> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thebeyondpodcast.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # You're Paying Too Much for Bad Food. A Michelin Expert on What's Actually Worth It | Andy Hayler - URL: https://www.thebeyondpodcast.com/youre-paying-too-much-for-bad-food-andy-hayler/ - Published: 2026-10-22T16:15:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-31T19:31:31.000Z - Description: Food critic Andy Hayler, who has eaten at every three-Michelin-star restaurant, on how Michelin judges a kitchen and what is worth the money. - Author: Aleksandra King - Tags: Andy Hayler, episode, Season 4, Food, Fine Dining, Michelin, Japan **Is a €400 tasting menu ever worth it? Andy Hayler, the first person to eat at every three-Michelin-star restaurant in the world, tells Aleksandra King how Michelin really judges a kitchen, why Japan wins, and what to take home from the world's best restaurants.** Food critic and author [Andy Hayler](https://www.andyhayler.com) joins host Aleksandra King on The BEYOND Podcast to settle a question most of us only guess at: when is expensive food actually worth it? Andy is the first person to have eaten at every three-Michelin-star restaurant in the world, has reviewed restaurants at andyhayler.com since 1994, and has been to Japan thirteen times and India twenty-four. ![Andy Hayler and Aleksandra King on blue velvet sofas either side of a round wooden table on The BEYOND Podcast set](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5e/74/5e74ba0c-c249-4586-8ce5-03deb56fdf93/content/images/2026/10/andy-hayler-aleksandra-king-in-conversation-the-beyond-podcast-16x9-4.jpg) Andy Hayler and Aleksandra King on The BEYOND Podcast. Photo: The BEYOND Podcast. ## Episode summary Andy is better placed than anyone alive to answer the price question. He first completed the list of every three-star restaurant in the world in 2004, around 150 of them at any one time, and kept it up to date until the pandemic. He walks Aleksandra through how the Michelin Guide actually works, from its origins in 1900 as a tyre company's scheme to get the few hundred motorists in France driving further, through the stars introduced in 1926 and the one-two-three grading of 1933, whose definitions have not changed since: a very good restaurant in its category, a restaurant worth a detour, and one worth a special journey. Chefs respect Michelin above every other guide, he says, for one reason: it takes no money from restaurants, and its inspectors arrive unannounced. Most other guides and influencers take a fee or hospitality and can therefore be influenced, which he calls the very definition of the word influencer. Michelin's system is opaque, but four criteria have been acknowledged: the quality of the ingredients, the technical skill of the chef, whether the chef's personality comes through in the food, and consistency. Andy puts real numbers on the bill: around €400 for a three-star tasting menu in Paris and €600 at one address, about £450 at London's two-star Ikoyi, and roughly £200 to £400 for food at most three-stars, with drinks on top. Stars push prices up without guaranteeing better cooking. He names the Dysart near Richmond, a one-star whose chef Kenneth Culhane won the Roux Scholarship in 2010, as better than many two- and three-stars in the UK. He tells the story of The Shed, the garden shed a bored journalist pushed to number one on TripAdvisor, and offers the only reliable fix: find a critic whose taste matches yours and trust them. Asked for the best food country in the world, Andy says Japan without hesitation, and explains the ecosystem behind it. The produce is the best in the world, the Tokyo fish market had 65,000 people working there when he visited, and the word wagyu literally means Japanese cattle. He describes a ramen cook in his late sixties who sleeps on the floor of his restaurant to stir the stock through the night and serves a soup and a beer for about ten pounds to a queue that forms before noon, and a chef who taught him that Japan has 26 micro-seasons of about two weeks each. Even school lunches, he says, are fresh rice, fish, meat and vegetables. He also visits the Parasite Museum in Tokyo's Meguro district, home to a 29-foot tapeworm, and explains why sushi fish is frozen by law in Europe and the US but not in Japan. The second half turns practical. The mistake that sinks young chefs and home cooks alike is doing too much: adding one more element to a plate until the fish is overcooked waiting for its garnish. The fix is to buy better ingredients and cook them well, as Michel Guérard did with three or four elements on a plate. Andy explains how to shop like a critic, from relying on a butcher's twenty-year reputation to smelling the strawberries, and gives Aleksandra a dinner-party menu that is mostly made in advance: crab and avocado with grapefruit sauce, sea bass with a mustard and herb butter sauce, and a dessert he outsources to his wife. A WSET Level 3 in wine, he pairs spicy food, white fish, steak and dessert in plain English, explains why noble rot needs a river, a hot summer and fog, and weighs what AI can and cannot do in a kitchen. He closes with a free tip: two three-star restaurants in Germany, forty minutes apart by taxi from Luxembourg, where the menus cost significantly less than in Paris and some wines sit below retail. > “A two-star restaurant is somewhere that's worth a detour. And a three-star restaurant is somewhere that's worth a special journey.”