Redzepi was being modest, naturally, but he was also speaking to the subjectivity of taste and to the somewhat esoteric appeal of his foraging for culinary inspiration. Did he mind all the needling about, well, his pine needle garnishes, tree bark reductions and the like?

“It’s fine, it doesn’t bother me”, he replied. “People will disagree. There is no absolute truth.”

…just as with the very highest of high fashion, the highest of haute gastronomy eventually filters down to what we all eat on a regular basis and we all benefit from it.

My concern with trickle-down gastronomics (my term, not his) is that the great influence of innovative masters like Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal, the chefs at the restaurants named best (elBulli) and second best (The Fat Duck) in the world, often results in overly ambitious homages with disastrous consequences in all the wrong places. Architecture provides a parallel. From the modern masterpieces of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe came the nightmarish tower blocks of Glasgow and the hellish projects of Baltimore.

Fortunately, a badly conceived meal does not last as long as a badly conceived building.