Fine living and fine dining: a very pertinent silver lining dilemma

Whilst eating at a fine dining restaurant is a gourmet experience, the same is not always a healthy one. But should it even be?

Photo by paje victoria on Unsplash

In a perfect universe, the most high-end dining experience would enhance your hedonistic pleasure and infuse your body and mind with the best nutrients to make you feel great.

This, of course, would mean completely redesigning how we interpret fine dining and creating a new paradigm. A paradigm that is more in tune with transhumanists than frock-dressed gourmands of lore.

But, as Thomas Kuhn teaches us, shifting paradigms is hard, as there is a struggle between early adopters of a new Weltanschauung and the guardians of the old paradigm.

In this sporadic publication, I will also explore my journey into this (and other) possible paradigm shifts. Gastronomy evolves with and around us. How can we interpret this flow?

Let's explore this idea a bit more.

As I grow tired of the little chef’s trick of loading everything with salt to enhance the flavours, I walk a different path. I start looking at every plate more inquisitively, balancing flavour, nutrients, and issues.

Not only culinary issues but dietary, environmental, labour and health-related ones. It’s much, much more than what the nouvelle cuisine wave wanted to achieve. Because balance and health aren’t just on the plate.

There are other issues too. Like excess salt, or scarcity of work-life balance for the industry workers.

Restaurant fatigue

In the past few years, I spent quite a lot of time sitting at restaurants, and fine dining ones, sampling their food and exploring their menus. I speak a lot about some of those in the other blog (in Italian).

However, for me, 2023 came with a new awakening, whereby I felt oh so very tired at the thought of dining out.

As I went back to rearrange my pantry and dedicate more time to shopping for groceries than choosing a restaurant, I started to wonder what and why this was happening.

To me, and the restaurant scene.

Suddenly, the idea of facing an endless sequence of complex and overly complicated plates loaded with sauces, foams, sugars, salts and smoke started losing appeal.

A seemingly infinite rooster of bottles duly opened by an overzealous Sommelier for an extreme wine pairing, a bore.

I started dreaming of a simple boiled lobster with a pat of fresh, whipped Normandy butter, some oysters squeezed with lemon, a steak sprinkled with herbs and fresh pepper, a freshly tossed salad, and the absolute lack of excess salt.

The F X Mayr, Lanserhof and other healthy universes

I grew up in a household that was naturally oriented to delicious food.

We have a vegetable garden and an orchard, and we regularly exchange goods with our neighbours (eggs come in and jam goes out, cheese scraps go and pastry dough comes, and so on).

All homemade, all km zero and locally sourced.

We always followed a diet loosely based on alpine tradition mixed with Steiner’s suggestion, and there have been nights spent bathing in the moonlight to work our garden in a biodynamic way.

Recently I came across the various implementation of an akin diet, the F. X. Mayr one, in two whimsical places just above the Alps. I must admit, I was immediately captured by the atmosphere exuding from Lanserhof, with its clean and no-nonsense approach to well-being. Well, they stick pads to your feet to improve your sleep, but at least they do not pretend said pads are detoxifying you. They are loaded with lavender and aromatics, and they simply soothe your rest with an alluring scent.

For detoxing, we have the liver and kidneys.

The diet these outlets propose is simple, based on conscious chewing, drinking infusions, and preferring vegetables, light preparations, fish and whole pulses. Buckwheat, my favourite grain, is a king. Processed food, of course, is a no-go. Coffee: mildly frowned upon. Infusions: aplenty, in abundance, and ever-changing.

Sounds like heaven. Sounds like home.

Gut gut Gut

The gut, that in German is funnily good by design - at least in the language, is our other brain. Or so my mum always told me. A healthy gut is a healthy person, and every illness can somewhat be tracked to some bad gut (ha!).

I duly care for my gut, but as my life revolved more and more around dining out, I realised that supplementing was insufficient to keep my gut happy. After a meal outside, and a fine dining one, I frequently felt in worse shape than before and I often regretted the wine, the dessert, and some of the sauces. In this specific order.

That is when I started interrogating myself about the increasing discrepancy between eating in a gourmandise style and eating in a healthy style.

Are these two words juxtaposed, again?

After all, the nouvelle cuisine movement had tried to give substance to credence where food should be a nourishment for the body and the soul, but then again, the massive use of flavour enhancers (salt, but not only), has brought back fine dining into a track where it can be an indulgent experience, full-blown hedonism, but not necessarily a healthy one.

Fine, dining out

How can one balance the desire to eat appealing, tastefully presented, enticing food not prepared in the traditional chef’s way of overloading it with salt and fake aromas? Is there even such a place in the landscape of the fine-dining restaurant offer?

Let’s try to find out.

In this publication, among other themes that are very poignant in present-day gastronomic philosophy of thought, I will explore the limits and possibilities of healthy fine dining.

This is a quite adventurous field, where not even Michelin has ventured, limiting itself to slapping a vague green star on restaurants that are behaving in a more environmentally conscious fashion.

Here, I am instead very bodily conscious. My body. And the body of the earth. And the bodies of those who prepare food.

It is my body, my temple. If eating fine dining means loading my body with worse stuff than a well-conceived fast food meal, we have a problem, Houston. And what about having the calories count, alongside the prices on a menu? Something to discuss.

It is the earth, we all inhabit. If eating at a fine dining establishment means just relying on endangered species, abundance of salt and two cuts of meat and two boring vegetables, we do have a problem because fine dining should be a relentless seeking for perfection, not mediocrity. What about being serious about the food we serve and get served and we refuse what is bad for the earth? Intensive agriculture, intensive cattle, and intensive fisheries are all equally bad. There is a balance and is yet to be found (again), in this brave new world.

It is the people, who work in the kitchen. If they are NOMA-like unpaid trainees, how can one even fathom thinking about sustainability, even with all those pickled vegetables? What about being transparent in pay and working hours with staff and customers? We all, customers, would think twice about fueling bad practices and unpaid interns and perhaps chose a different place.

I used to eat out much more - last year, recovering from the austerity of the pandemic, I went on a restaurant frenzy.

This year I am more conservative, also a bit more interested in eating well, than eating out: I visit and revisit my favorite places, but I am not so keen on venturing out for the sake of it - and to post “something new”. That’s for foodies - and they are thankfully an endangered species, we will see.

A topic for another day, for sure. Stay tuned. In two weeks there’s more - and next week the appointment is on Oltre il Baccalà. See you!