P i s t a c h i o

Yesterday, an assignment came in from Foodservice & Hospitality Magazine. Managing Editor Alistair Kyte [great name] asked me to do a profile of a couple of chocolatiers in Richmond, BC. The mag is doing a roundup of the year’s most notable chefs.

Perfect. I love doing chef profiles. I wrote about a hundred of them for The Food Encyclopedia, published last fall.

Shameless bragging here. Two years ago, I spent eight months doing a line-edit of the Encyclopedia’s predecessor, The Cook’s Essential Dictionary, all 4,000 entries, including some of my own. There were a few biographies included, like Caréme, Escoffier, and as I was wrapping up my portion of that project, I started thinking about other greats similarly responsible for advancing modern cuisine. I asked the publisher what he thought about adding more culinary biographies for the second edition of the book, which was to become the Encyclopedia. He liked the idea, and the culinary biographies were born. My partner in writing about 150 biographies was food writer Judith Finlayson. Together we covered a gamut, from Alain Ducasse to  Margaret Visser, and more.

But back to those chocolate geniuses in Richmond. Cindy and Dominique Duby have  been called Atomic Chefs for their use of molecular gastronomy in making their highly original work. There’s literally no one doing this kind of work in sweets, although they do savoury as well. They’re also virtual entrepreneurs.

Coming soon, the profile in toto.