YOU know a movie is in trouble when a voice-over narrator has to explain the plot that the combined efforts of screenwriter, director and editor failed to make clear. Something like that is going on at Eleven Madison Park, which just eliminated its $125 prix fixe option and now offers only one menu, a $195 blowout that lasts about four hours.

The meal is narrated almost from the minute you sit down, starting with a printed card tied to a box of savory black-and-white cookies (“the quintessential New York treat”), and scarcely letting up until you leave, when you are handed a pocket-size book of historical background on the food you’ve just eaten.

Restaurant dishes are rarely self-explanatory these days, when it seems every item on every plate must be pointed out and identified before the first bite is taken. But with its new format, Eleven Madison Park, celebrated around the world for Daniel Humm’s virtuosic cooking and its vaulting ambition to be seen as an innovator, has made the explanatory text central to the meal.

Taken on their own, with no voice-over, a high number of dishes in the new tasting are extraordinarily pleasurable, fine enough to transcend any words that might be applied to them. And a few of the narrated courses lead to the kind of delight more often inspired by theater or dance.