– *Andy Hayler on how Michelin has defined its stars since 1933* ![Andy Hayler gesturing with both hands as he explains a point on The BEYOND Podcast set](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5e/74/5e74ba0c-c249-4586-8ce5-03deb56fdf93/content/images/2026/10/andy-hayler-making-a-point-the-beyond-podcast-16x9-6.jpg) Andy Hayler explains how Michelin inspectors actually score a restaurant. Photo: The BEYOND Podcast. ## Key takeaways - Judge a restaurant on the four things Michelin admits to scoring: ingredients, technique, the chef's personality on the plate, and consistency. A one-star that passes all four can beat a famous three-star. - Separate the food bill from the drinks bill before you book. Andy's range for food at a three-star is roughly £200 to £400; what you spend on wine is your choice, and water is allowed. - Crowd ratings can be gamed by a garden shed. Find one critic whose taste you can check against your own and trust them instead. - The most common mistake in professional and home kitchens is the same: too many elements. Buy better ingredients, cook them well, and leave things out. - For a dinner party, make the starter and dessert in advance, cook one simple main at the last minute, and spend the saving on the produce. - Two three-star restaurants in Germany, Victor's Fine Dining and Waldhotel Sonnora, sit forty minutes apart and cost significantly less than Paris; fly to Luxembourg, where the buses are free. ## Key chapters | Chapter | Timestamp | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------- | | Introduction | [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c) | | How the Michelin Guide started in 1900 and the four things inspectors actually score | [02:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=179s) | | What a three-star meal costs in Paris, London and Japan | [09:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=546s) | | Why some one-star restaurants beat three-stars | [11:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=711s) | | The fake London restaurant that became number one on TripAdvisor | [14:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=887s) | | Why Japan wins: 26 micro-seasons, school lunches and a ramen cook who sleeps on his restaurant floor | [17:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=1048s) | | Why there's no such thing as Texan wagyu | [19:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=1171s) | | The one mistake that lets down young chefs and home cooks alike | [27:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=1654s) | | A 29-foot tapeworm, and what the Parasite Museum in Tokyo taught Andy about raw fish | [33:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=2011s) | | How to shop like a critic: butchers, fishmongers and the smell test | [36:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=2162s) | | Andy's favourite dish in the world, and his dessert | [42:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=2543s) | | A starter, main and dessert for a dinner party you can mostly make in advance | [44:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=2670s) | | Wine pairing made simple: spicy food, white fish, steak and dessert | [51:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=3087s) | | What AI can and can't do in a kitchen | [57:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=3463s) | | Two three-star restaurants 40 minutes apart that cost less than one in Paris | [1:01:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c&t=3710s) | ## The guest Andy Hayler is the first person to have eaten at every three-Michelin-star restaurant in the world, a list he first completed in 2004 and kept up to date until the pandemic. An independent critic who pays his own bills, he has reviewed restaurants at andyhayler.com since 1994, was a guest critic on the first four series of BBC MasterChef: The Professionals, and is restaurant critic for Elite Traveler magazine. He also works in technology and writes on artificial intelligence; his next book, The Hallucination Game, is out in January 2027. - [andyhayler.com](https://www.andyhayler.com) - [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/wyahaw/) - [X](https://x.com/wyahaw) - [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@wyahaw) [Andy Hayler's guest profile](https://www.thebeyondpodcast.com/guests/andy-hayler/) ## Where to listen - [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJhlnZqcK4c) - [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beyond-with-aleksandra-king/id1786173140) - [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/0haFQYUTnEn0fpr0LQYlhH) ## Transcript #### Read the full episode transcript Transcript 00:00:00 ****Andy Hayler:** I'm the first person to have eaten at every three-star Michelin restaurant in the world. 