Michele Farnesi (Dilia, Paris) with Tim Spedding (P Franco, London). London. 21st October 2016

Carpaccio, sea urchin, bergamot and almond
Carpaccio, sea urchin, bergamot and almond
Smoked eel, sweet onions
Smoked eel, sweet onions
Agnolotti of Yorkshire grouse, game broth, elderberry and thyme
Agnolotti of Yorkshire grouse, game broth, elderberry and thyme
Tamworth pork jowl, turnips, crisp potato and apple cider
Tamworth pork jowl, turnips, crisp potato and apple cider
Poached quince, ginger and ewe's milk yogurt
Poached quince, ginger and ewe’s milk yogurt

I have eaten Michele’s cuisine twice. Once when he was still the executive chef at Heimat and later on when he started creating in his own restaurant Dilia. I fell in love with his cooking. He is still very young but with an incredible sensitivity for flavours, great technical skills and a very strong passion which you can feel when eating his food. Tim I knew from his time at The Clove Club which is still one of my favourite restaurants in London (I still need to visit P Franco to see what is he creating there). I simply knew that a four hands dinner between those two highly talented chefs has to be spectacular. And it was! The most surprising is that they never met before, so they didn’t know each other and they also didn’t know each other’s cooking. They started talking about the dishes they would create and discovered that their vision was incredibly similar, so they were creating them together – through a long distance brainstorming between Paris and London. For this four hands dinner they had to work in an improvised kitchen with only two induction cookers and only two cooks as assistants. I have no idea how they made it (they cooked for cca 90 people!) but the results were fantastic – every single dish was highly delectable – beautifully cooked, exploding with flavours  and with fantastic accents like the elderberries in the broth for example, which gave to the delicious game broth a totally new dimension.

Andreja Lajh

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