Just Too Much

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Dining a Deux, CityZen Style

CityZen chef Eric Ziebold describes his special Valentine's Day menu, with specialty dishes designed for two.

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When the seafood-themed BlackSalt in the Palisades expanded last fall, owner Jeff Black and chef Danny Wells briefly contemplated simply adding more seats but ended up creating a separate 32-seat dining room designed expressly for tasting menu patrons. And when Anthony Chittum took over as chef at Vermilion in Alexandria last year, he created a tasting menu as a way, he says, for people to get to know his food.

As with so many culinary fashions, France is where the taste-of-this, taste-of-that notion got its start. The concept -- and people who have praised and panned the ritual -- stretches back to the dawn of nouvelle cuisine there in the 1970s, when chefs began offering customers a sampling of their vast repertoires via numerous petite versions of the appetizers and main courses. (Around the same time in this country, Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., helped popularize the concept with a multi-course set menu that changed daily.) Even at the beginning of the trend, critics found flaws with the format.

"I have never had a menu degustation when I have not wished a few dishes had been dropped in favor of others," Mimi Sheraton wrote in a 1981 story in the New York Times. The food critic also groused about portions "so small, it is hard to get a really solid impression of the dish."

On the road and over the years, I've sometimes been happy to find tasting menus available. They can be a godsend when I'm able to visit a restaurant only on ce, or when I know I won't be back anytime soon. But just as often, I've ultimately regretted the experience. As exciting as it was to dine at star chef Thomas Keller's exclusive Per Se in New York, I left the table after close to four hours remembering precious little about the dozens of dishes that had passed my lips. (Was that an oyster glaze on a cauliflower panna cotta, or a cauliflower glaze on an oyster panna cotta?) When I'm shelling out hundreds of dollars for dinner, I want an impression of more than the first thing I ate, the last thing I ate and the fact that the restaurant offered me a selection of salts from around the world.

In Barcelona, at the trendy Moo restaurant, the epic six-course script was also stimulus overload, climaxing with a dessert designed to smell just like the Incanto fragrance from Salvatore Ferragamo. As the confection was set before me, a server waved a little card scented with the actual cologne under my nose.

In those and too many other situations, I felt as if I were there for the amusement of the chef rather than the other way around.

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Plenty of food lovers don't see tasting menus as endurance contests but as memorable meals in the making. Take Matt Brooks of Falls Church, who has eaten at some of the world's top tables -- the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif.; Charlie Trotter's in Chicago; Taillevent in Paris -- and counts 1,700 or so bottles of wine in his cellar, stocked with such cult cabernet sauvignons as Harlan and Sloan. "If you have the time to enjoy" a tasting menu, says Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, "it's an opportunity to experience the wide range of skills and the palette of a chef."

Precisely, say the chefs who cook that way. For Eric Ziebold, chef at the elegant CityZen in Washington's Mandarin Oriental Hotel, a succession of small plates is "an opportunity to give people a variety of textures, temperatures and flavors." Diners can stop, focus and move on to the next plate. They can also sample luxury ingredients -- foie gras, toro, truffles -- that would be prohibitively expensive in large portions. There's no getting bored in the dining room or the kitchen; Ziebold changes his menu in its entirety about every six weeks and tries not to duplicate his dishes.

Cathal Armstrong of Restaurant Eve in Alexandria says a tasting menu lets him show off "interesting" ingredients that might otherwise go unexplored by his patrons. "An entree-size portion of tripe might be too much," for example, but 2 1/2 ounces of tripe -- braised, breaded and gilded with creamy gravy and a ragout of root vegetables -- is more accessible. Armstrong adds that his tasting menus (Eve offers them in two sizes) aren't as rich as they might read on paper, because of the scaled-back portions and the way they are executed.

"There's less fat than you'd imagine," says the chef, who emphasizes vinegars and stocks over butter and cream in his tasting menu recipes. "We try to be sensitive to guests' needs." Thus, heavy dishes are balanced with light ones. Armstrong also was able to trim 30 minutes from the tasting menu experience by speeding up the canapes and cutting the time between courses. A couple ordering the five-course menu now can finish in about 2 1/2 hours. (Single diners tend to eat at a brisker pace, chefs report.)

Plenty of patrons are buying into the deal. A third of Vermilion's weekend diners opt for the tasting menu, its chef says. At Komi, 75 percent of the restaurant's patrons opt for the larger of the two tasting menus. Some restaurants are tweaking the idea to suit the needs of customers who are open to exploring, but on their own terms: When Vidalia ditched its prix-fixe, five-course New Year's Eve dinner for a format that gave diners five choices within each of five courses, owner Jeff Buben says, he doubled the business he'd done the previous year at the Southern-inspired downtown restaurant. And on Valentine's Day, 80 of 180 diners opted for Vidalia's tasting menu.

"Diners want freedom of choice," Buben says. "They want to create their own meal."

Some of them just want an appetizer, an entree, dessert -- and the check, please. Furstenberg, the cranky cook, thinks the tasting menu "comes from a generous impulse, but it comes off as torment."

Even those chefs who make money with them are sympathetic about meals with no end in sight. When he worked in Napa Valley, at the aforementioned French Laundry, Ziebold remembers going out for "a bowl of pasta" at a competing restaurant, where he was talked into letting the chef cook for him. Three hours later, he found himself shelling out $175 for the ordeal.

Armstrong calls such food extravaganzas "eating for sport" and cautions against excess: "Nine courses is as gluttonous as anyone should ever get."

That's funny. Nine courses is also the most he offers in the chef's tasting room at Restaurant Eve -- or so a diner reading the menu is led to believe. In reality, Armstrong pads the three-hour extravaganza with a canape, an amuse bouche, a pre-dessert and petit fours, making the total 13 courses. But who's counting?

Tom Sietsema is the Post's food critic. Join him at 11 a.m. today to talk about this article or to pose other questions about restaurant dining during his online chat, Ask Tom, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/food.