Why no choice is a good choice: the return of the tasting menu

Few things divide opinion in the restaurant world like the tasting menu. Over the past 20 years, this extended format has both accumulated cachet as a signifier of culinary ambition and attracted relentless dyspeptic criticism.

In 2012, the New York Times’s restaurant critic, Pete Wells, was feeling “trapped, helpless” in the face of “marathon” meals. Last year, Tim Hayward in the Financial Times was still bewailing this “exhausting to-do list of knackered cliches” – despite the tasting menu repeatedly being declared dead in the intervening years. Street food, small plates and casual dining had reportedly consigned it to the food recycling bin of history.

But then Brexit happened, Covid hit and Russia invaded Ukraine. Buffeted by soaring energy, food and staff costs, chef-owners have begun to reexamine the financial stability that tasting menus offer. To the extent, reports dismayed Observer restaurant critic Jay Rayner, that they are now “ubiquitous in certain places. In Edinburgh, it seems the default for a restaurant of any ambition is a tasting menu.”

“There’s some bad branding around the phrase ‘tasting menu’,” notes Chet Sharma, who pointedly serves a “chef’s selection” menu of seven core courses plus additional snacks and surprises at London’s BiBi.

The tasting menu comes with baggage: notions of dictatorial, egomaniac chefs, pompous staff and conspicuous consumption in hushed dining rooms. The new wave is keen to distance itself from all that by being more relaxed, with no-choice menus often shorter and more affordable.

The motivation is efficiency rather than exclusivity. In Cambridge, Alex Rushmer’s Vanderlyle operates with two chefs in the kitchen who create a meat-free £75 menu of about nine courses for 26 people. Diners pre-pay and, with dishes and guest numbers settled, Rushmer can order precisely the ingredients he needs, cutting prep time and the costly food waste associated with a la carte menus. Creating a sustainable business, says Rushmer, who opened Vanderlyle in 2019, is about removing variables: “Chiefly, not knowing how many people are coming and what they’re going to order.”

In December, Edinburgh’s Eleanore moved from a small plates menu to a set £55 menu consisting of seven dishes served over five courses, with optional extras. Owner Roberta Hall-McCarron wouldn’t call it a tasting menu. That sounds too grand. Eleanore is small and casual. But “it was the best option to not waste money and time”. The menu requires one less chef per shift, and those chefs work fewer hours.

“The hours are a big thing,” says Josh Overington, who later this month opens Myse in Hovingham, Yorkshire. “If you’re going to do four days a week, as I am, [a tasting menu] is easier to organise. It has a million benefits.”

Arguably, it also benefits diners. Launched last September, BiBi’s £125 dinner menu is expensive. But crazy as it may sound, says Sharma, it was introduced to provide value. In London, he argues, you can easily spend £70 or £80 a head on fairly average food, whereas BiBi’s food (“complex enough to sit alongside the most complex dishes in the country”) aims to provide far greater bang for your buck.

BiBi’s chefs are not wasting hours of costly labour “prepping ingredients that aren’t sold”. They are focused on perfecting a streamlined number of dishes. This helps Sharma keep tight control of his fluctuating food costs, and enables him to flexibly gild dishes: “Let’s add morels to this dish, for example”, when prices allow.

Value for money in restaurants is always subjective. But if you can afford the initial outlay, it is notable how keenly priced many tasting menus are. Wimbledon’s Black Lamb serves a £48 menu of five courses plus snacks. It increases guaranteed spend, says co-owner Richard Gladwin, “but offers better value than ordering five à la carte courses. It’s win-win for guest and restaurant.”

Historically, tasting menus were often offered on a take it or leave it, full menu basis. Shorter menus are now common, even in restaurants with established national reputations: five courses at Kent’s Michelin-starred Hide & Fox, £75; the new six-course £60 menu at Leeds’s The Man Behind the Curtain; a bargain £35 five-course tasting lunch at Sheffield’s Jöro. In a sign of the less rigid times, New York’s three-Michelin-star Eleven Madison Park has introduced a six-course menu, albeit priced at $285. Interestingly, BiBi still runs a lunch à la carte menu to simultaneously “provide a more accessible experience to guests, especially regulars”, says Sharma.

