Chef Doug Flicker’s teensy-weensy 12-table restaurant, Piccolo, has been a phenomena the past few years, earning national accolades (Anthony Bourdain called it the best restaurant in the Midwest,) while infuriating some local diners, who mock it for its teensy-weensy portion sizes, and baffling even some sophisticated diners, such as yours truly, who could never figure out how much we were supposed to eat, and how much we were supposed to spend.

So, after years, the chef has made a big change: A tasting menu! Five courses, for $48.

Is this a big deal? It actually is.

“You had brought it up when we first opened,” Flicker told me, in a phone interview. “And I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. In my mind, I created this menu and this portion size so people could do it themselves. The idea was to step back and allow absolute freedom. But there was this dissonance, we’d get reservations where people were saying: It’s a big night, our big anniversary, a big birthday, and then they’d order two courses and leave—and you knew they were going home hungry. The last straw for me was when I heard somebody talking on the radio about salad dressing, about how he was at the grocery store and there were 73 dressings and 500 things to potentially put in a salad and the resulting million possible salads paralyzed him—and I thought, I’m too close to this. I’m not giving people the dining experience I want to because they’re not seeing what I’m seeing.”

So now the Piccolo menu is divided into five sections, and you can pick five courses from the various sections for your meal (and your date can pick a different five, so you can have try ten things.) How popular is it? It’s what everyone’s been waiting for: Flicker tells me that a full 70 percent of Piccolo guests now order the tasting menu.

And the rest of us can finally quantify local fine-dining tasting menus, as of publication:

Meritage 9-course: $105
Meritage 7-course: $90
Heidi’s 9-course: $85
La Belle Vie 8-course: $85
Meritage 5-course: $75
Vincent 6-course: $74
La Belle Vie 5-course: $70
Cosmos 5-course: $55
Piccolo 5-course: $48
Restaurant Alma-3 course: $48
Heartland 3-course, fauna (w. meat): $45
Heartland 3-course, flora (vegetarian): $35

And now, the food porn! Who’s in the mood to see some Piccolo food shots? You know you have to look. Safe for work, barely…

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