I went to one of the world’s ‘coolest’ restaurants. I don’t get it

The hot-pink neon sign at the end of the table is a statement of intent. “Be a rebel,” it entreats. Meanwhile, the Tool song Eulogy is playing at ear-splitting volume, as a chef at a spotlit bench places little bits of food onto slender spoons.

Be a rebel. Be a rock star. “How many fine-dining restaurants have you been to that play f---ing Tool?” asks Gaggan Anand, chef and apparently DJ, as he hits stop on the prog-metal and challenges the 14 diners in front of him with a stare.

Gaggan in Bangkok, where everyone is equal as long as they can pay $750 for a meal.Credit: Alamy

“And if you don’t know Tool,” he sneers, “well, now you f---ing do.”

I know Tool. I actually like Tool. I also understand that Tool hasn’t been edgy, scare-your-parents music since the ’90s. The band’s entire fanbase these days is middle-aged dorks like me and Anand.

But anyway, back to being a rebel. “There are only four rules tonight,” says Anand, pacing back and forth in the kitchen like he’s Henry Rollins doing spoken word, while the rest of us sit around and hope that some wine will be served at some point.

No talking when I’m talking: Gaggan Anand.Credit: Alamy

One of those rules has to be that there are no rules, right? Like proper rebels? Well, no. No flash photography, Anand orders. No toilet breaks during the entire first “act”, a series of 10 dishes. And most importantly: no talking when I’m talking.

It turns out he will be doing a lot of talking.

Welcome to a restaurant that’s not like other restaurants. Gaggan is supposed to be the antithesis of fine-dining BS. It’s a punk-rock rebel’s idea of fancy food, stripping away all the artifice and ego, leaving you with just brilliance and enjoyment. No airs and graces. No formality or conformity.

It’s popular, too. This Bangkok eatery is rated the ninth best restaurant on the planet by the World’s 50 Best. The Google and TripAdvisor reviews for Gaggan are almost uniformly raves. Anand’s previous eatery scored two Michelin stars and was named the best restaurant in Asia four times.

And … I don’t get it. I don’t get the hype. I don’t get the love. I don’t even get the fascination.

There’s a type of attraction we’re starting to see pop up around the world now that really rubs me the wrong way. It’s the pretentious, high-art places that go to great pains to pretend they’re not pretentious and high-art; the venues that trade on anti-establishment cred while being very much part of the establishment.

The Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart: Painfully pompous.Credit:

Mona, the uber-popular art gallery in Hobart, is one of them. Everyone loves Mona, and I’m very pleased that it’s successful. Go, experience it, enjoy it. But I can’t stand it.

I hate the pretence that it’s “anti-art”; the way the gallery feigns dislike for all this stuff, the way it claims to have shed the pretentiousness of the art world – while somehow being even more painfully pompous. But if you hate it, they say, you just don’t get it.

Cool: I don’t get it. To read any information about the artworks at Mona you have to download an app and go to a section called “art wank”. You click on an icon of a penis to get there. The gallery’s permanent collection is called “Monanism”. So clever.

Picassos at Mona sit behind chicken wire. A Brett Whiteley masterpiece can be viewed only while listening to a video installation of a preacher gibbering in tongues.

But art sucks! So who cares? Right, guys?

And now here’s Gaggan Anand, the self-styled bad boy chef from Kolkata, telling anyone who will listen that he has moved on from traditional fine-dining, he pays no mind to Michelin stars, he wants to do things differently.

“We want everyone to be equal in this f---ed up world,” Anand tells his diners, who are arranged in front of him tonight on an L-shaped table staring into the show kitchen, awaiting 22 courses of frankly pretty average haute cuisine. “It doesn’t matter your race, how much money you have, black, white, rich, poor. So we came up with this concept where we all sit at the same table together and we eat the same food.”

Rat’s brain, anyone?Credit: Ben Groundwater

Beautiful. Except a meal at Gaggan costs $750 a head, so there’s only one type of person here, and they aren’t poor (or at least they weren’t before booking).

There are other tells that the punk-rock aesthetic here is artifice. There’s a dress code for the rebels who dine at Gaggan. You must be casual, you’re told – suits and ties are not welcome. You must pay 100 per cent of the cost upon booking, with no refunds under any circumstances. You must sit in silence while the chef speaks.

Anand probably sees himself as the antidote to someone like Andoni Luis Aduriz, poster boy of avant-garde fine-dining and the two-Michelin-starred chef behind San Sebastian restaurant Mugaritz. Aduriz’s eatery represents much that’s ridiculous about high-end cuisine, from forcing diners to lick sauce from a fake belly button to creating a dish called “Exquisite Corpse”.

In reality, though, these two restaurants are not so different (except that some of Aduriz’s food is delicious). One of Anand’s most famous dishes is “rat brains”, a small, brain-shaped dumpling coated in bloody red liquid. It’s served with a long story from Anand about his Thai staff catching local rats and extracting their brains. (We’re told later that they in fact use goat brains, which seems a pointless subterfuge.)

Anand also calls himself the “conductor of the food opera”, and spends most of the three-hour meal clutching an iPad like a dad at a barbecue, playing songs at high volume (Foo Fighters, Men at Work, Eminem) and looking around for appreciation.

Tourists love this. They book months in advance for the chance to slap down $750 a head on dinner in a city where the average meal costs about $7. They love the theatrics, the ceremony, the rock’n’roll bona fides. Maybe even the food. And good on them.

But is this rebellion or delusion? Are we breaking rules here, or just following new ones? The chorus of that Tool song booming around the room at the start of the night held the answer: “Don’t you step out of line.”

The writer visited Gaggan as a guest of the restaurant.