It is no wonder that I revere Guy Gateau. In a remarkable twist of fate or coincidence he prepared the cuisine at both my all-time favorite bistro and formal restaurant: Le Petit Coin de la Bourse in the Paris IVth and Restaurant Alain Chapel in the outskirts of Lyon. About 15 years ago, I tracked Guy down when I was doing some research into Alain Chapel after I saw Guy's name in a photo caption in the magnificent and detailed book from 1978 “Great Chefs of France”. We have had several get-togethers and have always kept in touch. Guy has now written this personal tribute to Joël Robuchon which I share here.

Japan has more than its share of difficult-to-book restaurants, particularly some of the sushi and kaiseki ones in Tokyo. In planning his recent trip to Japan, a provincial restaurant named Yanagiya caught Robert Brown’s eye because of its sky-high score on Tabelog, the Japanese restaurant-goer’s rating site. That it also was the only one of its breed–an irori restaurant, an old, traditional but dying class of grilling-over-charcoal cuisine–among the elite Tabelog restaurants really stirred his juices.

What France in the 1980s was and what Spain continues to be since the early 2000s is what Japan is today—a pre-eminent “go to” country for the inveterate gastronomic traveler. The entire country, however, is blessed for its rich and varied produce, too rich and varied to go into here. What you notice in watching the chaotic, unsightly, unplanned scene rolling past your Shinkansen window is that thrown in with the five-to-ten story apartment blocks; the landless single-family houses with brown tile roofs and a car port; the pachinko parlors and small industrial “ateliers” are small plots of land on which grow rice, vegetables or other produce. It’s no wonder, then, that the Japanese have a gastronomic landscape in the most far-reaching sense of the term.

Neo-nouvelle cuisine is what can be seen as the logical progression of nouvelle cuisine, it is what some might call classical French with a contemporary twist or the adaption of technical progression and contemporary trends into French cuisine. Frothed sauces, micro-herbs, acidity, Asian products, sous-vide cooking or gels are some of the cornerstones of what makes it necessary for me to differentiate this certain style from classical Nouvelle cuisine. Neo-nouvelle cuisine is a logical continuity, something one could possibly call a “conservative revolution” of French cuisine. One of the representatives of this approach, admittedly in a rather conservative way, is Éric Fréchon, chef éxécutif at Epicure in Paris.

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.

Hegel, a 19th century German philosopher, thought history only makes sense retrospectively, or, as he put it, “the owl of Minerva [symbolizing wisdom] spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk”. When we open an old bottle of wine, the same is true of us: Looking back in time, our past might begin to make more sense to us than it did back then. We can reflect on older projects, ambitions, relationships, see them with new clarity and measure their traces in our life today. And having a glass of wine in hand we can ask ourselves, which of the two has matured better with age?