00:00:05 ****Aleksandra King:** Best countries in the world for food. Full stop. 00:00:08 ****Andy Hayler:** Obviously, some fine restaurants in France. The very high-end restaurants in Germany are probably some of the very best in the world with a chef called Christian Bau who's had three Michelin stars since 2005\. He's sufficiently confident about his stars. He's got three stars tattooed on his arm. But I think Japan wins for a number of reasons. I remember going to a place in a very obscure part of Tokyo, a ramen noodle place run by this quite elderly guy. He sleeps on the floor of the restaurant so he can get up during the night and stir the stock for the next day. 00:00:39 ****Aleksandra King:** How much does the average three star Michelin meal costs? 00:00:44 ****Andy Hayler:** In Paris, three star restaurant, you're probably going to pay €400 for the tasting menu. It might even be €600 if you go to one particular place. 00:00:52 ****Aleksandra King:** What's the best thing for you about high-end dining? 00:00:55 ****Andy Hayler:** The ability of a really great restaurant to produce a very special experience. I went off to this place on the edge of a volcano in Japan. I mean, that's something I will remember. It's something you don't get to do every day. 00:01:06 ****Aleksandra King:** What is the most common mistake everyday people make when they're cooking at home? 00:01:10 ****Andy Hayler:** They try to do something that's too fancy and beyond that their beyond their capabilities. 00:01:16 ****Aleksandra King:** What about tapeworm in raw fish? 00:01:18 ****Andy Hayler:** I've been to a museum in Japan called the Parasite Museum. The prize exhibit is a big cabinet. It's a 29 ft long tapeworm that came out of a guy digestive system in Hiroshima. 00:01:33 ****Aleksandra King:** I presume if you had a tapeworm, you would know, right? 00:01:37 ****Andy Hayler:** I think in the restaurant world, Michelin is the most respected guide from chefs primarily because they don't take any money basically from restaurants. So the inspections are anonymous. The restaurants don't know that they're coming. The vast majority of other restaurant review guides and influencers take some kind of fee or payment or hospitality or whatever from restaurants and therefore they can be influenced. Whereas that's the very definition of the word influencer. The Michelin on the other hand run a completely independent set of full-time inspectors who go around restaurants that they think maybe worth u worthy of some kind of award and they give out stars to the restaurants that are at the top of that tree. So yes, I think it's fair to say that the in the restaurant world Michelin would be the kind of the Olympic standard of food guides. Yeah. 00:02:41 ****Aleksandra King:** And if you've got three, you like that you say in both. 00:02:43 ****Andy Hayler:** Yes. I mean, in the whole world there it varies obviously every not just every year these days, every month or two when a new guy comes out, but roughly speaking, there's about 150 three star restaurants in the world. 00:02:56 ****Aleksandra King:** 150\. Okay. Yeah. Okay. 00:02:59 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. 00:02:59 ****Aleksandra King:** Okay. All right. What is a Michelin star? 00:03:03 ****Andy Hayler:** Yes. Let's go back to basics. So, the Michelin Guide started in 1900\. Which and at that time there were only a few hundred cars on the road in France, but they Michelin Tire Company, which was a couple of brothers, had the idea of wanting to promote travel by car. And so they set up the idea of a guide which would list initially sort of places to stay, sort of hotels and restaurants, good restaurants to eat at. They also used to list sort of mechanics and garages because where to find petrol because that kind of thing was a was very limited in those days. So the guide sort of developed from its 1900 origins and in 1926 they introduced the idea of a Michelin star for particularly notable restaurants. And in 1933 they extended that a little bit and they awarded either one star, two stars or three stars. Now that stayed ever since and the definitions are that for a one-star restaurant that is a very good restaurant in its category. A two-star restaurant is that somewhere that's worth a detour and a three-star restaurant is somewhere that's worth a special journey and those definitions have remained unchanged since 1933. 00:04:25 ****Aleksandra King:** It's about so actually a Michelin star is about is rated or given about how much how worthy it is of actually visiting. 