"Flavor—what manifests when you throw taste, texture, temperature, smell and experience in a little mental blender and give it a quick zizz—is a stunning cocktail of hard science and smudgy memory, and it’s a tough SOB to nail down. A well-executed plate of food has the ability to take you away for a moment, and show you a flash of memory. Is it your memory? Is it the chef’s? Great bartending, too, should transport you. At its best, a brilliant drink transmits a feeling, a reminder of something you can’t quite put your finger on.
What I found myself pondering one night, admittedly after crushing a bottle of wine, was this: what are certain dishes really trying to tell us?
The obsession with discovering inspiration—what inspired this menu, what inspired this dish, who inspires you—tends to downplay the messy complexity of what we mean when we discuss palate expression. While waxing poetic over the noble thalamus gland would be fun in a Magic School Bus kind of way, I wanted to see how the brains in question understand what’s happening up there.
In the spirit of long nights spent earnestly philosophizing in college dorm rooms, a bartender, a chef, and two sommeliers try to pinpoint the cobbled-together imaginary language they speak exclusively with their palate, and how they translate it for everyone else. "
:: Read the rest of A Matter of Taste here ::
words by Cassandra Landry, art by Elizabeth Graeber