At the table, we see what is served to us, rarely all the work that went into it. Those who prepare it decide how much of that work to reveal: they can keep it out of sight, let it unfold before everyone, or make it the very reason people have come. It may seem a question of cooking, but it is more a question of how we come together around food.
Issue 00 promised issues that would be seasonal, slow and verified. This is the first, and it gathers three answers to that question, far apart in time and place. There are gestures that ask to be watched, gestures that ignore the gaze, and gestures that turn whoever is watching into part of the scene. None of the three pieces says so, and none was written to prove it.
The oldest answer is also the most explicit. In 1581 a treatise printed in Venice taught how to carve food held up on a fork, standing before one's lord, with grace, so as to make a fine sight, and without letting the strain show. Before any dish, the pupil practised on the crumb of a loaf, alone, until the hand was ready. That is why the essay is here: it marks the point at which a gesture made in front of others becomes a written rule.
Five centuries later, in Bangkok, the same precision appears where no one seems to be staging it. At Jay Fai's station the gesture has become so habitual that the decision no longer shows, and nothing is posed for whoever is watching, even though everything happens in full view of the street. Two evenings earlier, at Gaggan, a ticket had announced a show time rather than a dinner time, and by the end of the night the show was no longer only what was in front of us.
The three pieces can be read in any order; once you reach the last, you look at the first differently. The issue stays open until the end of autumn: if anything deserves to be added, it will arrive here, with its date.
I licked the world. Then we all sang together.
Read RITUAL · №05In Bangkok, an hour before opening, in front of Jay Fai's station
Read HOSPITALITY · №06In 1581 a treatise taught how to carve food held up on a fork, in front of princes. Before the knife, you had to learn how to stand.
ReadOf the nine wines poured that evening at Gaggan, we chose three: a Vitovska from the Italian Carso, a Malvasia from the Slovenian Kras, a rosé from southern Styria. We chose them for the road they travelled. Two political borders separate them; a bed of limestone holds them together. In Bangkok they ended up on the same table, more than eight thousand kilometres from home.
Origine 2020
On the Carso there is little soil and a great deal of stone. Paolo Vodopivec chose to grow a single grape, Vitovska, native to this plateau, and Origine is not made every year: only in the vintages he judges the best. 2020 is one of them. Of the three bottles, it is the one most closely bound to its place: a single grape, a single plateau, one reading of them carried all the way through.
Malvazija 2021
A few kilometres across the border the Carso carries on and changes name: Kras, the word that gave the world “karst”. In Gorjansko, five kilometres from the sea, the Čotar family carved the first part of their cellar into the rock in 1974; the whites mature there for at least two years in wood. Every bottle is signed with a fingerprint. The state changes, and so does the spelling of the grape, Malvazija rather than Malvasia; the stone is the same.
Rosé vom Opok 2021
Across a second border, the limestone returns under another name. In southern Styria, on the Slovenian border, the calcareous marl on which Maria and Sepp Muster grow their vines is called Opok, and the name goes on the label. The rosé is made from Zweigelt, Blaufränkisch and Blauer Wildbacher, the last a Styrian speciality, the same grape that, a little further west, gives Schilcher, the region's own rosé. It is the bottle that widens the map: no longer the Carso on both sides of one border, but another edge, where the wine still takes its name from the ground.
Sosta has no commercial relationship with these wineries. The three wines were drunk at the dinner of 17 August 2026 at Gaggan, booked and paid for by the author.
The carver, when he must, hides the strain, but leaves the art in front of everyone present, because that is where it is judged.
— CARVING IN THE AIR · №06