It’s become a well-documented fact that people dining out want a memorable experience, whether it’s eating in a fashion boutique or having an AI-chef prepare your meal. But the full-on obsession with spectacle had not been so apparent to me until a recent dinner at the world-renowned Eleven Madison Park in New York City.

It started with a potato.

The spud was wheeled on a cart through the dining room, as if it were a stolen gem from the Louvre, in a tagine-like vessel designed by the artist Rashid Johnson. Now by my table, I could see the potato had been cut into dozens of precise, thin, crosswise slices. After it was briefly infused with smoke tableside, the server sifted a cream-colored powder — dehydrated potato — over it like a dusting of snow, then added it to a plate adorned with a column of mashed potato. She added a dollop of plant-based cream and garnished the service with tonburi — vegan caviar. It promised everything: a crispy outside, a creamy interior, a top-of-the-line finish. I prepared to be transported.

I was not. The potato was not fully cooked. Neither the smoke nor the powder brought much to the party. The plant-based cream alongside was overly sweet. Only the mash stood out.

Also lackluster was the leek course, which featured the vegetables cut on an extreme angle and served in a neutral sauce that was nominally enhanced with green chili and coriander, though you wouldn’t have known from just tasting. It reminded me of a dish we were taught in cooking school to practice knife skills.

Having two out of eight courses disappoint at Eleven Madison Park, a place that for years has won three Michelin stars and was crowned the World’s No. 1 restaurant in 2017, is not a great ratio. Especially when the menu goes for $365 before drinks and tip.

My original mission for dining here was to bear witness to the reintroduction of meat at the restaurant. Four-plus years ago, chef Daniel Humm made headlines by turning EMP into a vegan establishment. Two years later, he declared to Bloomberg that he would never serve meat or butter again: “No, no, no, not here,” he said.

Alas, in mid-October he added three nonplant proteins to the menu: ceviche-style scallops; butter-poached lobster; and the restaurant’s famed spice-encrusted duck as an alternative to skewers of maple-glazed, pine-seasoned maitake mushrooms with seitan. The lobster and the duck were both excellent — buttery-sweet and juicy-but-crisp-skinned, respectively — and they brought back tastes I remembered from pre-pandemic times.

But it was the potato service that I talked about after the meal.

Because even if the food at EMP didn't blow me away, the spectacle of the evening did. Of course I’ve seen a trolley roll through a dining room before, but I still loved the Manhattan cocktail service presented tableside — by an affable mixologist who took me to bartending school while making my bourbon-fueled Arthur Avenue. And I sat admiring the flames go up when a sommelier prepared white-hot tongs for the opening of a wine bottle. It was fabulous.

I’ve covered eating out in restaurants for decades, and even through eras of celebrity chefs and tasting menus that played tricks with ingredients, food has always been the most important talking point. If a place didn’t have very good food, there was always another option down the block. That concept now seems quaint.

Restaurants have long known the value of putting on a spectacle to keep diners entertained, flambéing crepes and any other dessert that would ignite, and carving prime rib, not to mention ostentatiously sprinkling salt over steak, in front of guests. Its popularity has ebbed and flowed, but showy presentation is having another moment.

Union Square Hospitality Group founder Danny Meyer is a longtime proponent of an experience at restaurants. For years, he’s maintained that if you give guests great food but bad hospitality, you might not see them again. Hospitality — remembering repeat guests and having empathetic servers work the dining room, for instance — is, he says, "what they tend to remember long after they can recall how their burger tasted.”

Major Food Group’s chef and co-founder Mario Carbone has likewise leaned into the importance of experience since he opened his eponymous dining room in 2013 in Manhattan. His restaurants have become known for tuxedoed maître d’s telling bad jokes while tossing Caesar salads in front of guests. The group’s latest restaurant, Carbone Riviera, which just opened in the Bellagio Las Vegas, is a paean to seafood; but the whole fish — or the multiple Picassos that decorate the walls — isn’t what everyone’s putting on social media. It’s the sleek, James Bond-style Riva Anniversario speedboat docked outside, not far from the Bellagio fountains. It’s one of only 18 in the world, and designed to take super VIP guests on a lake tour timed for prime fountain viewing.

The boat is a singular extension of the restaurant entertainment trend. “Going out needs to be so much more than dinner,” Carbone says. “There’s more options than ever, including getting things to your doorstep. Restaurants need to be theatrical, experiential — choose your adjective. If you can deliver on the entertainment factor on this fun night out, it makes it worth getting out of your sweatpants and going out.” (Especially when that Caesar alla ZZ will cost you around $34, the same price as a spicy vodka rigatoni.)

A few casinos away at the Venetian Las Vegas,Cote Vegas’ Simon Kim and designer David Rockwell have conceived of their new restaurant as something akin to the US Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium. There are private dining rooms that feel like skyboxes, as they overlook the action at the lit up bar that lies below. “Entertainment-ready,” is how Kim describes it.

There’s also a deluxe caviar-topped wagyu sandwich, aka steak and eggs. And there’s wagyu paella and kimchi jjigae black cod, a clever riff on the famed Korean stew. Both were good, but the DJ booth installed above the dining room captured everyone’s attention.

“More than ever, clients are telling us that they want to create an elevated journey for diners,” Rockwell says. “This is because of the dominance of small screens in our daily lives, but guests want human to human interaction and experience.”

It makes sense to me. Operators are plowing more and more of their budgets into giving diners experiences, from the servers who feel like friends and entertain you, to the tricked-out venues that look spectacular on social media. No wonder food at restaurants may now seem like an afterthought. Everyone’s already seen a nice dining-room steak on TikTok, and good quality beef is increasingly expensive — but having a DJ suspended in the air above your table is a showstopper reel.

I hope restaurants don’t lose sight of good food in search of such experience. But I surprised myself the other week by actually expecting more from a dining vibe. I was at London’s most controversial restaurant, the Yellow Bittern, which only serves lunch, only accepts cash and only offers chef-owner Hugh Corcoran’s set menu. It prides itself on being a home-style place, with decor that shows off its dual identity as a bookstore.

The food was mediocre — lackluster fish soup, bitter parsley-laced carrot salad. More notably, the service was transactional. The place didn’t need a DJ or a speedboat, but it could have used something to help customers engage with the place. “It’s like a dinner party without the party,” my friend smartly observed.

Back at Eleven Madison Park, chef Humm says that despite the fierce backlash to serving animal protein again, he’s seen a large uptick in reservations, especially for private events. He’s been selling a lot more splashy, big-ticket wines too, like a 2014 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, which one table ordered at a cost of $15,000.

Recently, his restaurant was once again awarded three Michelin stars. Maybe the inspectors weren’t served the potato course. Or maybe, like me, they got distracted by the cart.

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