“Hitting the right notes” in terms of the flavors within a single dish is one thing; coming up with a harmonious sequence of dishes is quite another. The focus here is on what makes a meal work and how culinary artists are able to compose a menu that flows from one course into the next—like the sentences of a paragraph of prose, like the movements of a symphony—making the whole greater than the sum of the individual parts.
Planning a menu is one of the most difficult aspects of our art. —Auguste Escoffier