5

The Zen Garden

Moto Restaurant

Many high-concept dishes are not about the taste so much as they are about the experience. In other words, people eat them because they're expensive and have some neat gimmick. In a refreshingly honest move, Moto restaurant in Chicago actually seems to admit this with their signature zen garden dish, which is custom designed for playing with your food rather than, you know, eating it.

The zen garden is a cheese plate consisting of Camembert, spices, chocolate, and frozen, blended fruit. It has been painstakingly shaped into the form of a Japanese zen rock garden, complete with a little meditation rake you can use for arranging the elements in the garden for some contemplative peace and quiet.

Creatas/Creatas/Getty Images
As with real zen gardens, this provides much relief to those who have no actual problems.

4

The Octopop

Mike Anegus/Wikimedia

Molecular gastronomy is an umbrella term for various types of experimental cooking, known by most fans of ordinary food as "that pretentious horseshit with foams and gels." Although it doesn't actually involve any Molecule Man-style alterations of the food's biochemical structure (you can easily do that shit yourself by forgetting your leftover Chinese in the fridge for a week), it is all about radically altering the ingredients' shape and consistency. You know, like if you were to make lollipops out of octopus.

Madrid Lab
First came the name. Then they wrote the screenplay. Then then scrapped that and made it a dish.

The terrifyingly named octopop was conceived by Australian chef Adam Melonas at Dubai's Burj al-Arab hotel, presumably after he read the Necronomicon and mistook it for a confectionery handbook. Its basic idea is actually pretty simple: It's a piece of roast octopus on a stick.

However, in true mad scientist fashion, Melonas has added to the process until the end result barely resembles octopus or, for that matter, food. The waxy sheen and structure of the octopop are achieved by vacuum-cooking the octopus for 12 hours, then using a knife and an enzyme called transglutaminase (a substance commonly used to glue bits of meat together) to turn the perished cephalopod into a pretty, flower-like construct. The end result is dipped in spiced gel and stuck on a stick with some dill for you to try and figure out what the hell you're chewing on.

Madrid Lab
When you figure it out, handing these out from your van to kids suddenly seems creepy.

3

The Sound of the Sea

Sternefressner

There are only four restaurants in the United Kingdom that have received three Michelin stars. Two of those restaurants belong to Frenchmen. One belongs to Gordon Ramsay. And then there's the Fat Duck. The Fat Duck is often called one of the best restaurants in the world, and it's operated by a bona fide mad scientist. Its head chef, Heston Blumenthal, has dedicated his life to the most important questions about food. If his work is any indication, every single one of these questions is: "How can I make the person eating this lose his goddamn mind?"

Oli Scarff/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Heston Blumenthal, seen here designing a chair with one leg that's too short.

Blumenthal's menus read like he's aspiring to be a food-themed Batman villain. They have an Alice in Wonderland-themed dish that consists of mock turtle soup and a dissolving pocket watch. They have scrambled-egg-and-bacon ice cream and bright green snail porridge. And then there is "sound of the sea."

Instantly recognizable on their menu as the only dish with quotation marks around its name, sound of the sea looks less like food and more like a giant "fuck you" from the kitchen. A strange mini-collection of plants, sand, and frothy foam, the dish looks like it can't possibly be edible. Yet its each and every element is an insanely complicated food item: The sand is made of panko breadcrumbs, baby eels, and half a dozen other things. The "sea" froth is cockles, mussels, carrots, and ... well, here's the recipe if you want to give it a shot. There are no less than 55 separate ingredients in there, all painstakingly prepared to create the "taste" of the sea.

2

The Card Trick

Alan Shayne/Huffington Post

Eleven Madison Park, a perennial contender in world's best restaurant rankings, has found success in the crowded food scene of the Big Apple thanks to its arsenal of clever gimmicks. They have a carrot tartare dish that somehow passes for steak and a drink cart that roams the restaurant hall serving Manhattan cocktails. However, those are just trimmings. The biggest trick up their sleeve is an after-dinner chocolate, which is simply magical. Literally.

Eric N./Yelp
Where did the plates go? Magic.

1

The Liquorice Nitro-Dragon (and Other Liquid Nitrogen Dishes)

El Bulli

elBulli was a celebrated Spanish restaurant that also relied heavily on molecular gastronomy. Under its head chef, Ferran Adria, dishes such as potato-foam "Spanish omelettes," liquid olives, and wood-smoked water were all par for the course. Some of elBulli's weirdest menu items were little treats called morphs. They were tiny dishes that looked like one thing but tasted like another. These Transformer foods included corals that were actually chocolate, envelopes made of sugar, and marshmallows disguised as human hands, because apparently no one cares how many serial killer flags you raise when you're really, really good at cooking.

Endo Edibles
They're not quivering in pain. They're ... applauding. Yeah, applauding.