How tasting menus became a fine dining trend

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There was a time when ordering at a restaurant meant choosing, scanning a menu, weighing a craving, picking a winner. The tasting menu asks you to give that up entirely. No choosing, no compromise, just a sequence of small plates arriving in an order someone else has decided, building towards something the chef alone can see. It sounds like a strange thing to pay a premium for.

It has become, over the last few decades, the format that fine dining keeps returning to.

The story begins in France in the 1970s, with a detour through Japan. Chefs working within the nouvelle cuisine movement, already moving away from heavy, sauce-drenched classical cooking towards something lighter and more seasonal, travelled to Japan and encountered kaiseki, the centuries-old tradition of multi-course meals built around restraint and a strong sense of place.

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What they brought back was an adaptation of its logic: a fixed sequence of small courses, designed and ordered entirely by the kitchen. They called it menu dégustation. It was a quiet but significant departure from the à la carte format that had dominated French restaurants since Escoffier codified it in the 1890s. For the first time, the diner wasn't choosing the meal. The chef was authoring it.

A shift in who holds the pen

Avin Thaliath, co-founder and director of Lavonne Bakery, frames this as the heart of why the format endures. "Tasting menus allow chefs to tell a complete culinary story rather than serve individual dishes," he says. "This is what we live for, as chefs." It's a small distinction with large consequences. A tasting menu isn't a greatest-hits list; each course has to earn its place in a sequence, doing work that the dish before and after it also depend on.

That idea found its most extreme expression in the 1990s, when Ferran Adrià at El Bulli and Thomas Keller at The French Laundry independently stretched the format into something far more ambitious than its 1970s origins, fifty-plus courses over several hours at El Bulli, each only a few bites, driven by techniques that read more like chemistry than cooking.

It's also when the format started attracting as much criticism as praise. Restaurant critics were already complaining about gruelling, marathon-length menus by the late 1990s, and that tension between spectacle and exhaustion has trailed the format since.

Diners have changed alongside the technique, says Thaliath. "Current diners are well travelled, well read, and environmentally aware," he says. "They love to see a plate which is globally sustainable." A tasting menu, done well, can hold both within a single course.

Abundance without excess, in an Indian context

India complicates the format in an interesting way, because Indian hospitality has historically measured generosity in quantity, more rice, a second helping, a table that never looks empty. A tasting menu, by definition, asks guests to accept the opposite. Thaliath sees this as a question of rhythm.

"While each course is intentionally small, together they should feel complete and satisfying," he says. "In India, where generosity is deeply valued, the real challenge is to create an experience that feels abundant through variety, flavour, and hospitality rather than sheer quantity." Abundance, in this telling, is measured in range and attention rather than portion size.

The bigger challenge for any chef working in this format, Thaliath says, is consistency. Each course has to land with the same precision, course after course, without the rhythm flagging halfway through. The opportunity, though, is what makes the format worth the difficulty in the first place: the chance to take a guest through seasons, technique, and culture across a single sitting, something no single dish could manage alone.

Whether the format survives in its current shape is less certain. Globally, there's already a visible correction underway, restaurants trimming twenty-course marathons down to four or five, citing diner fatigue with both the length and the cost of attention such meals demand.

"Tasting menus will continue to be central to fine dining," he says, "but they'll become more flexible, interactive, and personalised, reflecting diners' preferences while preserving the chef's vision." A recalibration of how much story a diner is actually willing to sit through, more than a retreat from the format altogether.