Adam Reiner, Author at The Restaurant Manifesto

1. DA’ SOLO – Ancona, Italy

Italian Chef Giuseppe Ciabolongo’s remote one-seat restaurant, nestled away in the hills of the Marché, has the distinction of being this year’s top restaurant. Reservations must be made ten years in advance since Da’ Solo only serves one guest per night—a solitary feast which often lasts over fifteen hours. Eager gastrophiles must be patient since the restaurant is only open four days a year, on the Summer and Winter Solstice and the Vernal and Autumnal Equinox.

2. TWIG & BERRIES – London, England

Native Londoner Mildred Cooms serves a menu of exclusively animal genitalia and reproductive organs at her trendy London gastropub. The uterine design of the dining room soothes guests with a womb-like comfort as they dig into Chef Cooms’ signature Spit-Roasted Duck Testicles with Cod Sperm Béarnaise.

3. FIELD OF DREAMS – Fargo, USA

The Farm-to-Table movement gets turned upside down at this rustic eatery in the middle of a soybean field in rural North Dakota. Former New York Chef Arlen Meecham tests his culinary skill by importing genetically-modified hothouse produce and factory-raised meats presenting them in a beautiful pastoral setting designed to trick locavores into thinking they’re eating organically.

4. BISTRO DERRIÈRE – Marseille, France

Guests at Jean-Pierre Lispenard’s neo-French bistro eschew forks and knives enjoying a multi-course tasting menu delivered rectally. Lispenard relies heavily on molecular gastronomy to distill complex flavors into suppositories which are administered to his guests by a staff of registered nurses. The talented sommeliers can also pair wines with retro-fitted bidets beneath the banquettes that bathe your undercarriage with a focused selection of biodynamic wines.

5. SPENDERÖRGAN – Frankfürt, Germany

As a young medical student German Chef Johannes Guttmann began preparing meals of human offal for classmates by smuggling organs from dissected cadavers from the university morgue. His obsession gradually took the shape of this exciting new pop-up restaurant in Frankfürt where visitors receive a medical examination upon arrival before each one agrees to contribute a vital organ to the evening’s meal.

6. KAISEKI SEBUN – Hokkaido, Japan

Chef Kumiko Nakarata started cooking professionally at six months old when, as an infant prodigy, she was invited to stage at Le Bernardin in New York City. Having just turned seven (Sebun is the Japanese character that represents her age), Ms. Nakarata is the youngest chef to appear on this list by over twenty years. Her restaurant—set along the Pacific Ocean in Hokkaido, Japan—is a destination for seafood lovers all over the world and tourists who come to see the youngest three-Michelin starred chef in history. Sebun changes its name to a new number every year to commemorate Kumiko’s birthday.

7. LEFTŒUVERS – Oslo, Norway

Meals begin at “Freegan” Chef Lars Jørgensen’s Scandinavian eatery in Oslo with each table foraging their own ingredients from a nearby landfill. Aside from turning food waste into haute cuisine, the restaurant was designed to be entirely self-sustaining, running all of its electricity on biofuels and kitchen grease. Trash from your meal is discarded directly into the landfill every night to be scavenged by tomorrow’s hungry gastronomes.

8. INADEMEN – Amsterdam, Netherlands

Dutch for “inhale,” diners need only breathe to enjoy each course of their prix fixe at this über-modern space designed by the husband and wife team of astro-physicists turned chefs, Sven and Hälle Nillstrom. At the communal table, your food is delivered in the form of flavored vapors you inhale through e-cigarettes. After toking your main course, you’ll be invited to the Nillstrom’s psychedelic hash bar next door for “dessert.”

9. CORO – São Paolo, Brazil

A team of 75 classically-trained Brazilian chefs prepare your meal in a kitchen the size of a soccer field. Unlike most professional kitchens, the chefs don’t work together. Each individually prepares one of your 75 different courses then the chefs—also classically-trained musicians—gather to invite you into the kitchen for a choral concert of epic proportions.

10. MUDPIE – Mexico City, Mexico

Chef Luisa Romero Ballatín-Cortez extols the health virtues of cooking with mud in her new restaurant on the outskirts of Mexico City. Chef Ballatín-Cortez spares no expense importing the finest mud from all over the world as far as the Himalayas and encorporates it into her unique Jaliscan-style cuisine. Diners come from near and far to experience such delicacies as Sri Lankan Mud-braised Wild Boar Enchiladas and her famous Oaxacan Red Mud Mole.

