Welcome to the Eater Upsell, a podcast from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

My name is Daniel Janine. My co-host, our editor-in-chief Amanda Clute, is off today.

She's at the Vox Media annual summit where Vox's super

elites gather at the top of Mount Olympus to talk about the company. Today on the

upsell we're looking at the history of modern fine dining. I was watching this

movie recently called Ants on a Shrimp. It follows Renee Rizepi and the Noma team as they popped up in Tokyo a couple years ago.

What they do when they pop up is they base their menu at least loosely on the style of

food that they are surrounded by and so in this case they're basing their menu on the

traditional style of Japanese Kaiseki and there was a moment I had where I was watching it, and I didn't really put it together at the time,

where I thought, oh my God, this food, this menu that they're making is almost exactly the same as the menu they serve out of their Copenhagen restaurant.

And then our senior editor, Megan McCarran, wrote this piece called The Japanese Origins of Modern

Fine Dining.

And it blew the lid off the whole thing for me.

The argument is that what we see as fine dining today actually has more of its roots in Japanese

food than maybe even French.

And it totally reshaped the way that I see fine dining.

So I wanted to talk to Megan a little bit more

about the piece.

But first, I think it's important to define the term fine dining, which is notoriously difficult

to define, but for the purposes of moving this episode along, I'm going to take a step at it.

Okay, here we go.

Fine dining is a meal that is moderately expensive.

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