Against the Tasting Menu of Nineteen Courses

I have sat through a nineteen course tasting menu. It took four hours and twenty minutes. I remember the third course vividly and almost nothing after the eleventh, and I remember the fourth hour chiefly as a test of posture.

A meal has a shape. It builds, it arrives somewhere, it ends while you still want a little more. Nineteen courses is not a shape, it is a list, and a list cannot build to anything because there is always another item.

Palate fatigue is real and arrives sooner than any chef would like to believe. Past a certain point you are not tasting, you are receiving.

Seven courses is generous. Nine is a celebration. Beyond that, the kitchen has stopped cooking for you and started performing for itself, and you are paying for a ticket to a show in which you must also sit up straight and produce appreciative noises.

The finest meal of my life had four courses and lasted three hours, because there was conversation between them. That is a dinner. The other thing is an inventory.