The Young&Foodish year ended on a high note, with my signing on with Phaidon, the prestigious publisher of books by Massimo Bottura, Ferran Adrià and René Redzepi, to compile a guide to the world’s best pizzerias.

This happy development should not come as too much of surprise if you’ve been following my posts here or on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. 2 of my top 5 posts of 2014 were about pizza. In the past year I posted 5 videos about Neapolitan pizza on my YouTube channel.

This preoccupation with pizza did not come at the expense of my burger obsession. Burgers, like pizza, claimed two slots among my top 5 posts of the year. Since early October I’ve working on a major Young&Foodish event for early 2015 that’s to be all about burgers – real burgers. The Real Burger Challenge launches in London on January 18th.

Best wishes to you for a Happy New Year and a deliciously foodish 2015.

Top Young&Foodish Posts of 2014

5. Why Pizza in Naples has to be Soft

Naples shared its love of pizza and dry pasta with the world many years ago but something got lost in translation. Rather than eat pasta al dente and pizza soft, in the Neapolitan way, foreigners learned to do the opposite.

Non-Italians at last discovered the pleasures of al dente pasta in the late 20th Century. But only recently have hardcore devotees in the pizza diaspora acquired a soft spot for pizza with a light, pliable crust.

In my video above the master pizzaiolo Enzo Coccia of Pizzaria La Notizia explains why Neapolitan pizza must be so soft and light.

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4. Meet the Burgers #LBBfinal

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3. Pizza Pilgrims Think out of Box & Into Pan

“I have something for you,” said Londoner James Elliot, one of the Pizza Pilgrims behind the pizza van and insanely popular pizzeria of that name. “I’d like to you take it home and test it.”

I assumed the white pizza box Elliot handed me contained a pizza, albeit a rather heavy one. But when I opened the lid I saw a chemistry set where the pizza ought to have been. Plastic containers containing various elements were slotted into the round openings in a square sheet of green cardboard.
I slid the box over to Elliot for an explanation of its contents. The printed text under the lid contained the step-by-step instructions (see their recipe) for the Pizza Pilgrims Neapolitan Frying Pan Pizza.

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2. My Salad Cream Days in the UK

Assimilating the young and foodish me into British life has proven more frustrating than expected. I assumed it would be easy for me to adapt to the London foodscape, given I was educated in New Yorkese, a language with vast similarities to English, and was already acquainted with orange marmalade.

Turns out there was more to mastering the British food curriculum than distinguishing crisps from chips, aubergines from eggplants, tomatoes from tomatoes. 10 years into my London education I discovered I hadn’t even heard of, much less tried, a beloved British condiment, Heinz Salad Cream.

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1. Bleecker Street Triumphs with Blood & Guts at London Burger Bash Final

photo by Ian Sargent

Zan Kaufman of Bleecker St Burger won the Final of the London Burger Bash on April 5th at Borough Market with a combination of blood and guts.

The blood refers not to the oozy redness of her aged beef patties, cooked south of medium rare, but to the dried blood in the Clonakilty beef black pudding she added to her #LBBfinal entry – the Bleecker Black.

The guts alludes not to any beef innards in that Irish black pudding, however essential they may be, but rather to the audacity of using an ingredient that could repulse a thick slice of the voting pool.

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If you ask chef Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana, just named world’s fifth best restaurant at this year’s World’s Best Awards, the answer is no. Indeed, Bottura goes so far as to suggest Italian grandmothers don’t do Italian grandmother’s food justice.

“Tradition does not respect ingredients,” Bottura explained to me.

My first reaction to Bottura’s heretical statement was one of relief: Relief that he and I were chatting on the breakfast terrace at Vila Joya, a secluded boutique resort in the Algarve, and not at a bustling coffee bar in his native Modena. I’d have feared for our personal safety had his sacrilegious words been overhead anywhere in Italy. Bottura was taking on tradition in our private conversation as he would more dramatically a few hours later with his closing-night tasting dinner at this year’s Portugal International Gourmet Festival.

Don’t panic: Italy’s highest-rated chef and recent recipient of a third Michelin star has not forgotten his roots. The artisan producers and farmers of the Emilia-Romagna region have no greater champion. Ask him what Parmigiano-Reggiano he uses and he’ll talk about the 24, 36, 40 and 50-month old cheeses from Hombre single-owner organic dairy with such affection you half expect him to describe the sleeping patterns of each of the dairy’s Modena White Cows.

Bottura is not rejecting his heritage so much as answering his critics who expect their regional Italian food to be rustic, homey and maternal. He tells me he even finds himself confronting his own mother, who swears her tagliatelle are better than his.

A modernist and kitchen chemist spiritually aligned with Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal Bottura has always kept a clear eye – but never a nostalgic one – on the past. Now he’s put a second one there. “This period of economic crisis is no time for fireworks and magic tricks”, he explains. “It’s time for real things”.

