‘Dinner? I’m afraid we can’t serve you dinner,” the waiter at Charlie Trotter’s said starchily as we arrived at the celebrated Chicago restaurant. For 25 years, people made special trips from all over the country to brag about the dozens of courses Trotter served on his ever shifting tasting menus. But as other chefs became more celebrated, the traffic slowed, and Trotter—the first American celebrity chef to build a cult following for elaborate, very long, take-what-I-give-you meals—announced he would be closing for good.

I’d never been to Charlie Trotter’s and called the restaurant to ask when in the next six weeks or so they could possibly seat us. After a long time on hold, the man on the phone told me they could fit me in at 5:30 on a distant Friday. We booked our flight, invited Chicago friends who had likewise never been to the restaurant, landed on time, and then were stopped on the runway to wait out a freak thunderstorm—a storm that lasted two full hours, during which we anxiously texted our waiting friends to keep the table.

Keep it they did—but they also, at the restaurant’s insistence, ate their way through the eight-course tasting menu. For us, the waiter pronounced when we finally got there, it would be the dessert courses. Or nothing. After a good bit of protestation, the maître d’ agreed that we could be served the full meal—at a forced-march pace, all eight appetizers and main courses plus two preliminary and two post-dessert “complimentary” courses. It turned out to be a mercy: we were able to get out in just under three hours.

Mercy is a rare commodity at restaurants like this, where the diner is essentially strapped into a chair and expected to be enraptured for a minimum of three and often four and five hours, and to consume dozens of dishes. Choice, changes, selective omissions—control, really, over any part of an inevitably very expensive experience—are not an option. Course after course after course comes to the table at a pace that is “measured, relentless,” as the former New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton wrote (admiringly!) of Blanca, the latest tasting-menu-only cult restaurant in New York.

When Trotter began, chefs were just breaking out of their backstage supporting roles and putting themselves on display—often literally, in open kitchens. He helped unleash a generation of chefs no longer willing to take orders. The entire experience they will consent to offer is meant to display the virtuosity not of cooks but of culinary artists. A diner’s pleasure is secondary; subjugation to the will of the creative genius comes first, followed, eventually, by stultified stupefaction. The animating force radiates outward from the kitchen, with no real chance of countervailing force from the table. The chef sets the rules; the diner (together with the cowed serving staff) obeys. The reason we were initially denied dinner at Trotter’s, we later learned, was that it didn’t suit the cooks to have us start late. They were making all the courses for all the tables at exactly the same time, and didn’t want to break their lockstep pace to accommodate the inconvenient exigencies of customers.

How did the diner get demoted from honored guest whose wish was the waiter’s command to quivering hostage in thrall to the chef’s iron whim? I found clues in the signed menus on the walls of the guest bathrooms at Trotter’s—a history of revered restaurants of the past 25 years, almost all of them in France, the menus inscribed affectionately to Trotter. Paul Bocuse, Frédy Girardet, Michel Guérard, Marc Veyrat—these were the kings of nouvelle cuisine, champions of the techniques of classic cooking married to rigorously seasonal and local ingredients, and lightened to create a supremely elegant dining experience. Many of the menus were degustations, or tasting menus—but tasting menus that were modest in their ambitions. They listed four, five, maybe six courses.