(Photo above: Daikon, acorn jelly and wild arugula. Adam Lawrence’s dish at Mirali in Kyiv, the dish the host chef called the most memorable of the night. Foraged or made by hand, impossible to serve anywhere else. This is the fine dining that is not dying.)

On 8 September, Bruno Verjus posted a video announcing that he’s closing Table, his two-Michelin-star restaurant in Paris, on 22 December. Table has spent the last three years in the top ten of the World’s 50 Best. Verjus didn’t just announce a closure. He delivered a verdict: “Fine dining is over,” he said. He doesn’t want to keep running a 480-euro menu that excludes most people from eating it. He wants to feed more of them.

Within days, the phrase was everywhere. Instagram filled up with the usual eulogies. Substack ran the usual think pieces. If you’ve spent any time in this industry, you’ve seen this exact cycle before, because it isn’t new. Restaurant Business ran a piece called “Fine dining is dead. Long live fine dining” in 2014, after the 2009 recession gutted upscale traffic across the US. In January 2023, when Noma announced it would close its original restaurant, one critic warned readers to brace for a tsunami of think pieces on the death of fine dining, and got one. Fine Dining Lovers asked three of the world’s most respected chefs whether it was true. At least one of them said no, flatly.

So here we are again – same phrase, same performance, different chef, same year we’re always apparently in when it happens.

The pushback started almost immediately this time too. Martijn Defauw, a Michelin-starred chef in West Flanders, posted his own rebuttal within days: fine dining isn’t dead, it’s simply changing, as it always has. Christian Puglisi, who ran Relæ in Copenhagen on the World’s 50 Best list for a decade before closing it himself, has been arguing on his Substack that the whole question is wrong. It was never really about whether fine dining is dead. It’s about why parts of it stopped being relevant, and why nobody wants to say so directly.

If you actually look at what’s happening to the category Verjus says is finished, the data doesn’t cooperate with him. The 2026 Michelin guide for France and Monaco named a record 668 starred restaurants, fourteen more than the year before, including a new three-star and seven new two-stars. Great Britain and Ireland added a record number of restaurants this year too, with Brighton and Hove getting a starred restaurant for the first time in nearly fifty years. Germany added a new three-star. Michelin isn’t retreating anywhere. It’s expanding into Türkiye, a second edition in Doha, a first star in Fujian, new US regional guides for the Southwest, Boston, Philadelphia. The World’s 50 Best ceremony moves to Lima in November, the first time in the award’s history it’s been held in South America, on the back of two Peruvian restaurants taking the number one spot in three years. And at the top end, demand has never looked more extreme. Waitlists running years out. Thousand-name lists for eight-seat counters. Tables gone within seconds of release.

None of that reads like collapse.

It’s also worth noticing what Verjus’s announcement did as a piece of media, separate from whether his stated reason holds up. A two-star chef with a top-ten World’s 50 Best ranking closing his restaurant and delivering a one-line verdict on the entire category is, by design or not, a story that travels. Ruth Reichl covered it within days, French outlets ran it as a referendum on the whole industry rather than one restaurant’s decision. Within a week it had fed directly into the exact social media cycle this piece opened with. None of that tells you whether Verjus meant what he said, it tells you that “fine dining is over,” said by the right person at the right moment, is a sentence built to spread, regardless of what’s actually true underneath it.

What is genuinely collapsing, and this deserves to be said directly rather than folded into a vaguer story about “dining,” is corporate and chain dining. Wendy’s is closing up to 358 US locations. Pizza Hut is shutting 250. Papa John’s is cutting 200. Applebee’s, TGI Fridays, Red Lobster are all being squeezed by labour costs, rent, and falling footfall. In the UK specifically, rising business rates and alcohol duty are doing real damage to independent restaurants, fine dining included, and that damage is real. But it looks less like an industry dying and more like attrition: restaurants folding quietly, one Instagram farewell post at a time, while the restaurants that survive keep getting fully booked.

So no, fine dining is not dead. But I understand exactly why a chef with Verjus’s reach felt he needed to say so, because there is something wrong with the category, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. It’s just not the thing he named.

Here’s my actual complaint, and it has nothing to do with price. I have eaten fifteen-course tasting menus in London, Paris, Copenhagen, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong. Strip the language off the menu card and half the time I couldn’t tell you which city I was sitting in. The same foams, the same restraint, the same sourcing vocabulary, product-led, hyper-local, zero waste, deployed identically whether the kitchen is in Shoreditch or Marina Bay. That isn’t cuisine anymore; it’s a format that’s been copied so many times the copies have started copying each other.

This isn’t a new complaint either, which is exactly the point. Julia Child was already noting a certain sameness settling into the new nouvelle cuisine restaurants back in 1977, as the movement popularised by Paul Bocuse spread and lesser kitchens started reproducing its tricks without its thinking. Food writer Josh Ozersky made almost the identical complaint in 2010, this time about the generation mimicking El Bulli’s techniques, foams and spherification showing up on menus that had no real relationship to the ideas behind them. Fifty years later, the same criticism keeps landing on a new set of chefs, and every single time the industry treats it as a fresh crisis instead of what it actually is: a habit nobody has broken.

What I want from a restaurant is what I want from a glass of wine. A Barolo doesn’t taste like a Burgundy, and nobody would forgive it if it did. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not romantic language for the sake of it – it’s discipline. Terroir means the place has to be detectable in the glass, or nothing about the word means anything. Fine dining borrowed that vocabulary decades ago- hyper-local, product-led, seasonal- and then quietly let go of the one obligation that made the vocabulary honest: that the place actually has to show up on the plate, and it has to show up differently depending on where the plate is.

Terroir isn’t the only way there. Some of the best things I’ve eaten had nothing to do with place. They came from a chef daring enough to put two or three ingredients together that nobody else would have risked, building a flavour that didn’t exist on any other menu because it existed nowhere else at all, only in that one person’s head. That’s a different kind of unrepeatable, but it’s unrepeatable all the same. A dish rooted in a specific soil and a dish rooted in a specific imagination pass the same test. Neither can be lifted onto a menu in six other cities and still mean what it meant on the plate it was born on.

So Defauw is right that fine dining is changing rather than dying. But changing isn’t enough on its own to answer the complaint. It’s changed plating; it’s changed how sourcing gets written on the menu; it’s changed lighting, service rituals, how casual the room is allowed to feel. What it hasn’t changed is the part that actually matters, which is whether the food could have been made anywhere else in the world by anyone who owns the same equipment and reads the same cookbooks. Puglisi’s question – why did parts of it stop being relevant – has an answer, and it’s this one: because relevance was never really about price or ritual. It was about whether a dish could only have existed where you were sitting when you ate it.

Verjus is closing a brilliant restaurant for a reason I respect, even if I think he’s diagnosed the wrong disease. Fine dining doesn’t need saving from its prices. It needs saving from its own sameness, from the fact that a kitchen in six different cities can now produce six versions of the same plate and call each one a reflection of place. The category isn’t dying, but the version of it built from the same ten techniques, served under any sky, deserves to. What’s left after that, the rare place that hands you something you genuinely cannot find anywhere else on earth, is the only version of fine dining still worth defending.

Andreja Lajh is the founder of Haut de Gamme, a London-based PR agency working with chefs, restaurants and food producers worldwide. She writes about food, wine and the restaurant world at hautdegamme.net.