Chef Grant Achatz places on a tray one of the many elaborate courses served at his famed Chicago restaurant, Alinea, in Chicago, April 3, 2008.
The 1% eat out often and well. Maybe too well. A class of American "gastrocrats," as I like to call them, has enabled decadence of the most monstrous kind: dinners with dozens of courses, ideological manifestos and wine pairings so elaborate that the table becomes a veritable forest of glassware. Was prime strip steak and Petrus really that bad?