Successful chefs have much in common with successful artists, not least that their talents are sometimes over-venerated.
Both benefit from the emperor's-new-clothes syndrome. When they produce work that is absurd, people are often reluctant to say so for fear of being thought ignorant or foolish. As a result, we overpraise the pretentious, the meretricious and the self-aggrandising. Nowhere has this been truer than in the now 20-odd-year-old field of 'molecular gastronomy'. It is time to reassert a sense of proportion.
As one innocent was recently heard to inquire: 'Do they call it molecular gastronomy because the portions are so small?'
It is probably no coincidence that Damien Hirst's dead animals in formaldehyde and Heston Blumenthal's bacon and egg ice cream are products of the same era.
An unhappy convergence has taken place in the kitchen between the techniques of the laboratory workbench and the pretension of Charles Saatchi's art collection.
Many of the people who visit the Saatchi Gallery in Britain, and take it seriously, probably like to eat at The Fat Duck, Blumenthal's restaurant in Bray, Britain. Both showcase creations that are provocative, then repetitive and, ultimately, boring.