I recommend Saam to anyone who will be visiting LA and is curious about the fancy-pants world of the long-form, ultra-finnicky show-off dinner.  First, $120 for 22 courses is a relative bargain, compared to prices at the rest of the restaurants named above, or for that matter (just for perspective) the price of Pittsburgh Steelers nosebleed-section tickets on Stubhub. Second, there’s a tapas-like friendiness to Andrés’s food (the huge restaurant that houses Saam, called Bazaar, is a riff on the tapas theme).  One dish consists of a tiny boneless chicken wing, marinated and made crispy, topped with a drop of gelatinized hot sauce, a wee daub of blue-cheese emulsion, and a microscopic mince of celery. It was a one-bite homage to the buffalo wing—and delicious. Other treats: a little ampule of spun sugar containing a drop of olive oil; glass noodles constructed from smoky dashi broth, with a wee clam; a demitasse foie-gras flavored soup with a sweet corn foam and bits of crunchy corn nuts; a slow-cooked quail egg with crisp potato, wrapped with “veal breast pastrami.” The food was matched with a canny assortment of vivid wines (which costs extra, of course).

As I say, nothing a home cook could learn here. But then, you don’t go to the ballet to learn how to pirouette. Some things are best left to the fancy-pants professionals.