American physicist Thomas Kuhn once argued that big changes in thinking don’t happen bit by bit. Instead, old ways of thinking accumulate all sorts of problems, then break, and then they are replaced by a new way of seeing the world.
On its face, his idea basically argued that progress isn’t smooth. Recently, a Spanish historian of science took that idea to make a bold claim about food.
Raimundo G. del Moral, a professor at the University of Granada, makes the case that Western haute cuisine has officially passed through four distinct paradigm shifts since the tail-end of the French Revolution. And now, we find ourselves in the midst of a fifth.
It can be argued that the field of cooking generally evolves through refinement. Chefs opt for what’s perceived as better ingredients, they marshal tighter techniques, they deploy new variations on familiar forms. But every so often, something more fundamental shifts, and the purpose of cooking gets redefined.
In those cases, what counts as excellence is rewritten and the role of the chef often changes, too. This is something you can see across modern culinary history:
- The world’s first celebrity chef. The first paradigm shift was driven by Marie-Antoine Carême, the 19th-century chef who took elaborate banquet cuisine of the French aristocracy and brought it into the newly invented public restaurant. This democratization of opulence established the idea that cooking could be a codified art form rather than domestic labor.
- The father of modern French cuisine. The second was pushed by Auguste Escoffier, who in the late 1800s stripped away gilded excess and replaced it with rigorous standardization: the brigade system, the mother sauces, the recipe as repeatable formula. Excellence, under Escoffier, meant precision and uniformity.
- Food as art. The third was “Nouvelle Cuisine,” the movement that swept French kitchens in the 1960s and 1970s, championed by chefs like Paul Bocuse, which declared that excellence meant the opposite: lightness, freshness, the individual chef’s creative vision over institutional tradition.
- Laboratory kitchens. Finally, the fourth was driven by Ferran Adrià’s now-closed El Bulli, a Catalan restaurant that spent the 1990s and 2000s serving diners olive oil as a solid, gazpacho as a capsule, and melon as caviar. Excellence to him meant surprise, conceptual provocation, and the manipulation of perception.
Each of these didn’t improve on the last so much as reject its premises. Escoffier wasn’t a better Carême, he had a different theory of what cooking was for. Adrià wasn’t a better Bocuse, he tackled an entirely different game. That’s what makes something a paradigm shift rather than progress.
The fifth — which del Moral takes the liberty of naming — is a real mouthful. Let’s say it together:
Post-Digital Integrative Cuisine.
This isn’t a movement on the horizon, del Moral argues. It’s already here, and it’s evident in restaurants across several countries. What makes it distinct isn’t a specific style or method. Instead, it’s the underlying beliefs about how cooking knowledge is created, who gets to create it, and what purpose it serves.
Now, del Moral takes pains to distinguish this from things that look similar. Sustainability branding doesn’t qualify. Neither does fusion cuisine. Veganism, however significant as a social movement, falls short of paradigmatic status unless it generates new gastronomic knowledge through technique, authorship, and the culinary experience. In del Moral’s view, a new way of thinking has to fix the problems the old one couldn’t solve, and change what the field is trying to achieve in the first place.
So what does the fifth paradigm looks like in practice? Del Moral points at several examples. including:
- Noma (Copenhagen, Denmark) — This is where chef René Redzepi ran fermentation experiments with biologists and perfumers.
- Mugaritz (Errenteria, Spain) — It’s here that Andoni Luis Aduriz established menus that function less as dinner and more as philosophical provocations. Think dishes conceived as vehicles for cognitive and emotional disruption. For instance, there are on the menu potatoes coated in edible clay that appear as small, rough stones. The idea is you’re invited to eat something your brain initially rejects as inedible.
- Aponiente (Cádiz, Spain) — With a kitchen oriented around marine ecosystem restoration, chef Ángel León turns plankton and discarded sea biomass into a three-Michelin-star tasting menu.
- Atelier Crenn (San Francisco, USA) — This is where chef Dominique Crenn weaves ecological narratives throughout the menu, which is meat-free, rooted in regenerative agriculture, and framed explicitly as “the plate as landscape device.”
One of del Moral’s more interesting views is just how seriously he takes AI as a gastronomic collaborator rather than a gimmick. There’s a small movement called computational gastronomy that uses big datasets around chemistry and culture to come up with new flavor combinations, improve sourcing, or even predict how food might make people feel. To him, that’s not just something new, it’s the start of a completely different way of thinking about food. There are some companies already using algorithmic systems to recombine molecular data into plant-based products (think NotCo). The question the paradigm raises isn’t whether AI can cook, but what happens to authorship when it does.
The fifth paradigm, del Moral acknowledges, is not evenly distributed. The restaurants that best embody it are among the most expensive dining experiences on the planet. Their ecological ambitions might be real, but their prices are not. None of it comes cheap, and he admits that “the most ethically and ecologically ambitious forms of gastronomy are often accessible only to elites, even when these rhetorically embrace inclusivity.”
This is the tension that any honest account of this moment has to sit with. And it’s an issue that the makers of lab-grown, cell-cultured meat ran into, as well. The restaurants arguing most forcefully that food should be a medium for ecological repair are also the ones charging several hundred bucks a head to experience it. When Noma announced it was closing its doors (at least as a conventional restaurant), del Moral framed the moment not as a sign of failure, but as a “paradigmatic reorientation.” It’s what happens when the labor economics of avant-garde cuisine become impossible to sustain alongside stated values.
By any measure, so-called Post-Digital Integrative Cuisine is still in its early days. Its most compelling proof points are individual restaurants with individual chefs whose work is difficult to replicate, scale, or institutionalize.
Del Moral’s broader argument is that food world is decidedly in a post-El Bulli period. The restaurants he highlights are interesting and they share a logic. They treat the kitchen as a research platform. They distribute authorship. They take fermentation ecology more seriously than mere technique. They are, in some meaningful sense, asking the same questions in different ways.
Whether the answers will grow beyond the tasting menu is the more important idea to bring to the table — and it’s one yet to be answered.