At Gastromondiale, we are moved by dishes that entice our senses and only subsequently instigate us to consider the technical or semiotic dimensions of a dish. The organoleptic aspects may provoke comparisons. One tastes the rey fish at Güeyu Mar and the variegated textures also encountered in wagyu are superseded by a depth of flavor more profound than any beef. The historical relevance of a dish can equally follow suit. Alain Passard’s vegetable pasta transports the diner to an alternate history of Roma, where the spaghetti carbonara might have benefited from the minerality of potatoes. Suffice it to say, both dishes send one uncontrollably on a path of rumination. In their initial, visceral appeal, they resemble madeleines. It is in this spirit that we appropriate the Proustian icon to denote three privileged moments from the dining year 2018.

On the continuum of critical writings, restaurant reviews fall somewhere between the Venice Biennale and the toaster ovens in Consumer Reports. When the restaurant culture began to take off in the 1960’s, the review media barely existed, but with the expansion of the restaurant business, reviewing grew likewise. Despite the inevitable hacks and the legions of bloggers with their cellphone photos, restaurant reviewing can be a legitimate form of journalism, and it has had some who are enjoyable to read beyond a review’s sell-by date. Also there is at least one master whose writings could conceivably remain immortal as the Annales school of historians that studies accounts of every day life will be having a field day with his output. That is Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold who showed how much the form has evolved since The New York Times’  Craig Claiborne began in 1962 writing short, perfunctory descriptions and soon after giving one-to-three stars to New York City restaurants.

Inconceivable these days, Bernard Pacaud began his apprenticeship with the Lyons culinary legend La Mère Brazier when he only 15 years old. Her demands on the quality of ingredients of all kinds defined Pacaud’s cooking philosophy very early: “Only use the best. The guests end up paying for it”, he says.  Pacaud also does not pose for front pages and rarely appears on television. “I’m just interested in doing my job as well as possible,” he says. But Bernard Pacaud is disillusioned: “Just look at what has become of gastronomy!”

In terms of experiencing this Age d’Or de la Gastronomie, which is what we think every aspiring gastronome who already hasn’t should, there are luxury hotel restaurants to go to where you can be surrounded by opulence with formality dating back to the late 19th-century such as L’Epicure, the main dining salon in the Hotel Bristol or the Alain Ducasse Restaurant Le Louis XV in the Hotel de Paris in Monaco, where the cuisine and service hark somewhat back to this Golden Age. Yet in our estimation, no restaurant quite captures the undistilled essence of fine dining in France of the last 30 years of the 20th-century than L’Ambroisie.

A recent reading of Alexis Papazoglou’s article “The Sociality of Wine” in Gastromondiale left me with a warm feeling. It recalled many convivial dinners I have shared with oenophilic friends, who are not always as easily accessible depending on my whereabouts. While I found the tone warming, not unlike a good Amarone, I had the nagging feeling that his panegyric towards the sociality of wine endowed his “solipsistic” wine drinker with a flimsy coat. The concepts of sociality and “the social” were also conflated, so that I was not certain when one was invoked to buttress the case for the other.

Greek wine might be experiencing global recognition in the past 30 years or so, increasingly finding its way into wine menus of revered restaurants and on the shelves of prestigious wine retailers, but wine in Greece has been made for thousands of years, leaving behind a legacy of numerous grape varieties indigenous to the area. Greek wine modernism therefore could not simply be excellent Viogniers and Cabernet blends. It would have to be something within which this long tradition is detectable, but also transformed into something new.

Nothing has shaped my thinking and preferences in ambitious restaurant dining more than Restaurant Alain Chapel. It was thus an "isn’t it a small world" moment when dining at Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare I encountered the sommelier David Chapel, the first son of Alain Chapel, who told me about his wife Michele Smith who worked at this restaurant and Per Se, as well as their new wine-making venture that is unfolding in the Beaujolais region. I am joined in the interview of Michele by Vedat Milor and Alexis Papazoglou.