History Main / HauteCuisineIsWeird

** ''{{Literature/Maskerade}}'' has a subversion when the Anhk-Morpork opera makes Quirmian (French-Italian-ish) food for the visiting singer. This being Ankh-Morpork, they don't actually know how to make it, burning the pasta. Fortunately Nanny Ogg makes traditional food, claiming there's no need to make foreign food for foreigners ([[spoiler:and the singer himself being from Ankh-Morpork but taking a foreign stage name cries at finally eating home food again]]).

* In episode 25 of ''WesternAnimation/MiraculousLadybug'', Plagg dismisses all the fancy foods Adrien (who is rich) gives him as inedible.

* ''VideoGame/{{Earthbound}}'' features trout yogurt, popular among the wealthy of Fourside.

#The food is, at best, bland, or at worst highly unusual. If the food is weird looking instead of gross, the excuse will be that [[TrueArtIsIncomprehensible the chef is striving for artistic value]].

Compare to WineIsClassy, HollywoodCuisine, and FrenchCuisineIsHaughty, food stereotypes which might appear alongside this trope. See also AlienLunch and ForeignQueasine, where unappealing dishes come from a strange place of origin; and ExoticEntree, where they're a sign of evil rather than wealth and taste.

* ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' states that "an Antarean parakeet gland stuck on a small stick is a revolting but much-sought-after cocktail delicacy and very large sums of money are often paid for them by very rich idiots who want to impress other very rich idiots."

* An ad for Harvey's has a man take one look at a Nouvelle Cuisine dish, and walk right out of the restaurant, loudly singing a parody of ''I Am Woman Hear Me Roar'' and attracting a huge ammount of fellow blue-collar men who proceed to storm the local Harvey's.

* This is the topic on one of the tracks on [[Creator/PattonOswalt Patton Oswalt's]] comedy album Werewolves and Lollipops - [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K--2gKR5zi8 Great Food is Cooked by Psychos]]
-->There's a place I've got to go to, I haven't been there yet, it's in Las Vegas, it's called Fleur De Lys. And the way the guy describes it, it's the owner, like, writing about his own restaurant. Listen to this crazy, mental patient, ritualistic behavior that he thinks is important, alright. It says: "Every day, at Fleur De Lys, we fly in three thousand ice-pink roses and put them each in their own silver-dusted crystal decanter" And you read that and you go "wow, that's a- THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FOOD!"

-->''"It's an absolute joke; I don't like anything about it. Comes on a wooden block like you're eating lunch at Home Depot. Some guy, with his bare hands, balls up some ham in the corner and then throws some shards of manchego cheese and some haphazard drizzle of honey so you can eat like an Andalusian farmer taking a lunch break in a field in 1830 for, like, a hundred bucks."''

[[folder: Fan Works]]
* The current page quote comes from Fanfic/ThisBites. While training in the Kamabakka Kingdom, Sanji is told to continue learning the island's cooking techniques that he'll need to learn how to use a rotary evaporator, a real device that's typically only used in ''chemical labs''. Sanji is understandably skeptical.

[[folder:Film - Animation]]

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Ratatouille}}'': As the movie takes place in a French ''novelle cuisine'' restaurant, the food, including the eponymous ratatouille, is served in small portions. However, it is presented in a realistic manner, not comically exaggerated, and nobody points it out in-universe.

[[folder:Film - Live Action]]

** When Sasha and Marcus go on a double date to an expensive restaurant, the dishes are all very pretentious, very small, and very expensive -- their multi-course meal of venison (that comes with headphones that play the sound of the animal dying), a tiny greens-and-seafood salad (microgreens served with dehydrated seaweed and "fish dandruff"), asparagus soup "extracted with a centrifuge", the ''flavor'' of Caesar salad, and lavender "sugar bubbles" for dessert. It all comes up to ''[[ShockinglyExpensiveBill $6400]]''.

