During my visit by invitation to his London boutique I’d taken issue with his UK area manager dictating what I could and couldn’t photograph. My letter to Hermé concluded with a statement of acquiescence: all content for my website would henceforth be subject to his approval.

Had Hermé read the blog post? If so, had this rendezvous been arranged in response to it? All I knew was that Hermé had travelled to London from Paris for Valrhona Chocolate to help promote its new book, Cooking with Chocolate. Andre Dang, the ace food PR who’d arranged this brief meeting (but not the July visit to the boutique), had said nothing about the letter to me – nor had I, to him.

To play it safe I decided to interview a culinary genius in the art of saving the best for last by saving the worst for last. It’s an old journalist’s tactic: Pose the most difficult questions as the meeting is winding down. If the subject is offended and storms out you still have a story from the answers to the prior questions.

I was eager to learn about the creative process behind Hermé’s incomparable macaron flavours and signature combinations like olive oil & vanilla, violet & black currant and salted-butter-caramel & apple. How often, I asked, did new flavours in development end up on the cutting room floor? He answered with a shrug: Never.

“It’s a creation,” he said. “It’s not a process.”

Hermé tossed in lyrical French when discussing his oeuvre, describing, for example, flavour combinations not as associations or mariages of ingredients but rather as conversations des goûts – “conversations of tastes”. He nevertheless came across as an extremely serious, no-nonsense chef who reserved his puff and flash for pastries. Even if it did enter the back of my mind that he might have my letter in the back of his, Hermé’s matter-of-fact self-confidence could not be dismissed as posturing.

“When I imagine a new flavour I always have in my head a scenario de goûts,” he explained. “I write down the quantities before I do two tests.”

And what if a new scenario des goûts, to use his term for what most of us call a recipe, proved to be unpopular? Not his concern. Pastry, he scoffed, is not democratic.

His great challenge is identifying ingredients that meet his expectations. In his book a lemon is not just a lemon. The fruit can vary according to acidity, bitterness, juiciness, even the texture of the zest. Much like the perfumers at Guerlain and Rochas, the fragrance houses he’s worked with, Hermé must identify not just the main components of a formula but also the most suitable varieties of and sources for those ingredients. His recipe for the Infiniment Vanille (“Infinitely Vanilla”) macaron, featured in the recently released English edition of Pierre Hermé Macarons, calls for vanilla pods from Mexico, Madagascar and Tahiti. For this, the corollary to Guerlain’s Spiritueuse Double Vanille perfume, he desired a woody and floral vanilla with undertones of almond. He knew he couldn’t capture all that in only one type of vanilla pod.

Could so exacting a pastry chef sanction a scenario restricting the content, angle, composition and background of photographs taken of his macarons displayed in his boutiques? With his cappuccino cup nearly empty and the pages of my memo pad nearly full I at last posed a short version of that question. He was ready for it – yes, he’d read my open letter – but the words did not come easily.

“No, of course you can take photographs,” he replied, suggesting the behaviour of his UK area manager had been “maladroit”. That individual, he added, was no longer working at the boutique.

I didn’t like being responsible for anyone’s dismissal but I was happy with the interview. In 15 minutes I’d gotten more than I expected, plus the difficult business was behind us. In parting we discovered our mutual love for burgers. True burgers. I told Hermé about my BurgerMonday series of London pop-ups and my plans to organise one in Paris early in 2012. Lionel Lévy, a Marseille chef we both knew and admired, would be flipping the burgers. Hermé handed me his business card and said if invited he would be delighted to attend.

He was out the door and off to another rendezvous before I thought to warn him about the restrictions on photography at all my pop-ups: No one may take shots of the “young” behind young&foodish from a low angle. These give the false impression I have double chin.

Dear Pierre Hermé,

Imagine my delight when on the first of this month I received an invitation from your public relations representative in the UK to visit your Pierre Hermé Paris boutique in London (map), sample some of your incomparable macarons and share the experience with readers of youngandfoodish.com.

I was a great admirer of yours long before I sought your expertise for a 2009 Los Angeles Times article I wrote about the marriage of chocolate and matcha. In my household your 2010 opening on 13 Lowndes Street in London’s Belgravia was cause for celebration: No longer would I have to drop everything, travel to Paris and brave the permanent queue outside your boutique on the rue Bonaparte whenever I, or, more urgently, Mrs Young&Foodish, got the uncontrollable urge for a milk chocolate and passionfruit macaron.

