About HdG
Haut de Gamme is two things at once. It is a web-zine about the people who make food worth writing about, and it is an agency: the practical side of the same passion, where I help chefs, restaurants and producers on several continents become known for what they actually do. One feeds the other. Writing keeps me close to what I love about this world, the agency lets me act on it.
The site began in 2014 as an experiment. Chefs wrote short pieces for it themselves, one question at a time, and over the years, more than 55 of them built portraits this way, piece by piece, alongside my own reviews of their restaurants. That archive still lives here. You can follow the original Favourite Flavour series (http://hautdegamme.net/category/stories/) and see how chefs from entirely different worlds answer the same question, or look up anyone in the directory (https://hautdegamme.net/directory/).
The site has since grown into something else too: a home for long-form writing about food. Essays on where the restaurant world is heading, interviews with the people shaping it, and arguments that occasionally make someone uncomfortable, which is usually a sign they are worth publishing. Some pieces are mine, others come from the people this site was built for: a farmer explaining why your steak costs what it does, a chef writing about the dish that changed how he cooks, the leadership of the world’s most talked-about restaurant sitting down to say, at length, what comes next.
Who appears here has never been about stars or rankings. What someone cooks matters; who they are matters more. I have always gone looking for the obsessive ones, the ones with real ethics, the ones who could have taken the easier road and didn’t.
There is also Fabulous Meals (https://hautdegamme.net/category/fabulous-meals/), a running record of the best lunches and dinners of my life, and a few other things worth finding in the menu.
About Andreja Lajh
I am not a chef. I am the person a chef calls when the food is extraordinary, and almost nobody knows it yet.
Food found me twice. First through family: one grandmother was born in Italy, the other in Serbia. I grew up eating two different worlds cooked with the same conviction. My grandfather’s vineyard above Maribor taught me the other half, a love of wine that never left. Then, at ten years old, I watched Paul Bocuse cook on Austrian television, bought his cookbook, and taught myself to cook from it, recipe by recipe, alone in the kitchen. I understood early that food is never just food. It carries memory, place, love, and sometimes an entire argument about how to live.
For a long time, I did something else entirely. Over 18 years as AD in advertising at Publicis, McCann and Ogilvy, learning how stories are built and how attention actually moves. In 2008, I finally listened to what I actually wanted and left, and began working with chefs, winemakers and producers in Slovenia and Italy: dinners, events, campaigns, the beginning of everything that followed.
In 2013, I moved to London with nothing but the intention to start again. No contacts, no reputation. I wrote, I travelled, I sat at hundreds of tables next to the food writers whose names now fill the mastheads of the Financial Times, Forbes, Monocle, Conde Nast Traveller and other media. Many became friends. All of them I know well enough now to sense what story they are looking for before they can put it into words themselves.
That instinct is the actual work. Anyone can write a press release; what I do begins where a press release stops mattering: persuading a journalist who has already decided a restaurant is a gimmick to make the journey anyway, and watching them leave converted. Taking a chef and building him a reputation abroad from absolutely nothing. Knowing exactly which writer belongs at which table, and which one does not, because the wrong introduction can cost a story that the right one would have won easily.
The part of this world I love most happens far from any ranking. When Andrea Petrini gathers chefs for one of his Gelinaz happenings, those strange, unrepeatable evenings that exist once and are then only ever spoken about, I am lucky to be often among the very few writers he invites to be there and tell the story afterwards. I consider that one of the finest compliments of my working life. It reminds me, every time, why I chose this world in the first place: at its best, food is not an industry at all. It is a gathering of people who could never have done anything else.
If you are a chef, a restaurateur, a farmer or a producer and you believe your work deserves to be seen further than it currently is, write to me. Everything I do is built around the person in front of me, not a template. I can be reached in English, Italian, German, Slovenian, Serbian or Croatian.
Andreja Lajh, founder of Haut de Gamme