* Pretty much every restaurant dish in ''Literature/AmericanPsycho'' is artistically bizarre. Some are even inedible (mud soup and charcoal arugula)-- or so [[UnreliableNarrator Patrick]] describes them.

* ''Music/TheLonelyIsland'': "Boombox" has a running joke with snooty white people eating boiled goose. It then extends into street vendors in New York and the daily meal in old folks homes. ItMakesJustAsMuchSenseInContext.

-->''...lesser gourmands might offer plates of still-crawling (and ichor-slick) centipedes or a bowl of tiny heads forever howling (even as they tumble into the stomach). Actually distilling the ''essence'' of fear in a flavour, that's the task of the truly great ''chefs de cuisine.

* ''VideoGame/PokemonXAndY'' takes place in [[FrenchCuisineIsHaughty the France-inspired Kalos region]], so the more expensive the restaurant, the more eccentric the food is and the longer your servers go on about it. Dishes include soup made from a 3000-year-old bone boiled in snow for 100 days and a 180-year-old aged blue cheese that is described as smelling so strongly that it'll burn your nose. The exception is Sushi High Roller, a ridiculously exclusive and ''very'' expensive restaurant whose full-course meal consists of... five different forms of sushi, delivered with to-the-point descriptions.

* [[https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0744.html Tarquin's dinner]] in ''Webcomic/TheOrderOfTheStick'' has courses such as Phoenix pate[[note]]it's pricey because phoenixes explode when they die, so the liver has to be cut out while they are still alive[[/note]] or pegasus flank. Elan decides not to eat any of them.

* ''[[WebVideo/BingingWithBabish Babish Culinary Universe]]'': When challenged to make a 7-course tasting menu on "Stump Sohla", Sohla mentions a time when she spent too much money on a fancy dinner composed of tiny tasting plates and wound up leaving hungry (and angry).

'''Chef Elzar:''' Hey, that's what rich people eat - the garbage parts of the food.\\

* In ''WesternAnimation/JackieChanAdventures'', the Rabbit Talisman is first discovered lodged into the shell of a Galapagos Tortoise that was sold to a club of rich people who liked to eat endangered animals.

* ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'': In "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS6E13SpiceUpYourLife Spice Up Your Life]]", Rarity and Pinkie go to the upper-class city of Canterlot to fix a friendship problem. It turns out a father and daughter duo of [[FantasyCounterpartCulture Indian-inspired ponies]] are fighting because their restaurant is unpopular. Nopony visits their restaurant, the Tasty Treat, because it hasn't been rated yet, and the highly influential critic [[CausticCritic Zesty Gourmand]] dislikes it because the food is nonconformist compared to other restaurants in the area (who are all identical, right down to the decor). Pinkie, however, finds the other restaurants displeasing due to their small proportions and bland-tasting food. [[spoiler:In the end, after a grand reopening impresses the locals, all the restaurants go back to ''their'' thing, while Zesty is ridiculed and her opinion invalidated]].

* In the ''WesternAnimation/SonicBoom'' episode, "[[Recap/SonicBoomS1E5MyFairSticksy My Fair Sticksy]]", when Sticks gets nominated for an Awardy Award, she and her friends are invited to attend the award ceremony. Upon going there, Sonic and Knuckles find such fancy foods as asparagus crustini, hempseed quiche, and goat cheese with red ridicio spread. Knuckles tries the goat cheese with red ridicio spread and finds it tastes terrible, so he calls it "goat cheese in a red crudicio spread". This quickly earns him the admiration of Professor Cluckins and Admiral Beaverton, who tell him he had the audacity to say what they're all thinking.
* In the ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' episode "Creme Fraiche", Randy has taken to obsessively watching FoodPorn shows on the Food Network and recreating their complex recipes, even taking the job as the chef of South park Elementary. The kids however just want simple foods like Pop Tarts and chicken nuggets.

