chocolate.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nSweet, conflicting chocolate.<\/p>\n
What the actual fuck?!<\/p>\n
These two ingredients do not share the same zipcode!<\/p>\n
Then I completely lost it and could not stop laughing.<\/p>\n
The dish was served with some kind of luxury bread, and one of my co-workers actually grabbed a bun, sliced it open, put the duck liver with the chocolate swirl on top.. and started eating it as if this was completely normal behavior.<\/p>\n
The serving staff, dressed in extremely formal penguin-like outfits, did not appear amused.<\/p>\n
Their facial expressions strongly implied that my co-worker had violated several unwritten haute cuisine protocols by placing the duck liver and chocolate combination on bread. \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n
This only escalated my laughter problem.<\/p>\n
Staff<\/h2>\n
Again: absolutely no disrespect toward the staff.<\/p>\n
They were incredibly professional throughout the entire evening.<\/p>\n
But when a waiter silently re-positions one of your 20.000 forks because it shifted two millimeters out of alignment?<\/p>\n
My factory starts wondering whether we are still eating dinner or participating in a NATO precision engineering exercise.<\/p>\n
Intermezzo<\/h2>\n
Between two courses we received some kind of strange intermezzo thing.<\/p>\n
It was served in a tiny egg-holder-like bowl with an en cro\u00fbte<\/em> crust on top.<\/p>\n(Seriously\u2026 who comes up with this stuff? :P)<\/p>\n
Underneath the crust was some kind of soup.<\/p>\n
The name of the intermezzo the waiter mentioned?<\/p>\n
Completely unpronounceable.<\/p>\n
Long.<\/p>\n
Complicated.<\/p>\n
Filled with an alarming number of French words.<\/p>\n
The amount of soup?<\/p>\n
Roughly one spoonful.<\/p>\n
The taste?<\/p>\n
Warm seawater.<\/p>\n
Salty.<\/p>\n
Very salty.<\/p>\n
Could I identify even a single ingredient from the three-minute French explanation given moments earlier?<\/p>\n
Yeah\u2026<\/p>\n
Nope. \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n
Main course<\/h2>\n
Then came the main course.<\/p>\n
Again:<\/p>\n
a fifteen-minute explanation by the staff<\/p>\n
followed by an even longer explanation about the accompanying wine.<\/p>\n
And then there is me\u2026<\/p>\n
I simply do not like wine.<\/p>\n
And besides that, I also have one very simple personal rule:<\/p>\n
Never drink and drive.<\/p>\n
Ever.<\/p>\n
Did politely declining the wine offend the staff?<\/p>\n
Oh hell yes!<\/p>\n
Even me, the autistic guy who is usually half blind to non-verbal communication, noticed that one immediately.<\/p>\n
Somewhere deep inside the restaurant, a sommelier probably felt a great disturbance in the force.<\/p>\n
Back to the main course.<\/p>\n
I do not remember the main course exactly anymore.<\/p>\n
It was far less memorable than the liver-and-chocolate incident. \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n
What I do remember, however, is this:<\/p>\n
The haricots verts required some serious scaffolding to keep them standing upright on the plate.<\/p>\n
Quite impressive, honestly.<\/p>\n
And the meat itself?<\/p>\n
Indescribable.<\/p>\n
Very…<\/p>\n
Very…<\/p>\n
Very…<\/p>\n
Very…<\/p>\n
very small!<\/p>\n
At some point I started wondering whether I was eating dinner or inspecting a small modern art exhibition.<\/p>\n
Taste-wise?<\/p>\n
Honestly\u2026 no clue.<\/p>\n
And considering I still remember most other main courses I have eaten throughout my life, the fact that this one completely slipped my mind probably says a lot.<\/p>\n
Dessert<\/h2>\n
Ironically, this was actually the only course that I genuinely enjoyed eating.<\/p>\n
It was substantial, very tasty and honestly memorable.<\/p>\n
It was basically some sort of apple turnover<\/p>\n
Dutch: appelflap…..<\/p>\n
just done differently.<\/p>\n
Pricing<\/h2>\n
The damage?<\/p>\n
Roughly 1000 euros back in 2008 for 6 people.<\/p>\n
Adjusted for inflation, my factory meltdown would probably cost around 1500 euros today.<\/p>\n
Was the experience worth it?<\/p>\n
Honestly?<\/p>\n
HELL NO.<\/p>\n
Hungry<\/h2>\n
The main reason to go out for dinner is to eat tasty food and enough of it for the evening.<\/p>\n
Not to eat conflicting ingredients that clearly do not share the same zipcode\u2026<\/p>\n
while also paying absurd amounts of money for the privilege.<\/p>\n
And surely the main goal is not to return home still hungry after eating all proposed courses.<\/p>\n
Somewhere during the evening my factory started asking a very simple question:<\/p>\n
\u201cAt what point exactly are we supposed to stop analyzing the food and actually become full?\u201d<\/p>\n
Question<\/h2>\n
This is actually an honest question directed at all Michelin-starred restaurants around the world.<\/p>\n
And I genuinely would love to have a good discussion about food with a starred chef someday.<\/p>\n
I truly do not want to be a food barbarian\u2026<\/p>\n
but why is haute cuisine so incredibly complicated?<\/p>\n
Why is it so heavily centered around seemingly conflicting ingredients?<\/p>\n
For comparison:<\/p>\n
To my factory it almost feels like serving steak with ice cream!<\/p>\n
It simply does not compute!<\/p>\n
This is a random appetizer I found:<\/p>\n
Sea bass combined with:<\/p>\n
Conference pear, yuzu, Tomasu soy, black olive, Japanese wasabi<\/p>\n
So let me get this straight.<\/p>\n
Fish…<\/p>\n
combined with:<\/p>\n