Could you cook a MICHELIN style menu at home

As said, a full tasting menu in most Michelin starred restaurants can amount to quite a lot of food. Individual courses are small, but if there's 8-12 courses that's irrelevant. If you go and have an a la carte lunch then maybe it's a possibility depending on how you order.

People who scoff at fine dining are as entitled to their view as anyone else, but yeah, if I was going to come up with a shortlist of what I suspect is behind it in most cases:-

• Reverse snobbery, sometimes reminds me of a bloke I knew who wasn't comfortable staying in nice hotels, he always had to stay in a kip, because he had this image of himself as being a 'working class lad'.
• Inferiority complex tied up with ideas of class, palate and a nervousness about what a fine dining environment is like ... This one makes me sad, as people who try a fine dining restaurant will almost always find themselves made very welcome. I don't like the idea of being being put off by a perception that today's fine dining restaurants remain snooty or exclusive (Bar the odd exception)
• Limited palate. I actually think this is a fair and reasonable issue. If you are a very fussy eater the reality is that a fine dining restaurant is not going to suit unless they have kindly put "safe" options in the a la carte menu. And in fairness, this being Ireland, many places do this. Martin Kajuiter used to be adept at doing this, when he was at the Cliff House. His tasting menu was the real fine dining experience, and his a la carte was chosen to cater to well-heeling Irish people who just wanted to come in and have a well-done steak, or a nice piece of fish, and get their vegetables on the side as usual.
• Cost implications. I have a friend from Cavan and none of the above applies to him, and he has plenty of money, but he is never, ever going to put his hand in his pocket for the price of a tasting menu for two people. Sorry for perpetuating the stereotype about Cavan folks but I said what I said ;)

I'm with "The Truth" on one thing though, I'm not an eel fan. I don't like little smoked cubes of it, I don't like bigger pieces of it, to me it's like vermin of the water, it's up there with salmon roe as a commonly used element in fine dining that I will pass to the missus and ask her to finish off for me.

I partly trace this dislike back to eating in a tempura restaurant in Japan where part of the set menu was eel. We were sitting at a counter, and the chef reached into a vat of water and pulled a live eel out in front of us. He pinned it to a wooden block with a chisel, at the neck, and then the slit it open and boned it in front of us. Then into the batter and it was fried and served in about 4 minutes flat. I can still see it whipping around like a live electric wire!

On the cookbooks thing: A lot of Michelin starred chefs' cookbooks are geared towards home cooking. To be honest I'd say a shocking number of them are ghost-written by other chefs and just get the nod from the celebrity after the fact. A great one for everyday cooking is Tom Kerridge's first book 'Proper pub food'. Within the culinary grasp of dads everywhere, I should think ;)

But then there are others, as L1011 alludes to, you get the sense are intended as coffee table food porn, not anything intended to be cooked at home in reality.

For those interested in that, a great book that does away with any pretence of being about more than food tourism is 'On the menu' by Nicholas Lander. A big book tracing the evolution of fine dining menus.