How the Tasting Dinner Lost Its Mind

I love a good tasting dinner. I mean genuinely, deeply love them.

The anticipation of sitting down to a menu you didn’t choose. The bubbles arriving first, cold and sharp, resetting your palate before anything else happens. Paired with “gifts” from the kitchen. You get gifts. Who doesn’t like gifts.

Then a white — usually something with just enough acidity to make you lean forward. A rosé if it’s hot out or an orange if they’re feeling edgy. Reds that build. And then that final pairing — a bold pour alongside a heavy cut of protein, the kind of course that makes you sink into your chair and stop talking for a minute.

There’s a rhythm to a great tasting dinner that no other dining experience touches. It’s not just dinner. It’s a story told in glasses. But somewhere along the way, that story went sideways.

A quick history lesson

The tasting dinner as we know it didn’t really exist until the 1800s — and the reason is surprisingly structural. European dining ran on service à la française: everything came out at once, laid across the table like a buffet. You grabbed what you wanted. Wine was wine. Nobody was matching a Chablis to your second course because there was no second course. There was just… the table.

Then came service à la russe — dishes arriving one at a time, individually plated, in a deliberate sequence. It crept into France in the early 1800s and took most of the century to win; both styles were still in play in the 1860s. But once courses arrived in order, a sommelier could match a pour to each one. By the 1890s, Charles Ranhofer of Delmonico’s in New York was devoting a chapter of The Epicurean to wines and the order they should be served in.

Simple rules. And honestly? The logic still holds up 150 years later — it’s the same thinking behind a good wine and cheese pairing today.

In practice, most people never followed them. For most of the 20th century a single bottle of claret could carry you from soup to cheese, and champagne was routinely poured straight through a meal. The obsession with course-by-course pairing — a different wine for every plate — is far more recent than most people think.

The art form years

The tasting menu as creative expression came from two traditions colliding in the 1960s and ’70s.

From Japan: kaiseki — meditative, seasonal, sequential. Each dish intentional, nothing wasted, the whole meal building toward something. Kaiseki isn’t about showing off. It’s about restraint — the idea that what you leave out matters as much as what you put in. Western chefs took the structure and mostly forgot that part.

From France: Paul Bocuse and the nouvelle cuisine movement running with it. The menu dégustation was born. Smaller portions, more courses, the chef in full control of the experience.

This was genuinely exciting. For the first time, chefs could tell a story across an entire evening — and sommeliers could score that story with wine. The progression mattered. Light to heavy. Subtle to bold. Acidic to tannic. The wine didn’t just accompany the food, it pulled you through the meal.

Julia Child was already grumbling by 1977, reportedly said there’s “a certain sameness” in what the new cuisine was putting out. She was talking about nouvelle cuisine rather than tasting menus specifically, but she had the scent of something.

The escalation

The 1990s is where tasting menus went from craft to competition.

Thomas Keller at The French Laundry. Ferran Adrià at elBulli. Charlie Trotter in Chicago. These three basically turned the tasting dinner into an Olympic event. More courses. More technique. More theater. The question stopped being “was the meal good?” and started being “how many courses did you survive?”

Keller’s nine-course menus at The French Laundry were — and still are — stunning. They proved a tasting dinner could be both disciplined and transcendent. Nine courses, each one purposeful, the wine building alongside the food. Keller understood that the format works best when it disappears, when you’re so immersed that you stop noticing the architecture. But he opened a door that other chefs sprinted through without his restraint.

Adrià took it furthest. elBulli’s final service on 30 July 2011 ran to 50 dishes. Not per year. Per dinner — and that wasn’t a send-off stunt, since 40-odd had been routine there for years. Fifty individual plates, each one a molecular exercise in making you question whether you were eating food or watching science. It was brilliant. It was also completely unhinged.

And suddenly every ambitious chef on the planet was chasing that number.

The price of admission

Here’s the part nobody talks about: while the course counts were climbing, so were the prices.

The French Laundry’s tasting menu now runs $425 per person, service included, for nine courses. Keller, to his credit, never joined the arms race on quantity — it was nine courses decades ago and it is nine courses today. There’s no fixed wine pairing either; the sommelier builds it with you from the list, which is the right way to do it and also means the wine is open-ended.

