Fine Dining is Not Dead, But it is Changing
Fine Dining is Not Dead, But it is Changing
My predictions for the near future for haute cuisine.
In my friend Ignacio Medina’s column, La Memoria del Sabor, on the Spanish culinary website 7 Canibales, he recently responded to a reader’s Twitter question about Noma closing and the future of fine dining:
“A quick response to your headline comes to mind: haute cuisine will never die. Ours is a world of inequalities, of rich and poor distributed in their own ghettos (you can read that as dining rooms), in which there are also not so rich and not so poor who act as a hinge, and haute cuisine has always been, is and will be on the minority side of the wall that separates these two realities.”
Despite the clickbait headlines we keep seeing about fine dining being dead in recent weeks, not to mention in years prior, his eloquent response gets right to the point. There will always be fine dining. There will always be the rich wanting to flaunt their wealth and indulge in luxurious eating and drinking, just as regular people will always want places to celebrate special occasions or to impress someone, whether a date or a business account. It’s not dead or even close to dying.
Later in the column Medina echoes something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Fine dining is changing. While changes in fine dining previously occurred rather gradually over decades – fewer white tablecloths, a broadening of what constitutes luxury, etc – the changes now are happening swiftly and somewhat abruptly because of the pandemic. The expectations we have of fine dining and how restaurants are run is undergoing a major shift. Here are my predictions in how fine dining will change in the near future.
Prices will rise dramatically
If you thought Noma was expensive, there are many restaurants that cost far more and their prices will rise too. Prices for fine dining in Sweden and Norway, not to mention great sushi in New York or a tasting menu in San Francisco, make Copenhagen feel rather affordable at times. The costs of running restaurants like Alchemist in Copenhagen are astronomical and I expect prices across the fine dining spectrum to rise dramatically in the coming years. For staff and producers to get paid fairly for their work, this is the only realistic way for that to happen. I predict some fine dining restaurants in Europe and the U.S. to start charging more than $1,000 before tax, tip and pairing anytime now.
In my interview with Jeremy Chan of Ikoyi in London, he explains why he is charging 300 pounds per person, even though, according to him, his restaurant is quite casual. “If they want those kinds of experiences, they have to accept that there’s a price to that,” he said. “At the same time, if the hospitality industry wants to bring its standards up to that of other industries, then people need to be paid right and they need to have a work life balance.”
I think the economics of Noma could work if they charged significantly higher prices. If Noma charged double, every table would still sell out. Would it mean they would get fewer people that go every season? Yes. Yet it would mean more people going for a once in a lifetime meal and taking the experience for what it is, rather than obsessives observing the incremental changes that occur between seasons.
Small and Intimate restaurants will become just as experiential as high-profile ones
When I think of the fine dining restaurants that I think are the future, I think of Honey Badger in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn. This is a small restaurant, just a handful of tables in a single dining room, plus a few sidewalk cabins that were erected during the pandemic. They are in a part of New York City with relatively low rents, and not even on a main street. The owners and co-chefs Fjölla Sheholli and Junayd Juman, have just one employee that helps in the kitchen, plus the occasional waitress. They have no PR or social media manager, rather most find them through word of mouth. So, in general, their costs are relatively low for a fine dining restaurant in New York City.
The menu Honey Badger puts out is as delicious, as interesting and as innovative as the city’s top restaurants. They forage and source hyper-seasonal ingredients throughout the northeastern United States themselves and their knowledge of the region’s flora and fauna is served to you alongside dishes like 400 plus day aged squash and red deer sweetbreads served in carved out skulls. They don’t serve hundreds of people a week, usually just a few dozen, and they charge $195 for the menu to make it all work. I think there will be more restaurants with creative menus turning to models like this with lower overhead and high prices.
A changing definition of stagiers
Months ago, I made clear my feelings about the stagier system in Europe and restaurants being unable to operate without relying on unpaid labor. These will be relics of an old way of doing things, though the idea of stagiers and apprentices will not disappear completely. Nor should they. However, the value of an apprenticeship will need to be more than just a line on a resume.
Restaurants will no longer be able to build their working model around stagiers. Those that accept the willingness of a young person to dedicate themselves to their business cannot simply use them for free or low wage labor. The restaurant will need to help them develop their skills in the same way culinary schools do. This might mean that having dozens of stagiers at once won’t work, but maybe a few that become highly involved in the process will.
Better staff working hours
At top restaurants, a shift is already underway for better working hours. More restaurants are shifting to 4-day work weeks and only having one service per day and sometimes just one seating. If a restaurant’s reservations are full every night no matter the day, what’s the difference if they choose to open Monday through Friday instead of Wednesday through Sunday? The staff, especially those with children, would certainly appreciate having the weekends to spend time with their families and friends.
Incorporating fine dining elements into casual settings
As the costs of fine dining will continue to rise and limit the amount of people that are able to dine at them and how often, more restaurants will turn to incorporating elements that we associate with haute cuisine into casual atmospheres. Some of the best meals I’ve had in recent years were at these kinds of restaurants. Places where the cooks have fine dining backgrounds, but instead have opted to serve larger numbers of people for lower prices. Fonda Lo Que Hay in Panama City, Panama is one of those. José Olmedo Carles proves he can be just as innovative with a final bill that’s $40-50 per person rather than $200. He can experiment with things like smoke and fermentation in creative ways while serving larger courses with nice plating to diners that return again and again.
Collaborations, residencies & pop-ups
A fine dining restaurant collaborating with another entity is nothing new, refer to Blue Hill at Stone Barns as an example. Up until this point, however, these have been rather isolated cases. I expect to see more restaurants working with or collaborating with NGOs, communities, farms, brands and tourism boards. It’s already starting to happen. Mil, Central’s satellite restaurant in Moray in the Peruvian Andes, formed a partnership with the Quechua communities of Kacllaraccay and Mullak’as-Misminay where both sides benefit.
While it closed during the pandemic, the New York City space Intersect by Lexus, a multi-level fine dining space that brought in top chefs from other parts of the world was a rather great idea. The food that came out of the kitchen, from chefs like Chile’s Sergio Barroso, was superb and the Lexus brand wasn’t in your face. Similar, restaurants with rotating head chefs that come for months at a time and have an established team behind them, as is being done at Fulgurances in Paris and Brooklyn.
Product development
Expect a lot more restaurants to think as themselves as a business where hospitality is just one aspect of the their overarching model. Maybe in the past a fine dining restaurant hawking a product would have been seen as selling out, but demand for products developed in house are showing no signs of slowing since the pandemic. Noma’s garum and vinegar and Central/Mater Iniciativa’s chocolates are two examples of fine dining groups make retail inroads. There’s also Niko Romito’s cakes, Blue Hill’s seeds, Alinea’s tableware and Bros’ ceramic mouth thing. These are products that the restaurants themselves would use.