Kitchens
Named rooms with a current record — what they cook, how they run, and what they decided.
Noma Stopped Serving and Opened as a Test Kitchen
An account of Noma's closure as a nightly restaurant at the end of 2024 and René Redzepi's stated reason — that the hours a tasting menu needs cannot be paid for by the seats it holds. Covers what the test-kitchen model actually produces and whether other rooms have followed the same logic.
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02St. JOHN Has Served the Same Dish Since 1994
St. JOHN in Smithfield, roast bone marrow with parsley salad, and what that constancy says about a kitchen's argument. Covers Fergus Henderson's nose-to-tail position as a cooking philosophy rather than a trend, and how the room's economics depend on the cheap part of the animal.
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03Central Organises Its Menu by Altitude
Virgilio Martínez's Central in Lima and the altitude-as-tasting-menu structure: each course named for an ecosystem, from ocean floor to high Andes, and the sourcing network of Mater Iniciativa that makes it possible. Asks what it costs to run a menu whose ingredients cannot be ordered from a catalogue.
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04Disfrutar Kept the elBulli Method and Dropped the Name
Oriol Castro, Eduard Xatruch and Mateu Casañas opened Disfrutar in Barcelona after elBulli closed and have held two Michelin stars since 2018. Covers how the elBulli technical archive was carried forward and what changed when the room was smaller and the service nightly rather than seasonal.
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05Chez Panisse Drew the Californian Line in 1971
Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley and built a sourcing philosophy — named farms, seasonal menus, no freezer — that became the template for a generation of American cooking. The piece traces what that line actually produced: both the restaurants it influenced and the supply chains it required.