It’s not my logic, I was pointing out the problem with Diogenes’ analogy.
And on re-reading the OP, I see that you are most explicitly correct! My bad.
The point about “already created art” is legitimate. It doesn’t mean that the particular plates are already assembled and waiting under a heat lamp; the creation is in the development of the recipe and technique. As with a stage performance, you’re paying to receive a freshly-rendered copy, but the assumption is that all the major creative work was done before that day.
Seconded. It’s not art. It’s food. Deal with it.
If you go to a restaurant where the chef considers his work art, then either you deal with it or go somewhere else. You don’t walk into a McDonald’s and start demanding that they serve you Burger King food.
If you’re at a restaurant with a name chef, the chef is there to do things his way and customers are there because they want to experience things done the chef’s way. That’s the whole purpose of high-end dining. That’s the whole reason that the chef has opened his restaurant. That’s what people who go to those kinds of restaurants pay for. If you’re not interested in that kind of a transaction, go somewhere else.
Somewhere in between. Customers can be assholes but I know a lot of chefs and chefs are huge bitches and prima donnas who think they can do no wrong.
Wow, I’m kind of surprised at the level of, well, apparent subservience in some of the attitudes.
We drop $2-300 on a dinner a several times a year and hit lots of diners and fine restaurants in between. Whether we’re at The River Cafe or Bob’s Lunchenette, if we have a request the chef’s/cook’s feelings don’t enter into the equation. We’re not talking HarryMetSally-like instructions, and the likelihood of asking for something far from the menu’s description becomes vanishingly small at higher end restaurants. While we’re not asking for abominations, if one of our guests/companions wanted a well-done steak then the chef should make the best damned well-done steak he/she can and leave the derision (and culinary sadness) to us.
The painting analogy is apt. I’m not going to walk into MOMA and demand they rearrange something just because we’re sustaining members, but if I’m commissioning Goya to make a woodcut of Bender killing all humans, I’m well within civil bounds to make sure I can see his shiny metal ass.
To a degree, I disagree with this premise. IMO (and again, I really don’t have experience with ultra-high end restaurants) I go to have a fantastic meal and experience. The chef (and staff) is there to deliver that. It may be exactly what is on the menu, but it may be a melding of what I want and what the chef is capable of. I trust the chef’s decision, but the best chefs should bring so much to the table (sorry) that they are uniquely capable of working with their customers. I don’t think we’re talking about making wholesale changes to the recipes. Just minor modifications to accommodate a customers health, allergy, or strongly held preference.
I’m wondering if we’re all talking about the same level of dining; when I think high-end dining, I think of food that’s highly stylized, that’s arranged on a plate with sauces and garnishes, where I can hardly imagine how one would ask for changes without ruining the whole dish. Asking for a well-done steak simply doesn’t come into the equation; this place wouldn’t offer a steak. It might offer sliced beef tenderloin in a sauce on a bed of wild ramps or something, but you’d never get a hunk of steak on a plate.
I mean, check out the pictures here (including one VERY interesting preparation of smoked salmon!). How does one ask to customize most of those dishes? Aside from one or two things (I suppose you could leave the asparagus or the sauce off the lobster dish easily enough), everything is so composed that it’d be next to impossible to ask them to do much with the dishes without completely ruining them.
If I were dining at a high-end restaurant with an expert chef, I would not make special requests, not because I wanted to spare the chef’s feelings, but because I trust that the chef had carefully crafted that dish, and if the combination or proportion of its ingredients were altered, the chef could no longer guarantee that it was what he had in mind.
Although, I suppose some chefs like to experiment and would welcome the chance to custom-make a dish to an individual diner’s tastes. So in that sense I guess it does depend on the chef’s feelings.
Yes, with dishes like those it would be hard for the customer to suggest changes, except perhaps to accommodate a food allergy. But even with these, the meal is being cooked for the customer’s benefit, not the chef’s benefit.
(My big problem with meals like that is that the food looks so beautiful it seems a shame to destroy it be eating it!)
