THE CUISINE OF A SMALL COUNTRY THAT HAS BEEN TOLD TO BE QUIETER DURING HIS HISTORY.
There is a cookbook written in Catalan in 1324 that most of the world has never heard of, and that contains, in its medieval parchment pages, a more sophisticated understanding of flavor than anything produced by the industrialized food system in the last fifty years. The Llibre de Sent Soví predates the printing press.
The Saffron and the war
Consider what it took to build a spice route. Not the romantic version taught in school, the one with bold explorers and favorable winds and the gleam of discovery. The real one. The one built across centuries of accumulated trust between traders who did not share a language, a faith, or a flag, but who shared something more durable than any of those: the knowledge that certain things grew in certain places and nowhere else, and that this specificity was worth protecting.
02
Macau, where cuisines learned to speak more than a language
There are cities that accumulate cultures, and others that ferment them. Macau belongs firmly to the latter. For more than four centuries, this small peninsula at the edge of the Pearl River Delta has functioned not as a border, but as a translation table—between China and Europe, between maritime Asia and the Atlantic world, between memory and adaptation. Few places on earth embody the idea of a culinary melting pot with such precision, restraint, and continuity.
03
Ginori 1735 — The discipline of continuity
04
Heritage, when genuine, is never decorative. It is structural.
Founded in 1735 near Florence, Ginori 1735 did not emerge from fashion or commerce, but from inquiry. Marquis Carlo Ginori was not seeking to imitate Chinese porcelain—he sought to understand it. The early years of the Manifattura di Doccia were marked by experimentation, failures, reformulations, and an almost scientific obsession with matter. What survived was not a style, but a method. Porcelain, at Ginori, was never treated as surface. It was treated as language.
When food becomes a form of farewell, Chibineko and the restaurant of the cats and the memories
There are books that do not ask to be interpreted, only accompanied. Chibineko — O Restaurante dos Gatos e das Memórias belongs to that quiet lineage of novels that understand something elemental, and therefore difficult to execute without sentimentality: food does not comfort because it distracts, but because it remembers.
05
Pop-Tarts in Switzerland
When Scott Bessent joked in Switzerland that next time he would bring Pop-Tarts, after dismissing Swiss and German food, the comment was widely treated as harmless banter. A moment of cultural clumsiness. An anecdote not worth lingering on. It deserves lingering.
Bessent was not in Switzerland as the typical American tourist passing through. He was there as one of the most powerful economic figures in the United States, participating in high-level meetings at the very heart of the global financial system.