Scrolling through my food-flooded feeds on Instagram and YouTube, I am often astonished by the gorgeous dishes that I see; a humble carrot that takes 48 hours to prepare, jewelry boxes filled with artistically crafted truffles and cakes, and the rough beauty of a purposefully broken lemon tart on a white plate. Seeing these culinary spectacles inspired me to research some of the restaurants around the world that lean into the more innovative and playful approach to preparing food.
Broken Lemon Tart from Massimo Bottura’s restaurant Osteria Francescana
Azurmendi is a three-Michelin-star restaurant located just outside of Bilbao, Spain. With a focus on sustainability, diners experience an unforgettable meal crafted from local ingredients and house-grown vegetables in a restaurant operating largely on solar and geothermal energy. Rather than beginning the meal on an elegantly decorated table, the meal commences with a picnic in the restaurant’s luscious garden, helping to better immerse the diner with the sustainable practices and ideologies of the restaurant.
Images highlighting Azurmendi’s ambiance and food
Chicago’s Esme Restaurant blurs the lines between modern art and fine dining as sculptures and paintings fill the dining room. Esme’s 14-course tasting menu takes inspiration from the items that are typically found in a Latin-American household. Highlights of the menu include edible sewing equipment packed into the blue Royal Dansk Butter Cookies tin that many families use to store sewing strings, pins, and needles, as well as, hyperrealistic edible dominoes. For the entrée, you are asked to crack open a clay pig with a mallet to reveal succulent and tender pork. The whimsical nature of Esme’s menu creates an experience not reminiscent of fine dining, but rather theater or an interactive art display.
Clay pig dish served at Esme Chicago
Culinary mastermind and rule breaker, Gaggan Anand, has made it his goal to simply have fun with his restaurant (named Gaggan Anand). The structure of the restaurant’s menu constantly changes form: dishes described using only emojis or the menu taking the form of a school test. One of Gaaggan Anand’s most famous dishes is titled “Lick It Up” in which diners are asked to lick the vibrantly colored sauces and vegetables that coat the plate. It is Anand’s unrestrained culinary approach that makes him and his restaurant so exciting and beloved by commoners and food critics alike.
Famous “Lick it up” dish served at Gaggan Anand (left); Gaggan Anand (Right)
Noma Copenhagen, voted the world’s best restaurant five times according to the World’s 50 Best Restaurant List, has recently announced that it will be closing its doors in 2024. The fall of such a culinary juggernaut has cast a dark cloud over the fine-dining industry as a whole. Although many restaurants fall victim to the stereotypes of fine dining including having a lack of sustainability, toxic work environments, and an uncomfortably posh feel, I wanted to feature the restaurants above to show admiration to the fine-dining restaurants that take a different approach. Each of these restaurants serves a much greater purpose than simply serving expensive food. Azurmendi sets the standard for what sustainability in the culinary industry should look like, Esme demonstrates how crucial food can be for uncovering cultural identity, and Gaggan Anand simply presents itself as a middle finger to any “rules” associated with traditional fine dining.
Despite the generally negative feeling associated with fine dining, the restaurants mentioned earlier and so many others break the stereotype of serving expensive meals just because. A general shift of the fine-dining world towards the direction of an Esme or Gaggan Anand will create a more exciting, impactful, and positive view of the incredible chefs and restaurants who push the boundaries of food in a fine-dining setting.
If you enjoyed this article, check out my previous article where I interviewed Daniele Bolognini, Executive Chef of the Benzina Restaurant in Denver, Colorado.