Oh, maybe just a taste

THROUGH flickering candlelight, the gastronomically curious chart a course through the maze of offerings. To the left, bite-size passion fruit cannoli, litchi pate de fruit and lemon macarons; to the right, towers of mini frosted cupcakes. The crowd juggles Champagne flutes and wine glasses as it waits to sample tiny caramel-filled profiteroles with bitter chocolate sauce. In the next room, a line forms for a crumb of aged pecorino, Fiscalini cheddar and Humboldt Fog.

Scanning the well-dressed crowd, it’s not easy to tell: Is this a food festival? A social event?

No, it’s a tasting.

OK, it’s also a benefit preview of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at the Geffen Playhouse. But it’s hard not to feel as if the promise of bites of cheese and mini-desserts and tastes of wine are what really has sold out a revival production on a Sunday night.

These days, everyone wants to taste, and everything’s a tasting.

Last week, you could attend a chocolate cake tasting in Culver City or a tutored tea tasting in Pasadena. This evening there’s a Champagne tasting at Monsieur Marcel Gourmet Market, an Italian wine tasting at Enoteca Drago in Beverly Hills and wines that scored 95-plus at Moe’s in Brentwood. Later this week you can even taste foie gras and Sauternes at the Miele appliance showroom in Beverly Hills.

Remember when people smoked cigars? Now they taste them. In the Old Bank District in downtown Los Angeles, the 2nd St. Cigars & Gallery regularly hosts cigar tastings in its combined art gallery and gentleman’s smoking retreat.

Naturally, wine shops are getting in on the act. In San Francisco’s new Vino Venue tasting bar in the Mission district, automated wine tasting stations dispense 1-ounce pours of more than 100 wines, paid for with a “tasting card” that works like a debit card. Mission Wines in South Pasadena recently remodeled to include a sit-down tasting bar that opens onto the front window. For about $10, groups or solo adventurers can sample flights of what proprietor Chris Meeske is featuring each week. In Dallas, a year-old wine shop, Grand Tastings, designed to look like a winery tasting room, is built specifically around tastings.

Why eat when you can taste? We don’t take the time for a conversation any more; we chat or instant message. So why bother drinking, smoking or sitting down for a civilized meal? We even have a West Hollywood restaurant called -- what else -- Taste.

The wine dinner is out; the tasting is in. Our frenzied, never-enough-time culture can’t seem to commit to more than a taste here, a sip there.

“The trend has much to do with a generalized adult attention deficit disorder, I think, especially among fashion-conscious foodies,” says culinary historian and author Albert Sonnenfeld. “Since so many of them rightly consider ‘starters’ the most imaginative creations of ambitious chefs, grazing in the fields of hors d’oeuvres and antipasti has become our M.O.,” he says.

No surprise then that you can order a “market-inspired flight of butternut squash” as a first course at Ocean and Vine, the restaurant at Loews Santa Monica beach hotel. Or a single bay scallop, a small scallion pancake or a shot of soup at the Belvedere at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel. That would be on the “small bites” section of Belvedere’s menu.

And in Las Vegas, at Joel Robuchon’s new restaurant L’Atelier in the MGM Grand, the menu begins with “la carte des plats en petites portions degustations“-- the menu of small tasting portions. Even at $18 for a langoustine en papillote or $60 for osetra caviar on a little capellini with fresh tomato and marinated scallops, these are not to be mistaken for small plates, which are smaller-than-entree-size portions meant for sharing. These are a single diner’s sample, a slightly overgrown hors d’oeuvre. A taste.

Culinary excess

MEALS that are structured samplings or tastings, says Sonnenfeld, have their roots in the menu degustation, the chef’s tasting menu. The idea is gustatory and experiential -- the diner comes to understand the totality of the chef’s talent and range by tasting through the menu.

But in 21st century America, the tasting menu has come to stand less for focused tasting and more for culinary excess.

Meanwhile, tastes and flights, samplers and tasting portions, are everywhere. Isakaya Sa-Sa Ya in West L.A. offers a $10 sake tasting, two junmais and a daiginjo, served with a little taste of marinated tuna. The waiter explains the sakes from left to right, and if that’s not clear, a sign explains each one. Traktir in West Hollywood offers a $4.95 tasting of four or five house-infused vodkas. At the Lodge, a Beverly Hills steakhouse, wines by the glass also come in a 3-ounce tasting pour. And in Santa Monica, the wine list at Violet includes 75 milliliter (2.5 ounce) “tasting portions” of 16 wines. At the new CrepeVine Bistro & Wine Bar in Pasadena, a tasting cart brings to your tableside the two wines featured for sampling that night.

At Ocean and Vine, each dish on the menu is paired with a recommended wine, offered in 4-ounce tasting portions. You can start with a 2-ounce tasting-size pour of Moscato d’Asti as an aperitif, then have that flight of butternut squash (squash cappuccino, squash fritter, squash ravioli). For dessert, taste three types of Valrhona Grand Cru chocolate (caraibe, guanaja and manjari) prepared five ways, and finish with a Scotch sampler -- 1-ounce tasting portions of three single malts.

But wait, those can’t be 1-ounce pours; they’re so generous, just like the Moscato. “I know,” confides the server. “The bartender pours one ounce, and it just looks so small -- so he keeps pouring.”

Tastings aren’t limited to restaurants, bars, hotels and cheese shops. People are holding them at home too.

One of the hottest gifts this holiday season is the wine tasting kit. In the Red Envelope holiday catalog, a $75 wine tasting party kit that features numbered, faux suede bottle covers, scorecard holders and a framed tasting guide was the only product to earn a full page -- and it’s already on back order, says Christine Dang, executive vice president of merchandising. Elsewhere there are $50 interactive kits that come with four half bottles and a DVD, and $25 kits with paper bottle sleeves and notebooks.

Even Crate & Barrel is selling scaled-down dishware to accommodate at-home tastings.

Bringing them in

THESE days, tastings are a powerful promotional tool for hotels, restaurants and other businesses. (Many are listed on www.localwineevents.com.) Maison 140, the boutique Beverly Hills hotel, has hosted monthly wine and cheese events that pack the 50-person bar and generate interest in the hotel, the wines and the featured wares of the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills.

This year at the Cheese Store’s 5th Annual Holiday Tasting Spectacular, proprietor Norbert Wabnig expanded the number of categories from three to 10. Patrons paid $100 each for the chance to judge not just the best cow, goat or sheep’s milk cheese, but also honey, olive oil, condiments, sausage and more. The less expensive monthly cheese and wine tastings have become a regular marketing feature.

The ubiquity of tastings has surprised even professional tasters, including Chris Burroughs, the tasting room manager of Sanford Winery in Santa Barbara County. He recently called friends who answered their cellphones at Fairview Gardens Farm in Santa Barbara. They were at a squash tasting.

“I figure you have hit the height or depth of something to be at a squash tasting,” Burroughs says.

All of this was to be expected eventually, says Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at USC who has just finished writing a book on American eating habits. Tasting, he says, “is the exact opposite way Americans ate traditionally. Now we are at a point where experimentation is seen as normal behavior.”

But beyond that, Glassner says, tasting makes you cool. “You gain status in many social circles by having a broader, rather than a narrower, approach to eating,” he says. “Among the affluent, having consumed the latest delicacy deemed worthy by chefs, the local culinary elite and food professionals reinforces your savoir-faire, affirms your class, and dare we say it, refines your taste.”

So don’t fret if a few drops of new season, first-press Paso Robles olive oil stains your Prada handbag -- it’s actually a badge of honor.