11. EMBRYŌ – Bangkok, Thailand

Animal fetuses and underdeveloped life forms are the specialty here at this subterranean restaurant in the seedy Soi Cowboy district of Bangkok. Four-hundred pound Chef Alex “Big Baby” Sriphatkorn built his own hatchery adjacent to the restaurant in order to harvest unborn animals he can cook immediately in his natural wood-fired ovens. Although “Big Baby” has become an international celebrity—most notably for his food-themed viral rap videos—look out for PETA activists who frequently protest outside the restaurant.

12. 171℃ – Bogotá, Colombia

Instead of preparing the food sous vide, Chef Simón Mascherano prepares his guests sous vide by mummifying them in plastic wrap and submerging them into temperature-controlled water baths. His technique ensures that none of his precious flavors can escape through the diner’s pores during the meal. He literally seals in your juices. After a highly published drowning case, Chef Mascherano moved his restaurant from Medellín to Bogotá where the higher altitudes allow his water baths to boil more gently at the perfect temperature of 171 degrees Celsius.

13. X/Y – San Francisco, USA

Have you ever stopped to consider the sex of the plant, animal or marine life you are eating? Most diners don’t, but Chef Angela Marx takes the matter very seriously at this San Fransisco eatery. She allows her guests to choose the gender of their steaks, chops, lobsters and even certain plant life. Try the “Girl’s Nite Out” ten-course tasting to experience Chef Marx’s menu of all female life forms. Sommelier Margueritte Thiebault takes special care to make sure the all-female winemakers wine pairings are seamlessly tailored to the menu’s feminine food.

14. FOCI – Various Undisclosed Locations

Created in 2048 in conjunction with Google Ventures, FOCI began as a Kickstarter project of Chef Kosmo3, a computer hacker with no formal culinary training. His futuristic kitchen brings the virtual reality experience to fine dining where diners consume a luxurious multi-media tasting menu without actually eating anything. Real-time biofeedback that reaches the kitchen’s “servers” through your Bluetooth-enabled cutlery allows the virtual chef to feed you images of what the body craves without the need for opinionated waitstaff.

15. CHEF:BÔT – Osaka, Japan

Adventurous diners can experience chef-less dining in Osaka, Japan where human cooks are replaced by 3D printers that prepare your meal tableside. Choose from a digital menu of iconic dishes made famous throughout the history of modern cooking. The restaurant’s patented Transparent Kitchen™ can create exact replicas of virtually any haute cuisine. It gives a new meaning to the concept of open kitchens.

16. THE MILLENNIAL KITCHEN – Napa Valley, USA

After a forty year hiatus from cooking, legendary Napa Valley Chef and pioneering locavore Alphonse Treadwell revives the comfort food that made him famous in the Oughts. His humble kitchen specializes in his once trendy but now retro dishes that have fallen out of favor like Avocado Toast, Pork Buns, Korean Fried Chicken and Cacio e Pepe.

17. LILY AND SAND – Dubai, UAE

It took over fifteen years to construct this giant 300,000 square foot flotilla in Dubai that seats over 5,000 guests at once making it the largest free-standing restaurant in the world. Guests must take a helicopter and three different ferries before arriving in the luxurious dining hall designed by architect I.M. Pei’s goddaughter. English Chef phenom Ian Chatterton’s Persian menu focuses on aquatic life and includes the most expensive dish in the world—a spit-roasted dolphin encrusted in 24-Karat Gold, yours for only $40,000.

18. DINE X – Outer Space

Billed as the first intergalactic culinary experience, Space X and Elon Musk have joined forces with the Culinary Institute of America to launch fine dining out of the Earth’s atmosphere. Patrons are rocket blasted into orbit for three hours where they can enjoy an intimate meal in a custom-made Space X dining capsule. Lay back in your Kevlar suit while you enjoy delicate space-raised meats barbecued over sizzling hot moon rocks and freeze dried desserts, both specialties of former NASA-engineer-turned-Astro-Chef Zoltan Janucyzk’s aeronautical kitchen.

19. GUSTIBUS – Philadelphia, USA

Visitors must check into the Dining Pavilion adjacent to the University of Pennsylvania Hospital at their scheduled reservation time. After receiving an epidural, a highly-skilled medical staff inserts small arthroscopic cameras into the guest’s digestive tract so he can joyfully witness his meal being digested in real time. The cafeteria-inspired menu was developed by a team of nutritionists at U. Penn—featuring such Heartland delicacies as Grass-Fed Salisbury Steak and Lancaster County Mushy Peas. Each diner is issued a secure portal to live-stream the camera feed from inside their stomach via Snapchat.

