it is true: entrees are overrated. i am usually much happier getting a bunch of appetizers instead.

You’re amazed when the busboys clear your table in preparation for the arrival of the entrée. It’s not that you’re full; it’s that you forgot what you ordered. The fish with the thing? The meat with the other thing? Or the chicken with no thing at all, except its pedigree? And then the entrées come and you realize: It doesn’t matter. Whatever you ordered, you now have to eat it, in the same way you’ve had to eat everything all your life. Yours: the tile of line-caught halibut, with the succotash risotto and the potatoes hashed with pork-belly jus. Hers: the sweating pork chop brined in bacon grease and pomegranate emulsion, sharing pride of place with a 6-minute egg nestled in a haystack of shredded asparagus. They both sounded pretty good. But then you feel yourself chewing, and suddenly the whole compact of America’s food revolution — that the food, and thus you, will be transformed — has been broken. The fish is just fish, the pork is just pork, and for the first time you don’t think to share.

And you understand something: that although, like all American eaters, you’ve been conditioned to think of the entrée as the climax of the meal, it never is. It is, indeed, almost always disappointing, especially if you order fish.

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