Fine dining is very important. I will help you being taken seriously. If you know fine-dining with all its details, you will look credible. I am not writing about this topic to get you knowledge per se. Don’t underestimate it: most important discussions happen over lunch or dinner. Your dinner with the partner of your law firm or consulting firm, that casual meeting with your client after work, the MD of your investment banking firm treating the associates for lunch at this fancy Manhattan restaurant, that lunch with your future in-laws (also important, right?), etc. You should know how fine-dining is “organised”, e.g. when to order white and red wine, not to order beer or coke (at least outside the US…), what is proper cooking and what is BS. My favourite is “What is this? You can eat that?”
What is good food and who decides it?
As the British and Italians used to dominate the worldwide dress code, it were originally the French who dominated the world of fine-dining. These days French cooking is a slight bit on the retreat due to the rise of Spanish & Japanese cuisine as well also the molecular cooking method. However, the starting point is French. And French cuisine is ranked, in typical absolutistic terms of l’etat c’est moi, by one central organisation, the Michelin guide. 
Forget bottom-up Zagat guide, TripAdvisor and all those food-bloggers. What is good and what is not, is decided by a few chosen one, the Michelin testers who taste food anonymously and rank it depending on their star-rating. They decide for you. 3-stars is high, 2 stars medium, 1 star the starting point. There is also a less-famous casual ranking called the “Bib gourmand” as well as the general list of restaurants in their guide, at least in most cities (I think only Tokyo has a complete guide where every single restaurant has at least one star, different to Hong Kong, Singapore and soon-to-be-published Seoul).
Michelin guides get updated every year and exist worldwide in the major cities. Traditionally strong in France and continental Europe, they also get published for the US and Asia. While in Europe the guides existed already for decades, it was probably the launch of the Tokyo and Hong Kong guide which caused a new interest. The reason behind it, is that in Europe, especially France, restaurants with stars would usually be above average price-points. That means, for a 3-star lunch you would have to spend at least a 100 EUR per person, probably more. A lunch with your family would easily cost a few hundred Euros, so you would not celebrate going to Michelin restaurants for simple financial reasons. My father, who loved eating and cooking and certainly didn’t have a problem with paying a lot for food, never took me to one when I was younger. Maybe because there were no websites back in the day where you could look it up, maybe because it seemed to flashy for us. Michelin means serious food for serious occasions, you could say.
This is very different in Hong Kong and also partly different in Tokyo, as Michelin decided to include very small cheap restaurants and award them with stars. While Tokyo is still VERY pricey, eating according to the guide in Hong Kong can be fairly cheap and reasonable. Hong Kong can sometimes be a quite funny experience, as many of the 1-star restaurants are very casual and don’t look like proper restaurants, more like food stalls or cantines.
I myself have so far only been to two 2-star restaurants and various 1-stars. You can definitely realise a difference between a starred restaurant and a non-starred. It’s usually better and more consistent cooking, they don’t screw up things. However, the two 2-star restaurants were not that impressive. I have also talked about this with other food-lovers and we all concluded that there is just so much thrill you can generate with your food, until it gets really stagnant. I love the Michelin guide and I use both website and book to find new restaurants. If you live in Western Europe, chances are high that you can find good restaurants in your neighbourhood via their website. Try to visit some that are at least Bib-Gourmand-rated. My secret criteria is usually whether they have white table-cloth or not, which gives me an indicator 1. how conservative they are, 2. if they care about the details.
What is the basic structure of fine dining?
Handling the menu is not that difficult. If you are insecure, just order the course. A serious restaurant usually has at least one lunch course and one dinner course. But then try to understand the structure of the courses. I have seen people at business lunches who would not know in which order to get their food. And then order a coke on top of it………..embarrassing, embarrassing….try to avoid it…
You should know this, but for completeness of this entry, let me throw out the basics:
- Oftentimes you will be asked if you want to order drinks first. If you don’t know, order a bottle of (sparkling) water, but in France they will give you a bottle of tap water for free anyway.
- After you make your food order, you will be often be given a “greeting from the kitchen” or “amuse bouche”. That’s free, so don’t send it back!!! Chefs often give this to test out a creative combination they are working on.
- Then starts your meal with the cold appetiser, which can be a salad or something light, often vegetable-based. French restaurants have a lot of cold cuts/cured meats. Try them, they are usually delicious. Italian restaurants often have a “antipasti misti”, a combo of mixed cold products usually with a lot of meat. If you are in a rural area in Italy, you have to try it, as it’s all local produce.
…cold appetizers….
- You can also have a warm appetiser like a soup. And usually you can choose between a cold or a warm appetiser. But of course, if you have time you can also order both.
- For Italian restaurants: pasta is a warm appetiser, not a main dish, at least traditionally. Unless it’s a super formal restaurant or occasion, you can of course have the pasta or any other dish as your main dish.
- Then you have your main-dish. For most folks that’s meat-based or, especially for a lunch, fish-based. As many meat dishes will serve you some form of beef, try to go beyond that and shoot for fish or pork dishes. Ask for the details of the sauces, those are usually the real deal.
….a fish-based main-dish…. - What you eat will decide what you drink: traditionally, you can choose between water and wine, nothing more (but these days you also see people ordering all sorts of cocktails which is ok in fancy restaurants). If your main dish is red meat, you go for red wine. If it’s anything else, you go for white wine. If you don’t know and/or if the occasion allows, go for champagne (a glass!). NEVER order beer or let alone soft drinks (In fact, never drink beer at all, unless it’s a high school bbq. There is nothing more indicative of the working class than beer).
- You can order a dessert. I never eat cake, as it puts you in food-coma afterwards. If you want to look healthy, get a fruit-salad. If you want to enjoy, get a panna cotta or a chocolate souffle. And if you want to look really like you know your stuff, ask for a grand marnier (orange liquor) souffle or an espresso with a shot of grand marnier
….often also called a “petit four”, a mini combo of sweets instead of a dessert….good restaurants will throw this in for free - Sometimes you can also have a combination of cheese instead of dessert. If they have a good selection go for it, but be aware of the calories!
French or French-oriented restaurants have usually the most complex dishes. All those sauces, herbs and cooking techniques….Italian cooking is more product-oriented, so it’s actually more simple to learn and understand the menu. While you can easily have seven or even nine different courses in a French restaurant, the Italians keep it a bit more simple (that’s not to say Italians cannot create complex flavours!).
There are lots of other blogs or also books where you can read and learn about food. I would like to bring your attention more on the fact that you need to know certain ingredients and dishes. You can easily impress your boss, if you know the truffle seasons or the difference of white vs. black truffle for example. Or if you can spot the nationality of the head-chef by just looking at the menu (usually they include their home-cooking or the place where they learned to cook with a few dishes or ingredients, I was once offered a white-wine tarragon sauce (do you know the flavour of tarragon?) at a steak-house…tataaa, the chef was from Alsace). Or on the contrary, you will look rather weird if you order a glass of deep red Spanish Shiraz to your fish-dish. Don’t underestimate it. Think of it like going to work in jeans and t-shirt.
upward mobility~ 