[citanul]

I like to consider myself a bit of a gourmet. Perhaps "foodie" is more appropriate. I enjoy cooking, finding cool new restaurants around town before the crowds (and Time Out) make it impossible to get in the door, and a few times a year, eating something remarkable at a high-end restaurant. I'm sure there's many of you who do the same.

By high-end, I'd like to restrict discussion to places where you can very reasonably expect your bill for food only to be >$75 (pre tax and tip). The range of discussion may include things as "pedestrian" as a good steakhouse and things as "snooty" as Per Se.

I'd like to discuss what you expect before you walk in the door of any such place, what you look forward to, perhaps what you don't, and also hear reviews of specific places, and how they stacked up both to your expectations of that particular place and your personal concepts of high-end dining.

For instance, I expect the food to be excellently prepared, never have to send anything back, ever, the wait-staff to be knowledgable and good at their jobs, the space to be clean, etc.

There's also I think probably two main categories of such restaurants:

1) Serves food that everyone is likely to like/love everything they order. Traditional preparations, perhaps jazzed up or just prepared with super-great ingredients.

2) Serves food that they are pretty sure most diners will not really enjoy at least one part of their meal. Food tends to be more experimental or "experimental" or whatever the word is, and the menus tend to be ordered "as a menu" as opposed to as individual plates.

As examples:

A couple weekends ago I ate dinner at Spiaggia, a traditional Italian restaurant in Chicago, which somewhat routinely wins awards for things like "best restaurant in the midwest. When I walked in, I expected fantastic service, great surroundings, white tablecloths, fresh pasta, great wine list, and in general, the sort of filling Italian meal, with ingredients you normally can't find outside of Italy, that you don't expect to find outside of a nice place in Italy. I was not disappointed on any aspect of this. This would be a type 1 place, even though they do have complete menus for ordering, we ordered individual dishes.

Last year, I ate at Aureole in Las Vegas with a couple of other degen poker players. We expected semi-nightlife buzz to the place, women in cat-suits climbing a tower of wine, and somewhat more "experimental" food, with good service, obvious large wine selection, etc. What we got was significantly different. Though we ate at about 8:30pm on a weekend, the place was very quiet except for the bar area, there was no one climbing the tower as far as we could tell, and though we took abut 2.5 hours for dinner, the place was entirely empty when we left. Though the service was great, and the tablet-PC wine ordering is cool, there was at least one dish that when the waiter brought it to table he said "as a warning, almost no one likes all 3 of these things." (He was referring to a plate containing 3 preparations of tuna tartar, one rolled in chocolate (fairly disgusting). On the whole, a good meal, but clearly a different experience than Spiaggia.

So, which type of high-end food do you prefer? Are you open to both? What do you "get" out of the experience? What are some of your favorite high-end places?