Only after I’d arrived at your London boutique and removed my camera from its case did your UK Area Manager inform me of certain restrictions:

• No photos of partly eaten macarons.
• No photos of halved macarons.
• No photos of a gloved hand handling macarons.
• No photos of macarons with chocolates in the background.
• No photos, nor mention by name, of the boutique manager.
• No photos of any anyone in the boutique, even with their approval.

I’m sorry, was your area manager not aware that the url for my website was http://youngandfoodish.com, not http://herméandfoodish.com? As the only individual who decides which words and photos go on mywebsite I was determined to refuse all his demands and storm out of the boutique. The trouble is, one doesn’t think clearly when standing before hundreds of your macarons, all perfectly arranged like jewellery in a Tiffany display case. The knees weaken; the backbone turns to gelée.

All youngandfoodish.com content is subject to the approval of Daniel Young and Pierre Hermé.

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Anyone wanting to update prevailing notions of Greek dining or upset those who cling to them could find no better ambassadors. In London, Greek food is typically marginalised as either greasy taverna fare or folksy, rustic, grandmother’s cooking. (Don’t get me wrong: I love grandmother’s cooking as much as the next guy. It’s just that if I ate it every night I’d have to pay for two seats when riding the Piccadilly Line.) The Real Greek, London’s first and hopefully not its last sophisticated, contemporary Greek restaurant, did take a wider view, transporting diners beyond the realm of Greek salad and taramasalata, pastitsio and moussaka. But all that’s left of that endeavour is a chain of souvlaki restaurants. (Don’t get me wrong, I love souvlaki. It’s just that if I ate it every night I would be scattering statins and Gaviscon, rather than blueberries, on my morning porridge.)

Champions of Greek food can perpetuate its humble image, too. During the Q&A at the Taste of Greece launch, Peskias was asked who his main influences were. He cited the celebrated chefs Raymond Blanc, Charlie Trotter and Ferran Adrià as role models. The jaded journalists in the audience were unimpressed; the Greek dignitaries, unmoved. Peskias faltered. He searched his mind for a fourth name. Tonia Buxton, the effervescent, voluptuous, Greek Cypriot presenter of Discovery Channel‘s My Greek Kitchen, called out a suggestion from the front row: what about your mother? Buxton spoke with passion about the love and cooking of Greek mothers. Most of the Hellenes in attendance shed tears into their yogurt martinis. (I wept too and my mother is Jewish-American.) Not Peskias. He stammered and wavered and then, summoning all his courage, looked Buxton directly in the cleavage: No, he told her, almost apologetically, his mother did not inspire him to become a chef.

As a deconstructionist, Peskias appears not to uphold tradition so much as tear it down. He reinvents the basic elements of the Greek kitchen, turning Feta to powder or tzatziki to foam, before reassembling them in modern forms familiar to the nose yet exotic to the eyes. At Taste of Greece he prepared pork belly souvlaki sous-vide, holding up the slow-and-low-cooked pork belly in its vacuum poach and then cutting it open to release a fountain of fatty cooking juices. The audience oohed and aahed out of either temptation or terror, it’s difficult to say: Souvlaki never looked like this.

Stelios Parliaros is also a deconstructionist driven by the latest advances in food science. He lives by his instant-read digital thermometers. When you extend your hand to Parliaros you half expect him to take its temperature before he shakes it. In his hands olive oil, yogurt, Feta and mastic aren’t merely viable flavours in French patisserie and fine chocolates. They inspire revelations. I know: For my wedding party in 2005 Parliaros prepared a mastic vanilla mousse and served it in a figurative wedding cake consisting of 75 white Chinese soup spoons. The guests were visibly stirred or stupified, I can’t quite recall which.

At Taste of Greece I asked Peskias and Parliaros if they were ever worried their inventiveness went too far, violating the essence of a classic dish or revered family custom. Peskias didn’t think so, providing the ingredients were indigenous to Greece. Rather than attacking the cooking of Greek mothers he felt like he was celebrating it. In his mind the best way to breathe life into something old and familiar was to revisit it. When you change the perception of a dish you invite its rediscovery. “Same taste,” he noted, “different experience.”

At a glance, the cross-cultural dessert pairing of chocolate and matcha, the prized Japanese green tea powder, may not seem the sort of combination to elicit uncontrollable cravings. Among the many terms used to evoke matcha’s elusively complex character — grassy, spinachy, watercress-like, seaweedy, earthy, floral, herbaceous, aquatic, bitter — barely a single one screams dessert.

But still, it’s quite the rage in Paris and Tokyo, where the only really big question is: Which chocolate makes the best matcha match? Read full article