you can have the same type of meal anywhere in the world. Frankly, fine dining has gotten boring. It’s been a long time since I’ve been genuinely surprised and delighted by a dish. I went to Alinea 15 years ago, and I went to Alinea last week. They’ve certainly gotten more polished in someways - they have a larger repertoire of platinum-hit dishes, and both the ambience and service are polished to a T. But, in some ways, it feels like they’ve gone backwards. The kitchen is smaller and the number of chefs is less, which shows up in fewer crazily complex dishes. More than that, Alinea feels like the state of fine dining today - the ambition is gone, the feeling like we’re pushing the world forward is gone.
Imagine if you get an empty plate and robots catapult food from all across the room creating a beautiful dish. Imagine if you put on a VR headset and eat a French dish in 19th century Paris. Imagine if a complicated machine cooked a dish before your eyes in the middle of the table. Imagine if you could write or draw any dish on a piece of paper, and it would be served to you in the next course. Imagine if a robot would cut your food and feed it to you like a child. Imagine if the restaurant googled you and printed out your information on a taco shell. Imagine having a device that straps to your nose and plays a symphony of scents while you eat plain rice. Imagine a soup bowl that vibrated to music. Imagine an interactive dish where you are part of a cooking competition with your friends. Imagine generating a short film of everyone at a table with accompanying food.
If you went to a restaurant with all of those dishes, I’m pretty sure you’d remember it. The hard part is that it’s really hard and expensive to make these dishes. For instance, to make robots that accurately catapult food from across the room is a significant engineering challenge. The biggest problem is that the unit economics don’t work. Using back of the envelope math - Alinea with ~100 diners per night probably grosses $15-20 million per year. That’s on the high end of top restaurants too. After paying staff, food costs, rent, etc, Alinea likely makes a decent profit for its owners, but certainly not obscene one. The reason that food has stagnated is because the total R&D budget, for even one of the best restaurants in the world, is much less than most tech startups. Moreover, this isn’t easily changeable - a lot of processes don’t scale at these types of restaurants. It’s not possible for Alinea to start having 1000 diners a night. No top restaurant I’m aware of gets anywhere near that scale.
But, this isn’t a dead-end. It’s an opportunity to change how we think about haute cuisine. Over time, in any popular field, the experiences between the top and the bottom converge. A Coca-Cola is a Coca-Cola whether you were rich or poor. Anyone with a pair of headphones can listen to an orchestra. A variety of thrill-seeking activities have found their locus in Rollercoasters and Amusement Parks.
You could imagine a company similar to Disney spending hundreds of millions per year on developing new courses and culinary experiences. With this fixed investment into highly automated systems, incredible new experiences could be rolled out with minimal marginal cost. Every big city and town in the world would have access to these amazing centrally produced delights. Suddenly, the economics change. Instead of doing one hundred diners a night, this company would be serving one hundred thousand diners. With this scale, they can imagine and create culinary experiences for everyone, that are completely impossible and unimaginable to even the most sophisticated diners today.
The movie The Menu is a fitting caricature of today’s world of fine dining. For many, this caricature is one of a fundamentally decadent and elitist world. But, to me, the movie’s success comes in it’s accurate stereotyping of a whole type of experience. The fact that The Menu feels so accurate and familiar also shows how standardized and similar this world had become. We’re overdue for a new culinary revolution. The question isn’t if. It’s when. This could come from a big bet from a big company. Or, more likely, a few super talented startup engineers and chefs. Right now, all of the cooking startups have focused on the low end - pizza, bowls, etc. Maybe the high end would be more promising. It’s a lot easier to compete with no one than Chipotle. It will certainly be more fun.