Is choice, rather than excess, the new luxury in fine dining?

“You’re about to embark on a culinary journey centered around leaves,” my server tells me as I’m seated in a sunlit dining room overlooking the French Riviera’s Mediterranean costline. I’m at Mirazur, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant previously named the world’s number-one restaurant, where chef Mauro Colagreco cycles through four menus during the year based on the cycles of the moon—leaves, roots, fruits, and flowers. Nine courses of leaves? No problem, I thought. While most of the dishes were definitively green, they were not all light salads, and by the seventh course (a sharing bread made from his grandmother’s recipe, presented with a poem), a dreaded sensation arose in my stomach: I was full. When I confessed this to my server, he informed me that I was only halfway through the menu—the addition of surprise courses had bumped the total up to 14. I was struck with fear. After having learned about the extensive preparations behind each plate, I felt obligated to finish each course out of respect. But I began to feel lightheaded, and so I had just a small taste of each remaining plate—I had to respect my body first.

If I was going to have an extravagant feast anywhere in the world, I would want it to be in France, a country I’ve long associated with the modern tasting menu. But the birthplace of the tasting menu is actually in Japan, where the multicourse kaiseki meal served in the style of a tea ceremony dates back to the 16th century. When French nouvelle cuisine chefs visited Japan in the 1960s, they were inspired by the ancient tradition and adapted kaiseki to create their own version, which they called a menu dégustation. The French tasting menu involved at least four courses, each no more than a few bites, and saw the chef take greater authority over the diner’s experience than was previously common.

The international prestige of the French chefs who popularized this new dining format, coupled with a burgeoning culinary media industry, contributed to the rise of the celebrity chef and established the tasting menu as a showcase of a chef’s creativity, proven through course after course after course (and then a few petits fours, after dessert). Over the next 30 years, the tasting menu format spread around the world, becoming increasingly ambitious as chefs like Thomas Keller, Ferran Adrià, and Charlie Trotter competed for acclaim. By the 2010s, surrendering all control to the chef in service of their creative vision for a three- or four-hour menu had become the template for fine dining.

But after struggling to get through a four-hour menu myself, I wondered: Is the traditional tasting menu what diners really want? Upon returning to the United States, I reached out to fine-dining restaurants across the country to find out. What I discovered excited me. There’s a fresh approach to tasting menus underway that suggests we’re entering a new era of fine dining, one in which the diner is empowered to choose a shorter, more casual tasting menu.

“I rarely find myself wanting to sit through an extensive three-plus-hour dinner,” admits chef Brian Kim. “The enjoyment derived from these dinners diminishes as the number of courses increases.” A year into opening bōm, an intimate Korean chef’s counter tucked behind his Michelin-starred restaurant Oiji Mi in Manhattan, Kim heard this sentiment echoed by his guests. “We noticed some guests having difficulty finishing the final courses or remarking that the last few courses were not as impactful as the first,” he says.

So this January, he scaled the menu down from 13 courses to ten. Now guests leave feeling satisfied rather than stuffed. “The shorter menu is easier on the stomach, allowing guests to thoroughly enjoy the menu without getting tired from filling up too early,” Kim explains. “If only ten of the courses in a 15- to 20-course menu blow you away, do you really need to serve the extra five to ten courses?”

Further uptown, nestled under Grand Central Terminal, is another omakase-style restaurant that reduced the size of its menu earlier this year: Jōji. Like bōm, the Michelin-starred Japanese restaurant initially chose to offer 21 courses because this number aligned with the length of a traditional omakase dinner. But not long after opening, chef George Ruan noticed guests struggling to finish the full sushi lineup that followed the first five appetizers. “We wanted guests to really taste the full meal we curated rather than being too full by mid-meal…to enjoy the latter half, so we shortened the menu from the feedback we received,” says Ruan. Since limiting the menu to 19 courses, the chef has noticed less food waste and a better flow of service as the kitchen and front of house have more time to focus on each course. “Shorter menus make omakase more accessible and digestible for a greater range of diners,” explains Ruan.

Downtown in the East Village, the recently opened Korean restaurant Odre takes “short” seriously with their four-course tasting menu, meant to reflect Korea’s four distinct seasons. Despite choosing a short menu for Odre, chef Changki Kang—who trained in Korea under the acclaimed Cho Hee-sook and was on the opening team at the Michelin-starred Onjium restaurant in Seoul—personally enjoys the longer format. “Before I became a chef, I was one of the customers who loved the thrill of fine dining—I’d dive into tasting menus, soaking up the creativity behind each dish and the kind of service that makes me feel like royalty. Going to a tasting menu felt like an event that required me to mentally prepare to fully appreciate it,” the Kang explains.

