Music is Chef Blank's favorite metaphor. As he invokes comparisons of kitchen preparations to conducting a symphony and of chefs to musicians, Blank leaves no trace of doubt about who wields the baton in Deux Chemineés’ kitchen. “We cooks,” he has said,

have a different purpose than do diners at a table: we are the creators and keepers of endpoints. Just as a violinist playing Mozart needs and uses a totally distinct set of sensorial awareness than does an average person sitting in the audience….Chefs should use all five of their senses to compose, create, execute, adjust and titrate as they work. Accordingly, a chef’s memory must be keener and more directed than is the memory of a diner, for that memory holds the key to structuring a great symphony…

Each year Chef Blank’s love of music culminates in a fundraising dinner for the Philadelphia Singers. These Great Composer dinners feature menus that might have been enjoyed by Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin, Verdi and others. After determining the food preferences and habits of a composer from manuscripts, diaries and personal papers in special collections, Blank then uses his own library, suggesting specific recipes, for instance, of 1780’s Vienna, 1890’s Parma or the Russian and Jewish foods of early 20th-century New York.