THERE are fashions in gastronomy, just as there are in garments. While both are the preoccupations of the wealthy, the rest of us can at least aspire to follow some of these expensive trends.

For instance, the best restaurant in the world – at least on the 2011 San Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurant list – is Noma, the Copenhagen eatery that was also voted number one last year. This ranking is on the basis of votes cast by over 800 members of the 50 Best Restaurants Academy, and to get on this list means an instant in sales.

Until a couple of years ago, Copenhagen was not on the foodie radar for gastronomic delights. Indeed, much of Denmark's reputation for food revolved around variations on herring and elk meat. So how did this sudden transformation happen?

To introduce us to the delights and the mysteries of Noma, Jonathan Gold, the food critic of the Wall Street Journal, flew to the Danish capital. At the restaurant, located in a converted herring warehouse, Gold describes the appearance of Noma's signature dish (as there was no menu, he calls it the Hen and the Egg):

“A plate of damp hay appears, smouldering under the empty, superheated pan that rests atop it. A squeeze bottle is produced. You are directed to squirt a few drops of hay-infused oil into the pan, and then crack a speckled wild-duck egg into the oil. A timer is set. The egg white bubbles and spits. When two minutes have elapsed, you are instructed to swirl a knob of goat butter into the pan and briefly sauté a few fragile leaves of spinach and of ramson, a kind of wild garlic…

“A chef brings over a tiny saucepan of forest-green ramson oil, which he spoons over the cooked white. You scatter herbs and wildflowers, and break off whorls from a potato-chip helix. The fragrance of Nordic spring drifts from the pan: the distant smoke, the dampness of thawed earth, the secret pungency of the forest floor. You have discovered what it might be like to fry an egg in the spring woods if you had the resources of one of the world's great kitchens. A hundred tiny things have been orchestrated to ensure that you will be eating the best fried egg of your life.”

Apart from revelling in the poetry of this description, I was left contemplating what such an egg might taste like. Noma's award-winning chef, Rene Redzepi, has worked for years in the kitchen of El Bulli, the iconic Spanish restaurant that launched the 'molecular gastronomy' techniques that are now at the cutting edge in trendy restaurants. El Bulli, unsurprisingly, was voted best restaurant four times. It is now closed for major renovations, and the rumour is that it might not reopen: despite its huge success, it was losing money because it only had one sitting in the evening, and operated for six months a year. For the rest of the year, its chefs experimented in a laboratory to come up with new recipes.

The Fat Duck at Bray, on the outskirts of London, is another temple of molecular gastronomy. Here, Heston Blumenthal has also won the best restaurant award, and offers playful offerings like ice cream topped with sea spray and snail porridge. The tasting menu of some 27 tiny dishes costs 180 pounds, excluding wine.

Just to give an idea of how difficult it is to get a table at these restaurants, the El Bulli website used to open for reservations for one day a year. Out of two million requests, only 8,000 applicants were accommodated. The Fat Duck, too, has a long waiting list, as indeed, do all Michelin-starred restaurants.

Gold describes the three main movements in the higher realm of modern gastronomy: the insistence on fresh, locally sourced ingredients; the increasing use of every bit of an animal, or 'nose-to-tail' cooking; and the 'exotic technologies of the Modernists'. Noma incorporates all three.

Despite the excitement these avant-garde restaurants generate, I suspect that in many cases, people go there largely for the sake of being able to say they have eaten at Noma or El Bulli, rather than because of the food itself. Of course, they don't dare complain because so many critics have praised these places to the skies. But while tickling the palate, the bottom line is that you would not wish to replicate many of these experimental dishes at home, even if you had the equipment to do so.

Here in Pakistan, we are stuck in our culinary groove: while I can get great desi grub whenever I'm here, it's always the same. While comfort food is fine, there are moments I wish I could try something different. There is little attempt to experiment, to try something new, and so we are still stuck with the old aloo-gosht and dal-chawal. Don't get me wrong: a good aloo-gosht and dal-chawal can be as good as anything anywhere. But why can't we get to the next level?

Chefs at Indian restaurants in London have shown that exciting new dishes can be developed, using traditional techniques. Presentation can be made more visually attractive, and ingredients combined in different, more innovative ways. But for desis like me who like their mirch-masala, the spicing is crucial, so there are limits on how far we would like our food to deviate from traditional cooking.

The other thing, of course, is that we desis love our meat, and in large quantities, especially when we eat out. So it would be a brave Pakistani chef who served two-year old turnip that resembled meat, as Noma does.

At the end of the day, we are all creatures of habit. Although we would like to experiment once in a while, we always revert to what we have grown up with. A couple of years ago, my son Shakir was with us at our home in Sri Lanka. As we live by the sea, the staple is fresh seafood, often caught the same day. At the end of a week, Shakir said: “I'd kill for a cheeseburger.”