Alinea in Chicago shows where the ceiling went. The Salon starts around $450 a head, and the Gallery and Kitchen Table both land near $594. Wine pairings run $195 standard, $285 reserve, and $475 for the top tier. Do the arithmetic on a Gallery seat with the reserve pairing and you are approaching $900 per person for one dinner.

Per Se in New York. Eleven Madison Park. Atomix. The numbers all land in the same neighborhood. We’re talking several hundred to north of a thousand dollars per person for a single evening, and at some places that doesn’t even include wine.

This is the part that kills me as a winemaker. The pairing at these restaurants is often the best thing about the experience — it’s where the sommelier earns their money, matching a specific producer to a specific dish in a way you’d never land on by yourself. But stacked on top of an already steep menu price, it turns accessible magic into a luxury product. The format that started as a way to showcase food and wine together has priced out most of the people who’d appreciate it the most.

What $3,000 gets you in a glass

If the tasting dinner arms race had a final boss in Ganondorf’s castle, it lives in Copenhagen.

Geranium — the three-Michelin-star restaurant that ranked number one in the world in 2022 — offers four wine pairing tiers alongside its tasting menu. The entry level, “Heart & Soil,” runs 2,300 DKK (about $360). That gets you bottles like Chartogne-Taillet Champagne, Littorai Chardonnay from Sonoma Coast, a 2013 Giulia Negri Barolo, and a 2011 Heymann-Löwenstein Riesling from the Mosel. Serious wine. Genuinely interesting selections. Most people would be thrilled with that pairing at any restaurant on earth.

But Geranium doesn’t stop there. They climb through “Classic & Appellation” at 4,500 DKK (~$700), “Big & Bold” at 8,000 DKK (~$1,250), and finally “Rare & Unique” at 20,000 DKK. That’s roughly $3,100 for the wine pairing alone — on top of the $650 tasting menu. One dinner. One person. Nearly $4,000 before tip.

They don’t publish what’s in the Rare & Unique tier. Which tells you everything.

Their $700 pairing has been documented by bloggers: Grosses Gewächs Riesling from the Nahe, Meursault-Blagny Premier Cru, a vintage Champagne aged 11 years on the lees, Volnay Santenots Premier Cru, Mosel Auslese Riesling, and a six-puttonyos Tokaji Aszú to finish. That’s their third tier. The one that costs less than dinner at Per Se.

But the most interesting case study is Koan, also in Copenhagen. Two Michelin stars, 18 courses, 23 seats per service, Korean-Danish menu. Their Prestige wine pairing runs about 15,000 DKK — roughly $2,300 per person — and unlike Geranium, someone actually wrote down what they pour:

• 2019 François Raveneau, Montée de Tonnerre Premier Cru (Chablis)
• 2016 Etienne Sauzet, Puligny-Montrachet Premier Cru
• 1990 Scarpa, Barolo “Tettimorra”
• 2008 Armand Rousseau, Charmes-Chambertin Grand Cru
• 2000 Krug Vintage
• 2017 Kongsgaard, The Judge
• 1999 Egon Müller, Scharzhofberger Auslese

Raveneau Chablis. Rousseau Grand Cru Burgundy. Kongsgaard’s The Judge. These are wines most collectors have a hard time getting their hands on. A 1990 Barolo. And a 1999 Egon Müller Auslese, which is about as close to liquid gold as German wine gets.

Koan is also the only restaurant in Denmark pouring Krug Clos du Mesnil by the glass — including the 2009 vintage. By. The. Glass.

So is it worth $2,000?

Here’s my honest take as a winemaker: if you walked into a wine shop and tried to buy those seven bottles individually (key word, tried), you’d spend more than $2,000. Significantly more. A single bottle of Rousseau Charmes-Chambertin runs $400-600 at auction. The Kongsgaard Judge is $200+ if you can find it. The Egon Müller Auslese, depending on vintage, can hit $300-500. You’re getting pours of wines that most people will never encounter in their lifetime, served in the right glass, at the perfect temperature, matched to a dish that was designed for them.

So, you could argue there is value there.

But — and this is the big but — it only works if the pairing actually pairs. If the sommelier is matching Rousseau Chambertin to a course because the flavors demand it, that’s worth the price. If they’re pouring it because it’s expensive and impressive, you’re just drinking expensive wine at dinner, which you could do at home in your pajamas for a lot less.

