Say what you like about McDonald’s, but the system works. A Big Mac in Stockholm tastes like a Big Mac in Singapore tastes like a Big Mac in Cape Town. That is the whole point. No surprises, no risk, no soul required. You are not buying a meal. You are buying a guarantee.
Fine dining used to be the opposite. One restaurant, one chef, one room. If you wanted that food, you travelled to it. That was the deal. The food lived where the chef lived.
Now look around.
Nobu has more than fifty restaurants and a chain of hotels.
Wolfgang Puck went from one legendary room in Los Angeles to a global operation with a supermarket line on the side.
Gordon Ramsay’s name now appears in around ninety restaurants, including one at Heathrow, where you can eat the brand between security and the gate.
We have been there twice. To borrow the man’s own vocabulary, it is appalling.
Daniel Boulud and Yannick Alléno, quieter names, each have empires of their own. The plates are polished, the rooms are beautiful, and the same name appears on doors eight time zones apart.
It is not a blueprint like the burger. Nobody is measuring the black cod with a ruler. The restaurants have their own profiles, and the menus differ from city to city.
But the concept is the concept.
Take a name that worked once, in one room, and roll it out. The chef’s name does the fronting. The brigade does the cooking. Fine dining as a franchise. The tasting menu as a Happy Meal with better lighting.
Here is our problem. We know all this. And we still make the reservations.
We know Gordon Ramsay is not standing in the kitchen at Pétrus in London. We go anyway. For the restaurant, the reputation and, if we are honest, the name.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes we sit there eating a beautiful, faultless dinner, and we cannot say a single thing was wrong except that we did not like it. Something was missing.
We wanted the person. We got the brand. But we were still hoping.
To be clear, these kitchens are not bad. They are often led by seriously competent head chefs and brigades, some of them brilliant. A famous chef does not need to plate every dish personally for a restaurant to have a pulse.
But the name on the door promises something. Presence. Judgment. A point of view. The feeling that this food belongs to this person and this room.
Sometimes that promise survives without them. Sometimes it does not.
And when the chef is actually there, we go soft like schoolchildren.
When we saw Clare Smyth in the kitchen as we walked into Core, we felt it. When Daniel Berlin meets you at the door at Vyn with a hug, you feel it. We have not tasted a thing, and somewhere inside we have already decided the evening is saved.
Rational? Not really.
We still want to believe the food tastes better when the person whose name brought us there is standing behind it.
We wanted the person. We got the brand. But we were still hoping.
Here is the uncomfortable part. Michelin does not seem to mind. Stars land on the outposts too.
A system built to find the singular now also rewards the repeatable, because the repeatable is easier to deliver and harder to get wrong. Consistency is a virtue, they say.
McDonald’s agrees.
To be fair, Michelin has a point. The star belongs to the restaurant, not the chef. A serious kitchen should not fall apart because one person has left the building. A strong brigade can hold the line for years, and often does.
But Anthony Bourdain understood the distinction. Cooking on television does not make someone a chef. A chef leads a kitchen. They taste, correct and decide. They arrive before the cooks, leave after them and work at least as hard.
The biggest names earned that title long ago. The hours, the burns, the years of someone else’s shouting. No one is taking a single success away.
They just do not lead kitchens anymore.
They lead brands.
The next model is already everywhere. Watch the luxury hotels.
A hotel group builds something new and wants a famous name above the restaurant. So it hires one.
The chef designs the menu, poses for the opening photographs and flies home. The name stays on the door. The chef is already on the way to the next opening.
The kitchen may be excellent. The resident team may be talented. But the guest is not booking the resident team. The guest is booking the name.
Win for the hotel. Win for the chef.
The bill lands on the guest.
A burger is supposed to taste the same everywhere. A great dinner is not.
A great dinner tastes like one person, on one night, in one room, deciding things. The dinners that stay forever were never repeatable. That was what made them.
So no, fine dining has not become McDonald’s. Not yet.
But it has learned the recipe.
