MOIRA
Claire.

CLAIRE
Moira.

MOIRA
What are we doing here?

CLAIRE
I think that we’re trying to get to the bottom of a very non-problem, problem.

MOIRA
The best kind of problem, really.

CLAIRE
Set menus or ala carte?

MOIRA
A la carté versus set menu.

CLAIRE
It’s going to be hard for you to change my mind to ever want to pick a set menu.

MOIRA
It’s going to be hard to change your, or our minds, ever.

CLAIRE
Unless I’m going regional destination dining, or somewhere really fancy and every single part of the meal and experience has been meticulously thought out, I never, ever want a set menu.

MOIRA
Very fair.

CLAIRE
I’m too picky. That’s for starters. I love that going out to dinner is about the adventure and getting to decide and make decisions. I don’t really want someone to take that out of my hands.

MOIRA
Totally. I also feel, having worked in restaurants, set menus are famously a head spend scam. Actually, that’s not always true, but set menus largely are seen as ‘financially effective’ for restaurants because they guarantee a higher than average spend on food per person. But it’s so much food.

CLAIRE
So much food. I think the way that I dine out is very specific. I kind of avoid mains. I’m like a multiple-entree person.

MOIRA
Mains are minimal.

CLAIRE
I want snacks. I want to try the most amount of things. So, if you tell me that I’m going to get one thing, a main, another thing, and two desserts, I’m going to be bummed out. Dining to me is how I feel in the moment and how I want to eat. It’s not helpful to be like, “we’re taking this decision fatigue that you have off of the table.” I want to make decisions, sweetie.

MOIRA
Though, I do feel like we’re both the kind of people who are comfortable making decisions on what our table is eating and drinking. And are trusted to do so. I think we may be a rarer breed.

CLAIRE
Maybe we’re the set menu of our group.

MOIRA
Haha, I reckon. Man, I went to Ten Minutes by Tractor with my family for their set menu and they had an additional dish you could add on. We wanted to get three to share between us and they said no.

CLAIRE
I absolutely despise that. It should be up to my discretion as a diner, as the person who’s paying to be there, to order that many things. What’s the logistical nightmare of me ordering less food that goes to waste?

MOIRA
It’s not a logistical nightmare. It’s a spend nightmare for restaurants who can’t put an extra $18 for a singular foraged pine mushroom on the bill.

CLAIRE
I think this all the time. They’re forever saying, you can’t share things because they’re one bite. I’m like, I’ve never eaten one thing in one bite in my life. I’ve never taken a whole thing, insert whatever the snack is, put it directly into my mouth and eaten it in a single bite. I remember Chateaubriand in Paris, I had their famous dessert. A caramelised egg yolk so when you bite into it, it’s this oozy, dessert egg. The guy kept saying, “you have to eat this in one bite”. And I was like, “I’m telling you, I cannot do it”. I don’t care. It ruins the experience. I don’t want to eat this in one bite. I hate eating things in one bite.

MOIRA
Are you telling me that when you’re doing an omakase in Japan, you’d–

CLAIRE
Oh, look, in a dream world, I want to eat sushi in two bites. If I didn’t feel like people were going to absolutely shame me, I would have loved a knife and fork.

MOIRA
Screaming.

CLAIRE
Even though I know how twisted that is.

MOIRA
The only time that I am pro set menu is when I’m dining as a big group. Or with people who are going to be annoying about the splitting bill in the end because they didn’t have an oyster. I’m constantly waiting on groups sans a CLAIRE or MOIRA spitting out completely heinous orders with no logic and without knowing how to facilitate a good group order and thinking the meal is average at the end. I’d choose a set menu over that.

CLAIRE
I tend to agree in that regard. To me, I understand why restaurants have set menus. It’s easier for the kitchen. That’s par for the course and we’re coming in with a more frustrating configuration. What annoys me is that as dining changes in Melbourne, we’re seeing more and more places where it’s six or more and you have to do a set menu. And I’m like, six people?! Six people’s hardly any people!

MOIRA
Shock, we’re extroverts.

CLAIRE
I’m like, I know more than five people and I need to go to dinner. Does that mean we could only really go to Cantonese restaurants?

MOIRA
Restaurant logic, baby.

CLAIRE
I also think there’s an element of set menus at formulaic restaurants where they stop you from ordering a la carte, where you lose the excitement of dining out and what comes out has that sharehouse potluck energy. You don’t feel like the thing you’re having is special, and then you have that sunk cost fallacy where you’ve spent this much and it didn’t even feel exciting.

MOIRA
And there are these set menus where they’re just carb loading you. You’ve just given me bread, then you’re giving me pasta, and now potatoes. I can see what you’re doing. I think there’s this whole thing of needing to walk away after having a set menu being painfully full. Do you reckon that started with Chin Chin’s Feed Me menu bullshit?

CLAIRE
That’s the first one I remember. God, the Feed Me menu. It’s very ‘the upwardly mobile global city dining’. And I’m telling you, ten years ago, this was not a thing.

MOIRA
I do still fuck with a set menu if it’s like a regional, farm-to-table-esque, destination dining place. Though I guess that’s a degustation.

CLAIRE
Yeah, absolutely. Like, I’m thinking Chauncey.

MOIRA
Muni. Agrarian Kitchen.

CLAIRE
Tedesca. Yes, where the expectation is that it’s this long, winding affair. But if I’m going out to dinner on a Friday night for my friend’s 28th birthday, I’m not expecting that I’m going to be there for, like, 4 hours and that this is going to be this extra special thing.

MOIRA
If a place only does set menu, then hell yeah. But very rarely is the place that offers a set menu in addition to the a la carte menu, somewhere that you should be ordering the set menu. I like knowing that there’s not another option. I think it’s the idea of there being an option of a set menu and having to opt in, as opposed to it being the default.

CLAIRE
Oh, my God, you have stumbled on something perfect. That is exactly. That is exactly the problem. The problem is that I don’t like knowing that there’s other things that I could have gotten that I would have preferred. Like, see, which at the end of the day–

MOIRA
Is the same reason why people want to do set menu. It’s FOMO. Our Taurus placements being like, no, I would know best. Don’t tell me what I like.

CLAIRE
Give me a shot at that set menu, honey. I’d create the real set menu. Do you think that this is our connoisseur brain rot? That you and I view dining or eating through the lens of value proposition, point of view, taste and experience. And to a lot of people, that scope is really wide and to you and I, it’s really small because both write critically about food, are both obsessive about food?

MOIRA
I mean, yes. My brain is always questioning what we’ve been structurally indoctrinated to like and want over the course of our life experiences. But also, we do both just prioritise deliciousness and value.

CLAIRE
The more I eat out and the more I have to think about food critically, the more I think that point of view is what separates good restaurants from great restaurants. And what I get bummed out about so often about dining out is that why?

MOIRA
Why? Why the hell have you done this? What does this dish say?

CLAIRE
What is this trying to do? What are you trying to say with this? I think I put more priority on that than I used to.

MOIRA
And with that, I say death to set menus.