Japanese chef Seiji Yamamoto is widely admired for coupling a vivid imagination with a deep respect for tradition and Japanese culinary heritage. His outlook, combined with immense skill and precision, results in the inimitable dishes served at this Tokyo destination, which has been on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for five years now. The 18-seat restaurant’s interior is relatively plain, but the labour-intensive cooking is anything but.
Exquisite food pushing Japanese tradition forward
Imagine this dipped in chocolate. Go on. (Photo: Adam Gasson)
One of the best things about blogging about chocolate is the chance to share enthusiasm and exchange views and discoveries with people from all over the world (see below, I hope). So it was exciting to meet a bunch of chocolate fans from a particular online grouping last week at a highly sociable demonstration/party/pig-out in a central London kitchen organised by the social media phenomenon Pinterest and Great British Chefs.
The star of the evening was the chocolatier Paul A Young, who has won umpteen national and international awards and recently opened a fourth London shop in Heal’s on Tottenham Court Road.
Young occupies a unique position in the UK chocolate scene because he and his team (now 36 strong) make everything that they sell completely by hand and he doesn’t use any artificial additives or preservatives. He is particularly celebrated for his truffles and caramels – a reflection of the six years he spent as a chef/patissier with Marco Pierre White in MPW’s heyday – but Young also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of chocolate itself, and a passionate concern for the people that grow it.
BY BROCK RADKE
DECEMBER 26, 2014
Bazaar Meat BY JOSÉ ANDRÉS is nothing less than the most spectacular new restaurant to land in Las Vegas in 2014. The innovative Spanish superchef was already a prominent force on the Strip with Jaleo and China Poblano. But at the hip new SLS Las Vegas, risen from the ashes of the iconic Sahara on the northern end of the Strip, Andrés creates a signature and singular culinary experience that must be eaten to be understood.
Considering the rest of SLS’ exciting restaurant lineup, it’d be easy to assume Bazaar Meat is the latest in a series of celebrity chef-powered steakhouses to join the carnivorous competition on Las Vegas Boulevard. But if you think José Andrés is simply going to char a steak, bake a potato and call it a night, you don’t know José Andrés. Bazaar is a celebration of meat, specializing in animals that graze or swim, served raw and cooked over fire. Most steakhouses might offer one massive, shareable ribeye or roast that could feed the table; Bazaar offers a variety of Spanish-style, bone-in beef rib steaks priced by the pound and fired over oak as well as suckling pig served in quarters or, if you order ahead, the whole thing.
Heston Blumenthal looks back on nearly 20 years of The Fat Duck in Bray, before heading to Australia to open the three-Michelin starred restaurant there
What a difference nearly two decades of sweat, blood and frequent tears makes. Heston Blumenthal has certainly come a long way from the round faced ingénue who transformed a former run-down pub into a future three Michelin-starred restaurant, to today’s shaven-headed master of molecular gastronomy.
And when he shuts the door of The Fat Duck on Sunday he will be bringing to a close, albeit temporarily, a revolutionary chapter in British cuisine.
Since its opening in 1995 the restaurant, in the Berkshire village of Bray, has gone from refurbished pub to groundbreaking laboratory for cutting edge cooking, topped with what he calls a “typically British sense of humour”.
Now he is transferring the Fat Duck lock, stock and smoking pans 10,000 miles to Australia, bringing with him the wonders of snail porridge, salmon poached in liquorice gel and jelly of quail on oak moss and truffle toast.
While the 17th century cottage near the River Thames, which houses the original Fat Duck, undergoes a six-month programme of refurbishment and renovation, Blumenthal and his team will be running a reconstructed version of the restaurant at the award-winning Crowne Towers hotel in Melbourne.
Brett Graham’s understated west London restaurant breaks into the top 10
Discreet, welcoming but quietly outstanding – the same epithets can be used to describe chef Brett Graham, his food and The Ledbury itself. The restaurant, tucked away in a corner of west London’s fashionable Notting Hill neighbourhood, still retains a loyal local (if distinctly well-heeled) following, with long-time regulars sitting harmoniously alongside the increasing number of international visitors.