I was reminded this week that this was the last mega-tasting menu my consort and I ever succumbed to, the one that made us realize this way of eating is really more of a hostage situation. I dredged it up from the archives in the storeroom the Google keeps as “old site,” so I’m not certain of the date. But I do know we watched the invasion of Iraq on the teevee while we were in Oz . . .

On our last night in Sydney, my consort turned down dinner at a new friend’s home because we had long-arranged reservations at Tetsuya’s, the Charlie Trotter’s French Laundry of Australia. We wound up facing down 18 little assemblages of overhyped, overhandled food in a stuffy room, and we’re both wondering what we missed.

I can’t remember any dinner outside of the Beard House where I so wanted to yell: Make it stop. We actually skipped the third and last dessert out of stupefaction. Until then, it was one dainty dish after another, each element sedulously explained by the waiter again after the whole meal was forecast in exhausting detail by the headwaiter when we sat down. Because the entire restaurant was facing the same food in the same order, it was hard to get excited when the scallop carpaccio with foie gras arrived with great ceremony after other tables were well on their way to the roasted squab with buckwheat and mushroom risotto.

We also took the “wine option,” with half-glasses poured with each course for $65Australian extra apiece, which was not the smart decision it was at Trotter’s. About halfway through the ordeal, a waiter came by to say the kitchen was waiting for us to catch up on our wine. “If you were university students,” he added, “I’d advise you to slam it back.”

So how was the food? Suffice it to say that I remember the green salad served with Tetsuya’s signature ocean trout confit the best. A couple of his creations were quite good, like the scallop carpaccio, and a sliver of venison rolled around foie gras with rosemary and honey, and a little shotglass of beet and blood orange puree. But it was all too much, with too few of those fusillades of flavor that brilliant chefs can send out without even trying. I actually saw the butter presented with the bread as an omen: It was tricked up not only with black truffles but with Parmesan. A chef who would gild the tuber just doesn’t know when to stop.