How do great chefs create new dishes?

Photo by food_in_mouth on flickr

I've often wondered how chefs work through the process of creating new dishes when they have so many other things going on. How do they come up with ideas? How many tries does it take to get just right? How do they adapt a dish over time?

In The New Yorker's profile on David Chang we learned that Chang and Momofuku Ko chef Peter Serpico worked on a scallop dish "for weeks." I tried this labored over dish shortly after Ko opened and loved it. Its other incarnation, with fluke standing in for the scallop, received mostly positive reactions from the critics.

In a post yesterday chef blogger Laurent Gras at L2O in Chicago provided a glimpse into his new dish creation process and how he works to "get in the memory of the guest." Gras uses lobster, peach and lemon verbena as his starting point and adapts the components based on taste, aesthetic and technique. He then turns to the visual impact and then finally to assessing overall balance, texture and intensity.

Considering that the seemingly thrown together "seafood stew" I had for dinner last night at a popular southern Connecticut restaurant was priced at a third the cost of Ko's tasting menu I think that more insight into how talented and thoughtful chefs work can only benefit their cause.