Gastronaut: Arts and Crafts  There was a time when being a chef
was purely a trade, and having an artist in your kitchen was
only slightly better than having rats. But with the rise of
“egotarian” cuisine, the artists are ruling the food world.
Illustration by Kagan McLeod  Illustration by Kagan McLeod  I
saw this coming years ago. Not because I’m clever or prescient
or some kind of unappreciated soothsayer of cuisine, but simply
because I was on the front lines. I was a restaurant critic in
Denver, Colorado, back during the second boom of New American
cuisine.  I saw this coming years ago, but it had no name — not
until GQ’s Alan Richman gave it one a few months back. He wrote
about young chefs, exclusively male, working “with like-minded
discipline, hardly ever haunted by doubts, seemingly in
possession of absolute confidence.” He called it “Egotarian
Cuisine” — food that is “intellectual, yet at the same time
often thoughtless … straddling the line between the creative and
the self-indulgent.” More to the