Food Wine and Dining
What could be more revealing of human nature than the act of dining out? It’s a seductive experience, fine dining. Even the setting is one that exposes. An evening of elegant debauchery, where all our senses are engaged, our voyeurism indulged, and intimacies unmasked.
Tastes, choices, judgments — what do they signify, what do they say about us, and what impact will they have on our lives?
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ensuality, indulgence, appetite, flavor, aesthetics, compliments and contradictions, manners, imagination, memory and emotions, subjectivity and solipsism, truth, lies, denial, generosity and betrayal, harmony and friendship, closure, new selves — dining embraces all of these things. And all within a setting of elegance and ceremony. Course following course of sumptuous dishes and splendid wines, the finest tableware and accoutrements, conversation fascinating and intimate, the courtly deference of restaurant staff, even perhaps the admiration of other diners. How could you not succumb to such an atmosphere?
This is the space of all possibilities, after all. A place of intriguing artifice...
This is the space of all possibilities, after all. A place of intriguing artifice. Within it even space and time are different. The world is so much smaller — just your table and its surrounds — while the evening passes in a discontinuous stream of rushings and meanderings. Events in such a world cannot help but grow in significance, the most seemingly trivial comments or acts elevated. Hints of affection, compliments, slights, betrayals, things meant or not — every word or action will acquire sharper meaning, penetrate more deeply into the psyche, and emerge to play a part later as the evening unfolds.
For dining is a kind of transmutation (this is but one of its secrets), more than the metamorphosis of ingredients into dishes. It will take your very essence — feelings, motives, aspirations, desires — and distill this ever more purely, at each stage of the evening.
The alchemists of old sought the elixir of life. Dining’s alchemy leaves a quintessance more tantalizing —the enhanced understanding of yourself and searing insight into others.
(This insight provides the driving force for our latest category: You — the Diner. In a narrative beginning 0n June 30, 2008 and lasting thirty bi-weekly episodes, it explores how and why the experience of dining out changes people's lives. Four tables of diners, at the mercy of what they bring with them and what they find already there. Not to be missed. )