Because Odre offers comforting, homestyle Korean fare, Kang wanted to make the menu more accessible at $42 per person. “A shorter menu can bridge the gap between casual dining and fine-dining experiences,” says Kang. “By lowering the barriers—whether they be time, money, or occasion—I can offer a more relaxed, cozy, and heartwarming meal.”

It’s this idea of accessibility that motivated Michelin-starred Pacific Northwest restaurant ōkta in McMinnville, Oregon, to launch an abbreviated five- to six-course version of their 13-course farm-to-table tasting menu this year. “Our approach was simply allowing guests more accessibility without feeling they needed to commit to the full tasting menu in the main dining room,” general manager Christine Langelier explained when I visited the restaurant in July. “We simply say, ‘How hungry are you?’ and meet them where they are,” says Langelier. This was certainly my own experience when—after three hours of eating—I ashamedly told my server at ōkta that I would be opting out of the final few courses. “You’re not the first,” the server told me. In hindsight, I would have been better off with the abbreviated menu offered in the separate cellar room, which Langelier explained about 15 percent of their guests use to “test the waters” before committing to the full menu.

Like ōkta, Michelin-starred Esmé in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago recently expanded to offer a second concept—Bar Esmé—not because they believe the traditional long tasting menu is too long but simply to give guests options. “We started with a more traditional structure, but the price point was a miss, and the consumer feedback was clear: Guests were looking for a place they could visit often and have the option to make the experience reasonable or extra,” says Katrina Bravo, co-owner and creative director of Esmé and Bar Esmé. Inspired by the multiple-menu concept they witnessed at Oiji Mi and Le Bernardin while visiting New York City, Bravo and Esmé chef Jenner Tomaska tried out a similar menu format during Chicago Restaurant Week in 2022 that turned out to be “wildly successful.” They immediately saw an increase in reservations and received positive feedback from guests. “This was frankly a matter of listening to the consumer and adjusting to meet their wants,” says Bravo. Today the restaurant sees guests cross-dining between 16-seat Bar Esmé and 42-seat Esmé, but the affordability of the former more easily lends itself to regular dining.

The three-course version of Tomaska’s Michelin-starred tasting menu includes now-famous Esmé dishes like the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto, a mind-bending, three-foot-tall bouquet of the classic snack covered in a cheesy habanero spice mix, but at a more accessible price point of $68 per person. Similar to ōkta, Bravo says they find guests use the abridged menu to try the food before committing to the full tasting menu experience. “They love it,” reports Bravo. “Guests’ needs are specific. They aren’t always looking for a special-occasion experience; there are evenings—especially in a neighborhood like ours—when they are looking for quality food at a reasonable cost.” Another benefit of having two concepts is the reduction in food waste. “This was another reason for the switch,” explains Tomaska. “We are now cross-utilizing ingredients, like the dover sole we currently serve in both the dining room and the bar.”

Using two menus to reduce food waste is also the strategy at Corima in Manhattan’s Chinatown. “We’ll utilize different cuts of the same protein for each menu,” explains chef and owner Fidel Caballero. “We serve a cured kampachi on the tasting menu and then a kampachi crudo and collar on the à la carte menu. The heads go into a stock to make a sauce for the tasting menu.” Like Esmé, Corima started with a short tasting menu—six courses for $98—and added a more casual à la carte menu later.

With the restaurant space divided between two rooms, Caballero says the switch came naturally. Now guests can choose between the casual or elevated menu or try both on different occasions without tasting the same dish twice. “Having an à la carte menu gives us the flexibility to appeal to a larger audience and allows people to pop by and treat us like a neighborhood restaurant,” he says. The restaurant has noticed many guests return to try both menus, and most nights, it sees an even split in reservations between the two concepts.

“I think what Corima is doing is really cool,” says chef Daniel Garwood. “Dinner is an hour and a half, and you can still go out after. You have five to six courses, plus an optional cheese course and three snacks to start. It’s really good value.” Garwood hopes to offer this kind of value at his first restaurant, ACRU, which is slated to open later this fall in Manhattan. “I don’t think you need to go to out and spend $300 to $400 on a tasting menu experience,” Garwood says. “Yes, maybe you won’t have the white tablecloth, but you can still have really good food done with the same kind of integrity.”

