Medium Raw

After-dinner drinks in the garden with the chef. Dark by now—and very late, the restaurant closing down. The way Keller seemed to vibrate at another, slower, deeper pitch than every other chef I’d met. He seemed a happy yet still restless man, sitting there, surrounded by growing things, the place he’d built. I asked the famously workaholic chef if he’d ever consider taking time off—just doing nothing for a month—and he reacted as if I’d asked the question in Urdu, tilting his head and trying to make out what I possibly could have meant. I remember pulling away in our ridiculous rented prom limousine, knowing that I had had the best meal of my life.

But I remember now another detail, something I’d forced from my memory as inconvenient. That didn’t fit in the picture I was painting for myself—of an idyllic five hours in wine country, a timelessly magnificent meal prepared by a chef I idolized.

I push myself to remember what came after—what happened after we pulled away in our silly white stretch. There was little revelry in the back of that car. I remember moaning and heavy breathing. A struggle to hold on.

We willingly and enthusiastically ate and drank too much—this is clear. But this, I’d argue, is what is expected when you order the grand tasting at the Laundry or at Per Se. That you will—or should, if you’re sensible—prepare yourself in advance: maybe fast for a day. Wake up early the morning of your dinner and stretch your stomach with water. And the following day must be planned for as well. There will—there must—be a period of recovery.

Is there something fundamentally, ethically…wrong about a meal so Pantagruelian in its ambition and proportions? Other than the “people are starving in Africa” argument, and the “250,000 people lost their jobs in America last month alone” argument, there’s the fact that they must necessarily trim off about 80 percent of the fish or bird to serve that perfectly oblong little nugget of deliciousness on the plate. There’s the unavoidable observation that it’s simply more food and alcohol than the human body is designed to handle. That you will, after even the best of times, the most wonderful of such meals, need to flop onto your bed, stomach roiling with reflux, the beginnings of a truly awful hangover forming in your skull, farting and belching like a medieval friar.

Is this the appropriate end, the inevitable result of genius? Of an otherwise sublime experience?

Must it end like this?

And should it end like this? Struggling mightily to not spray truffle-flecked chunks into the toilet?

No one expects that anyone would eat like this every other day—or even every other month. But even as a once-a-year thing…shouldn’t how you feel afterward be a consideration?

I should point out that there is a perfectly reasonable nine-course option. We chose to be gluttonous. But when you’re fortunate enough to be at Per Se or at the French Laundry, you just don’t want to miss anything. You eat way past the point of hitting the wall. Or I do, anyway.

Last night, the early evening light appeared, to my jaundiced eye, unkind to Per Se. This was not a good way for me to start the meal. A dining room is a stage set, an elaborate illusion, a magician’s trick contained between four walls. Per Se’s dining room is one of the most meticulously constructed and most beautiful such spaces in New York. It looks out over Columbus Circle and Central Park. There is a wide “breezeway” of unused space between the kitchen and dining room, a luxuriously empty zone designed to serve as a peaceful, quieting transitional area where servers can have a few extra seconds to make the transition from kitchen reality to dining-room reality.

If cooking professionally is about control, eating successfully should be about submission, about easily and without thinking giving yourself over to whatever dream they’d like you to share. In the best-case scenario, you shouldn’t be intellectualizing what you’re eating while you’re eating it. You shouldn’t be noticing things at all. You should be pleasingly oblivious to the movements of the servers in the dining area and bus stations, only dimly aware of the passage of time. Taking pictures of your food as it arrives—or, worse, jotting down brief descriptions for your blog entry later—is missing the point entirely. You shouldn’t be forced to think at all. Only feel.