Hey, Chef: Next Time, Skip the Fennel

Dinner Lab Brings the Wisdom of Crowds to Haute Cuisine

It was a late July evening, and Christopher Sorter had just finished cooking an exotic five-course meal that included such triple-dare dishes as beef heart ragù and crème brûlée with bone marrow. When the dinner began, there had been some apprehension about the food among the 120 guests who had gathered in a warehouselike space in Silver Spring, Md. But as waiters cleared the last plates, the event had a relieved and jubilant air, as if everyone had just narrowly dodged a bus.

Mr. Sorter is a lean, 28-year-old chef, with a perfectly coifed updo and a pair of black, nickel-sized stretchers in his earlobes, the kind that make you wonder what happens when they come out. He had joined a group of diners sitting at a long communal table, and he asked the five or six who could hear over the din of the music to weigh in on the food. They rhapsodized for a few minutes.

“O.K.,” Mr. Sorter asked, “what didn’t you like?”

This is an unusual question from anyone making haute cuisine. Typically, the pricier the food, the more likely that it’s prepared by a culinary maestro, and you wouldn’t tell this person that an entree lacks flavor for the same reason that you wouldn’t tell an artist, “That painting needs more blue.”

The chef Christopher Sorter, 28, called his Dinner Lab menu “Vonnegut” because both he and the famous author hail from Indiana.
But Mr. Sorter works for Dinner Lab, a pop-up restaurant company that started two years ago and is dedicated to the notion that high-end chefs ought to listen to customers. This is a surprisingly radical idea. Low- and midprice restaurant chains have long market-tested everything from the sesame seeds on a hamburger bun to the cream sauce on a chicken bella. But at the wallet-thinning end of the dining spectrum, you can send your compliments to the chef or you can shut up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/business/dinner-lab-brings-the-wisdom-of-crowds-to-haute-cuisine.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMediaHigh&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0