To be honest, I don't believe that creative flavor combinations often work, even in a $100 restaurant. It's the height of arrogance for an individual cook to believe that they possess genius exceeding the crowd-sourced collective imaginations of an entire people. And actually believing one "needs" to do something different, to make one's mark? It's hard to be a good cook, but it takes the barest modicum of emotional control and self-awareness to avoid falling into this trap. Just don't.
As in mathematical or scientific research, one is actually most creative and original when one is channeling with clarity what everyone else meant to say, wanted to say but didn't know it. In cooking, the hardest thing to do is to express a classical recipe using modern methods and ingredient sourcing, better than an entire people had managed before with conventional methods. Either this is too hard for elite restaurant chefs, so they instead play with their food, or there's no market, because one has to be on the same level to taste the difference? I don't believe that; perfecting the thoughts of others is the ultimate challenge.
Baking is easy. I have a spreadsheet going back fifty versions for sourdough bread ground from whole grains. It's a careful search algorithm in a high dimensional space, not cooking. Corn tortillas from scratch, via nixtamalizing and grinding landrace Oaxacan corns from masienda.com, is an ultimate baking graduation exercise. There's much conflicting information out there, but no reference recipe that guarantees success at home. Within a month one is at the research frontier for home cooks in a modern setting. One needs to be comfortable with research, not with following direction. And the results can be as truly spectacular as anything one can produce in a home kitchen.