Welcome to Le Cordon Bong!
Why should I subscribe?
In short, I cook the tedious (and often, not very well-tested) recipes from cookbooks by Michelin star restaurants, so you don’t have to.
This newsletter is for anyone who loves cooking and food, and it’s especially for people who want to expand their culinary horizons, cook more challenging recipes, and are frustrated by the lack of detail and explanation in advanced cookbooks - just like I was (and still am!).
My posts will be a mix of:
Cooking Posts - these talk through a dish from a Michelin cookbook, the history of the dish, concepts, interesting origin stories, and my experience of cooking through the recipe;
Recipe Posts - these will usually be an adaptation of the Michelin recipe that (hopefully) doesn’t take 16 hours of prep work, so you can make it at home. I’ll also write up everyday recipes that I like to cook myself, and occasionally, some of my own original recipe ideas.
Who’s writing this stuff?
Hi there! Friends call me Bong. I’m a thirty-something guy living in central London who’s obsessed with cooking and food. By day, I do boring finance things, and in the evenings, I cook unnecessarily complicated meals. On weekends, I cook even more unnecessarily complicated meals.
I believe that (1) great food is a birthright; (2) more meals should be occasions; and (3) nobody should settle for mediocre food when you can whip up amazing meals in your very own kitchen.
What do you know about cooking?
I’ve been cooking since I was a kid, hanging out with my mother in the kitchen, and things kicked up a notch about 7 years ago, when I was fortunate enough to have a long stint of gardening leave between jobs.
While I don’t have any professional training (unless you count a half day pasta-making course in Florence where we spent most of the time drinking the wine that was supposed to go in the ragu), for what I lack in experience, I make up for in enthusiasm.
I’ve also eaten at about half of London’s Michelin-starred restaurants (to be abundantly clear, I am absolutely not a restaurant snob - I just eat a lot), so I do at least have some vague idea of what I’m trying to create when replicating these Michelin-starred recipes.
How can I stay up-to-date?
You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.
