When It’s Right

As we’ve seen, how chefs accomplish that feat is through applying basic principles of menu composition to achieve their desired affect on a customer, just as great composers and playwrights can hit the right buttons that they know will make us laugh or cry.

Joyce Goldstein believes that as a chef, you must design the way a menu will affect the customer. “You have to figure out, with finger food and a three-course meal plus dessert, how many orgasms do you have in a meal? You don’t want to have four! Nothing will have any meaning, because they’ll all be the same,” she says. “So it’s, How do you want to play it? Do you start quiet and build to the second course, and then lay low and build to the third? Do you start quiet, quiet, quiet, and build? Do you hit them the first time, and let them recover? You have to choose where you think your big gun is, or the one that’s going to cause silence at the table. And you can’t do it at every course. So you just have to plot your attack. Which dish is the killer? Which is nice? Which is another little crescendo? And where’s the surprise?”