I want to start by saying that I like food. I’ve been eating it for sixty-eight years. I know what food is. Food is a thing you put in your mouth that tastes like something and fills you up and does not require a glossary to understand. I have strong feelings about this because I just spent four days eating at North Side Restaurant Week establishments and I am no longer sure any of that is true.

North Side Restaurant Week, for those unfamiliar, runs February 26 through March 8 and features prix fixe menus at participating restaurants across the North Side. I was told it would be “a great way to try new places.” What it was, actually, was a great way to discover that every restaurant north of Diversey has collectively decided that the future of cuisine is putting foam on things.

My first meal was at a place in Lincoln Park whose name I won’t print because it had an umlaut in it and I refuse to give it the satisfaction. I ordered what the menu described as “Heritage Pork Belly with Charred Scallion Purée and Smoked Maple Foam.” What I received was a piece of pork the size of a domino sitting in a puddle of green paste, topped with what appeared to be dish soap.

“That’s the foam,” my waiter said, with the tone of a man who has explained this before and will explain it again.

I ate the foam. It tasted like someone had whispered the word “maple” into a cloud and then put the cloud on my plate. The pork was good. There was not enough pork. There was plenty of foam. This would become a theme.

At the second restaurant, in Lakeview, I ordered a steak. A man wants a steak, he orders a steak. Simple. What arrived was a strip of beef arranged diagonally across a plate the size of a hubcap, accompanied by “Truffle Bone Marrow Foam” and a single roasted potato that had been cut into a cube, presumably by someone with a protractor. The foam was on the steak. It was on the potato. There was a small additional dot of different foam on the rim of the plate that the waiter identified as “beet air.”

I asked if I could have some horseradish. He looked at me like I’d asked for a cigarette.

The third restaurant was in Andersonville and I’m going to level with you: I don’t know what I ate. The menu was in English but functioned more like poetry. My appetizer was “Deconstructed Kimchi with Fermented Daikon Foam and Black Garlic Soil.” I’m going to say that again. Soil. They put dirt on my plate and called it dinner. The foam was fine. The soil tasted like dirt. I don’t know what I expected.

The dessert at that meal was “Lavender Panna Cotta with Citrus Foam and Edible Flowers.” The panna cotta was topped with foam. The foam was topped with flowers. The flowers were topped with a smaller, different foam. I counted three foams on one dessert. At some point you have to ask yourself: is this food, or is this a bubble bath that someone plated?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Hennessey, you’re a dinosaur. You don’t understand modern cuisine. You probably think a prix fixe is something wrong with your car. And fine. Maybe I’m old. Maybe the world has moved on and foam is the future and I’ll be eating it on my deathbed while a twenty-six-year-old chef explains that it’s actually a “reduction of my essence.” But I don’t think wanting to eat a meal that I can identify with my eyes is an unreasonable position.

Back when I was coming up, a restaurant gave you food and you ate it. The food was on the plate. It was not conceptual. Nobody described your mashed potatoes as “a meditation on tuber.” You didn’t need the waiter to narrate each course like it was a TED Talk. You sat down, you ate, you paid, you left. The meal didn’t have a thesis.

I went to one more place, on my wife’s insistence, in Ravenswood. She said it was supposed to be “approachable.” The first course was “Compressed Watermelon with Feta Mousse and Basil Foam.” In March. Watermelon. In March. I looked out the window. It was thirty-four degrees.

The foam was green. I ate it. I think it tasted like basil. It might have tasted like nothing. It’s hard to tell with foam because, and I cannot stress this enough, foam is mostly air. You are eating air. You are paying thirty-eight dollars for a prix fixe menu that is, by volume, approximately sixty percent air.

North Side Restaurant Week runs through March 8. If you go, bring a granola bar.