Haute cuisine is high-class French cooking — the elaborate, refined tradition of grand restaurants, palace kitchens, and legendary chefs from Carême through Escoffier to the modern masters. It is defined by technical mastery, the finest ingredients, precise sauces, artful presentation, and service as theatre: the tasting menu as a composed performance. Classical haute cuisine built the brigade system, the mother sauces, and the vocabulary of professional cookery worldwide. The nouvelle cuisine revolution lightened it; modern tasting-menu culture reinvented it. Beyond technique, haute cuisine is an idea — that cooking can be an art demanding the same seriousness as music or painting — and France’s most successful cultural export.