Is it a waste of your time to go to a fine restaurant for homestyle food made the same way for generations? Is it a waste of an acclaimed chef’s time to cook it? If you ask chef Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana, just named world’s fifth best restaurant at this...
Heston Blumenthal
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...
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. The...
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...
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...
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...
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...