Resolute Portland correspondent Kit reports from:
where the menu degustation once included a single giant French fry.
Jade on 36 in Shanghai serves “avant garde” food. Is avant garde relevant in these postmodern times?
My personal experience with molecular gastronomy (other than armchair) is limited, but I have an opinion anyway.
Vanguard cuisine in 1979 was Nouvelle Cuisine and I spent that year (nearly all the hours of it other than sleeping and eating a few bbq potato chips late at night) in the kitchen of Le Pavillon, experimental, fantastical, pure, essential , and above all, radical. Reading about the vanguard of 70’s haute cuisine, it sounds so tame, with barely an echo registered. Not true, in fact. Okay, there was ridiculousness, and that went to the cutting room floor. Food these days, without the incorporation of nouvelle cuisine notions and practice would be stodgy and dull. It’s an open and shut case.
Molecular gastronomy will fare similarly in culinary history’s great sausage machine, imho. Not sure which gizmos and devices will stick though…
“BLT Chic”
Yes!
“Bread”
No! I draw the line at foam.
With all due respect to Jeffrey Steingarten who claims in The Man Who Ate Everything, “No smells or tastes are innately repulsive”, before he goes on to sketch out his “Six-Step Program to liberate my palate and soul.” He’s absolutely right, of course. It’s all learned.
The Lunch Encounter 
lovely food porn