00:04:34 ****Andy Hayler:** Correct. 00:04:34 ****Aleksandra King:** It's not about the food is like this or something. It's basically is it worth the detour. 00:04:40 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah, I mean it clearly is about the related to the food because it's a restaurant. I mean but and in theory Michelin assess primarily the food. I mean, it's they have a very a fairly opaque system. So, it isn't entirely clear what they assess things on, but based on the interviews that have been occasionally given over the years, they primarily scoring on the food. 00:05:03 ****Aleksandra King:** That actually makes it more scary for anyone listening anyone running a restaurant because you don't really know what they are thinking about and judging you on Generally to get the start. 00:05:14 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. Well, as I say in interviews in recent years, they've been kind of little bit less tight lipped. So there are a few criteria which they have acknowledged that they use. So one of them is the quality of ingredients. One of them is the sort of technical skill of the chef. One, is the, what they would call the does the personality of the chef come through in the food? Well, that's obviously a little bit harder to define. And the fourth is consistency. Which is interesting since Michelin probably rarely actually go back to a restaurant more than once in a year except under unusual circumstances. But, nonetheless, consistency is what they would claim is a one of the factors. So those factors are the ones that they've admitted to. 00:06:02 ****Aleksandra King:** So to be able to probably reproduce that level of dish over and over again. Okay. So should it matter for the everyday person this Michelin star? I mean if I'm travelling to Spain and I know that in Girona there's a restaurant with three stars. It is a known restaurant. It's either first or second in the whole entire world. Do you recommend or Michelin certainly does a detour and making the effort if you can get a place that is because none those restaurants are so difficult to get into. Let's just be honest. Is it worth it? 00:06:37 ****Andy Hayler:** Well, you're in the one you're referring to is a restaurant called El Celler de Can Roca run by three brothers. It's yeah and it is a pretty interesting restaurant. I mean, I think the definition of a three star restaurant is there's only 150 roughly in the world I mean clearly those restaurants should in principle be worth a special journey and that one is a in my view a pretty good one. So it's certainly I enjoyed my meal there very much. I remember a even now I can remember a particularly spectacular sort of very elaborate take on beef tartare that I ate there which was very incredibly interesting dish. So yes I'd say it's worth a journey. 00:07:24 ****Aleksandra King:** I've just come back from a fantastic holiday in Japan amazing food all that kind of thing. 00:07:29 ****Andy Hayler:** I think Japan's a particularly nice example. I've been to Japan 13 times. 00:07:34 ****Aleksandra King:** 13 times. Yeah, nice. 00:07:36 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah, I think I have on my andyhayler. Com website. I've got over just I think it was exactly a hundred reviews just of Tokyo restaurants in Tokyo, but I've been also to a number of other places obviously to Kyoto, but also to oh Kobe and to Nara and to Hiroshima and other locations including her Hokkaido and one of the probably most probably the most interesting location I've ever been to at a restaurant is in Japan. So there's a place called Michel Bras which is a French restaurant. It's a sister of a place in Laguiole in France and this place in Japan is actually set on the rim of a volcano extinct volcano. The about 30,000 years ago the volcano blew up and literally lost its sort of lid if you like. And there's now a big sort of volcanic lake in the middle. And there's only one building on the side of the volcano which is a hotel. And this restaurant Michel Bras is in that hotel. So it overlooks the volcanic lake. So yeah. 00:08:48 ****Aleksandra King:** Incredible. And it has three 00:08:50 ****Andy Hayler:** That had three stars. It's think it's currently got two but yeah when I went there it had three 00:08:55 ****Aleksandra King:** Three stars. 00:08:56 ****Andy Hayler:** Had a terrific chef for some years called Alexandre Bourdas who then moved to France and opened his own restaurant in Honfleur which was superb. 