Osteria Francescana’s Massimo Bottura: “Our Ideas are in Service of the Most Beautiful Foods”

Chef Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy didn’t win the 2011 The San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards on votes but he was tops in decibels. Roars erupted from Monday night’s audience at London’s Guildhall when the chef at the fourth best restaurant in the world, up two places from 2010, was declared the winner of the Chef’s Choice award.

This was the second great honour bestowed upon Bottura in two weeks. On 4 April the local boy made good was awarded the Medaglia d’Oro – “gold medal” – from the commune of Modena (photos here). [Read more...]

20 April 2011 By 1 Comment
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Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine: Why Simplify Something When You Make It Complicated?

“If you can suspend gravity you can do wonderful things with a burger,” said Nathan Myhrvold, holding up two of the 2,400 pages from Modernist Cuisine, the six-volume cookbook the former chief technology officer of Microsoft both wrote and underwrote. [Read more...]

15 April 2011 By 1 Comment
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The S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants a good bad day for the UK

The UK had a bad night at The S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2010. In a glamorous if cacophonous countdown at Guildhall in the City of London, just 3 British restaurants heard their names called. Hibiscus (London) slipped in at 49; St John (London) got its tail in the door at 43; and 2005 winner The Fat Duck (Bray) was demoted from 2nd to 3rd best, behind El Bulli and Noma, the first-time champion from Copenhagen.

With New York placing 6 of its restaurants in the top 50 and Paris 5, proud locals who were calling London the number one restaurant city only yesterday may have been having second thoughts this morning. I too found myself reassessing my position on the matter, only from the opposite perspective: last night was the first time since moving to London 5 years ago I felt inclined to place it above Paris and New York, my prior cities of residence, as the world’s gastronomic capital. [Read more...]

27 April 2010 By 1 Comment
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Changing the perception but not the taste of Greek food

With the London launch of its Taste of Greece promotion The Greek National Tourism Organisation made it clear Tuesday 9 February 2010 was no day to be in Athens. A European capital already confronting a financial crisis was without two culinary giants who, ignoring unmistakable discrepancies in waistlines and hairlines, might be deemed the Heston Blumenthal and Pierre Hermé of modern Greek cuisine. Christoforos Peskias and Stelios Parliaros were at The Cookbook Cafe, doing cooking demos and helping to sell Greece, by which I mean they were promoting their country’s assets, not liquidating them. [Read more...]

12 February 2010 By 3 Comments
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The perils of trickle-down gastronomics

Subsequent to the naming of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, awards judge and Guardian food critic Jay Rayner makes a courageous case for haute cuisine in down times:

…just as with the very highest of high fashion, the highest of haute gastronomy eventually filters down to what we all eat on a regular basis and we all benefit from it.

My concern with trickle-down gastronomics (my term, not his) is that the great influence of innovative masters like Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal, the chefs at the restaurants named best (elBulli) and second best (The Fat Duck) in the world, often results in overly ambitious homages with disastrous consequences in all the wrong places. Architecture provides a parallel. From the modern masterpieces of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe came the nightmarish tower blocks of Glasgow and the hellish projects of Baltimore.

Fortunately, a badly conceived meal does not last as long as a badly conceived building.

21 April 2009 By Leave a Comment
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Do you have to be fat to be a great cook?

In his review of Corrigan’s Mayfair in London, Matthew Norman devotes the first 285 words to a single hypothesis: The best professional cooks are, like Norman himself, portly:

Just as you can’t put too much faith in a bald barber or in a psychiatrist whose jacket does up from the back, so you cannot fully trust a professional cook with a Body Mass Index anywhere near whatever nonsense the powers that be classify as “normal”.

The premise is neither amusing nor original nor valid. A thick rim of fat might be a requirement for dart players, judging from last week’s World Darts Championship at Lakeside, but Heston Blumenthal, Joël Robuchon, Ferran Adrià, Alain Ducasse and Thomas Keller prove you don’t need a body like the Michelin man’s to gather his stars. [Read more...]

13 January 2009 By Leave a Comment
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