In a style of cooking I call “nouveau retro” Bottura revisits regional and national classics with world-class techniques and ingredients. He insists the grandmother who, according to tradition, dutifully boils her bollito misto – Northern Italy’s legendary “mixed boil” –  is killing off the vitamins and decimating the organoleptic flavour compounds in the meat and vegetables. Can’t argue there: I suspect the average Italian nonna is rubbish at getting her head around organoleptic compounds. His radical response was imagined a long way from home (it’s safer there), on a visit to New York. Lying on the ground at Central Park and staring up at the Manhattan skyline he had a vision for what would become a new signature dish: “Bollito misto not boiled”, a reinvention of a classic gently cooked at 65 degrees (150 degrees Fahrenheit), its vitamins and aromas left intact.

The progression of Bottura’s cooking philosophy is purposefully represented in the autobiographical mouthful, “Compression of my Gastronomic Life in the Shape of Pasta and Bean”.  On his menu at Osteria Francescana he lists the dish, ironically or not, it’s hard to say, as a classic. In Portugal he served this three-layered creation in small glasses. At the base was a crème royale of foie gras representing his French culinary training with Georges Coigny and Alain Ducasse; at the top, an air of rosemary in homage to Adrià. The core had Parmigiano-Reggiano crusts standing in for maltagliati (“badly cut”) pasta in a pig-skin-enriched pasta e fagioli (“pasta and beans”), the hearty bean stew emitting call-to-home fragrances from every other open kitchen window in Italy.

“I’ve compressed my grandmother”, Bottura told me rather proudly as he illustrated the dish in my memo pad.

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The pasta e fagioli I tried that night in Portugal was unquestionably the best I have ever had – or might ever have. Still, something other than pasta was missing. The soul maybe? The thrill of discovery felt by a student on his first trip to Italy? To explain my thinking I reminded Bottura of the utter joy felt by the boy in Vittorio De Sica’s film “The Bicycle Thief” when treated to a slice of pizza by his destitute father. Bottura nodded and smiled. Surely he couldn’t match the emotion of that pizza with kitchen wizardry alone. Or could he?

Bottura closed the dinner – and the festival – by turning what he regards as the world’s most snobby food, foie gras, into an ice cream lolly dipped in hazelnuts. He injected the lollies with aged Villa Manodori Balsamic vinegar. Bottura himself produces this vinegar in very small quantities matured in oak, chestnut and juniper barrels.

When I told Bottura I loved his foie gras ice cream-on-a-stick he seemed pleased enough. But when I added a single detail, that the Villa Manodori had dripped down like syrup onto my hands, compelling me to lick the prized 40-year-old Balsamic off my fingers, the three-star chef looked happy: Happy as a young boy from Modena in his grandmother’s kitchen.

The billionaire’s burger was made without foie gras, truffles or pickled gold dust. Its great luxury, like that of this massive project, was Myhrvold’s wherewithal to indulge his curiosity and entertain ours. He liberated the chef/scientists Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, both veterans of Heston Blumenthal‘s Fat Duck, to do what we presume techies do in any lab when there’s no adult supervision: tear things apart and put them back together. How else would you get a burger made with shiitake mushrooms freeze-dried for 48 hours, a restructured Emmental cheese slice and a short-rib patty that is first cooked in an unsealed sous-vide bag, then flash-frozen with liquid nitrogen and finally deep-fried?

I don’t plan to buy Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking and it isn’t only the £395.00/$625.00 list price. I fear that over time I might sag like an Ikea book shelf under the weight of its mass and matter. In particular I am oddly prone to confusion when following recipes in which many components have their own recipes located in another part of another volume, each one requiring equipment I don’t own and ingredients I can’t find. I’m funny that way.

But don’t put me down as an anti-modernist. I am three parts fascinated to only one part unnerved by the new mechanics aligning Myhrvold with kitchen wizards Ferran Adria, Blumenthal, and Grant Achatz. My concern has been that technique can trump creative expression. When I met Myhrvold for tea on Tuesday at London’s new St John Hotel I asked how he and co-authors Young and Bilet reconciled the friction between culinary art and science. The question was irrelevant to someone who views science as serving art, not hindering or displacing it.

“It’s hard to make art if you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Myhrvold responded, reasoning now, as the great American food writer and teacher James Beard famously did decades ago, that the how of a recipe or technique is not of much lasting use to the reader without the why. “Perhaps,” conceded this technical magician eager to reveal his secrets,”we’ve gone a little overboard in explaining the why.”

You’d have to say they’ve gone a little overboard with that burger, too, transforming a test of resourcefulness – how can you make a burger that’s thoroughly juicy pink on the inside yet caramelised crusty but not burnt on the outside? – into one of resources. Whereas a conventional chef working only a grill or flat-top griddle might nevertheless manage to produce a patty that “crumbles in the mouth” – the hallmark, according to Myrhvold, of a succulent burger, he concluded that this challenge dictated multiple means and methods. In a cookery book illustrated with sawed-in-half cooking machines and vessels the logic can seem inverted: Why simplify something when you can make it complicated?

