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Elite chefs are swapping kitchens, and shaping the world's culinary and cultural future.
Earlier this year in the hushed private dining room of the three-Michelin-starred Le Bernardin in New York City, chef Eric Ripert emerged from the kitchen to greet lunch guests and escort them to their seats. Although the setting was his seafood-forward dining temple, the dishes that hit the table that afternoon weren't Ripert's handiwork at all. Rather, they had been created by English-born chef Martin Benn, who had jetted in from Sydney with a small team from his award-winning Sepia restaurant, known for its focus on sustainable ingredients and avantgarde dishes that fuse classic French techniques with Japanese-influenced visual artistry. Cooking at Le Bernardin for one day, Benn dazzled American eaters with a butter-poached Hawkesbury River squid; tender Australian wagyu beef with Japanese pickles and samphire, a briny sea vegetable; and a golf-ball-sized "pearl" dessert that, when cracked open, released a slightly fifizzy, tart gingerade with fifinger-lime powder.
Kitchen sharing or even relocating a restaurant to a faraway continent is trending. This year, for the fifirst time, Britain's Heston Blumenthal uprooted his 20-year-old flflagship establishment, The Fat Duck, moving it from Bray, England, to Melbourne, Australia, for six months. In January, Danish chef René Redzepi temporarily relocated Copenhagen's Noma-regularly a "World's Best Restaurant" contender-to Tokyo, where he opened a Noma pop-up serving a 15-course tasting menu priced at 40,200 yen (about $336). Such exchanges generate publicity, to be sure, but on a deeper level they are a form of culinary diplomacy, a fifirst step in the demystifification of a faraway culture. Food, after all, is the way to a nation's heart, an easy gateway to understanding- witness the long-standing custom of monarchs exchanging tribute gifts of tea, local delicacies, and livestock.
Some of the recherché ingredients and techniques shared by chefs ultimately filter down to the masses. Consider that, until the 1970s, sushi was a rarity in Western countries and is now a mainstay in cities around the world. Or that currently...