Chocolate and liver do not share the same zipcode

After years of undocumented internal food protocols and culinary short circuits, I have come to one unavoidable conclusion:

My Brain Factory was absolutely not designed for haute cuisine or Michelin-starred restaurants.

Still, that doesn’t prevent me from ranting about some of the absurd things I encountered while trying to survive the world of “haute cuisine.”

Sensory overload speedrun!

Let me be fair before I continue.

I absolutely recognize the craftsmanship, discipline and creativity involved in haute cuisine.

Some of these chefs operate on a level that honestly borders on art.

The precision, presentation, timing and combinations they create are genuinely impressive.

My factory, however, occasionally reacts to these creations as if somebody tried to install incompatible software into a production environment.

Zipcodes

I once ate at a restaurant that was, as far as I know, on a fast track toward earning its first Michelin star.

One of the appetizers was:

Duck liver pâté served with a swirl of chocolate.

CEO Bob’s immediate reaction:

“Why the hell would anybody mix those two together in the first place?”

After putting the first bite into my tasting centre (read: my mouth), my tasting department immediately became overstimulated by conflicting sensory readings.

The structure and taste of liver:

• rich
• fatty
• slightly metallic

Followed by:

• chocolate.

Sweet, conflicting chocolate.

What the actual fuck?!

These two ingredients do not share the same zipcode!

Then I completely lost it and could not stop laughing.

The dish was served with some kind of luxury bread, and one of my co-workers actually grabbed a bun, sliced it open, put the duck liver with the chocolate swirl on top.. and started eating it as if this was completely normal behavior.

The serving staff, dressed in extremely formal penguin-like outfits, did not appear amused.

Their facial expressions strongly implied that my co-worker had violated several unwritten haute cuisine protocols by placing the duck liver and chocolate combination on bread. 😛

This only escalated my laughter problem.

Staff

Again: absolutely no disrespect toward the staff.

They were incredibly professional throughout the entire evening.

But when a waiter silently re-positions one of your 20.000 forks because it shifted two millimeters out of alignment?

My factory starts wondering whether we are still eating dinner or participating in a NATO precision engineering exercise.

Intermezzo

Between two courses we received some kind of strange intermezzo thing.

It was served in a tiny egg-holder-like bowl with an en croûte crust on top.

(Seriously… who comes up with this stuff? :P)

Underneath the crust was some kind of soup.

The name of the intermezzo the waiter mentioned?

Completely unpronounceable.

Long.

Complicated.

Filled with an alarming number of French words.

The amount of soup?

Roughly one spoonful.

The taste?

Warm seawater.

Salty.

Very salty.

Could I identify even a single ingredient from the three-minute French explanation given moments earlier?

Yeah…

Nope. 😛

Main course

Then came the main course.

Again:

a fifteen-minute explanation by the staff

followed by an even longer explanation about the accompanying wine.

And then there is me…

I simply do not like wine.

And besides that, I also have one very simple personal rule:

Never drink and drive.

Ever.

Did politely declining the wine offend the staff?

Oh hell yes!

Even me, the autistic guy who is usually half blind to non-verbal communication, noticed that one immediately.

Somewhere deep inside the restaurant, a sommelier probably felt a great disturbance in the force.

Back to the main course.

I do not remember the main course exactly anymore.

It was far less memorable than the liver-and-chocolate incident. 😛

What I do remember, however, is this:

The haricots verts required some serious scaffolding to keep them standing upright on the plate.

Quite impressive, honestly.

And the meat itself?

Indescribable.

Very…

Very…

Very…

Very…

very small!

At some point I started wondering whether I was eating dinner or inspecting a small modern art exhibition.

Taste-wise?

Honestly… no clue.

And considering I still remember most other main courses I have eaten throughout my life, the fact that this one completely slipped my mind probably says a lot.

Dessert

Ironically, this was actually the only course that I genuinely enjoyed eating.

It was substantial, very tasty and honestly memorable.

It was basically some sort of apple turnover

Dutch: appelflap…..

just done differently.

Pricing

The damage?

Roughly 1000 euros back in 2008 for 6 people.

Adjusted for inflation, my factory meltdown would probably cost around 1500 euros today.

Was the experience worth it?

Honestly?

HELL NO.

Hungry

The main reason to go out for dinner is to eat tasty food and enough of it for the evening.

Not to eat conflicting ingredients that clearly do not share the same zipcode…

while also paying absurd amounts of money for the privilege.

And surely the main goal is not to return home still hungry after eating all proposed courses.

Somewhere during the evening my factory started asking a very simple question:

“At what point exactly are we supposed to stop analyzing the food and actually become full?”

Question

This is actually an honest question directed at all Michelin-starred restaurants around the world.

And I genuinely would love to have a good discussion about food with a starred chef someday.

I truly do not want to be a food barbarian…

but why is haute cuisine so incredibly complicated?

Why is it so heavily centered around seemingly conflicting ingredients?

For comparison:

To my factory it almost feels like serving steak with ice cream!

It simply does not compute!

This is a random appetizer I found:

Sea bass combined with:

Conference pear, yuzu, Tomasu soy, black olive, Japanese wasabi

So let me get this straight.

Fish…

combined with:

• sweetness from the pear
• salty soy sauce
• bitter olives
• sour citrus-like yuzu
• and spicy wasabi

So basically:

fish + sweet + salty + sour + bitter + spicy.

WHAT THE FUCK?!

My factory immediately classified this as:

“sensory overload speedrun.”

This is haute cuisine nowadays?!

hard pass!

Don’t get me wrong…

Well-prepared sea bass?

Absolutely fantastic!

Combine it with some vegetables and you have a killer main course.

But adding soy, olives, yuzu and wasabi on top of that?

To my factory that feels like grabbing black paint and mixing it with green, blue, purple and yellow…

while simply hoping the final color somehow turns out beautiful.

My factory prefers:

“A few ingredients working together.”

Haute cuisine sometimes feels more like:

“Let’s combine every available flavor profile and see whether culinary magic or complete system collapse occurs.”

Am I the food barbarian here…

or is haute cuisine sometimes comparable to modern abstract art?

You know…

like duct-taping a banana to a wall and calling it genius.

Brain, the food barbarian, out!

Original article: https://www.familie-kleinman.nl/brain/index.php/2026/05/23/chocolate-and-liver-do-not-share-the-same-zipcode/