Food is no longer just about sustenance; it’s an art, it’s a lifestyle, it’s an opportunity, and it now comes with the highest of expectations. Chefs, no longer behind closed kitchen doors, are the curators and conjurers of the show, and many of them have a lot more than just food on their plates.
Chefs are capitalizing on the theatricality of the restaurant experience. Grant Achatz, of Alinea in Chicago, is treating his new restaurant like a theater and will sell tickets to the opening of Next in the fall. Diners will pay in advance on its Web site, and tickets are from $45 to $75 for a five- or six-course meal.
“You can literally come in, sit down, start your experience, and when you’re done, just get up and leave,” Mr. Achatz told The Times.
Museums want people to stay put. Realizing that fine dining is on par with fine art, museums from Paris to New York have been upping their dining experience in the last few years to the same standards as their masterpiece-filled halls. Gone are the insipid school-cafeteria style dining rooms and prepackaged sandwiches. Ambitious dishes are now paired with eyecatching interiors. Eric Frechon is overseeing the menu in the Grand Palais in Paris; in New York, the restaurateur Danny Meyer will run a new cafe at The Whitney and Gabriel Kreuther is the chef of The Modern at the Museum of Modern Art, which has one Michelin star.
“Visitors are both more discerning and demanding than they used to be, and many want, or even expect, a memorable meal to round off their day,” wrote Larry Rohter in The Times.
What if you could round off several days with memorable meals? You can if you stay in one of the chef-run gastro-hotels in Spain. Some six million people embark on gastronomic tours, according to El Pais of Madrid.
“Let’s face it, chefs are control freaks,” Virginia Irurita, whose travel agency Made for Spain assists these tourists, told The Times. “They know exactly what they want in terms of design and service, and they know how to train staff to achieve it every single day.”
At Mas Les Cols, a hotel and restaurant in Olot in Catalonia, the chef Fina Puigdevall has two Michelin stars. Near San Sebastian, the Basque chef Pedro Subijana is building a hotel and spa on the grounds of his restaurant Akelarre, which has three Michelin stars. And in Extremadura, construction is underway for the Atrio Hotel and Restaurant, run by chef Tono Perez and the sommelier Jose Polo.
If intimate access to chefs, day or night, is what disciples crave, they probably also follow them on Twitter, which has become a place for chefs to make their names and develop online personas to go with their culinary ones. Chefs are tweeting to promote specials, protect their restaurants and confront critics and rivals , The Times reported.
“JoeDoe is a character I play online to keep my name in front of people,” Joe Dobias, the owner and chef of JoeDoe restaurant in Manhattan, told The Times. “I just need them to come into my restaurant, and then my food will do the talking and I can shut up.”
The hyper-attention and elevated expectations come with a price.
“They want us to be rock stars, which doesn’t have anything to do with what we do in the kitchen,” Ryan Skeen, former chef of the now closed Allen & Delancey in New York, told The Times. “But on the other hand, let’s be honest, we’re getting paid twice as much as we used to.”
ANITA PATIL
Museums like the Palais de Tokyo in Paris want their restaurants to be up to par with their fine art. / LAURENT GRASSO
