Tasting Menu: A Reading

This 12-minute reading is from The Soul of a Chef, on my first experience with a tasting menu. Though I had special consideration at the meal—I was not a paying customer—it is an honest and emotional description of what remains the most important restaurant meal of my life. I thought it apropos, following my previous post addressing recent criticisms in the media of today’s tasting menus. It’s not a polished video—I simply set up a tripod in my kitchen before dinner and read—so please forgive my lack of video production skills!

[For more information on what led up to my unlikely passage from unknown Cleveland-based writer to dinner at The French Laundry and what was to follow, read The Main Dish, a 35-page memoir of becoming an accidental food writer. It was published as a Kindle Single, $1.99, and is available on all devices (iPads, etc.); just download the free Kindle app.]

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My first run-in with Tony Bourdain happened to be in print when he reviewed The Soul of a Chef for The New York Times Book Review.


My book The Making of a Chef had not been published at the time of the meal in question, making my presence there all the more unlikely.
One of my assistant Emilia’s favorite tasting menus was had in Switzerland at Chef Phillipe Rochat’s Hotel de Ville.
Video: Next versus elBulli: Preparing for the elBulli tasting at Next restaurant in Chicago.
Not only Copenhagen’s top restaurant but, some say, the world’s: Noma.

© 2013 Michael Ruhlman. Photo © 2013 Donna Turner Ruhlman. All rights reserved.