Restaurant dining is not aligned with the nature of human hunger.

The fixed-portion menu is anti-human because appetite does not play by set amounts. Menus are stiff.

Imagine if you could dial in the quantity of each menu item as easy as moving a slider:

• “Give me 0.7 of the risotto.”

• “Let’s do 1.2 of the scallop tartare.”

• “Just a 0.3 of that signature dessert, enough to taste.”

You could eat to perfect fullness and satisfaction, and there would be no waste. You’d have the freedom to compose your meal as a landscape of tastes.

There’s something profound about being able to say, “This is exactly what I want and need, no more, no less.”.

But not every dish is so easily divisible. So how does one approach this?

Every dish has an essence. A dish with featuring lobster could become lobster croquette/emulsion/bisque, each, sat one “one-tenth” the experience, and you order as many as you like.

Pull this off and you stand alone in gastronomy as one who truly serves the eater, not the kitchen.

The status quo is designed around the kitchen’s production logic and the arbitrary “portion” as dictated by tradition, cost, and convenience.

But human hunger is personal. It’s in flux with mood, company, even weather. A person needs direct authorship over their own satisfaction.

Why shouldn’t you be able to dial in a meal like tuning an instrument? “Tonight I’m a 1.3 on the gnocchi, but only a whisper of the lamb.”

Small-plate concepts like tapas, izakaya, dim sum exist but are precise enough. No one is free to say “give me 0.4 of the braised eggplant.”

Software is fit to handle the complexity of dynamic portioning.

There is indeed a rise of tasting menus, but even those are dictated, not chosen.

The real game-changer is not dish into 10ths, but distilling its soul into modular, divisible experiences.

A lobster dish becomes three micro-forms: croquette, bisque, mousse, each representing a slice of the whole lobster idea.

The risotto becomes a tasting spoon, a half-portion, a full bowl and each is fully realized.

The dessert is not just a bite but an intentional essence-serving.

A chef would need to rethink dish design so every portion is complete on its own rather than being a mere piece.

The question is not “what are the main courses?” but rather “what landscape of tastes and fullness do I desire?”.

Pull this off and you’re a pioneer because you treat taste and hunger as a continuum.

Never stuffed, never wishing you had just a little more of something. The conversations it would start in gastronomy.

Unleash Your Culinary Genius

Life is taken care of via a taken-care-of stomach.

What the snow globe is to the globe, the gut is to the cosmos.

The gut is the universalizer. Food made from across the world becomes local the instant it enters the gut, the personal microcosm. Distance dissolves in the grand scheme and everything is linked.

The gut is a kind of cosmic transformer. Everything it encounters becomes here & now. Vietnamese lychee. Spanish olive. Canadian oats. These things lose their foreignness & become one w/ their distances erased via transformation in gut.

Even our understanding of distance is vastly limited, by our limited understanding of space and time. Think light speed & wormholes & more. The configuration is not what we think.

Explains why we feel at home w flavors from anywhere, bc once tasted, they functionally *become* home.

The evidence-basers trail the gut-feelers.

Removing the bran & germ from the grain was a mistake. Nature engineered the grain to build and clear at the same time.

A complete system.

Refinement is surely better for mass production. And therein lies the source of the problem.

You are left with only the endosperm which is essentially pure energy that needs to be catapulted.

An athlete or warrior can catapult it. Question is can you.

Nature made food to be a self-contained dual-action (nourishing + clearing) system. Tampering creates major ripples.

But its Nourishing power, some of it, is locked until transformed, that is, fermented naturally. What they call sourdough. The architecture changes and a sort of tang emerges. Chewy airy crumb, complex flavor profile, deep color crust.

The farm and the restaurant are businesses of the past. But they are also businesses of the future. Combined, they are in the timeless business of food creation … the business of life, presence, and integrated gastronomy.

Imagine if this were a stripped down version of your coveted dish.

You keep the real recipe secret but you release this seed of a recipe out into the wild to spread knowledge of the basic taste and texture profile.

Imagine the wonder that would spark.

Engage the sense of smell.

Various coloured & textured seaweed and seafood. Combined with fire and water.

Table with the aroma of sea.

The real reason to show calorie counts on the menu is to give the customer an insight into the satiety level of the dish.

Gastronomy and travel are one continuous circuit. You want that natural restaurant-hotel duo. Or an Airbnb host who knows the best local spots. New terrain, new ingredients, and thus new perception, on multiple levels.

If a city can adopt the universally-loved French & Italian gastronomies while also combining them with its own ingredients to create novel things ... that's some smart innovation.

We need more companies like Mud Scone. Local wheat and oat scones handcrafted with pure ingredients … creative & stunning flavour pairings.

Dessert is the universal craving and it transcends culture. So that you generally expect to feel bad/guilt/heaviness after dessert is an abomination that should be solved quickly.