There is one gadget recommended by Myhrvold that is both inexpensive and indispensable: the digital meat thermometer. It may not nullify gravity, but using one will help you turn out a burger that either looks or, if you prefer darker shades of doneness, doesn’t look like the one pictured below. This particular burger, served last week at Hix in London’s Soho, had great meat that passed Myhrvold’s crumble test but was diminished by a cracked, squished bun and streaky bacon I couldn’t manage to cut with my teeth. If only I’d ignored the art vs science nonsense when I had the opportunity to question Myhrvold and instead got down with the billionaire to buns and bacon.

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.

Could this be the reversal of a starstruck food obsessive gone gooey after breathing the same heady air as celebrated chefs René Redzepi and Grant Achatz, Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal? Potentially, yes. Did I maybe drink one too many mugs of smoke-breathing Guildhall Punch chilled with dry ice at the Awards after party? Not that I remember.

Mostly I was moved by the great hospitality of London, not merely to this international gathering of elite chefs but, more significantly, to their ideas, their accomplishments, their influence.

After the awards I followed Adrià around, snapping photos and waiting for a moment alone with the master. When I got it I asked him through an interpreter what was required of the diner, what made a world’s best restaurant diner?

“They should enjoy themselves and,” replied Adrià, pausing for emphasis, “they must be open-minded”.

That, I thought afterwards, was London: unburdened by traditions set in soil and wide open to discovery, innovation and foreign influence. In the UK, unlike in France, gastronomic chauvinism, justified or not, is rooted in the freedom to look overseas and find what’s best, a glorious task the nation’s food enthusiasts share with the organisers and judges of the 50 Best. The bias for the new over the old is manifest.

Blumenthal denied this had been a rough night for the UK before revealing how delighted he was to see so many of his foreign chef friends, perhaps including a few selected at the expense of his overlooked British colleagues. The best thing about the awards, he said, was their expanding global reach. In his eyes the rankings, for all their subjectivity, were an accurate reflection of modern gastronomy and a new spirit of international exchange.

“15 to 20 years ago the great chefs of France would accuse each other of stealing ideas,” said Blumental. “They were very competitive.” Now if he wants to nick an idea he calls the chef behind it on the phone, as he did with Massimiliano Alajmo, a fellow top 20 chef (from Le Calandre in Padua) also inclined to do strange things like filling a syringe with ragu. (Remember the spag bol from In Search of Perfection on the BBC?)

End of the day, The S. Pellegrino World’s Best Restaurants 2010 is, as Achatz of Alinea, the highest-ranking US restaurant says, “a list”. What could executive chef Daniel Boulud have possibly done in the space of a year for his Daniel to climb from 41st best to 8th best restaurant in the world (apart from garnering a 3rd Michelin star)? Are there really 31 dining destinations on the planet superior to The French Laundry?

“You can’t put too much into it,” said Achatz, as if to warn himself not to get too high – or low. “You can’t hit yourself over the head about it.”

It was heartwarming to see Redzepi accepting his award with 7 members of his kitchen brigade, all of them wearing t-shirts bearing a photo of an 8th – Ali, a Gambian dishwasher who couldn’t get a visa and was left behind in Copenhagen.

“The statement is, we miss him,” said Redzepi, “It is a team. If you surround yourself with people you love anything is possible.”

Does this spirit of teamwork, I asked the unassuming heir to Adrià and Blumenthal, signal the downfall of the tyrant chef?

“I can be angry sometimes,” he replied. “It lasts 5 minutes. Nothing is worth putting yourself through that type of crazy fighting. This isn’t the Nobel Prize.”

Still, he conceded, winning the World’s Best Restaurant prize “wasn’t all that bad”.

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.”

In an LA Times article about Ferran Adrià’s plans to open a pizzeria in Barcelona, the elBulli chef is shown sampling a pizza margherita at Turin ‘s Frattelli La Cozza [corso Regio Parco 39, tel: +39 011859900 map.] That pizzeria may take its name from brothers Carlo and Guilio Fratelli, but its claim to fame is Aldo Brandi, the sole living pizzaiolo directly descended from Raffaele Esposito Brandi. According to legend, Raffaele created the tricolored pizza – basil green, mozzarella white, tomato red – to honor Margherita, first queen of the united Italy. The Buster Keaton-like photo is of Aldo Brandi, though I’m not sure if he’s in the frame, holding the frame or both.

…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.

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.

It is, however, useful for a chef to be a good eater.  The innovative and, yes, slender chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten told me he consumes each new dish in its entirely before approving it for his menu. Familiar with the laws of diminishing returns, Jean-Georges knows that if he likes the last morsel as much as the first, as was the case with his molten chocolate cake, he probably has a winner.

It’s helpful for a food critic to be a good eater, too.  The more he eats the more he can tell as about the restaurant, the chef and the menu.  Yet at Corrigan’s Mayfair, Norman chose to share a single dessert with his companion.  What a time he chooses to go on a diet!  There are seven puds on the menu, yet Norman thinks sharing one is sufficient for him to write an informed restaurant review in a national quality daily newspaper.

Personally I would prefer my reviewers not share their desserts.  Better they should eat them from beginning to end, just like Jean-Georges. But if they insist on sharing desserts than I’d prefer they share five or six and tell us all about them.