AI versus the great chefs of Europe and the World

“VOILÀ!” declares the chatbot, assuming the voice of your favorite chef. “Here is the pièce de résistance.”

You nod and smile.

“Behold the kaleidoscope of ingredients, the gorgeous symmetry of the plating, the meticulous tweezering of the microgreens.”

You nod and salivate.

“Inhale the aroma, taste the way it enraptures your mouth…”

But you get nothing but air on your state-of-the-art Apple, Inc. mixed-reality headset.

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) threatens much of the status quo, but top chefs aren’t going to be displaced any time soon. The experience of haute cuisine — or indeed of anything that comes out of a kitchen — is an intricate interplay of the sensory, the emotional, and the locational. All that — plus the satisfaction of scoring a tough reservation — is impossible to replicate with machine learning.

A lot of people really want to return to restaurants, fight with waiters, and be awed or perturbed by the pretensions of chefs. As my colleague Leticia Miranda recently pointed out, the COVID-era solution to hospitality industry costs and overhead — the ghost kitchen — has quietly gone out of fashion because dining isn’t just about getting a box of food in front of you. My fellow opinionista, Ben Schott, warns about the perils of “Cur-AI-tion”: You get a sameness of recommendations, while the sense of discovery dissipates.

Only you can eat your own meal, and each restaurant visit is personal. It all contributes to foodie debates about Michelin stars and what rises or falls on the ladder of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants’ ladder — which was announced last night. I was gratified to see Central of Lima, run by Virgilio Enriquez and Pia Leon (who are married), take the No. 1 slot. (Leon’s own restaurant Kjolle came in at 28.) Another husband-and-wife team — Junghyun and Ellia Park of Atomix in New York City — took the No. 8 slot. I’ve dined at Central a number of times and been to Atomix (and the Parks’ other restaurants) on countless occasions. I was happy to see London’s Ikoyi rise in the rankings too. My appetites feel justified.

At the center of every restaurant experience is the star presence of the chefs, the best of whom exude a supple kind of charisma that AI has yet to master. They’ve been capitalizing on this pop-up cult of personality for a while now.

I certainly jumped at the chance when Bertrand Grebaut of Septime (No. 24) had a one-night appearance at Frenchie in Covent Garden here in London in early May. And now I am more excited than ever to dine at his actual place in the 11th arrondissement in Paris. Sometimes you get to see a brilliant chef who no longer has a restaurant, as was the case of the legendary Kobe Desramaults — who used to run In De Wolf in Belgium. He made a two-day appearance at Lyle’s in London, and I made sure I got in on day one.

In London, the celebrated West African chef Adejoke Bakare is waiting to open her new location. In the meantime, she’s launched a series of collaborations with other local chefs at The Globe Tavern in Borough Market. On Tuesday evening, she was cooking with Sirichai Kularbwong, whose Thai restaurant Singburi in Leytonstone was a delightful surprise on the National Restaurant Awards list of the UK’s 100 best eateries.

The pop-up phenomenon is just about 10 years old. Contra in New York City began inviting famous chefs from overseas and across the US to cook for a night or two at the restaurant on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side. New Yorkers who couldn’t find the time or cash to fly to London, Brussels, Tokyo, or Copenhagen get the chance to bask in the presence of chef celebrities (and taste their food).

The Grand Gelinaz took off around the same time: In 2015, it had 37 of the top chefs of the world switch places with their colleagues, each cooking in a different location, with diners buying tickets not knowing which chef would show up where. It was a delicious mess, with cooks materializing in kitchens they were completely unused to. “Why isn’t the water boiling?” was a common complaint. Still, gourmets got to know and taste fare of talents from oceans away.

Now there are restaurants — or halls, to be more accurate — whose business models are all about accommodating visiting chefs: lovely places whose charm is all about impermanence, such as Early June in Paris and Carousel and Oranj in London. Some terrific cooks (like Anthony Ha and Sadie Mae Burns of Ha’s Dac Biet) seem to go from pop-up to pop-up. One young cook at Early June insists that he likes working for pop-ups because he learns so much from each of the guests who show up in Paris. Still, he’d like to start his own brick-and-mortar restaurant one day.

Popping-up can cut other ways, though. As chef-owners are all too aware, it’s difficult to hang on to talent in the post-COVID era. That may be because sous chefs and veteran servers are taking their expertise and popping up at establishments that will accommodate their preferred work schedules. They come and go because the market is adjusting to transience.

Will technology eventually catch up to all this? I can imagine the day when chef Rasmus Munk of the Alchemy in Copenhagen (which came in at an impressive No. 5 in the 50 Best) will beam a hologram of himself to outlets where anointed acolytes prepare an actual meal — keeping his IRL presence as the premium for visitors to the original in the Danish capital.

“Nothing is permanent,” says John Ogier, one of the founders of the Lasdun, the wonderful new restaurant at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank. But it’s a lovely evening by the Thames. The late sunset streams in through the beautiful brutalism of Denys Lasdun’s architecture. The food by chef Tom Harris is marvelous — a sumptuous chicken and mushroom pie, smoked eel on potato pancake. We conversed about his life cooking around London and the world. I tried not to sneak a peek at Nigella Lawson, who was dining by the window. How can anything artificial ever compare to a summer day like that?

BLOOMBERG OPINION