[[folder:Real life]]
* The French [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouvelle_cuisine nouvelle cuisine]] and the Japanese [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiseki Kaiseki]] both take emphases on presentation and having small servings. Indeed, the idea of Haute Cuisine consisting of small portions is TruthInTelevision to some degree; as [[https://recipes.timesofindia.com/articles/food-facts/8-reasons-why-expensive-restaurants-serve-tiny-portions/photostory/61979002.cms?picid=61979218 explained here]], there are various reasons for restaurants to serve relatively tiny portions, like the often expensive costs of the ingredients, and to make the dish look more appealing and elegant. It should be noted however that, while is common that the portions will be small, in many Haute Cuisine restaurants you are set to eat from as low as 3 courses, to as many as 9, which means all those small portions still add up to a decent meal. It's also worth noting that Haute Cuisine portions are often small because they can be quite rich and filling.
* [[https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/ This review of the "worst Michelin-starred restaurant in the world"]], Bros in Lecce, Italy, went viral in late 2021. According to the review, the ''27''-course dinner was more a bizarre sort of theater or performance art than a meal. Highlights included two reconstituted orange slices served with the remainder of the actual orange (the diners were scolded for trying to eat the actual orange), olive-flavored ice cream (delivered without comment, so that the diners thought it was pistachio-flavored before they took a bite), a cuttlefish-flavored marshmallow, something called "frozen air" that literally melted before it could be eaten, terrible service that did not accommodate allergies, and the crowning jewel- a citrus-flavored foam served in a plaster cast of the chef's mouth, which the diners were then expected to lick out of the mouth. The 27 courses put together didn't even constitute a meal in the end and were so insubstantial that everybody was still starving afterward.

-->'''Chef Elzar:''' Hey, that's what rich people eat - the garbage parts of the food.\\

[[folder:AnimeAndManga]]

[[folder:ComicBooks]]

--->'''Raz:''' What sort of substitutions?
--->'''Sam:''' If I told you, that would compromise the perceived flavor profile.
--->'''Raz:''' Isn't that just straight up dirt?
--->'''Sam:''' ... For the ''umami''.

[[folder:Web Comics]]

-->--'''[[ChefOfIron Sanji]]''', ''FanFic/ThisBites''

* The current page quote comes from Fanfic/ThisBites. While training in the Kamabakka Kingdom, Sanji is told to continue learning the island’s cooking techniques that he’ll need to learn how to use a rotary evaporator, a real device that’s typically only used in ''chemical labs''. Sanji is understandably skeptical.

** Parodied in ''VideoGame/{{Psychonauts 2}} when Sam tries to disguise the very questionable composition of her pancakes behind haute cuisine buzzwords.

* In ''Literature/GoodOmens'', ''nouvelle cuisine'' was invented by Famine (of the HorsemenOfTheApocalypse), who loves the idea of very rich people spending a lot of money to go hungry. When introduced, he's just had lunch at a very exclusive restaurant, consisting of "a string bean, a pea, and a sliver of chicken breast, aesthetically arranged on a square china plate", a dish which he personally invented some time ago in Paris. A deleted scene in the [[Series/GoodOmens TV series]] would have given this a SettingUpdate with molecular gastronomy.

* ''VideoGame/{{Psychonauts}}'': The only way to recruit the Hearty Knight in Waterloo World and win the level is to offer him only the finest meal as befits "an elite warrior of my stature". And since he's a frenchmen, the meal is of course ''escargot'', i.e., snails.

* In ''Literature/GoodOmens'', ''nouvelle cuisine'' was invented by Famine (of the HorsemenOfTheApocalypse), who loves the idea of very rich people spending a lot of money to go hungry. When introduced, he’s just had lunch at a very exclusive restaurant, consisting of “a string bean, a pea, and a sliver of chicken breast, aesthetically arranged on a square china plate”, a dish which he personally invented some time ago in Paris. A deleted scene in the [[Series/GoodOmens TV series]] would have given this a SettingUpdate with molecular gastronomy.

