On restraint: a conversation with a three-Michelin-star kitchen.

The chef receives us at three in the afternoon, between services. The dining room is dark, the kitchen still warm from lunch. He has agreed to talk, on condition we do not name the restaurant. "What I would like to say," he begins, "is unfashionable."

What he wishes to say is that the discipline of his kitchen has, over thirty years, become a discipline of removal. Each dish on the current tasting menu has fewer components than its predecessor. The signature course — a poached oyster in its own liquor with a single drop of fermented elderflower — has, he tells us, three ingredients. "The fourth is the room. The fifth is the morning the guest has had."

It is the morning that interests him most. He talks, with surprising vehemence, about the breakfast that precedes dinner in the hotel across the street. "A guest who has been served a poor croissant and indifferent coffee will, by 8pm, no longer be willing to be moved by anything I do. The palate is forgiving. The mood is not."

This is the argument we keep encountering, in different vocabularies, in every serious kitchen we visit. That hospitality is a single arc, not a series of independent transactions. That the supplier who delivers the orange juice and the chef who composes the tasting menu are answering the same question, twelve hours apart.