Maybe if I creep up on this thing slowly—this spirit-destroying guinea worm wriggling around inside me, threatening my happiness, making me a bad person—maybe if I stab blindly at him with a cocktail fork, with a lucky shot I can reel the whole fucker out and resume life as it was before.

Why are there voices in my head—making me ask…questions?

Like this one:

At the end of the day, would a good and useful criterion for evaluating a meal be “Was it fun?”

Meaning: after many courses of food, sitting in the taxi on the way home, when you ask yourself or your dinner companion, “Was that a good time?” is the answer a resounding “Yes! Yes! My God, yes!”—or would it, on balance, have been more fun spending the evening at home on the couch with a good movie and a pizza?

Perhaps, given the expense and seriousness of the enterprise—and the fact that, presumably, you had to dress for dinner—a fairer question might be “Was it better than a really good blow job?” As this is the intended result of so many planned nights on the town, would you—having achieved touchdown before even getting up from the couch—have then bothered to go out to dinner at all?

Okay. It’s apples and oranges. How can you compare two completely different experiences? It’s situational. It’s unfair. It’s like asking if you’d prefer a back massage now—or a life without ever having seen a Cézanne or Renoir.

How about this, then? Same situation. You’re on your way home from the menu dégustation (or whatever they’re calling it). You’re sitting in the back of that same taxi, and you ask yourself an even simpler question:

“How do I feel?”

That’s fair, isn’t it?

Do you feel good?

How’s your stomach?

Could what you just had—assuming you’re with a date—be described, by any stretch of the imagination, as a “romantic” experience? Honestly now. I know you spent a lot of money. But look across the seat at the woman with you. Do you really think she’s breathlessly anticipating getting back to your apartment to ride you like the Pony Express? Or do you think it far more likely that (like you) she’s counting the seconds till she can get away for a private moment or two and discreetly let loose with a backlog of painfully suppressed farts? That what she’d much prefer to do right now, rather than submit to your gentle thrusting, is to roll, groaning and miserable, into bed, praying she’s not going to heave up four hundred dollars worth of fine food and wine?

And you—are you even up to the job? Any thoughts of sexual athleticism likely disappeared well before the cheese course.

That’s a fair criterion, right? Least you could ask of a meal—by classical standards, anyway.

To establish precedent, let’s take Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli in Spain—perhaps the longest and most famous of the tasting menus. After the full-on experience there—about five sustained hours of eating and drinking—I felt pretty good. I hung around drinking gin and tonics for another two hours—after which I could, I believe, have performed sexually and then happily gone out for a snack.

Le Bernardin in New York offers a “Chef ’s Tasting Menu” and I always feel fine after. Both meals are pretty carefully calibrated experiences. Laurent Gras’s L2O in Chicago, Andoni Aduriz’s Mugaritz in Saint Sebastian both take a modest and reasoned approach to the limits of the human appetite.

I mentioned chefs dreading tasting menus.

Consider the curse of Ferran Adrià. Not Ferran Adrià the chef, restaurateur, and creative artist. Ferran Adrià the diner—the “eater,” as he puts it. Ferran Adrià the frequent flyer. Doomed to walk this earth subjected to every jumped-up tasting menu, every wrongheaded venture in “molecular gastronomy” (a term he no longer uses), the interminable, well-intended ministrations of every admirer in every city and every country he may go. Imagine being Ferran Adrià. Food and wine festivals, chefs’ conferences, book tours, symposia. Everywhere he goes, there’s no getting out of it: he either gets dragged proudly to what his local handlers see as his kindred spirit—or he’s just obliged, when in Melbourne or Milwaukee or wherever, to pay homage to the local Big Dog, who’s famously worshipful of him. There’s no slipping in and out of town quietly without dissing somebody. He’s got to go.

One twenty-, thirty-course tasting menu after another, one earnest but half-baked imitator after another, wheeling out the tongue-scorching liquid nitrogen, the painfully imitative, long-discarded-by-Adrià foams, the clueless aping of Catalonian traditions they’ve probably never experienced firsthand.

And all the guy wants is a fucking burger.

Ferran Adrià walks into a bar…it’s like a joke, right? Only, I’m guessing, it’s no longer a joke to him. Because Ferran Adrià can’t walk into a bar—without six or seven freebie courses he never wanted showing up in front of him. When all he wanted was a burger.

Thomas Keller surely knows this pain. If the stories are true, when Keller goes out to dinner, an assistant calls ahead and explicitly orders the restaurant to not, under any circumstances, send any extra courses. There will be no unasked-for amuse-bouches. The chef does not want to see your interpretation of his signature “oysters and pearls.” He’s coming in for your chicken on a stick—which is quite good or he wouldn’t be coming—so please, leave the man alone.

You’re thinking, oh, the poor dears, great chefs all over the world wanting to stuff expensive ingredients in their faces…fuck them! But c’mon…Imagine, day after day, tired from long flights, one hotel bed after another, bleary-eyed, exhausted, craving nothing more complicated than Mom’s meatloaf, a simple roasted chicken—and here it comes, another three-hour extravaganza, usually a less good version of what you do for a living every day. It’s like being an overworked porn star and everywhere you go in your off-hours people are grabbing your dick and demanding a quickie.

Sitting here, wrestling with my reaction to last night’s meal at Per Se, I look back again; I search my memory for details from that greatest meal of my life at the French Laundry. There were me, Eric Ripert, Scott Bryan, and Michael Ruhlman. Twenty-two-some-odd courses—most of them different for each of us. God knows how many wines. A perfect, giddily excited five hours in wine country, thoughtfully punctuated by piss breaks. No one could have asked for more of a meal. Every plate seemed fresh and new—not just the ingredients, but the concepts behind them as well. It was a magical evening filled with many magical little moments. Those memories come back first:

The silly expressions on all our faces at the arrival of the famous cones of salmon tartare—how the presentation “worked” exactly as it was supposed to. Even on the chefs and on Ruhlman, Keller’s coauthor on the cookbook.

The surprise course of “Marlboro-infused coffee custard with pan-seared foie gras,” a dish designed specifically for me—at the time still a three-pack-a-day smoker—an acknowledgment that I was probably tweaking for a butt around that time.

The “oysters and pearls” dish—how thrilled I was to finally taste what I’d only gaped at previously in the lush pages of The Book. How they did not disappoint—if anything, only exceeded expectations. The way the waiter’s hands trembled and shook as he shaved a gigantic black truffle over our pasta courses. How he dropped it—and how, with a look, we all agreed not to tell.

The four of us, during another break before dessert, drunk and whispering like kids on Halloween in the Laundry’s rear garden as we snuck up to the kitchen window and spied enviously on Keller and his crew.

After-dinner drinks in the garden with the chef. Dark by now—and very late, the restaurant closing down. The way Keller seemed to vibrate at another, slower, deeper pitch than every other chef I’d met. He seemed a happy yet still restless man, sitting there, surrounded by growing things, the place he’d built. I asked the famously workaholic chef if he’d ever consider taking time off—just doing nothing for a month—and he reacted as if I’d asked the question in Urdu, tilting his head and trying to make out what I possibly could have meant. I remember pulling away in our ridiculous rented prom limousine, knowing that I had had the best meal of my life.