* On ''Radio/TheRickyGervaisShow'', [[Creator/RickyGervais Ricky]] once told a story about how he took [[Creator/KarlPilkington Karl]] to The Ivy, a fancy restaurant in London, and that Karl ate a blob of wasabi. Karl apparently thought it was haute cuisine and that the wasabi was just one mushy pea being served in a tiny portion.

* ''TabletopGame/ChangelingTheLost'' takes this UpToEleven with the Knights of the Knowledge of the Tongue, an [[PrestigeClass Entitlement]] for whom perfect food is ''[[MundaneMadeAwesome everything]]''. For this, they'll plumb the depths of the LandOfFaerie for the most exotic FantasticFruitsAndVegetables (and meats, sometimes [[ExoticEntree sapient]]) to produce dishes that might [[TastesLikePurple Taste Like Purple]] and induce literal [[OrgasmicallyDelicious Foodgasms]], at minimum.

* In ''Literature/GoodOmens'', ''nouvelle cuisine'' was invented by Famine, who loves the idea of very rich people spending a lot of money to go hungry. A deleted scene in the [[Series/GoodOmens TV series]] would have given this a SettingUpdate with molecular gastronomy.

* Being a manga about how any cooking style can make tasty food, ''Manga/FoodWars'' manages to zig-zag this with Alice Nakiri's focus on molecular gastronomy. While her meals taste good to the judges and she's not seen as any lower for focusing on the science side of food, she's often on the losing side because she doesn't take the customers' experience with the food into consideration. Once she's able to prepare a dish which uses her tech to add flair rather than be a close approximation, she starts to improve on her way of cooking.

* The French [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouvelle_cuisine nouvelle cuisine]] and the Japanese [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiseki Kaiseki]] both take emphases on presentation and having small servings. Indeed, the idea of Haute Cuisine consisting of small portions is TruthInTelevision to some degree; as [[https://recipes.timesofindia.com/articles/food-facts/8-reasons-why-expensive-restaurants-serve-tiny-portions/photostory/61979002.cms?picid=61979218 explained here]], there are various reasons for restaurants to serve relatively tiny portions, like the often expensive costs of the ingredients, and to make the dish look more appealing and elegant. It should be noted however that, while is common that the portions will be small, in many Haute Cuisine restaurants you are set to eat from as low as 3 courses, to as many as 9, which means all those small portions still add up to a decent meal.

* ''Film/TrinityIsStillMyName'': PlayedForLaughs when Trinity and Bambino, a pair of uncouth gunslingers, come into possession of a lot of cash and decide to visit the [[FrenchCuisineIsHaughty fanciest French restaurant]] in town. They're deeply unimpressed with the meagre portion sizes and force the waiter to leave the serving platter behind. Even a few of the high-society diners appear quietly approving of their efforts to have a good dinner on their terms.

* An ad for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F775_321EAQ Navy Federal Credit Union]] [[PlayedForlaughs plays it for laughs]] when it shows a soldier and his pals trying to enjoy the food at a fancy restaurant run by the soldier's older sister. The food is so tiny that the squaddie and his pals are squinting.

* Parodied in ''Film/AlwaysBeMyMaybe'', when Sasha and Marcus go on a double date to an expensive restaurant. The dishes are all very pretentious, very small, and very expensive -- their multi-course meal of venison (that comes with headphones that play the sound of the animal dying), a tiny greens-and-seafood salad (microgreens served with dehydrated seaweed and "fish dandruff"), asparagus soup "extracted with a centrifuge", the ''flavor'' of Caesar salad, and lavender "sugar bubbles" for dessert. It all comes up to ''[[ShockinglyExpensiveBill $6400]]''.
--> '''Marcus:''' Well, I'm not wrong about the fact that I'm hungry as hell after a $6,400 dinner. Hey! Can I get a monochrome burrito to go?

