Only a fool tries to upstage Marcel Wanders by out-smiling, out-dressing, out-tanning, out-hairing or out-flirting the tall, dark and handsome Dutch designer. But were you to tie your hair in a bun, as Josh Pollen did, or hide your intense gaze behind protective goggles, as Mike Knowlden did, you might find it relatively easy to out-geek Wanders. These ingeniously inventive – and skinny – young chefs managed just that at the London launch for Flos of the beautiful Wanders Can-Can Lamp at the Galleria Illy pop-up this October.

Josh Pollen and Mike Knowlden

The co-founders, with Amy Houston, of Blanch & Shock Food Design managed this feat not with smoke and mirrors but rather with smoking styrofoam boxes of liquid nitrogen, iSi siphons loaded with CO2 cartridges and four ingeniously experimental ephemeral edibles flavoured with illy espresso:

• Pain au Chocolat Nitro Ice Cream with Illy espresso
• Nitro Cappuccino
• Malt Coffee ‘Grounds’ in Filters with Cobnut Milk
• Nitro-Aerated Coffee Microwave Sponge with Brown Butter Sauce and Powder

Possessing the taste if not mouth feel of a buttery croissant marbled with the finest dark chocolate and medium espresso, the pain au chocolat ice cream was as much the day’s design revelation as the Wanders lights. Even so, it was the cone-shaped paper filters filled with malt espresso nibs that stole the show. Knowlden and Pollen prominently displayed their filters on a table beside the staircase, near the gallery entrance, and no one could resist them. It appeared as though the fabulously fashionable folks who’d filled the Galleria space beyond capacity were pouring individual containers of cream over coarsely ground illy coffee and eating the stuff with a spoon. They were delighted to discover that the coffee grinds were actually snacky nibbles and the cream, cobnut milk. Blanch & Shock’s imaginative food pun was a big hit.

Message to Marcel Wanders: Never try to out-cobnut Mike Knowlden or Josh Pollen.

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On the night of 28 November Knowlden, Pollen and Houston, three fast rising stars of the London food scene, made hay at my BurgerMonday pop-up. I mean that literally: They developed hay burger buns made with hay-infused roasted flour and reduced hay stock and slathered with smoked hay mayonnaise.

Admit it, London: There is no hope of any celebrity chef upstaging a geek in goggles, especially one whose sidekick has his hair in a bun, if smoked hay mayonnaise is part of the equation.

By evoking Spain the two-star Michelin chef at ‘t Zilte in Antwerp was asserting his opposition less to the contemporary cuisine of an entire nation than that of its most famous chef, Ferran Adrià. And by aligning himself instead with “the Nordic kitchen” and its obsession with exceptional vegetables from local producers and small farms he had one particular Nordic kitchen in mind, Rene Redzepi’s Noma. For his 15 September pop-up audience Geunes espoused a more grounded modern gastronomy, much as he does for diners every night at his new restaurant up on the ninth floor of The MAS – Museum aan de Stroom, overlooking the docks of Antwerp’s newly fashionable Eilandje district.

Geunes’ Galleria talk was improvised within the loosely structured hour it took him and his assistant Cindy Cuypers to assemble some 50 tasting samples of a new dessert composition created for the occasion. Appropriately, each was plated on a coffee cup saucer.

About halfway through his show-and-tell Geunes began to piece together a full-sized version of his chocolat au café aérien, crème nantais et baies d’argousier, only not on a serving dish. He assembled it beside the saucers, directly on the white tabletop.

The elements of the dessert translate loosely as follows:

• chocolat au café aérien – aerated coffee chocolate
• crème nantaise  – drained farmer’s cheese and cream cheese with lemon, vanilla, egg yolks, sugar & cream
• coulis de baies d’argousier – a sauce of anise muscat syrup and sea-buckthorns
• parfait de café au sésame – a frozen parfait of Illy espresso and sesame paste with beaten egg whites and  whipped cream
• crumble of almond, sugar, coffee and egg yolk
• chocolate chips made with Xanthan gum, agar, glucose and sugar

Beyond those mysterious red dots composed of sea-bruckthorn coulis, the revelation of this dessert, with its delicate crunches and ethereal creams, was how the pronounced acidity of those exotic berries countered both the fattiness of the cheese and the nuttiness of the crumble, the sesame and even the coffee. For Geunes the self-taught chef coffee isn’t only a drink in a cup, or a specific flavour. It’s a set of perfumes that can infuse a dessert, a fine olive oil or, by extension, a marinade for langoustines with a particular nutty, toasty or lightly bitter character. At ‘t Zilte he’s advancing coffee as a cooking ingredient by moving it backwards in the timeframe of a meal, from after-dinner note to dessert flavour to main-course infusion.

Following the demo many attendees returned for seconds of Geunes’s astonishing dessert ensemble. After an hour’s seduction a saucer-sized portion was barely adequate. The chef himself eyed the larger table version of the dessert with wonder and longing. He too seemed mystified by the splendid result, a constellation in coffee, chocolate, cheese and sea-buckthorn on a white sky.

I asked him if he might be inspired to serve out desserts in a similar manner at ‘t Zilte, as the chef Grant Achatz had famously done at Alinea in Chicago. Turns out he was having exactly the same thought. But much as was intrigued by the idea Geunes reluctantly conceded he wouldn’t be trying it any time soon. Forward-thinking diners in Chicago or London might be ready to eat dessert directly off their Michelin-starred tables but not yet their counterparts in Antwerp.

It was a good line, infusing his tea talk in what, given the Illy marker, you would assume to be espresso territory with its first refreshing sip of reverse snobbism. Jumeau-Lafond may be one of the world’s great tea snobs, boasting, for example, that Dammann Frères has Chanel and Hermès as its immediate neighbours at Tokyo’s great Takashimaya department store. But the third-generation French tea merchant could not let 30 seconds pass without poking a mischievous thumb in the refined ribs of tea drinkers, notably Anglo-Saxon ones, who hold their noses – and pinkies – high. Far from being offended the Londoners drank it up.

“Green tea,” he told a half-astonished, half-amused group that included breakfast tea drinker Riccardo Illy, “is not good for the taste.” What made it trendy and popular, he suggested, were magazine and newspaper articles that reported its benefits to mind and body.

That view reflected Jumeau-Lafond’s preference for strong, spicy, full-bodied teas over smooth, subtle, lightly bitter ones. He loves black teas, none more so than the assam his father brought home to the family’s flat, a rare luxury in the deprived 1950s Paris of his youth.

He doesn’t much like the fashion for herbal teas and fruit teas – “they’re not teas, they’re infusions“, though he sells them, and winces at the thought of certain perfumed teas aromatized with fruits, flowers or tastes that don’t exist in nature. That stance seemed one of hypocrisy, if not of betrayal, coming from the president of a company famous for its Earl Grey, a black tea blend flavoured with the citrus fruit bergamot. Dammann Frères in fact claims to be the last tea company using pure bergamot oil (from Calabria) in its Earl Grey. Moreover, Dammann’s prestigious Goût Russe blend, created by Jumeau-Lafond’s grandmother, first brewed in his boyhood bedroom and copied, he says, by 5,000 tea companies, is perfumed with citrus oils.

You’re an anti-snob snob, aren’t you?!, I asked Jumeau-Lafond, with admiration, at the conclusion of his surprising Galleria Illy talk. He thought about it for a few seconds, then broke out in a wide smile.

“C’est vrai“, he responded. Guilty as charged.