Weekly roundup of great reads on food and wine #82

Heston Blumenthal on taking photos of your food and his once-in-a-lifetime food experiences: HESTON Blumenthal is like a rock star of the cooking world, and so is his food. But there’s one thing he wishes people would stop doing in his restaurants — taking pictures of their food. “Chefs always have this problem now, it’s across the board and you can’t control people,” he told news.com.au while in Melbourne to film Heston Week which starts tonight on MasterChef. I would prefer if they (diners) didn’t take any photos and just enjoyed themselves at the table and certainly not take them throughout the whole meal.”

The ultimate grilling guide: Check out Bon Appetit’s summer grilling guide with lots of recipes as well as tips.

Spanish Roca brothers of top-ranked restaurant to open culinary lab: Roca brothers Joan, Jordi and Josep will be opening a culinary R&D centre near their top-ranked restaurant El Celler de Can Roca in Spain, which has topped the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list two times. The project is similar in scope to that of Ferran Adrià, the more senior chef of avant-garde gastronomy who, after shuttering one of the most sought-after dining destinations in the world in 2012, began work on the El Bulli Lab which also serves as a laboratory for culinary ideas.

The Faroe Islands: the natural home of Nordic cuisine: The Faroe Islands are beautiful in a very Scandinavian way – they’re not comforting or luxurious, but have this wild, untamed natural beauty. There are no trees, just wind and ocean, and I love how the cuisine reflects the place – it’s a great example of how we are good at creating a lot with little. With a population of only 50,000, there are more sheep than people. They’re everywhere – even grazing on top of houses, as rooftops are often covered in grass. If you hit one with your car you must report it to the police.

A Waffle-Lover’s Tour of Belgium’s Beach Towns: In fractious little Belgium, the Dutch-speaking Flemish and the French-speaking Walloons wholeheartedly agree on few things. They both cherish, however, the garland of pretty beach towns along the country’s brief North Sea coastline. And they both crave the wafels or gaufres (in Flemish and French respectively) served in tearooms and cafes scattered down that shore. An improbable peacemaker, perhaps, but the waffle federates the country nearly as much as Belgium’s famous love of abbey beers and frites (call them french fries there at your peril).

What Brexit means for British food: For most of my forty-two years, I have been eating bananas in Britain. I was born in 1974, the year after we joined the European Economic Community. Since then, I have consumed bananas in many shapes and sizes. Some were as rounded as a crescent moon, and others as straight as a policeman’s truncheon. I’ve nibbled on tiny yellow finger bananas—thin-skinned and sweet—and bananas so giant they could be sliced up and shared across three platefuls of pancakes.

Where to eat good Italian in Paris: In Paris, a growing appetite for Italian food has encouraged chefs to offer pizzas and pastas at reasonable prices — in handsome settings.

Is this the best pizza in the world?: Billing itself “the experts’ guide to the best pizza places in the world”, Where to Eat Pizza features 1,705 pizzerias. Now its compiler, Daniel Young, has revealed the restaurant that received the most nominations from the guide’s 1,077 contributors: Pepe in Grani, Caiazzo, Campania.

Is it last orders for restaurants?: Last weekend, with a certain amount of trepidation, I made a booking with a website called EatAbout, whose tagline invites you to “enjoy private meals in the home of a chef”. Conceived last October by two young Swedes living in London, the website launched in January with the intention of “democratising eating out” and making “good food accessible to everyone” by cutting out many of the costs associated with running a restaurant. Despite a deep and abiding love of the traditional restaurant-going experience, I was curious enough about the concept to give it a try.

Jeannie Cho Lee interview with Liv-ex: You visited Bordeaux to taste the 2015 vintage. What are your overall thoughts on the vintage, and which chateaux impressed you the most? I thought it was a great vintage, less consistent perhaps than the 2010 vintage, but I found it similar to the 2005 in both style and balance. All the basic elements – tannins, alcohol, acidity and flavour – were in balance. While some Merlot-based reds had high alcohol levels, it was in balance with all the other elements. Phenolic ripeness was achieved by all appellations and there was good concentration of flavors without heaviness. The moderate acidity levels meant that most of the wines were extremely approachable and open during En Primeur tasting week in April. I found many excellent cru bourgeois and petits chateaux in 2015, which is an important indicator of the quality of a vintage.