“The more I look, the more inspiration I have. Like, just now, I flipped through the archive and saw they served a ‘wild rose ice cream’. I thought, ‘Wow, they were so creative’. I immediately had the image of how I was going to do a wild rose ice cream.” He added, “This history, these stories, shouldn’t be buried somewhere in the archives. We should be able to give it life, so people can savour it and say, ‘This is a flavour from 130 years ago’.”
That said, “We’re not trying to restore history, but rather, we get a lot of inspiration from it.”
For example, a discovery of turtle soup on a menu from 1917 — the dish was haute cuisine and a status marker at the time — led him to interpret the dish in his own way. “Turtle Soup from 1887” is not made with turtle at all, but rather double-boiled chicken, grouper and herbs. “If I blindfolded you, you would think it was turtle soup,” he said.