The new 47-seat restaurant—the first non-Korean concept from the hospitality group behind two Michelin-starred Atomix, where Garwood was previously the sous chef—will offer a five- to six-course tasting menu for $95 and a separate à la carte menu at the bar, both featuring seasonal cuisine inspired by the Australian chef’s experiences traveling around the world and working in South Korea, Denmark, and Italy. While planning a menu for a shorter tasting experience might seem easier than doing so for the traditional long format, Garwood finds it more challenging to land on only five or six courses because the stakes are higher. “You risk palate fatigue—it’s a larger portion, so it has to be constantly interesting,” Garwood explains. “If you put a larger course out and someone doesn’t like it, there’s not much recovery you can do—the shorter tasting menu is a higher risk.”

Another challenge is determining the right portion size. “It’s one of the biggest complaints you usually hear in restaurants: ‘It was 22 courses, but I didn’t feel full by the end,’” says Garwood. “Figuring out the portion size is tough; you’re always going to have people who eat more and [people who] eat less.” Garwood intends for the dual-menu approach to mitigate this issue too—if guests are still hungry after the tasting menu, they can order dishes à la carte.

Like other chefs I spoke to, the ACRU chef sees having a shorter tasting menu and a separate à la carte menu as a useful sustainability strategy. “Reducing food waste is a smart business model,” he says. “Looking at the world the way it is now, it’s something that should be at the forefront of people’s minds.” Rather than throw out the imperfect cuts—as Garwood says he’s witnessed kitchens do in his previous roles—ACRU will remix leftovers on the à la carte menu. “One of the tasting menu courses is monkfish, but because of the way we shape it, we have a bit leftover.”

The unused fish will become the filling for agnolotti on the à la carte menu. “I really want the bar menu to be approachable and familiar, so having something like pasta on there is important,” Garwood explains. “For the tasting menu, I prefer to have dishes that are a bit more experimental.” The chef says the dynamic menus are fun for guests but also for the kitchen, as it spurs creativity and learning. “It’s a great way to teach the chefs we have here other ideas and techniques too.”

It’s one of the biggest complaints you usually hear in restaurants: ‘It was 22 courses, but I didn’t feel full by the end.’”

One easily overlooked incentive for the abbreviated tasting menu is financial—a shorter tasting menu means the restaurant can host more total guests in an evening. “Over the past decade, I’ve never cooked for more than 38 guests in a night,” Garwood admits. “At ACRU, we’re looking at 80 to 100 covers a night.” The standard duration for a tasting menu in New York City, he says, is no more than two-and-a-half hours. While this is partially explained by the profit motive to turn over tables, Garwood says it’s also because there is so much to do in New York City that many diners don’t want to devote three to four hours to dinner. In our current era of distraction, when diners’ attention spans are increasingly fleeting, a longer tasting menu is arguably a harder sell.

Despite his plans for a shorter tasting experience at ACRU, Garwood still believes in the long tasting menu. “If you go to a place like Mirazur, it’s a travel destination,” he says, referencing the tasting menu I had in France. “When you’ve got someone talking through the surrounding terroir, you want to sit there and enjoy it—it adds to the storytelling of the restaurant.” It’s this desire, on behalf of both the chef and the diner, to do justice to the story of a restaurant and the place in which it is set that protects the traditional tasting menu from losing relevance. “There’s always going to be space for the long tasting menu, especially for places that have a long story to tell,” says Garwood. Many of the chefs I spoke to echoed his belief. The difference, several of them said, is that now guests have options.

After talking to several chefs about the evolution of the tasting menu, I recalled the worry I felt about not being able to finish every course at Mirazur. When I expressed my guilt to the restaurant’s executive chef, Luca Mattioli, the next day, he admitted that their portions are generous for such an extensive tasting menu. He told me I could’ve requested smaller servings ahead of time (the price would have remained the same), and I found out the restaurant offers a shorter themed six-course tasting menu during select periods of the year (for €380, compared to the full €450 experience). In that moment, I realized the fine-dining tasting menu is no longer a unidirectional monologue delivered by the chef—it’s a conversation between the restaurant and the guest, built on mutual respect. The new tasting menu still satiates the chef’s desire to tell a story through food, but now the guest has a say too.

Photo: Anna Haines