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Frantzén originally started out as a collaboration between chef Björn Frantzén and his business partner and pastry chef Daniel Lindeberg in 2008, when they established restaurant Frantzén/Lindeberg in Gamla Stan, the old town of Stockholm. The restaurant experienced early acclaim from Michelin, collecting a Michelin star the following year. Perhaps no surprise, because the duo had trained in…
Tokyo currently has twelve three-star restaurants, of which four have held this accolade since the first edition of the Michelin guide Tokyo was published in 2007 (2008 guide). One of these four is Quintessence, located in Tokyo's Shinagawa ward/district, a difficult but not impossible restaurant to book. When I was in Tokyo I stayed at the Shangri-La Hotel and this was one of the first…
Picture this: you're a Russian multi-millionaire with a love for wine and food and you already own Hedonism Wines in Mayfair, which has quickly become one of the world's foremost merchants in fine wine. It has some 6,500 different wines in stock, including some very rare and very fine bottles, think Lafite and Pétrus vintages which go back to 1949 and 1945 respectively, and a large collection of…
From the outside Rakuichi Soba is an unassuming restaurant. It doesn't have a large sign, it's housed in a traditional Japanese wooden house/chalet, which you can reach by a narrow wooden bridge. As an unsuspecting foreigner you'd probably walk past without even knowing it's there. But today, everybody knows it's there. The restaurant became famous after it appeared in the Hokkaido episode of…
Hackney has become so hip by now, that it's hard to imagine that only a decade ago it was difficult to find a cabbie who would take you from central London to anywhere near Clapton Road aka Murder Mile. A friend of mine was living on Ickburgh Road at the time, and when we would ask to be taken there, more often than not the cabbie would look at us with a combination of suspicion and compassion and…
Chef Yoshihiro Narisawa (b. 1969) started his career at the early age of 19, training in the three Michelin starred kitchens of Frédy Girardet in Crissier (Switzerland), of Paul Bocuse in Lyon and Joël Robuchon in Paris, and at Antica Osteria del Ponto in Milan, also three Michelin starred at the time. After eight years in Europe, Narisawa returned to Japan in 1996 to open his own restaurant La…
Training with big name French chefs does set you up in the world of gastronomy and David Toutain (b.1981) trained with some of the very best, like Alain Passard , Pierre Gagnaire , Marc Veyrat, and Bernard Pacaud . Add to that two internships at Andoni Luis Aduriz' Mugaritz and Paul Liebrandt's Corton in New York City (now closed) and it will be of no surprise that when Toutain returned to Paris…
Last year, at the end of August, news broke that chefs Richard van Oostenbrugge and Thomas Groot of restaurant Bord'eau (2 Michelin stars at the time), would leave Bord'eau by the end of the year to start their own kitchen counter restaurant in Amsterdam. Two weeks later, around my birthday, I had one final meal at Bordeau, a truly outstanding meal that was nothing short of three-star quality. I…