From subtle asian cooking:
"A Defense on Fine Dining:
TL;DR: It's not just small plates and expensive food.
This is addressed to no one in particular, but after noticing some disparaging comments regarding a recent post on a chef's miso glazed salmon I felt like I had to speak out. I'm by no means an expert, but I consider myself someone who's really into food and I've had the honour to try some pretty good places around the globe.
For some people, there seems to be this interesting idea that fine dining boils down to expensive plates of food with minuscule portions. "I would need ten plates of this to be full!" or "I can just go to AYCE!" or "I'd need a microscope to eat this"
But this is pretty far from what fine dining is and should be. It's about celebrating great ingredients and telling stories. It's about taking a bite of something and recalling a moment of your childhood, calibrated perfectly to evoke a feeling. Or it's about a taking you through a journey of the seasons to paint images in your mind of Autumn through food. In that way, it's art. Similar to going to a museum or attending a symphony -- but we don't see people ask why you go to a symphony or a concert when you can just play instruments at home.
Some people think that it's egregious to charge a lot of money for something without taking the time to understand how it gets to their plate. They don't know that a fisherman line caught a 50kg fish and took it to a fishmonger who's the third generation working there, who then trusts only a few chefs to be able to capture the wonder of that ingredient. They don't see that the chef has put in decades of his or her life to perfecting the techniques required to bring out the best in that dish.
They don't know that the perfectly cooked morsels of chicken are from a chicken that was raised on the restaurant's own property.
They don't see the chef working for countless years to perfect a fucking tamago -- a single piece in your progression of omakase.
They may see ice cream on some pink ice. In fact, it's pickled watermelon kakigori with salted ricotta ice cream and a drizzle of olive oil, a culmination of a chef's training in Western and Asian cuisine actualized into a single dessert.
Or they see a turnip, not realizing that a chef who's trained in multiple countries has decided to have it on his tasting menu since the inception of his restaurant, one of the best in the world for years because of the subtle way it changes throughout the seasons, and how to continue to iterate upon it to improve it.
It kind of sucks. Some people see a tomato without realizing that it is a tomato of all tomatoes, infused with the smokiness of Japanese binchotan charcoal. Maybe they'll never know that a single bite of it transports your mind for a moment to the streets of Omoide Yokocho, where the inviting aroma of binchotan signals delicious bites are to be had all around.
People have all sorts of vices: luxury brands, luxury vehicles, travel, hypebeast clothing, and much more. We all have things that we don't understand.
But just because we don't understand something, it doesn't make it better or worse. It doesn't give us the right to judge someone else's passion. I don't judge people for paying $2000 for a bag, because if they can afford it and they truly enjoy it, why not?
Thanks for reading through this slog of a post. I hope you appreciated my TED Talk. And for those of you who are on the fence about trying fine dining, it really is a wonderful thing! Don't let small plates stop you. After all, if you need 10 small plates, most tasting menus have at least 12 
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