The difference between a $200 pairing and a $2,000 pairing should be the wines, not the theater. When I look at Koan’s list, I see a sommelier who built a pairing around specific producers and vintages that tell a story — old world and new, age and youth, power and finesse. That’s craft. The Geranium approach of tiering it like airline seats — economy, premium economy, business, first class — feels more like a pricing strategy than a philosophy.

The best wine pairings I’ve experienced weren’t the most expensive ones. They were the ones where I could tell the sommelier gave a damn about why this wine with this dish. Cassie and I still think about the wine pairing at Singlethread in Healdsburg. We tried local rare wines from all over California and were blown away. Another recent gem was in Tokyo at Sushi M — going with an opposite, global approach with pairings ranging from single vineyards in France, to small batch sake.

The lists that fed the fire

You can’t tell this story without the two institutions that decide which restaurants the world pays attention to.

The Michelin Guide has been handing out stars since the 1920s. Its own current wording is plainer than the legend suggests: one star for “top-quality ingredients” and distinct flavors, two where “the team’s personalities and talents shine through,” three as simply “our highest honor.” Roughly 150 restaurants worldwide hold three. The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, younger and noisier, runs on a 1,120-member voting academy split across 28 regions, with Deloitte adjudicating. The 2026 ceremony landed in Lima on November 4th — the first time Peru has hosted in the list’s 24-year history, after Maido of Lima took the 2025 title and Disfrutar in Barcelona took 2024. Asador Etxebarri near San Sebastian is a frequent flyer on the Top 50 list and won best restaurant for 2026

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Both lists reward the thing a twenty-course menu is best at demonstrating: technique, ambition, control. Nobody wins a third star for a perfect roast chicken. LA Times critic Bill Addison has said outright that “Michelin in particular is entwined in the success of restaurants like that” — while also being careful to add that he doesn’t believe most chefs choose the format accolade-first. That’s the honest version. The guides didn’t order anyone to serve fifty courses. They just made it very clear what got noticed.

And 50 Best has taken real criticism for how it decides. Joël Robuchon signed a petition objecting that jurors “vote anonymously,” never justify their choices and needn’t prove they ate the meal. Tourist boards and restaurants are free to court voters with invitations and free dinners. The list has been challenged on gender and on geography — though the Maido win has finally broken an 18-year run of European and North American number ones.

Chefs have pushed back on the stars too, and not quietly. Sébastien Bras asked Michelin in 2017 to leave Le Suquet out of the guide altogether, describing the “great pressure that results inevitably from the distinction of the three stars” and saying he wanted to cook without wondering whether his creations would please an inspector. Michelin agreed — then put the restaurant back in at two stars the following year. Marco Pierre White handed his three back in 1999. Marc Veyrat demanded removal in 2019 and went to court over it.

There are signs the guides are catching up to where diners already are. Michelin’s 2026 Great Britain and Ireland list added 37 new Bib Gourmands — its value award — noting that dining out “can be an expensive business at times” and nodding to “the small-plates format beloved of so many restaurants.” Stars are landing on rooms with no tasting menu at all. That’s not a change of criteria, and Michelin hasn’t announced one. But it’s a shift in what gets rewarded, and it points the same direction as everything else in this story.

Peak cringe

By the mid-2010s the arms race had fully lost the plot. Instagram poured gasoline on it — every course needed to be photogenic, every plating needed to stop your scroll. Substance was optional. Spectacle was mandatory.

Here’s where I’d put the kitchen visit on trial. You know the one. Course twelve, the lights dim, and suddenly you’re being led single-file through a swinging door to stand in a hot kitchen and watch someone torch a piece of fish while a sous chef narrates the farmer’s life story. You’re holding a glass of something you can’t identify, trying to look fascinated while standing next to a dishwasher.

The kitchen visit was the moment tasting dinners stopped being about you and started being about the chef.

There was also the era of the amuse-bouche that isn’t food. A dot of gel on a spoon. A single bite of foam that vanishes before you can taste it. A dehydrated something on a rock. These weren’t courses, they were art installations you were expected to eat, and they existed so someone could post them. The food was designed for a camera, not a mouth.

Then there was Bros’ in Lecce, Italy — the Michelin-starred restaurant that became the tasting menu’s obituary. In November 2021, food writer Geraldine DeRuiter published a review of her dinner there that went massively viral. She counted 27 things served over roughly four hours, among them citrus foam presented inside a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth. The review read like a comedy sketch, except it was real, and she’d paid hundreds of euros for the privilege.

