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.

The first thing I noticed about Gianluca Franzoni when I introduced myself to him just minutes before a tasting of Domori Cacao Culture at Gallery Illy in London was his suit.

There are artisan silk weavers in Lucca who dream of threading a fine scarf with the polish and delicacy of that blue pinstripe. There are custom glovemakers in Florence who fantasize about fitting your hands as flawlessly as those jacket and trousers traced Franzoni’s slender frame. And there is perhaps only one chocolate maker in Turin who’d dare to produce Napolitains, as individually wrapped squares of chocolate are known, as smooth as that fabric  – would you mind showing us the label, Gianluca? – cut and stitched by the Naples sartoria Salvatore Fusco.

That Turinese chocolate maker? None other than Franzoni.  The Naples-smooth Napolitians? From Domori, the company he founded in 1994 to produce chocolate from plantation to plant, Venezuela to Italy. No intermediaries. With his cocoa beans as with his suits Franzoni refuses to buy from middle men.

Franzoni and co-presenter Stefano Giubertoni, the Domori CEO, made it clear their house style of fine chocolate was very much about smoothness only without smootheners. There were no milky or nutty chocolates in the tasting, though Turin is famous for chocolate hazelnut gianduia as well as gianduiotti, nor was cocoa powder or cocoa butter amongst the ingredients. The Napolitains consisting only of cocoa mass (pure chocolate liquor) made from Criollo, the finest variety of cocoa bean, and sugar.

By starting with Criollo beans Franzone gets a creamy chocolate of maximum flavour and low astringency without a bitter or tannic edge. His concept of a smooth dark chocolate is one that doesn’t make you pucker as if to prove to its worth – or your sophistication. If anyone had guessed that one of his Napolitains had a cocoa mass content of 60 percent rather than the 70 percent listed on the labels he would’ve been thrilled. As the chocolate industry forces cocoa inflation, pushing higher and higher percentage dark chocolates as if 82% bars were automatically superior to 78% ones Domori was instead stressing flavour profiles and in its single origin chocolates.

Domori’s Teyuna chocolate, from Colombia, with its notes of cashew and honey, was already familar to me, though I didn’t know it. It’s the chocolate of choice at the extraordinary Grom Gelato. Based in Turin, Grom now has gelaterias throughout Italy as well as in Paris, New York and Tokyo but not yet, sadly, London. If any Londoner wanted to know what they’d been missing I had an answer of which I am sure Franzoni would approve: No Neapolitan tailor could make you a suit as smooth as Grom’s Domori Teyuna cioccolato extranoir.

When Pino Cuttaia advises young, ambitious Sicilian chefs to follow his example and work abroad to experience new techniques and unfamiliar foods he is not necessarily pointing them towards London or New York. The overseas destinations he has in mind are on mainland Italy and in particular the north, where you find such curiosities as polenta and, stranger still, butter. Butter, for the uninitiated, is a dairy product made by churning milk or cream and is often used in place of olive oil.

But, as Cuttaia and Italian food journalist Roberta Corradin made clear to Londoners at his informal Galleria Illy talk and tasting  (see video), a chef with Michelin stars in his eyes no longer needs to leave his native Sicily for good to pursue them. With the island only recently gaining recognition for its culinary aspirations and new regionalism, Agrigento, Caltanissetta, Catania, Enna, Messina, Palermo, Ragusa, Siracusa and Trapani are no longer just the provinces of cucina di nonna – grandmother’s kitchen. Forget the trattoria image: One highly rated restaurant, for example, Cuttaia’s La Madia, can turn a small, nondescript seaside town, such as Licata, into a destination for diners and chefs travelling from abroad, this time meaning Tuscany AND London.

It might have been his wife’s homesickness, more than his own, that ultimately lured Cuttaia back south to Licata from Piedmont in 2000. But the two-Michelin-starred chef clearly missed the flavours of his youth. His is a cutting-edge cuisine focused, paradoxically, on the past, filtering cherished memories of childhood through modern techniques. At Galleria Illy it wasn’t merely the memory of melanzane alla parmigiana Cuttaia wished to evoke. It was the still sweeter recollection of del giorno dopo (“the day after”) aubergine Parmesan. On summer afternoons young Sicilian boys love to dig into the chilled leftovers when their mothers either aren’t looking – or, more likely, pretending not to notice.

For the Galleria audience Cuttaia cleverly presented his del giorno dopo in small tasting glasses as a layered parfait of fried baby aubergine topped with a purée of aubergine, egg yolk and ricotta, a foam of Parmigiano-Reggiano and the Sicilian cheese Caciocavallo Ragusano and a chopped tomato and olive oil garnish. This may not have resembled anyone’s grandmother’s aubergine Parmesan, but the flavours were true to memory – Cuttaia’s guiding principle – and the custard-smooth textures transformed an old standard in Sicily as well as other regions of Italy into a new and guilty pleasure. This was dessert to start a meal, a small boy stealing something cool and creamy from the fridge after his mother stepped out of the kitchen.

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Cuttaia closed the show with bags of ricotta cream – the only thing that a Sicilian kid likes better in a cone than gelato. He piped this cannoli filling into pastry horns in the traditional manner, dipping them in crushed pistachios (Sicilian, naturally), adorning them with orange peel and powdering them with icing sugar. Then he took what was left of all the ingredients and improvised a deconstructed cannoli, crushing the pastry with his fingers and using the small pieces as the crunchy foundation for a cannoli parfait.

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So how was Cuttaia’s deconstructed cannoli parfait? Let’s just say I waited for the moment when he was looking the other way – or pretending to do so – and stole a second serving.