The entrance is a glass door in a pink wall on a cobbled street. A brass plate with the outline of a chicken is pinned to the wall; for some reason, I like this chicken. It comforts me, for chickens are normal.
This is Osteria Francescana, which this year was named number one in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards. In 2015, it was second; it has been in the top five since 2011. It won its third Michelin star in 2012. It is also, according to Michelin, the best restaurant in Europe. Osteria Francescana is owned and run by a native of Modena, Massimo Bottura, and this is where he placed his restaurant.
It was, I am told, very difficult to get a table. The suggestion – and it is made delicately – is that I am lucky to be dining here, and what I am buying is somehow beyond money, even while it is impossible without money. This irritates me; we are paying, after all. But that is how the marketing of luxury goods works: tell others they cannot have it, and watch its value rise. I admit it is effective. I fret we will be late, and drag my companion out of our hotel as if late for a train.
At 8pm, a queue of people are standing in the street. The door is shut. They are not the super-rich, who I suspect would queue for nothing – not willingly, anyway – but the comfortable, who spend their money on experiencing things they have read about. I meet a young married couple from Houston, Texas. They have flown to Modena to eat here, and will fly away in the morning. They are happy. No, that is inaccurate: they are thrilled.
At 8.01pm the door opens. Is the one minute a carefully considered unit of time? Did Bottura try two minutes late, or three and a half, or nothing, or minus one minute, and find one minute the ideal period to marinate the want of strangers?
We came earlier to gawp, at 5pm, and the door opened. Bottura walked out in his chef’s whites, nodded to us and spoke very fast into a telephone. He is small, bearded and handsome, in large, black spectacles that make him look like a Hoxton art dealer, which he almost is; his art collection (Damien Hirst, Maurizio Cattelan, Matthew Barney) is famous. He was once an unhappy law student; then he turned to food.
Bottura is among a group of chefs – Heston Blumenthal, René Redzepi of Noma, Thomas Keller in the US – who experiment at the end of food. They are both wondrous and ludicrous. When this kind of food is delivered with wit, it is enchanting, although I am yet to be convinced it is important. When it suffers from self-delusion – I was once served Turnip: Variations In Its Own Broth at Eleven Madison Park in New York, for example – it is absurd.
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