The age of Ozempic is changing fine dining. Anna Moloney asks how to run a Michelin-star restaurant when your diners don’t want to eat. In order to be awarded three Michelin stars, a restaurant must offer food so spectacular it is considered “worth a special journey.” That is a significant upgrade from two stars (merely worth “a detour” per the Michelin guide), and why only 158 restaurants – and just six in London – currently hold the honour.
So you could say that to be invited to an eight-course chef’s table at one of them, not at one’s own expense, and then to only eat half of it, might be considered a bit of a faux pas. But this is a new world of fine dining, where gluttony has been replaced with the less deadly sin of GLP-1s, commonly known as weight loss jabs.
Sitting at one three-star establishment, I watched as the woman opposite me, a well-to-do broadcast exec in her 40s, spoke in hushed tones to the guest to her right, the first of many courses lying untouched before her. She whispered furtively: “I’m on… The Jab.” The last two words she dared only mouth. Her recipient lit up. “Me too!” she shrieked back eagerly, hampered not a bit by the restraint that plagued the first, instead looks into the finer details of her dosage levels. “Alastair’s on it too,” she beamed, gesturing to a man further down the table. “We both took a week off last week – we just wanted a big boozy lunch – but we’re back on it now.”
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GLP-1s work by suppressing appetite. You feel fuller quicker, so you don’t need to eat as much. They are a miracle drug for those with obesity, or type 2 diabetes, but it’s fair to say its fanbase spans a far broader spectrum than that, one concerned less by health than appearance and, priced at £100-£350 a month on a private prescription, likely wealthier too.
This is a problem for the fine dining world, whose customer base – or at least their waistlines – are now shrinking rapidly, with many now rushing to adapt. At Heston Blumenthal’s three Michelin starred The Fat Duck, diners with smaller appetites can now opt for the ‘Mindful Experience’, a slimmed down version of the restaurant’s usual tasting menu. After being prescribed Wegovy himself, Blumenthal noted he was “struck by the feeling of not being hungry” and feared such drugs could “kill the restaurant industry”.
Staff are trained to pick up on the customers
Beyond evolving menus, there’s also the question of evolving etiquette – both for staff and diners. “In fine dining, chefs never like seeing plates come back with food left on them; it always raises questions,” says top UK sommelier Jonathan Kleeman. “They want to know that everything is okay, and you usually have to give the chef a lot of reassurance that the customer is fine and had no issues. But it’s something we’re seeing more and more.”
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Consequently, staff are trained to pick up on such customers, like my dining companion, who looks forlorn and queasy over her fifth barely touched dish. “How about we skip the next course, madam?” suggested our waiter. That way she could have a break before the lemon posset, try a taste if she could muster it, and he’d box up the chocolate tart. A doggy bag from a Michelin-starred tasting menu is an imperfect solution – you can’t scoop up purees! – but these are desperate times.
For Victor Garvey, the chef behind Michelin-starred Sola, it’s the eagerness, not the discretion, of his diners that’s been most striking. Many announce their jab use on arrival. “There seems to be very little shame associated with it,” he says. “It’s funny to me, because you would never go somewhere and be like, ‘Yeah, I’m on Viagra!’” As an American, he adds the whole thing feels oddly un-British. Though really, what’s more British than worrying that not eating the food you have paid for might offend the chef. Granted, this wasn’t a concern for my companion. Nor, indeed, was irony. As two young, slim, glamorous girls floated by our table to be seated, she glanced over at them and let out a cackle: “What are they going to eat!”
