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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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One time I went to the restaurant DAMON BAEHREL. I was informed afterwards that it had a 10-year waiting list and only seated 100 people a month. Despite having regularly commuted between the Midwest and the East Coast, getting there felt like the longest road trip I've ever taken since I had to go with my mother-in-law and some of it is on a gravel road.
I had to Google DAMON BAEHREL to spell it and I'm not going to bother retyping it.
It was far and away the most pretentious, absurd, cartoonishly fancy experience I've ever had, and I've dressed up in antique ceremonial Moroccan robes for a banquet at the art museum in the city I grew up in. At the art museum I sat next to the mayor's mother in a room of 200 people conversely, about 30 people total could fit into DAMON BAEHREL.
I thought the art museum banquet was fancy, but when I was little I thought Boston Market and IBC root beer were fancy.
DAMON BAEHREL was the kind of place that serves a dozen 'courses' but each one is like one cracker one sliver of cheese and one spritz of condiment with maybe a sliver of sausage made from some bespoke farm animal. He insisted that the water we were drinking was actually unreduced tree sap. Everything was served on various slabs of wood some with the bark still on it. The slabs were so much larger than the food It looked like putting a coin on a serving platter for each course.
I just felt embarrassed every time I looked at the Damon and his staff. They had clearly heard his bullshit so many times that it was hard for them to feign credulity anymore.
Anyway, that shit was way too fancy for me. Clearly it was just wasted on me.
Yeah, but how was that food?
I just tried a fine dining restaurant for the first time this past weekend.
I was just curious after watching a bunch of cooking competitions on Netflix about how good that kind of food could be so decided to find a Michelin star restaurant and give it a try.
While the portions were small, the food was on another level. Even the "worst" of it was only that because it wasn't amazing, but still really good.
The food was so good that when I got home and snacked that night, it was hard to enjoy any of my usual favorite snacks because it all felt so basic after that.
It was fancy in other regards, too. Like when my buddy went to the bathroom, someone came over and folded his cloth napkin rather than leave it bunched up on the table.
Plus, even though the portions were tiny and we joked about whether we'd need to stop for fast-food afterwards, by the end of the 9 or so courses, I felt completely satisfied. Even the snacking I mentioned was more due to the munchies than actual hunger.
It was expensive though. Two taster menu plus two drinks each came to about 500 CAD plus tip. And it was one of the cheaper options. There was a two Michelin star sushi place that advertised seats starting at 800 and I'm not even sure that includes any food, though I think it gets the "chef cooks what he wants" menu, which tbf would probably be way better than what I'd want anyways.
This place only needed to be booked like a month in advance, so the place you're talking about sounds like it's on another level itself. Though I'm curious how much that other level translates to better food.
Fine dining is one thing but the ultra exclusive, incredibly pretentious, top of the range place like DAMON BAEHREL is on another level entirely and has ceased, long ago, to be about making something a person wants to eat.
It's about the art in just about the worst way possible. Fair play to the people who are into this but it's complete bullshit, relies on borderline slave labour to produce and actively dislikes it's audience.
I'm convinced that Damon Baehrel is a semi-fake restaurant. Like, it's real, but doesn't actually take reservations or serve real guests, and the owner/chef lies about everything in order to seem more mysterious.
This article from 2016 lays out the case.
So I don't think it's a particularly good example of fine dining, as it's doing a lot of things different from a normal restaurant that is open to members of the public.
I wanted to learn more and found this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/29/damon-baehrel-the-most-exclusive-restaurant-in-america
Sounds like the ten year wait list might be made up and who knows where he gets his meats, but the whole thing just sounds fascinating. From his website, the current price is $550 USD a head, though it's subject to change several times per week.
He sounds like one of those guys that has a whole bunch of little projects going on at any time and over the years accumulated enough results from those to host some volume of dinner parties. And possibly exaggerates or lies about some of them (though hard to say if he treats his cooking similarly to how he treats his legend/myth).