A delicious meal teaches you that striving is basically futile. Things are literally handed to you on a platter.

Korea restauranteurs tend to have great respect for ingredient quality. They are clear and quick to say what is local/seasonal/organic in the traditional dishes. In Southeast Asia, contrarily, this is rarely done for traditional dishes. Only for the hipster brunch bowls.

A restaurant with no set menu, but just a set of ingredients. And the customer can design their own meal.

Suppose you can 'build your own' cheesecake from wholesome ingredients and a robot arm prepares your custom-made order in seconds.

Different base options:

• buttery shortbread date, coconut, almond, fig, etc

Different cream layers:

• blueberry, lavender, chocolate, pumpkin, etc
  

Mix and match.

Breakfast is exciting, lunch is cozy, and dinner is up for grabs.

A delicious meal is the epitome of presence and peace.

Southeast Asia transformed and never looked back after it acquired sourdough and learned the ways of the colorful bowl.

We need not another plant-based cafe but a plant-and-dairy-based one.

What's stopping you from becoming a three-ingredient magician?

Fine dining generally plays it safe with dessert. Cheesecake, tiramisu, ice cream with the usual flavours. Artisan street shops have novelty.

But there's much potential here. A local/seasonal ingredient not designed to be sweet, like mustard leaf or lotus root. Or scope out something bitter and zesty and transform.

The simple + stunning things that a restaurant can conjure with technology and taste.

You can pour 75% of the hot chocolate in, add whipped cream, and then pour the remaining 25%, effectively sandwiching the cream, allowing it to integrate rapidly and create a richer hot chocolate.

In the coming decades when the native-born culinarily-skilled population of Korea/Japan/Europe/SEA collapses to zero, so too will the ancient & traditional recipes. However ... as long as the fertility of the *Earth* remains, and ingredients are plentiful and diverse ... novel food innovations will emerge. The world will continue spinning.

One of the few things that will not only survive AI but go on to explode in significance is the growing, making, pairing, and eating of delicious food in a cozy and vibrant environment. Office buildings will be uprooted and trees will be planted in their place … and any city that does not follow suit will fade in relevance.

The end game for impeccable restaurant & cafe service is emotionally intelligent robots.

Encapsulating childhood food memories into an edible product with pristine ingredients is always a smart idea.

Imagine if this were a restaurant where the food was cooked and served on different kinds of stone.

Farming is about to become so huge. I don’t think you realize. AI will render white collar work obsolete for a human. Blue collar work like stacking boxes is for the robots. Farming is physical but also soft and nuanced. You can’t automate everything nor can you code everything. It’s the final boss but the irony is, it was the first boss … that we thought we’d defeated. No. Food and nature is life. There’s no defeating this. There’s only harnessing it to the fullest degree.

A city must do everything it can to become natureful and gastronomic. Farms, cafes, restaurants, as much as you can comfortably fit. Invest in sound internet. Solid transportation but also walkable. Clean air. With AI taking care of the white and robots taking care of the blue, this is really not a big ask.

Industries come and go but agriculture is one that will never die. It just gets reimagined and revitalized. Music is another. In fact food and music make a great pair. Taste is the common thread here. It’s the maker and the glue of everything.

Imagine a restaurant where the menu vividly described each item. "Each almond carries a gentle floral essence—vanilla-like and warm—brought to life by the slow roast. The caramel, rich and golden, clings to every curve, laced with sea salt that sharpens and deepens the sweetness." Fun eating.

A restaurant gets repeat customers by taking care of not just taste, satiation, and experience but also digestion. Digestion is overlooked.

Imagine a restaurant that prioritized the transformation of food as much as the taste of it. Delicious food that your body wholly accepts and flawlessly transforms. Food that is so perfect that you are fully present while eating.

A restaurant with modern but elegant architecture.

I'd love to sit in a restaurant with ~20 mini courses where each course is accompanied by carefully chosen acoustic melody that plays loud enough to enhance the aura of the specific dish but soft enough to allow for meaningful conversation.

To really taste food you must see through the world and its abstractions and see directly into the nature of the ingredients.

Know the tastes & textures and even intangible qualities — and the food becomes that much more perceivable (and delicious).

Put your mind on airplane mode then proceed to eat an immersive multi-course meal.

You don’t truly perceive a dish until you can trace back every taste to its respective ingredient. None of this is necessarily done consciously.

And when tastes combine you can detect the synthesized flavour but also the building blocks, all at the same time. Then the notes register forever in your memory, recallable.

As a kid you’d see food as an arcade. Every flavour & texture was new and exciting to you. You’d be immersed in the moment. Then you became an adult

.

Every dish I eat, I look for my outlook to be refreshed and transformed. To see an ingredient in a whole new light. To notice a texture that has thus far remained unnoticed. To detect a new subtle note. I put my old self on the chopping block every time.

Part 2 here.