Close, but not quite -- the butter isn't "made from French truffles". Butter is not made from truffles. Butter is made from cow squeezings. It's *flavored* with French truffles.
It translated into coin-sized towers of wafer-thin food, eternally surrounded by a raspberry jus or a kiwi coulis. Offering barely a decent bite per course, it was piled on to glossy black plates at maximum expense and with minimum impact on the appetite.
Back at the height of this nonsense, four of us dropped into a decent-looking restaurant at random while we were out on the town, and although the food was okay, all of us were quite literally still hungry when the meal was over. Filling up on desert wasn't much of an option -- it was an Asian restaurant and they're not big on deserts. So we paid our bill, left, and immediately chose another restaurant to go into and continue eating...
So many restaurateurs fail to realize that people talk to each other. If you serve "fashion food" you may get a few good restaurant reviews by the "usual suspect" snooty restaurant reviewers, and from that you will get an initial rush of business from those who worry about being seen in the "right places" but as the months and years roll by you won't have a sustainable business model because when hard-working people decide to have a special evening out at a restaurant, they are looking for good food, good ambiance, and a solid meal for a fair price. Restaurants who treat their patrons as you were will not get the sort of dedicated repeat business that keeps such a business in the black over time.
Which brings up a question that I've had in the back of my mind for years.
What was the incentive behind very first person thinking, "I'm gonna drink whatever comes out of that!" when he saw a cow?
Mark