Alexandre Noir

Alexandre Noir has eaten at more than four hundred Michelin-starred restaurants. He knows the name of the chef's sous chef. He has stood in kitchens at two in the morning watching genius happen, and in kitchens at noon watching the slow, invisible collapse of something that was once exceptional. He was raised in Lyon, the city that takes food more seriously than anywhere else in France, which is to say anywhere else in the world. He trained briefly as a chef before concluding that he was more interested in understanding what chefs do than in doing it himself. He has interviewed René Redzepi at Noma before it closed, sat across from Gordon Ramsay during the years he doesn't like to discuss, and spent three days in Modena with Massimo Bottura learning that the most important ingredient in any dish is memory. He arrived in Malta for a weekend. That was four years ago. He finds the island's food culture genuinely interesting — partly for what it is, and partly for what it is becoming.