Think about it. The processes of making a dish and DJing a set are fundamentally similar, and both activities share a common set of skills. Anyone can put on an album, or throw some spaghetti in a pot with some canned sauce, but to differentiate yourself and provide a higher quality experience, you need to understand the interrelationships between different objects (songs for DJs, ingredients for chefs), and combine them in ways that work. Sometimes that means tried and true combinations - garlic and onions, hip hop and funk. Other times it means innovating and finding hidden relationships between seemingly opposing things. Grant Achatz mixes olive oil into ice cream with orange and vanilla, to mind-blowingly delicious effect. Sebastian and Kavinsky, who opened for Daft Punk on their Alive 2007 tour, warmed the crowd up with a mix of electro-house and Rage Against The Machine. Genius.
The analogy extends even further when you consider the development of a chef or DJ. To develop as either, you need to familiarize yourself with a huge database of existing objects. In general, the more songs you know, the more effective a DJ you are, because you can finely tune your setlist to achieve very specific moods and flows. As a chef, being familiar with a huge variety of ingredients lets you adjust your dish to perfectly evoke or complement a given experience. Sometimes you want to hit on familiar themes, other times you want to surprise people with something new. It depends on the audience.
And, of course, there are techniques for both. Learning the rules as a chef involves mastering cooking and preparation technique. Knife skills, ability with various heating methods, and presentation, among other things, all contribute. As a DJ, beat matching, equalization, and mastering the art of flow - sequencing songs to create a shifting dynamic without too many abrupt changes - contribute to your overall success. And, as with any art, once you have learned how to follow the rules, you can figure out when to break them (see above - olive oil ice cream, Rage Against The Machine dance music).
The one place where DJs and chefs are notably different is in their handling of requests. Chefs take them as a matter of course, since ordering from a menu is essentially requesting a certain experience. Most DJs I know (including me, back in my Clark Hall Pub DJ days), on the other hand, do not like requests. I chalk this one up to the fact that DJs need to create one experience that's palatable to an entire room, whereas chefs can target individual palates with each dish. Most (not all, but definitely most) requests just don't fit in with the flow of a party. Usually, the people requesting songs are the people who don't like what's currently being played, and if you're a competent DJ, you've figured out the vibe of the room, and are playing to the majority. Football team social? Odds are you will be playing dirty rock and roll, liberally spiced with top 40 hip hop, with a side order of songs from whenever the people at the party were in high school. It's the DJ equivalent of spaghetti bolognese. Simple, predictable, popular with just about everyone. And, almost invariably, someone will come up and request some Tom Waits, or Black Flag, or *insert incredibly specific European techno subgenre here*. Please don't do that.
It is interesting to note that many of the world's foremost chefs aren't offering menus in their restaurants these days. Tasting menus are becoming extremely prevalent, in which you pay one price for a multi-course menu that is decided ahead of time. This is basically the chef's way of adopting the DJ ethic of knowing your craft really well, and then asking the customer to trust you to put together a high quality experience.
Finally, since the internet is basically a repository of every idea you could ever hope to think of, I am not the first person to notice this relationship, though I did arrive at it independently (I am the Liebniz of the chef-DJ relationship). Heston Blumenthal, chef and owner of the Fat Duck, host of In Search of Perfection, and subject of my personal man-crush, has created a dish where he combines seafood with an iPod loaded with sea sounds to activate the auditory region of the brain while eating. And this guy totally beat me to commercializing the idea. He calls himself DJ Chef ("Spinnin' the beats while cookin' the treats"), and claims to be the only entertainer in the world who will simultaneously DJ and cater your special event.
The only DJ/chef in the entire world, eh? I think I've finally got myself a plan for after I finish this silly masters in engineering.
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