That review didn’t kill the excessive tasting menu. But it exposed something everyone already knew: a lot of these dinners were performances that forgot to feed people.

Pete Wells at the New York Times had called it even earlier, writing in 2012 that diners at these marathon meals risked becoming “a cog in an invisible machine.” He was right. By the time you’re on course sixteen with no end in sight, you’re not dining. You’re enduring.

The movie that roasted it

Then came The Menu in 2022 — the Searchlight film with Ralph Fiennes as a psychotic celebrity chef running an exclusive island restaurant. Every character was a type: the reverent foodie afraid to admit the food made no sense, the tech bro there to be seen, the critic who’d lost all perspective.

It was horror-comedy, but it landed because it wasn’t really satire. It was a documentary with better lighting.

The film captured a specific feeling anyone who’s sat through a bloated tasting dinner recognizes — that creeping suspicion you’re being performed at rather than fed. That the ritual has consumed the reason the ritual exists. The best scene in the movie, without spoiling it, is when a character asks for something simple and real, and it breaks the entire illusion. That’s the whole thesis. Food is supposed to be food.

What actually makes a great one

Here’s the thing — the best tasting dinners never needed 20 courses. They needed the right five or six.

The progression I described at the top — bubbles, white, rosé, red, big red with protein, maybe a dessert wine to close — isn’t arbitrary. It follows the natural build of body and intensity sommeliers have understood since the 1800s. Light and bright at the start when your palate is fresh. Weight building gradually. The heaviest pour landing alongside the richest dish, when you’re ready for it. If you want to understand why the opening bubbles matter so much, it’s the same reason we keep coming back to sparkling wine as a starting point: acid and bubbles reset everything.

That’s what a great tasting dinner does. It takes you somewhere. You don’t notice the architecture because you’re too busy enjoying the ride.

The 20-course monsters broke that logic. Twenty pours nobody could keep track of, each with a sommelier monologue. By glass eight you’re not tasting, you’re drinking. The wine stops being a partner to the food and becomes a prop in someone else’s production.

The places that still get it right tend to share a few things: shorter menus, a sommelier who picks wines with purpose rather than prestige, and food that tastes good before it looks good. SingleThread in Healdsburg is one — a Wine Spectator Grand Award cellar, but a pairing that feels like a conversation rather than a lecture, and close enough to the vines that you can taste the Sonoma County in it. The French Laundry still works because Keller never let the course count inflate.

And some of the best tasting dinners I’ve had weren’t at famous restaurants at all. They were at small wineries with a chef friend, six courses on a harvest table, wines pulled from the library because the winemaker felt like it. That version — the casual one, without the Michelin star or the four-figure check — might actually be the purest form of the thing. No performance. No kitchen visit. Just a cook who made something delicious and a winemaker who poured something that made it better.

The correction

COVID accelerated what was already happening. Long menus meant more tableside interactions, bigger kitchen teams, more labor. The economics stopped working.

Noma announced in 2023 that it would stop regular service, and wound down to a food lab running pop-up residencies — the last of them closing in December 2024. Geranium in Copenhagen dropped meat from its menu in 2022 and now runs fifteen courses rather than twenty. Chefs started openly admitting what diners had been saying for years: enjoyment diminishes as courses increase.

The industry is moving in the right direction. Shorter tasting menus. More à la carte alongside the prix fixe. Some restaurants offering a choice between the full tasting and a condensed version. The rigidity is softening — and that’s making room for the wine to breathe again, both literally and figuratively.

The tasting dinner isn’t dead. But the ego trip version of it mostly is. And that’s a good thing.

The return to the table

The best meal I ever had wasn’t 27 courses in a Michelin-starred kitchen. It wasn’t served in a plaster cast of anyone’s mouth. It was probably six courses at a table where the wine made sense, the food was actually delicious, and nobody made me stand in a kitchen holding a glass I didn’t ask for.

That’s all a tasting dinner needs to be. A story told in glasses, with food that earns its place next to the wine. Not a performance. Not an endurance test. Just a great meal that unfolds the way a great bottle does — one pour at a time.

If you want to practice the thinking behind a progression like that, our food and wine pairing quiz walks through the same logic in about five minutes, and the full sommelier practice exams go deeper if you’re studying.

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What’s the best — or worst — tasting dinner you’ve ever had? Hit reply and tell us. We want the good, the bad, and the plaster-cast-mouth stories.

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