At Manchester’s Higher Ground, Joseph Otway serves an à la carte menu and a seven-course “chef’s choice” menu. Priced at £45, it usefully absorbs ingredients he has too much or too little of, short shelf-life produce, and parts of the whole animal carcasses he buys in, all of which assists him in managing costs. The tasting menu benefits Otway and diners, with half of his customers choosing it. “It’s the best value we can offer, and the best way to show a curated snippet of everything we’re about.”

Rayner would probably still go à la carte. He fully understands the “logistical attractions” for restaurants. He knows it is ludicrous to complain about tasting menus. “But my heart falls at being told I have to spend £90, £110, to sit through a menu of varying quality. Dishes tend to be small and intense, and when something comes along you do like, you ain’t got much of it. I find them exhausting.” Not choosing your dinner, says Rayner, strips “a certain joy out of going for a meal”.

Chefs see it differently. “Conducting the kitchen, if everybody is on the same menu, you’re more in control,” says Sharma. “Great for us but also for overall guest experience.”

Rushmer is not “maniacally controlling”. He doesn’t want to deny diners their freedom. Instead, he is trying to eradicate unexpected problems that prevent chefs producing their best work, particularly in the white heat of service. Angelo Sato goes further, asking guests to really lean into the experience. This year, his Soho venue, Humble Chicken, switched from being a high-end yakitori grill to a “theatrical” £125 tasting menu during which “there’s not really a still moment”. Sato had always dreamed of creating “a start-to-finish experience for diners, where you can really dictate how you want them to feel, eat and everything in between”.

The change had a financial rationale. “If you’re putting so much work into the food, you have to dictate a price-point. You can’t have people take up two seats on a Saturday night for two hours and spend 50 quid each.” But, primarily, this was about Sato fulfilling himself creatively. “If you’re not in love with it,” he says, “there’s no point.”

Do chefs deserve to be happy in their work? For Rushmer, that was a “massive part” of opting for a tasting menu. It gives him more time and “creative energy” to do what he really enjoys, developing his vegetable-led cookery.

These days, chefs have options. There are plenty of well-paid vacancies out there. They are in demand. Consequently, those who choose the more challenging path of working independently are prioritising their happiness.

Were Overington to cook à la carte at Myse “the kitchen would go down so quickly it’d be an embarrassment”. Its £110 tasting menu will allow him to produce consistent food in a comfortable manner. He sold two successful York restaurants to launch this venture. “I believe, in a business sense, not just creatively, it’s going to work. If I then do things I don’t want to because I’m worried Mr and Mrs Smith might complain, it’s stupid. Life’s short. You need to do things you enjoy.”

That cuts both ways. Diners need to enjoy tasting menus and, to facilitate that, the vibe (very much the correct word) in such restaurants is increasingly informal, chatty and overlaid with cool music. “We take our food seriously,” says Sharma. “But you can’t take us too seriously. How am I going to tell you this is a hallowed hall of dining when NWA’s Fuck tha Police is playing in the background?”

The New York Times recently hailed US chefs likewise serving tasting menus “with lower price points and less attitude … finding fun in the once stuffy form”. Fine dining’s fussier habits – long expositions on the chef’s philosophy; constant interruptions to refold napkins or de-crumb tables; extravagant decanting of wines – are now deeply uncool. Rushmer will happily answer diners’ foodier questions but allows them to lead that conversation. Rather than “reverently list the provenance of every turnip”, descriptions of dishes are brief.

There is a tension in balancing a relaxed atmosphere with the desire to communicate the detailed, often idealistic work undertaken in such restaurants. Myse will be a celebration of niche British produce. That story will be woven into the experience, says Overington, with, for example, some uncooked produce shown to tables first. “You need a bit of theatre to make it exciting,” he argues, in contrast to tasting menus that “last hours, just a boring list of different dishes. People sat in silence. Like an exam.”

Overington wants Myse to be fun while acknowledging it will not be for everyone. “What we do isn’t sustenance, it’s experiential,” says Rushmer. “That’s not how people can, should or want to eat every meal.”

No one is campaigning for compulsory tasting menus. As ever, the choice is yours.