Chef Seiji Yamamoto’s mission at his acclaimed restaurant in Tokyo’s Roppongi district is to convey the richness of Japan’s natural environment and its fluctuating seasons through a traditional kaiseki menu. The daily-changing selection of small dishes is shaped by what is available from the city’s premier markets each morning. Seasonal ingredients at their peak are [...]
Joachim Wissler, a pioneer of new German cooking continues to push the boundaries. A leading light of the so-called ‘new German school’ of cooking, the highly respected Joachim Wissler breathes new life into traditional German recipes and ingredients while drawing on international culinary thinking. French, Asian and New Nordic influences can all be detected in [...]
The reputation of Björn Frantzén’s restaurant has spread well beyond Sweden’s borders since opening in 2009, winning widespread praise for its modern Scandinavian cooking. Originally known as Frantzén/Lindeberg, it changed its name in 2013 when co-founder and pastry chef Daniel Lindeberg moved to pastures new. Frantzén, whose background includes spells at Chez Nico in London [...]
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. [...]
