Fourteen Courses, Eight Ideas: The Tasting Menu Problem
By course nine I had stopped tasting and started counting. Not counting flavours. Counting courses. Five to go, I was told, cheerfully, by a man who had delivered that same sentence roughly forty times already that evening. In front of me sat a piece of turbot that had plainly cost someone real skill and real attention, and the part of my brain that should have been meeting it halfway had wandered off to work out whether the last train went at eleven or half past.
So here is my position, and I will defend it properly. A fourteen course tasting menu is usually an eight course tasting menu wearing a costume. The six extra plates exist for reasons that have very little to do with how the food tastes and a great deal to do with pacing, pricing and risk. I am not against long menus as a form. I have eaten long menus that earned every single plate and I would go back to them tomorrow. What I am against is the quiet assumption, now almost universal, that length is a proxy for ambition.
What the extra courses are actually doing
Work a floor for a few years and the structure stops being mysterious. Four things are going on, and only one of them is about you.
The first is logistics. A tiny course is a timing device. One cold spoon of something buys the kitchen four minutes it did not otherwise have, and four minutes multiplied across a full room is the difference between a service that holds and a service that comes apart at nine fifteen. That is an honest use of a course. I have carried those spoons. They save nights.
The second is arithmetic dressed up as generosity. A large number needs somewhere to sit. It is far easier to justify a high price against fourteen printed lines than against eight, even when the eight took more labour and better produce. The count does the persuading, which is a mechanism I get into properly in the piece on menu tricks.
The third is risk spreading. If one plate in eight is a miss, that is twelve and a half percent of your dinner and you will remember it. If one plate in fourteen is a miss, it is a rounding error, and two more courses have washed over it before you finished forming the opinion. Volume is a hedge. It protects the kitchen from being judged.
The fourth is the greatest hits problem. A dish a kitchen became known for is almost impossible to retire. So it stays, and the new thinking gets built around it, and after three years the menu is less a composition than an archaeological dig.
Your palate has a budget and nobody is managing it
What irritates me most is that the fatigue is not subjective or mysterious. It is a well described effect. Keep eating one thing and your response to it falls away, and the fall is specific to what you have been eating rather than to hunger in general, which is exactly why you can be finished with savoury food and still want pudding. Sensory-specific satiety has been studied for decades and nobody serious disputes it. Yet menu after menu is built as though attention were an infinite resource that quietly renews itself between plates.
It does not. By course ten most people are running on politeness. They are still eating. They stopped tasting some time ago. If you have spent four hours of a cook's labour on a dish that arrives at that point in the evening, that labour is gone, and the person who wasted it is not sitting at the table.
The strongest argument against me
Now the other side, which is better than my critics tend to assume I think it is.
A long menu can be a genuinely composed thing. Music is not made entirely of loud parts. A quiet, nearly empty course works as a rest, resetting you so the next big flavour lands harder than it possibly could have in isolation. Take the small beats out and you are left with eight heavy plates in a row, which is exhausting in its own way. The best long menu I have eaten had four courses in it that were, taken alone, close to nothing. A cold clear broth. A single dressed leaf. They were not padding. They were the reason the loud courses worked at all.
There is a second real argument. A young kitchen with something to prove sometimes needs room to prove it. Range is genuinely hard to demonstrate across eight plates. If you want to show that you can handle fermentation and fire and pastry, you need the space to say so.
I accept both of those. What I do not accept is that they describe most of the long menus currently being served.
How to tell the difference from your seat
The test I use is subtraction. Pick any course and ask whether removing it would change the shape of the evening. If a plate could simply vanish and the meal would be shorter but not worse, it was padding. On a composed menu the answer comes back instantly. You can feel where the load-bearing walls are.
Second test: does the kitchen ever change gear? A menu that has thought about fatigue will do something structural around the two thirds mark. A jolt of acid. Something raw. A hard temperature shift. A composed long menu knows precisely where you are flagging and treats that as a design problem to solve. A padded one just keeps sending plates.
What I actually want
Charge me the same money. Cook me eight courses. Put the labour you saved into better produce and into the two plates you were previously too stretched to perfect, and let me leave carrying the memory of a meal rather than a receipt for an endurance event.
The seven or eight course menu is the most underrated format in serious cooking, and it is underrated for a slightly embarrassing reason. It is harder to sell. It looks like less. It is not less. It is edited, and editing is the part of cooking nobody gets applauded for. The wider distance between what a menu promises on paper and what turns up at the table is a subject of its own, and I have written about the hype gap separately. Course count is simply its most measurable form.
Nine in, counting. That is the failure state. If I am doing arithmetic at your table, you have already lost me, and no amount of turbot is winning me back.