Third Michelin Star for Blockchain Chef
Bitcoin isn’t the only meteoric rise associated with blockchain. Michelin announced today that L’Arnaque of Paris has become the first Blockchain restaurant to earn a coveted third star. The young chef, Jacques Soltys, previously known only for a brief stint at London’s Shed at Dulwich, used the technology to craft a cuisine that has shocked and enchanted the gastronomic world. “L’Arnaque earned our highest ranking for its courage and decentralized innovation,” said Jean-Luc-Naret, director of the Michelin Guides. According to Michelin’s rankings, a three-star restaurant offers “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey”.
For Soltys, a third star is the ultimate accolade in an accidental profession. Trained as a computer scientist, he originally became interested in cooking as a way to recycle the heat produced by his compute servers’ CPUs. “I used to make coffee on the heatsinks. I learned very precise control with coffee and then I tried broth. Such gentle heat!” he said. Only a few years later, Soltys discovered Blockchain and began the culinary odyssey that would produce L’Arnaque’s revolutionary cuisine.
L’Arnaque’s menu is at once serious and playful. The lusciously rich soft fork lamb with alt-cress combines ingredients “sourced-to-order” from local farms in what the restaurant describes as “a new paradigm for sustainability”. While, the “analog” veal coins with citrus cured beets and 128-bit mushroom duxelles celebrates the intersection of cuisine and technology in a connected world. Desserts, which the restaurant calls “rewards”, are sourced dynamically through a network of on-demand pastry chefs via the restaurant’s mobile app.
Soltys disregards the circumspection of traditional chefs, including a public feud with fellow 3-star chef Gordon Ramsey, who calls Blockchain cuisine “a fetid bubble”. Soltys insists that, “Diners want innovation. They tire of the legacy, bourgeois, fiat-cuisine of Paul Bocuse and Gordon Ramsey. At L’Arnaque, we use drones and intelligent salt wells. Other restaurants still think that blowtorches and ceramic knives are modern!” Asked to comment for this article, Ramsey replied with an unprintable epithet.
Signature dishes, like the micro-charred crypto-trout and white asparagus branleur stream to the dining rooms from an innovatively decentralized kitchen that operates on a series of immutable and irrefutable transactions between chefs. Line chef Francois Le Clerc explained, “Legacy kitchens routinely fail, because they require command and control. At L’Arnaque, I know that the fish is cooked, because I receive an alert on my phone.” Each interaction from mise en place to plating completes a “smart contract” clause, automatically directing payment from diner to employee account.
Innovation continues in the 64-seat dining room, where patrons may order seasonal ingredients direct from farm to kitchen to table and compensate servers with micro-tips for each aspect of service. “Post-meal tipping is too blunt an instrument. The server doesn’t know what was good and bad,” said Soltys. “Our system creates detailed data that becomes an irrevocable part of the Blockchain. Perhaps the server placed a sauce spoon quite elegantly. Servers must go home at night and analyze this data.” In a nod to his roots, Soltys now uses heat from his compute servers to warm the dining room.
Leading the vanguard has included some hiccups. “Mt. Gox was a disaster!” said Soltys. “We lost 32 micro-shipments of beef and lovely case of Pouligny.” But, L’Arnaque turned the crisis into opportunity, dropping Bitcoin in favor of a proprietary currency. The proceeds from L’Arnaque’s initial coin offering (ICO) funded an overhaul of the restaurant in which every aspect of food delivery, from oven to flatware was connected to the cloud. “Having our own currency was a game changer,” says Soltys. “To give us even more flexibility, we will soon experiment with currencies for each dish and an API.”
“Within 3 years,” predicts Soltys, “everyone will use Blockchain.” Referring to the graphical processing units used to run Blockchain technology, he added, “You will not be able to make a sauce bordelaise or pate a choux without a GPU,” he asserts, “And what a wonderful world it will be! So many culinary disasters could have been averted. We never would have had cronuts or rumaki or pizza with shrimp on it!”