A local well-trained and respected chef opened her own 2 restaurants; one for fine dining and a catering, sandwich place. She was the ONLY person making all the food, everyone else was merely the assemblers. Yes, she ran herself ragged but it’s b/c her ego wouldn’t let her delegate. I ate at her fine dining place on 3 occasions and tried 3 different dishes. I didn’t her interpretation of any of the classic dishes she served. She came around to each table for praise and when I told her my dish was too spicy for me (cayenne in crab cakes, under crab cakes, in the sauce for the crab cakes), she told me I was wrong. The hell? My husband still liked it (and hates conflict) so the next 2 times we went I kept quiet when she did some ‘creative’ thing that made the dish unpleasant for me.
Both her places closed; most people prefer not to pay for food they don’t like in the name of ‘creativity’; it’s cooking, not performance art.
I don’t know what some of you are thinking. “Customers” (echh) are nothing more than machines whose sole function is to transform a chef’s art into shit.
As with any other craft, I hire a professional to use his expertise to make something for me. With a chef it is some agreed upon food that may or may not be a unique creation of his.
If he and I agree that he should serve his “art” then I get what I get. Maybe it will be great, maybe I will hate it. That is what you get at very high end places. You are paying the high price for the uniqueness. Still, if the food is bad the customer has a right to complain because the chef has failed to meet even the minium requirements.
If it’s not a very high end place or if the food is not a unique preparation then the chef should to be able to accommodate requests. This discussion started with butter on steaks I believe. Is a chef really compromising his art when he cooks a hundred of the same thing every day and is asked to leave off one step? It’s hardly art if a place is producing identical food, day after day.
From Chef!, a BBC comedy:
[a customer just asked for extra salt]
*Gareth: I hate you more than you can possibly imagine! *
There is a filet on their menu. Agreed, ordering it well done would be an abomination, but if we’re taking clients or guests there, it’s their prerogative (and again, the derision is reserved for us and the chef behind the scenes–not outright refusal).
If someone is allergic to, say, asparagus, asking for a substitute vegetable should not be blinked at. I’d expect a cook to not know what to substitute, but a chef should be expected to be able to compensate.
Artful plates aren’t made up ahead of time–they’re prepared individually. Deleting a component may remove the broader picture the chef created, but not the entire plate. It’s also where the “can you” comes into play.
Back to allergies, I have a seafood allergy. On the very rare occasion there’s something I’m interested in on the menu but it’s finished with a seafood-based sauce or component, I have no problem asking the waiter if it’s possible to get X without Y. (At restaurants of this caliber it’s also expected that the waiter can generally speak for the chef, though I can’t say I’ve never hear ‘I’ll check’.) Sometimes it’s not possible because it’s linked prepatorily to other ingredients, but generally speaking it’s something handled on the fly.
A chef will know what the ingredient added (e.g., a bacon will generally add a measure of saltiness) and compensate accordingly. A cook will know how to follow a recipe and falter.
Come to think of it, I’ve never been in a situation where a restaurant/chef refused a nominal request. Is this something that people have actually encountered or is it some sort of Snopes-like myth? Is it that we’ve just never asked for something outrageous? Again, I believe the restaurants considered in the OP are the $100-200 per diner level–whose had that kind of bad experience and where?
And he asked for the salt even before tasting his food.
And, if I recall correctly, he was talking on a mobile phone while doing it. I think the first thing Gareth did was drop the phone in a glass of water.
By “already created,” I was referring to the recipes, not the execution of the recipes.
To draw another analogy, I see the fine dining experience as being akin to go see a musician perform, and requests for modifications as being akin to asking Bruce Springsteen to do “Thunder Road” with a Latin feel and without the second verse. The customers are experiencing fine dining as an audience for the art, not simply as people being cooked for and fed. If they want that, they can go to Appleby’s.
I agree that a chef is an artist. Which is why I’d 1000x rather WATCH chefs cook on shows like Top Chef or Chopped than actually dine at their restaurant. I think I may actually want to try about 1/10 of the dishes they make on either of those shows. The rest don’t sound appetizing to me at all. So chef-as-artist is wasted on me.
I’d rather pay $25 at a little diner for a medium-well steak and a baked potato than $100 at a fine-dining establishment for an asparagus-infused beef filet sculpture with edamame-flavored culinary foam.
If a chef doesn’t want to alter the meals he prepares, the customer should be informed ahead of time. If the server takes the order, the meal should be delivered the way it was ordered.