The Menu as Shared Experience

“We’ve lost that sense of the menu as a composition,” says Mark Miller. “The idea of a holistic experience, a shared perceptual experience, as opposed to ‘ordering something’—I think that’s part of what food has lost. It’s become commercial. Women chefs in particular are much more attached to menus. They are, I believe, much more concerned with creating a sense of family, the bonding of food and the social process, and the menu itself and how things flow from one thing to the other. There’s an emotional quotient in food that I think women understand better than men.”