New Era In Fine Dining

Top chefs around the world are setting the stage for a new era in fine dining.

- Michelle Yee

From treating your senses to dishes made with the finest, rarest ingredients, to immersing in culinary service that leaves you feeling like royalty, the essence of fine dining is as rich and diverse as the exotic ingredients it showcases.

Some two centuries following its radical beginning in the 1800s, fine dining continues to hold true to its revolutionary streak as a heady haute cuisine of new ideas and ingredients.

At the helm of this era of fine dining are revolutionaries such as the late multi-Michelin-starred chef Joël Robuchon. Following an astounding career that saw chef Robuchon’s establishments receive acclaimed Michelin stars year after year, he then steered fine dining away from its starched tablecloths and elaborate decor with the comeback of the millennium in 2003—L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Paris.

There, instead of elaborate dining rooms with chefs hidden from diners, the restaurant featured counter seating, chef service and a smaller, but no less exquisite space, that once again transformed the fine dining scene.

From then on, chefs emerged from sealed kitchens where they previously had little to no interactions with service staff, let alone guests at the dinner table, finding their element in front of diners. This moved fine dining from the elusive and the obscure, into something that beckoned transparency throughout, bringing with it new movements such as farm-to-fork dining and the return to basics, albeit more refined.

CHANGING WITH THE TIMES

As two Michelin-starred Noma’s chef and co-owner Rene Redzepi observed in Lucky Peach’s The State of Fine Dining, fine dining once referred to “a specific type of restaurant, where you’d get the best food”.