“THE ADVENT OF celebrity chefs and cooking-as-entertainment have influenced the way people eat in restaurants, and made chefs a lot more self-conscious,” says Mollie Katzen, the Berkeley, California-based author of the Moosewood Cookbook, who is something of a celebrity chef herself, having hosted cooking shows on television and sold more than six million cookbooks under 15 different titles. “It’s not that I don’t enjoy a good meal in a restaurant—I do. But with chefs trying to make names for themselves—it’s socompetitive—a lot of times it’s about trying to be clever, rather than just trying to be delicious. I had a meal the other day in a new restaurant here that’s getting a lot of press for all its local sourcing and so on—and the food was extremely precious, very fussed-over and complicated. There was a lot of discussion with the waiter about what you were getting; it was a big, ornate deal. And it didn’t taste all that good! Just give me a beautiful, perfectly prepared salad. I don’t want a cerebral experience in a restaurant—I’m not going for entertainment.”

[I've made the same complaints about magazine architecture, and I suppose it could apply to a lot of pursuits.]