Tasting: delight or debauchery?

These days, a great chef without a tasting menu is as rare as a celebrity without a publicist. And as the trend toward expensive, four-hour, many-course, no-choice dinners becomes ever more pronounced in the upper reaches of high cuisine, so too does the debate over this fabulous, terrible way of eating.

Last fall, an article in Gourmet by Shoba Narayan revealed that several of the country’s best-known cooks never order the tasting menu when dining out, and one unnamed chef who clearly has no future in marketing referred to it as “the fleecing menu.”

Expensive, expansive and sometimes an emotional or even unforgettable experience, the menu degustation (now commonly called the tasting menu) offers the diner the ultimate luxury of putting himself in the hands of a culinary sensibility -- in some cases, experiencing an astounding array of dishes from a cook so gifted he might have, in another time, been cooking for a Roman emperor.

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A question of control

Many chefs believe they can only express the full reach of their creativity through the total control a tasting menu affords them. According to Spago’s Lee Hefter, “You can’t eat one appetizer and one course and know the scope of a restaurant or the range of the chef’s skill.” Chicago’s Charlie Trotter, who in 1987 was among the first American chefs to institute a “tasting-menu-only” restaurant, likens the creation of such a meal -- a series of anywhere from six to twentysomething smaller dishes -- to composing a score, where one component logically follows another to create a totality of experience.

It may be art. But is it really a good way to eat?

Although a couple of local restaurants, Alex and Aubergine, have recently altered their tasting menu-only policy to boost business among diners who like latitude, Bastide, the only restaurant currently holding four stars from The Times, has not. And in New York City, the two newest must-have/can’t-get reservations are tasting menu only (Per Se and Masa, both in the new Time Warner Center and both run by chefs formerly working in California, Thomas Keller and Masa Takayama, respectively). Tasting menus are also the only choice at Chicago’s Trio, London’s Fat Duck and the Spanish Costa Brava’s El Bulli -- the world’s most cutting-edge restaurants.

Whether or not an a la carte option is offered, whenever a diner visits the shrine of a famous chef, the temptation to order the tasting menu can be overwhelming. After all, you’ve probably traveled and perhaps sacrificed for this meal. You may never be here again. Further, tasting menus are usually served to the entire table at once, which pressures smaller eaters to bow to the desire of the largest appetite at the table. And, as a star chef will sometimes visit the dining room, it often feels like simple good manners to let him take the reins.

While tasting menus designed by world-class cooks are the closest thing we have to the famous royal banquets of yore, most chefs will deny any similarity to the kind of meals that made the vomitorium a necessity. Bastide’s Alain Giraud speaks of balance, harmony and proportion in his menus, if not necessarily moderation. Giraud sees this way of eating as a “state of mind.... We give the diner the experience of many small dishes. It’s much more exciting to eat that way, to have a bite without being totally satisfied. If you have 20 bites of a dish, your last bite is not that exciting.” Giraud, like most chefs, checks the plates coming back into the kitchen to moderate the food flow; not finishing your plate usually means a smaller portion in the next round. It should be said: It is possible to enjoy a menu degustation and not overeat.

But tasting menus tend to err on the side of excess. Most chefs like to provide a bountiful experience. When I told Thomas Keller that my 20-course meal at his French Laundry in Napa Valley had overwhelmed me in ways both good and bad -- and severely tested the limits of my internal organs -- he asked, “Were you uncomfortable?”

“Yes, I was uncomfortable.”

“Good!” he said, delighted.

Keller does not advocate gluttony. He sees it more as ... generosity. “You can overeat anywhere -- in the local pasta place -- and come away with an uncomfortable feeling. What we want is to convey a sense of luxury. If someone wants to eat, I want to feed them. I don’t think that foie gras or truffles should be served in a restrictive way. I want people to say, ‘Where have you ever seen a piece of foie gras like that?’ ”

Clearly, faced with such a piece of foie gras, it’s the diner’s responsibility not to overdo it. For me, the tasting menu is the most difficult of temptations: It’s put right in front of you, you’ve paid for it, and no one else will suffer if you indulge yourself as far as you possibly can. Waste not, want not....

The multicourse set menu first became fashionable in this country after Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971, offering a five-course, fixed-price menu that changed daily. This coincided with the nouvelle cuisine movement in France, where chefs were offering longer evenings of smaller portions, and as Americans traveled to Europe and experienced the menu degustation, they became more willing to accept that way of eating here. Then came the highflying ‘80s, when “grazing” came into fashion. Ordering the tasting menu was not only a way to exercise a curiosity about food and cooking but was also an ideal form of conspicuous consumption, according to food historian Michael Batterberry, editor of Food Arts magazine.

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Dictating to the diner

By the late ‘90s, it was quite common for any chef worth his salt not only to offer a series of different-sized tasting menus but to ask the entire table to choose the same one. Waters finds the current tasting-menu vogue “more about the chef than the diner.... It’s very rare for chefs to restrain themselves when doing a tasting menu,” she says. “I have to be psychologically and physically prepared to do it. There are very few greens, if any. I’ve felt punished at times, even if the food was delicious.”

At its most extreme, the tasting menu is a twilight zone of pleasure and pain, a pact of specialness in which the chef assumes a godlike role by performing astonishing feats with food, and the diner does the same by behaving as if he has no limits to his appetite or to his pocketbook and can ingest, taste and savor many dishes, often with a matching flight of wines. And nothing puts a chef in the godlike position of total control more than the no-choice tasting menu.

Ferran Adria, perhaps still the most influential chef in the world, is also the most controlling. At his restaurant, El Bulli, 90 minutes up the coast from Barcelona, you are told not only what you are about to eat (because your peas may arrive looking and behaving like egg yolks) but also how to eat it. Some foods must be eaten while holding an aromatic under your nose (a gimmick since picked up by other chefs, including Trio’s Grant Achatz, one of Adria’s many disciples worldwide). Other dishes have components that must be ingested in a certain order. As we endured the seemingly endless parade of courses, many of which arrived with instructions and each closely monitored by an army of waiters, I wasn’t sure whether I was having dinner or joining a fascist party.

Adria’s desire not just to surprise but to shock the palate left me in a state of fear of what might come next, particularly after I popped the innocent-looking “cherry with ham” into my mouth and was greeted by a sweet piece of fruit and the distinctive taste of bacon fat. His way of cooking is, among other things, a demand for submission.

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Enough or too much?

Obviously, in other circumstances, surprise can be a lovely thing in a meal. So can abundance. But deep into a lavish meal -- especially if we are eating more than we can comfortably digest -- comes a sense of debauchery, or perhaps even unwelcome thoughts about a world full of hunger. Are we assuming, with the hubris of some Greek hero bound for disaster, that the earth’s bounty is there for the ravishment of our senses rather than for our and others’ nourishment? Some days, at some restaurants, one would need to be almost superhuman to find the exact line at which reason must say to appetite, to quote Brillat-Savarin, “Non procedes amplius: Go no further, my friend.”