The Tasting Menu Once Turned Chefs Into Legends. Now Its Star is Fading.

Prior to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, albums were largely an afterthought in the music industry. The single was king. But the commercial and critical success of that 1967 Beatles LP represented a paradigm shift that made a coherent collection of songs the path to musical (and financial) immortality for years to come. In the following decade, across the English Channel, a similar revolution occurred. French nouvelle cuisine chefs, incorporating influences from Japanese kaiseki, popularized the degustation menu—a.k.a. the tasting menu—and moved away from meals built around a few larger courses toward multiple tiny ones that, taken together, comprised the chef’s full artistic vision. Each course was a track, the entire tasting menu the LP. And in the same way that great albums separated elite musicians from mere one-hit wonders, tasting menus are where the legends of chefs such as Bocuse, Robuchon, Keller, Adrià, and Redzepi were forged.

The album eventually ran into the buzzsaw that was Napster, and the digital-music revolution has turned us back toward a single-dominated world—of the 50 bestselling albums of all-time, only one, Adele’s 25, was released in the past decade. A similar reckoning is coming for the tasting menu, with signs of its precarious state popping up in the wake of a world reemerging from the pandemic. René Redzepi announced the closing of Noma, calling his model of labor-intensive fine dining “unsustainable,” while three-Michelin-starred Quince, in San Francisco, has closed for remodeling this year and will reemerge with an à la carte experience that joins its prix fixe. And after crisscrossing the country in pursuit of this year’s best new restaurants, we encountered far fewer tasting menus than in previous years—and only one made our top 10.

Of course, the mechanisms of demise between the album and the tasting menu differ—there’s no streaming equivalent for food. Instead, multiple factors are making degustation less mainstream. For starters, rising labor costs and a shrinking pool of workers in the restaurant industry are making it difficult to employ the multitude of hands needed to wield all those tweezers. It’s not surprising that Redzepi discovered that his style of fine dining was unsustainable mere months after finally starting to pay his army of interns, whose free labor had undergirded the restaurant for so many years.

Another factor is that we simply don’t need tasting menus like we did before. In the past, to experience the highest level of culinary craft, you had to go to sit down for a three-plus-hour meal because the best chefs plied their trade at tasting-menu spots. It’s akin to how record labels in the 1990s held back on selling singles so you had to buy an entire album if you wanted the best songs. Whether for music or for food, you don’t have to do that anymore. The 21st-century restaurant boom produced a glut of highly trained chefs, making stellar food easier to find. Right now, you can head to a strip mall on the east side of L.A. where an award-winning chef make you a flawless fried chicken sandwich that expertly deploys spice and acid and texture—all with a visual flair that’ll have you posting it on your Instagram immediately. You didn’t have to wait until course seven of some tasting menu to experience those heights of cooking execution. It’s yours in 15 minutes.

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And the tasting menu’s decline is as much about chefs losing their passion for creating them as it is about diners walking away. Our best new restaurant in America this year is run by Srijith Gopinathan, a chef who crafted a tasting menu at a two-Michelin-star experience in San Francisco but traded it for an à la carte restaurant across town that lets you choose your own adventure—and better represents the kind of food he wants to serve.

We’re living in an increasingly atomized and faster-paced world, where you’re more likely to pull up a song quickly on Spotify than take a full record for a spin. Of course, there are a lot of us who still crave that full-album experience, which is why the form will never truly die; the same goes for tasting menus. But, just like the LP ceased being the pinnacle of music years ago, the tasting menu is finding the same fate in the culinary world.