By this point, I was a food writer of the not-anonymous variety, by which I mean that I joined the search for the next big thing by eating great meals courtesy of magazines and restaurants, without hiding my identity the way a critic would. In 2010, a magazine asked me to profile the extraordinary chef David Kinch of the aforementioned fancy restaurant, which is called Manresa and lies in the affluent suburb of Los Gatos.

I went there twice for work and concentrated both times on the food alone. I was knocked out, especially by a creation called Tidal Pool, which involved a clear littoral broth of seaweed dashi pooling around sea-urchin tongues, pickled kelp and foie gras. I know that I will set off the gag reflex in certain quarters when I confess that, in my view, Mr. Kinch took the sensory pleasure of falling off a surfboard into cold Northern California water and transformed it into the world’s most delicious bowl of Japanese-French seafood soup. Mr. Kinch, I concluded, was the savior sent to bring California cuisine into the 21st century.

Two years later, in December 2012, a magazine editor said that he could expense a Manresa dinner for the two of us. He suggested that we bring (and pay for) our spouses. I had never once eaten at a restaurant of that caliber on my own dime because I did not make nearly enough money. But I liked this editor, I loved Mr. Kinch and I calculated that my one-quarter share of the evening’s total would be $200. I decided to make it a once-in-a-lifetime splurge. After we sat down, Mr. Kinch emerged and said something like, “With your permission, I would love to create a special tasting menu for your table.” Because the editor and I were pampered food-media professionals, we took this to mean something like, Don’t sweat the prices on the menu; let’s have fun, and I’ll make the bill reasonable.

The meal lasted five hours, consisted of more than 20 fantastic courses, and we all felt that we had eaten perhaps the greatest meal of our lives. Then the bill came: $1,200, with tax and tip. It turned out that “a special tasting menu” was a price point marked on the menu. My editor friend confessed that he could charge only $400 to his corporate card, and I felt sick with self-loathing. I knew this was my fault — not Mr. Kinch’s — and I looked around the dining room at loving couples, buoyant double dates, even a family with two young children for whom a thousand-dollar meal was no stretch. I had been a fool in more ways than I could count, including my delusion that one could think and talk about food outside of its social and economic context.

Like any artisan whose trade depends upon expensive materials and endless work, every chef who plays that elite-level game must cultivate patrons. That means surrounding food with a choreographed theater of luxury in which every course requires a skilled server to set down fresh cutlery and then return with clean wine glasses. A midcareer professional sommelier then must fill those wine glasses and deliver a learned lecture about that next wine’s origin and flavor. Another person on a full-time salary with benefits must then set down art-piece ceramic plates that are perfectly selected to flatter the next two-mouthful course. Yet another midcareer professional must then explain the rare and expensive plants and proteins that have been combined through hours of time-consuming techniques to create the next exquisitely dense compression of value that each diner will devour in moments. Those empty plates and glasses must then be cleared to repeat this cycle again and again, hour after hour.