Fine Dining from the Wrong Perspective

Traveling in New York City last week, I had the pleasure of sitting down at two restaurants I’ve wanted to visit for a long time: Momofuku Noodle Bar and Les Halles.

The latter was the launching point of Anthony Bourdain’s career as a television personality (he still maintains the title of Executive Chef) and the former was the first restaurant of David Chang, who has blended old school street Asian food with high end molecular gastronomy at several restaurants across New York.

Steak tartare at Les Halles

Both Momofuku and Les Halles have produced excellent cookbooks, appropriately titled Momofuku and The Les Halles Cookbook, co-written by their respective chefs. While the quality of the recipes is debatable (and everything is when it comes to the cooking world), they are both wonderfully written, containing essays on cooking, tales from the chefs' lives and storylike presentations of cooking instructions. 

This is exactly why having lunch at these places was so tough. Because they are written by chefs, cookbooks are kitchen driven.  When you cook the same dishes a few thousand times, food starts to take on new and enlightening dimensions that make eating potatoes or noodles all the more enriching. The authors' excitement about their food lies in that perspective.

Unfortunately, this doesn't translate automatically into a dining experience.

This is not to say the meals at these places were bad (though Les Halles was out of blood sausage), but, for me at least, it was a reminder that no matter how glam the restaurant is, food is better and more interesting from the perspective of the person eating it, after they have made it themselves.