* Zigzagged in ''The Sol Majestic'' by Ferrett Steinmetz. The Sol Majestic restaurant prides itself on aggressively avant-garde food creations, including trees that grow leaves with different flavors and bubbles of molecularized food-smoke. Despite spending a lot of detail discussing what kind of extravagant waste these methods entail ''in space'', the book stops short of criticizing the food itself.
* In ''Literature/TheHungerGames'' franchise, the Capitol party-goers have a special drink that causes the drinker to vomit so they can eat more food.
* WhiteSheep Varjak from ''Literature/VarjakPaw'' hates caviar, while the rest of his IdleRich family loves it.
* Clan cats in ''Literature/WarriorCats'' view cat pellets as bland and disgusting food that only pets like. Sure, kittypets always have food in abundance, but it's gross compared to [[PrefersRawMeat freshly-hunted prey]].
* ''Literature/TheWheelOfTime'': FarmBoy-turned-General Mat Cauthon acquires two menservants used to working for high-ranking nobility, who serve him perplexingly fancy food in their efforts to outdo each other. Mat's confusion at being served an artistic arrangement of smoked tongues and quail eggs is compounded by the fact that the servants somehow acquired the ingredients in the middle of a cross-country voyage.

* In ''Literature/GoodOmens'', ''nouvelle cuisine'' was invented by Famine, who loves the idea of very rich people spending a lot of money to go hungry. A deleted scene in the [[Series/GoodOmens TV series]] would have given this a SettingUpdate with molecular gastronomy.
* In ''Literature/RatsBatsAndVats'', main character Chip was an indentured servant at a fancy French restaurant before the war broke out. He notes several times how the patrons would come in and pay outrageous prices for tiny dishes. It's his dream, if he ever wins his freedom, to open a steakhouse right next door to the restaurant so the rich people who previously scorned him will have to go next to it and watch his patrons eat huge portions of meat served at a fraction of the price of their fancy, unfilling meals.

* ''Series/{{Gentefied}}'': Chris's more outlandish fusion ideas that prove to be popular with the rich hipster crowd are called out as weird by his more tradition-inclined family. Watermelon radish tacos, anyone?

* In ''Franchise/DragonAge'', Orlesian food tends to fall into this. The wealthiest nobles enjoy things like ham which is reputed to taste like despair (something of a running gag for the fandom) and a cocktail called ''aquae lucidus'', which is made from wyvern venom and causes powerful hallucinations. It's worth noting that Orlais is the game world's equivalent of Bourbon-era France.
* ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim'': One [[MurderInc Dark Brotherhood]] quest has the player character KillAndReplace a world-renowned chef, then recreate his signature dish with a touch of extra poison. If they choose the "strange" dialogue options, they add a sweetroll, vampire dust, and a giant's toe to the dish, and the confused sous-chef defers to "The Gourmet's" presumed genius.
* ''VideoGame/{{Psychonauts}}'': The only way to recruit the Hearty Knight in Waterloo World and win the level is to offer him only the finest meal as befits "an elite warrior of my stature". And since he's a frenchmen, the meal is of course ''escargot'', i.e snails.

* ''WesternAnimation/FunkyCops'': In "A Fools Errand", the duo stay in a fancy hotel as part of their assignment in protecting a VIP, and see pizzas on the menu, including a small preview picture of them. They soon find out that said preview picture was the actual size of the pizzas themselves.

* In episode 25 of ''WesternAnimation/MiraculousLadybug'', Plagg dismisses the foods Adrien (who is rich) gives him.
* ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'': In "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS6E13SpiceUpYourLife Spice Up Your Life]]", Rarity and Pinkie go to the upper-class city of Canterlot to fix a friendship problem. It turns out a father and daughter duo of [[FantasyCounterpartCulture Indian-inspired ponies]] are fighting because their restaurant is unpopular. Nopony visits their restaurant, the Tasty Treat, because it hasn't been rated yet, and the highly influential critic [[CausticCritic Zesty Gourmand]] dislikes it because the food is nonconformist compared to other restaurants in the area (who are all identical, right down to the decor). Pinkie, however, finds the other restaurants displeasing due to their small proportions and bland-tasting food. [[spoiler:In the end, after a grand reopening impresses the locals, all the restaurants go back to ''their'' thing, while Zesty is ridiculed and her opinion invalidated]].

