The Psychology of the Plate
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What Does Waiting for a Table Do to the Meal?
Sometimes a restaurant experience begins long before we enter it. A table appears online and disappears almost immediately. There are weeks of checking, notifications arriving at the wrong moment, conversations with friends about whether another date might work. Eventually a confirmation appears on the screen and what was initially a dinner becomes something awaited. Esme,…
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Can a Restaurant Keep the Identity of a Chef Who Steps Back?
For more than two decades, it was almost impossible to separate Noma from René Redzepi. The restaurant carried his curiosity, his relationship with the Nordic landscape, his appetite for fermentation, foraging and ingredients that had rarely entered the vocabulary of fine dining. Even when hundreds of cooks, researchers and producers contributed to its evolution, the…