The Tasting Menu

Abstract A tasting menu is a set multicourse meal that a restaurant offers to all diners for a single price. Diners do not have a choice in what they eat or how many courses. Restaurants throughout the world—at various price points, with casual or formal service, in lengthy or concise lists—advertise tasting menus. These resemble other set-meal types previously served in restaurants, such as the French prix fixe and the Japanese kaiseki and omakase. They have at times influenced or have been influenced by the tasting menu. Nevertheless, one can distinguish the tasting menu by its French origin and global rise as the ultimate proving ground for the chef as a culinary artist. Apart from a chapter devoted to its history and the perspectives of restaurateurs and diners in Alison Pearlman’s May We Suggest: Restaurant Menus and the Art of Persuasion (2018) and scientific publications on limited aspects little scholarship has substantively or comprehensively focused on the tasting menu. Instead one finds extensive studies on related topics such as fine dining, the history and social science of other meal ordering schemes, the global influence of French and Japanese gastronomy, modernist cuisine, gastrophysics, the evolution of the chef profession, and the history of restaurants. An account of the origins of the tasting menu, how it became the choice medium for the culinary vanguard worldwide, trends in its design, industry constraints and adaptations, and cultural reception can provide points of departure for further scholarship.