* In ''WesternAnimation/JackieChanAdventures'', the Rabbit Talisman is first discovered lodged into the shell of a Galapagos Tortoise that was sold to a club of rich people who liked to eat endangered animals.
* In ''WesternAnimation/TheLegendOfKorra'', the new Airbenders save a herd of Sky Bison from some hunters who want to sell them to the Earth Queen, who likes to eat exotic animals. It's rumored that this is the fate of her father's prized pet Bear, Bosco.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Archer}}'': When the gang goes undercover at a Hollywood gala, Ray, Pam and Cyril are forced to act as servers, and the food they're serving is things like kobe beef tartare sliders and mini quiches made from endangered eggs. Archer stacks them all together to make a tiny sandwich.

* ''VideoGame/PokemonXAndY'' takes place in [[FrenchCuisineIsHaughty the France-inspired Kalos region]], so the more expensive the restaurant, the more eccentric the food is. Dishes include a 3000-year-old bone boiled in snow for 100 days and a 180-year-old aged blue cheese that is described as smelling so strongly that it'll burn your nose.

'''Ron:''' Can I ask if this entire establishment [[LampshadeHanging is a practical joke of some kind]]?

* The French [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouvelle_cuisine nouvelle cuisine]] and the Japanese [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiseki kaiseki-ryōri]] both take emphases on presentation and having small servings. Indeed, the idea of Haute Cuisine consisting of small portions is TruthInTelevision to some degree; as [[https://recipes.timesofindia.com/articles/food-facts/8-reasons-why-expensive-restaurants-serve-tiny-portions/photostory/61979002.cms?picid=61979218 explained here]], there are various reasons for restaurants to serve relatively tiny portions, like the often expensive costs of the ingredients, and to make the dish look more appealing and elegant. It should be noted however that, while is common that the portions will be small, in many Haute Cuisine restaurants you are set to eat from as low as 3 courses, to as many as 9, which means all those small portions still add up to a decent meal.

A common stereotype in fiction is that wealthy people eat unusual or bland foods. The proportions will also often be very small. If the food is weird looking instead of gross, the excuse will be that [[TrueArtIsIncomprehensible the chef is striving for artistic value]].

* In episode 25 of ''WesternAnimation/MiraculousLadybug'', Plagg dismisses the foods Adrien (who is rich) gives him.
* ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'': In "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS6E13SpiceUpYourLife Spice Up Your Life]]", Rarity and Pinkie go to the upper-class city of Canterlot to fix a friendship problem. It turns out a father and daughter duo of [[FantasyCounterpartCulture Indian-inspired ponies]] are fighting because their restaurant is unpopular. Nopony visits their restaurant, the Tasty Treat, because it hasn't been rated yet, and the highly influential critic [[CausticCritic Zesty Gourmand]] dislikes it because the food is nonconformist compared to other restaurants in the area (who are all identical, right down to the decor). Pinkie, however, finds the other restaurants displeasing due to their small proportions and bland-tasting food. [[spoiler:In the end, after a grand reopening impresses the locals, all the restaurants go back to ''their'' thing, while Zesty is ridiculed and her opinion invalidated]].
* In the ''WesternAnimation/SonicBoom'' episode, "[[Recap/SonicBoomS1E5MyFairSticksy My Fair Sticksy]]", when Sticks gets nominated for an Awardy Award, she and her friends are invited to attend the award ceremony. Upon going there, Sonic and Knuckles find such fancy foods as asparagus crustini, hempseed quiche, and goat cheese with red ridicio spread. Knuckles tries the goat cheese with red ridicio spread and finds it tastes terrible, so he calls it "goat cheese in a red crudicio spread". This quickly earns him the admiration of Professor Cluckins and Admiral Beaverton, who tell him he had the audacity to say what they're all thinking.