20. FORECLOSURE – Cayman Islands

Restaurant patrons must sign over the deeds to their homes to be invited to dine at this palace of modern cuisine in the Cayman Islands. Offshore accounting allows visitors to exploit tax shelters to offset their loss in personal wealth. In the spirit of the meal, the dining room is filled with repossessed furniture purchased by the restaurant from IRS auctions.

*Note: This list is fictional and purely for satirical purposes. Any similarities with real life restaurants, restauranteurs or chefs are purely coincidental. Maybe.

You innocently attempt to order just appetizers and the waiter interrupts to inform you—with perhaps a little more sass than is necessary—of the restaurant’s policy that you must order your entire meal at the same time. “The kitchen will not accept partial orders,” he says. You haven’t decided on the rest yet so you tell the waiter you just want to “fire up some apps” in the meantime. In fine dining establishments and high-volume restaurants, incomplete ordering is a divisive issue—probably one of the most common and unavoidable sources of tension between waiters and their guests. But why do so many restaurants need you to order everything all together? Is it really that big a deal?

First of all, let’s consider the misconceptions. Though it can be true in some cases, most waiters are not asking for the whole order so they can hustle you through your meal and turn the table. We do our best to to fire your food on a reasonable schedule—measuring time according to how quickly you eat. Ordering everything all at once helps to facilitate—though not necessarily guarantee—the seamlessness of the timing. Some diners withhold the complete order as a way of guarding against being rushed by a trigger-happy server or a passive-aggressive kitchen. While protesting the rules may result in your having more time, it also often ends up causing uncomfortable delays and undesirable hiccups in service. It all seems so easy until you actually understand how a professional kitchen operates.

In order for a restaurant to have a healthy heartbeat, things must be staggered in a way that keeps blood moving through the arteries and prevents clotting. This starts the moment you make your reservation. Instead of booking six tables all at 7pm—the time all six parties would prefer to dine—the restaurant will attempt to spread out the reservation times. (i.e. Book two tables at 6:45, two at 7 and two at 7:15) When you are seated, the maitre’d or host is also trying to spread guests throughout the dining room to avoid overloading each server’s section. Asking to be moved may create havoc for service when you migrate into a section that is too busy to accommodate you.

The rotation that goes on in the kitchen is even more delicate. There are only so many orders a kitchen can handle simultaneously. Every kitchen has a finite number of cooks physically capable of cooking only a finite number of dishes over a specific period of time. To make it work, the dining room is seated in intervals to give the kitchen ample time to stay organized. Sometimes when you feel pressure from a server to order more quickly it may be that the chef—concerned about a deluge of new orders—is pressing them to hound you. On their busiest nights, many kitchens are forced to fire food even when a table isn’t ready because they have to make room for the new orders that are piling up.

When parties are seated incompletely or when they insist on ordering piecemeal, it throws gasoline on the fire. If your party hasn’t fully arrived for a half an hour after your reservation time, you are now encroaching on the next tier of tables. The same thing happens on the golf course when people aren’t punctual about their tee times. It has a domino effect that will slow down everyone’s round. As a result, the kitchen will most likely be saddled with a heavier workload than they can handle.

Ordering your meal in fragments has an even more deleterious effect on a kitchen’s ability to perform. In order to understand this more clearly, we need to consider the division of labor in a kitchen. Most kitchen lines are divided into sections: cold appetizers (garde manger), sauteé, grill and pastry. Depending on the cuisine some restaurants may also have satellite stations that fulfill a peripheral part of the menu like raw bar, sushi or pizza. There will usually be someone who “expedites” the kitchen, the conductor—his job is to keep the cooks organized while tickets are spitting furiously out of the printer. Every station has a threshold of how many dishes it can produce at once. So, the expediter tries to create a manageable plan for them, screams it out loud and, if necessary, cracks the whip to make sure everyone is on task.

If the kitchen is left in the dark about what you are having for your next course, it inhibits the expediter’s ability to make a cogent plan. In the time you spend waiting to place the rest of your order, a handful of other tables have ordered their entire meal. The expediter has created a plan for his line cooks based on the information he has. New information cannot be added without threatening the balance of the rotation already in place—not without making the other tables who ordered before you wait longer than they should. Think of it like cutting the line to get on an amusement park ride. If you constantly allow people to order this way, the ones who have been patiently waiting will end up getting screwed.

It’s all about the flow. Responsible diners need to learn to be more trusting when restaurants set policies like not allowing incomplete orders or seating incomplete parties. We aren’t trying to make your life more difficult. It’s the opposite. We know our restaurant better than you. It isn’t always going to function the way you want. But it wont function at all if we can’t run it our way.