Brilliance can quietly manifest itself in the strangest places. Not that there’s anything wrong with this strip deep in the suburbs of southern Melbourne; it’s just that it’s more a place you might expect to go to get your shoes fixed or maybe stop for a cappuccino and fruit toast than a restaurant that draws [...]
Locations for a world-class restaurant don’t come much more unlikely than a motoring theme park adjoining Volkswagen’s car factory, but that’s exactly where you’ll find Sven Elverfeld’s inimitable Aqua. In Wolfsburg, a somewhat bland modern town between Berlin and Hanover, this former pastry chef cooks some of Germany’s most ambitious food in a strikingly contemporary [...]
The Alajmo brothers’ burgeoning dining group opened its first restaurant outside Italy last year in Paris, but standards remain stratospheric at the Paduan restaurant where one of the most intriguing stories in modern Italian gastronomy began. In 2002 Massimiliano Alajmo – then 29 – became the youngest chef ever to win three stars shortly after [...]
Mexican chef Jorge Vallejo’s star is certainly rising. Kicking off his career on cruise ships, he had a thorough training under Enrique Olvera in Mexico City and a brief stint at Noma with René Redzepi before opening Quintonil in 2012 with his wife Alejandra Flores, who runs the front of house. The restaurant has since [...]
Chef Pascal Barbot followed an interesting career path before opening his tiny Paris restaurant, which is widely fêted for redefining French fine dining. A five-year stint working under Alain Passard at L’Arpège in Paris was sandwiched between time spent travelling the South Pacific as a chef with the French Navy and heading up the Ampersand [...]
Chefs Mikel Alonso (French by birth but Basque-Mexican by heart) and Bruno Oteiza (from Spain's San Sebastián) fuse native Basque flavours with Mexico’s ingredients; mix in fellow Spaniard Gerard Bellver’s culinary techniques honed at El Bulli with Ferran Adriàn and Biko is a restaurant on another planet. An explosion of two world’s colliding. Nestled above [...]
Escape the clamour of Hong Kong’s Central district to relax on caramel leather sofas at Amber in an elegantly low-lit bar on the seventh floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Guests sip cocktails that give a hint of what’s to come, combining champagne with Japanese white peach juice or French vermouth with Chinese oolong tea. [...]
When El Bulli closed its doors in 2011, fans of Spanish techno-emotional cuisine may well have mourned the passing of a great, but there was a ready-made replacement waiting in the wings in the form of Quique Dacosta. Tweezers in hand, the Extremaduran chef behind this eponymous restaurant has been changing perceptions of the Costa [...]
While Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in California will always hold a special place in the history of American (and even global) cuisine, its sister restaurant in New York certainly doesn’t live in the shadow of its elder sibling. Per Se, whose kitchen is headed up day-to-day by chef de cuisine Eli Kaimeh, has three Michelin [...]
Set in a former house in São Paulo’s leafy Jardim Paulistano suburb, Maní is immediately welcoming with its outdoor patio centred on a beautiful tree. Large wooden front doors open on to a long, white corridor decorated with contemporary art, where diners can enjoy close-up views of husband-and-wife team Daniel Redondo and Helena Rizzo’s kitchen. [...]
