I feel a lot of high end restaurant cookbooks - like Alinea, EMP, Noma, and The Fat Duck cookbooks - have a limited use to home cooks. They're beautifully made and are filled with great information, but unless you're willing to spend a lot of time and money sourcing equipment, ingredients, and preparing the food, I don't know how often you'll cook from it. Unless you work in a kitchen and are looking for inspiration, I don't know if I'd recommend them.
Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc was mentioned here and I really recommend that and his Bouchon cookbook. They have the same level of quality as those other restaurant cookbooks but I think they're more accessible to home cooks. They have more of your traditional, 'base' dishes but since it's a Thomas Keller cookbook there is a very strong emphasis on technique and precision. So it's got good useful recipes that you can cook at home and a lot of skills you can take away that will help elevate whatever other products and dishes you're cooking - which is what I want a cookbook to do. I think anyone from an Executive Chef to a novice home cook would find value in them.
I haven't read Modernist Cuisine yet but for other, more 'scientific' focused options, you might consider books from Harold McGee and/or the Ideas in Food couple