Iknew everything when I graduated from cooking school. Texture, flavour, colour – whatever you had, I could tell you how you got it. This was the gift of my training at the Culinary Institute of America: a logic of food, a knowledge of action and reaction, of cause and effect. In learning technique, I learned ways of constructing and deconstructing dishes, in the way that learning grammar lets you take a sentence apart and know how it works. But beyond learning the rules of grammar, it was more like learning a whole language, and I drew the basic rules of food in close like instinct.

Then I ate bread at Wylie Dufresne’s restaurant, wd-50. 

It was shatteringly crisp, fragrant of wheat and the sesame seeds sprinkled on it. I knew, because of my training, that salt amplified these flavours. But I did not know how this bread had come to be paper thin, translucent.

I picked it up, stared at it and stared through it. It was – there is no other way to describe it – a sheet of bread. And really, then, this thing was not bread, but a thing that gave a distilled experience of the first impression of bread, just the crisp and crackle of crust. I didn’t know quite what it was, or how it had come to be. And it was only the first thing I ate that night.

Recently, I dug up the menu from that dinner. Rereading it and the excited notes I scribbled all over it, I remember the thrill of seeing, for the first time, perfect cubes of hot, fried, solid mayonnaise or a piece of smoked fish whose skin was, in fact, pork. I remember the pasta course, a tangle of linguini cooked perfectly al dente, served on a brushstroke of smoked yoghurt. It tasted incredibly, deeply, of shrimp.

At the time, I reasoned my way through it – fresh pasta is made of three things: flour, water, eggs. A little salt for flavour and a touch of oil for tenderness, but that’s basically it. Those are the variables you have to work with. So, to flavour a pasta, you can add things to the dough as long as you don’t interfere too much with the basic ratio of those elements. Spinach pasta, for instance, works when you remember that the juice of finely chopped spinach will replace some of the water. This dish was making sense to me now. What Dufresne must have done was replace the water in this dough with a concentrated shrimp broth. Inventive and brilliant, a play perhaps on a Cantonese noodle that adds tiny savoury shrimp eggs to the dough.

I was eating with friends; one was a great cook and a friend of mine from culinary school. We traded ideas and he liked my reasoning. To verify, we asked. “Oh, the noodles,” our server said. “There’s no flour in them at all. They’re made entirely of shrimp.”

Since that dinner, since I ran home and wrote in my journal feverish entries that apologised for using the phrase “paradigm shift”, I’ve been fascinated with this kind of cooking.  In the years since, I’ve eaten there a dozen times or more, talked to the chef, attended seminars on this new style of cooking. I can read that menu and talk about how that food was made. I can use words like methylcellulose and transglutamase and talk about techniques that employ machines developed for medical use. I don’t practise this kind of cooking, but I can talk about it and think about it. Slowly, haltingly, I’m starting to draw in these new rules, and they are seeming a little less like magic.

But then again, the magicians keep coming up with new tricks. At a conference featuring Spanish chefs last year at New York’s International Culinary Center, I tasted an oyster by the chef Quique Dacosta. Barely cooked but warm, the oyster was coated in a smooth juniper jelly that exaggerated its bulges and curves, made shiny by edible titanium and dubbed “Oysters Guggenheim Bilbao”. Seeing and tasting it evoked in me the same thrill as when I first saw images of that museum. That would have taken the prize for the most startling dish of the day, had I not had a nibble of Paco Roncero’s cheese, which he had made out of olive oil. Just for good measure, he carbonated it, so that it tingled when I put it on my tongue, mimicking the spicy bite of a great Parmegiano. I would have asked him to explain, but in the moment, all I could think was: “I’m eating delicious cheese made out of olive oil that tingles when I put it on my tongue.” What more was there to say, really? Sometimes it seems churlish to peek behind the curtain. 

I’ve also eaten some of this food that frankly isn’t very good. Since the innovators openly share their techniques, there is a tendency to copycat, or to present dishes that rely heavily on the shock of “I wonder how they did that”. In such cases, we might say that this food is nothing more than novel or pretentious.

But the best of it presents its flavours, textures and look with a kind of aesthetic logic, a conceptual thoughtfulness coupled with a consideration of pleasure. I haven’t loved every single dish I’ve ever had at wd-50, but most of them have been delicious and all of them made me think about what I’m eating, both in wonderment of the technique and the relationship between the flavours and textures. 

People have been looking for names for this kind of cooking. It doesn’t help that most of its innovators and practitioners take the “you-can’t-label-me” attitude of your favourite artists. A name that seems to have stuck, much to the horror of the field’s leading lights, is “molecular gastronomy.”

I think the term is a bit overwrought, a little too in love with its own sound, trying too hard to affect the gravity of science. It’s true that these chefs are interested in the science of food, but so is anyone who knows that 135ºF is the temperature of medium-rare meat. “Molecular gastronomy” seems more like a theory than a practice. No one is breaking out the microscopes and cooking molecule by molecule.

A more typical term, “avant-garde”, suggests these people are on the forefront of a field that will eventually become the norm. This food will in all likelihood not be the norm.

So I’ve just been calling it sci-fi cooking.  I don’t know why I called it that at first, it just kind of sounded fun. But writing this, a thought occurred to me: science fiction, at its heart, does not aim to show us what might be made possible by technology, but what we might make technologically possible by our values.

The truly exciting thing about this cuisine is not what the techniques and the technology can do. It’s that it shows us what the mind can do, what new rules we can make, what new logic, what new possibilities. 

Francis Lam is a contributing editor for Gourmet magazine