Fine dining is not at its finest at the moment. For instance, the final round of drinks and desserts, in a manner of speaking, will soon be ordered at Noma, the Copenhagen-based restaurant, which dazzled the world with its three Michelin stars and found itself on the top of the perch of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for a record-breaking fifth time. Noma was the address to which gastro tourists flocked, like moths to light, in the hope of savouring such exotic dishes as grilled reindeer heart on a bed of fresh pine or saffron ice cream in a beeswax bowl. That the bill set them off lighter by at least five hundred dollars per person did not cause their digestive systems to suffer heartburn. But by 2024, Noma will shut shop, following in the footsteps of a number of its illustrious brethren, including Manresa, another three-Michelin-star winner based in California and the Willows Inn, which tasted disgrace, albeit for different reasons.

The reasons for what is being touted as a crisis in fine dining are not difficult to guess. Food inflation, a global phenomenon, is biting into the profit margins: by some estimates, the cost of eggs has risen by 49% in a year. However, extraneous pressures are not the only villains of the piece. Some fine dining restaurants have been known to be pits of intensive labour accompanied by toxic work cultures. It appears that these two factors, documented brilliantly by George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London 90 years ago, remain the proverbial Achilles’ heel of modern fancy restaurants. Noma, to cite one example, has been heavily criticised for its treatment of employees: 16-hour work shifts are common; interns were unpaid; foreign workers treated poorly. Such working conditions, as Orwell found out all those years ago, blight the legacy of numerous other fine-dining chains: Willows Inn found itself deluged with lawsuits on, among other transgressions, racial discrimination and sexual harassment.

Another — lesser-known — adversary seems to be a perceptible shift in the cultural discourse on fine dining. Several celebrity chefs — Anthony Bourdain is an example — have sought to democratise the experience of consumption by exploring cheaper, inclusive genres such as street food to great public endorsement. Yet, fine dining establishments, with their aura of exclusivity and inaccessibility, remain content to be seen as motifs of the all-pervasive inequity that continues to plague the world. It is interesting to note that several titans in the world of chefs are now trying to widen the public reach of their new endeavours — Noma will be a food lab; another of its former employees now runs an ‘equitable’ fried-chicken sandwich chain.

The legacy of the fine dining restaurant is likely to be contested. It is undoubtedly a source of epicurean pleasures. Its institutions are equally non-egalitarian spaces. But their most formidable ability lies in never revealing to the wealthy patron that sweat and tears are also the ingredients of that grilled reindeer heart.