first of all, why do I have to tell the chef how to make the steak? “medium rare”? “well done”? those are words made up by wizards or something. second of all I don’t like how they taste. they’re super expensive and they just taste so boring. chicken goated steak boring. I’m in my early 20s so I’m getting used to some “acquired taste” things slowly like wine and coffee but steak is still so bland.
I think it’s like a decadence and wealth thing, because it feels like the whole idea behind them is that the cooking is just there to bring out the innate quality of the singular ingredient and anything but the mildest and most rote additions are treated as somehow sullying it, with the implicit idea that the quality is directly tied to how expensive and luxurious it is. It’s such a boring, gross, and fundamentally backwards way of approaching cooking imo, where instead of working with methods and available ingredients to make something good you instead start from the idea that you must not disrupt the natural quality of your expensive and luxurious one allowed ingredient and that it should be savored as the blandly decadent thing that it is.
Good kofta is better than even the “finest” and most decadent steak and I will fight anyone who disagrees.
Tbf that’s not an inherently bad way of thinking about ingredients, most sushi nerds will praise “real” sushi for not drowning the fish in spicy mayo and other extras to appeal to white people, but instead focusing on enhancing the rice and fish.
I fundamentally reject any sort of cooking that’s hyper focused on needing the most perfect and super special of all ingredients to work and that’s all about how awesome and cool the ingredients are. It’s far more impressive and valuable to be able to take whatever assorted ingredients and scraps happen to be on hand and produce something wholesome and good from it than it is to “master” the “fine art” of having something “amazing” to start with and not “ruining it” by changing or controlling where it ends up.
Haute cuisine is bad no matter where its from. Cooking should be something adaptable and vulgar, not rigid and prestigious.