00:09:06 ****Aleksandra King:** Okay, but we're talking about quite posh things now. So, let's get on to the nitty-gritty. How much does the average three-star Michelin meal cost? 00:09:15 ****Andy Hayler:** That's hard to say. 00:09:16 ****Aleksandra King:** I know. But 00:09:16 ****Andy Hayler:** I think Yeah, I think there's two things. Well, firstly, you've got to distinguish between food and wine. Because I think so the total bill is going to be dramatically dependent on what you spend on drinks. In terms of food the sort of bill will actually vary significantly by location and by country. So certain locations like London or Paris or are inherently expensive. So in Paris three-star restaurant you're probably going to pay €400 for the tasting menu. It might even be €600 if you go to one particular place. But it's something like that. And in even in London even a non three star restaurant somewhere like Ikoyi two star, I think last time I looked was about £450 the tasting menu. Most of them are a little bit less than that, maybe sort of £295, something like that. But you can if you sort of hunt around say more obscure bits of Japan which have got starred restaurants. I've eaten one three star meal I think at the time admittedly this is a decade ago but was something like £50 or something for per person. That's very unusual. But yes, you would typically spend let's say between £200 to £400 on a meal in a three star restaurant, which will usually be these days mostly tasting menu. A few places do a cart, but that's not so common these days. So you'll get a lot of different dishes for that. Yeah, but roughly speaking, obviously what you spend on wine or other drinks is then up to you and you can spend obviously a great deal if you choose to. But that's clearly your choice. You could just drink water if you prefer. 00:10:59 ****Aleksandra King:** Okay. So, should you does the price automatically go up? So, one star, two star, three star or do the sort of the restaurants feel like, oh, now that I've got three stars, I'm going to get you. I'm going to charge. And do like are there some really good one stars that are better than three stars or is it always three stars better? 00:11:14 ****Andy Hayler:** Yes. So, there's a couple of questions there. So I think the answer to the first question is the last thing you said which was that the essentially once a place gets to say a star then they probably feel more comfortable charging a bit more and if they get a second star after a little while they think oh actually got two stars now we can probably charge a bit more and so on. So it tends to work like that. I mean there's no rules. I mean it's a these are all independently owned restaurants so they can charge whatever they like but in general yeah the prices tend to creep up as the stars sort of continue. And 00:11:48 ****Aleksandra King:** Yeah. Okay. And are there some better one stars than three stars? 00:11:53 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah, I mean I think there probably are actually. I think that the standard of three stars I mean obviously Michelin have a system which should say is very opaque and they have a number of inspectors. We don't really even know how many inspectors there are though we have some rough idea. But clearly these are all human beings and they have different slightly different opinions and even though they're following a methodology people end up with different views. So there are certain restaurants which are I think generally reckoned to be let's just say strangely assessed by Michelin u but you may have three stars which where whereas the majority of sort of experienced diners and chefs would tend not to agree with Michelin. And then on the other hand there are some restaurants which have got two or one star which are terrific and for some reason Michelin seems to have overlooked them or not really understood them or whatever. So I give you an example there's a terrific restaurant in near Richmond called the Dysart and the Dysart's got one Michelin star. The chef was actually a Roux Scholar. So the Roux Scholarship is the sort of premier culinary competition for professional chefs in Britain and every year one person wins it. So the person that won it in 2010 was a guy called Kenneth Culhane and he's the head chef of the Dysart. Although he only has one star, but for me it's evidently solid two star and much better than many of the two stars if not three stars around the UK. And it's a sort of mystery to me why that doesn't have at least one more star. 00:13:35 ****Aleksandra King:** But the thing is for a person who hasn't eaten in every single three star Michelin restaurant who doesn't have your experience how can we watching how can we know whether what whe those stars are earned and whether we should justify that money like how do besides taste and enjoying a meal? 00:13:54 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah, it's very simple. You read my website tells you I mean I literally have listed every three star restaurant at least on the list until the pandemic. That was completely up to date. I first edited all the three stars in 2004 and kept that going until the till the pandemic. So at least on the three star restaurants, you can certainly have a look at my reviews. And I think in general when you're trying to assess restaurants, I mean, you can do some research. It's not just me. Obviously, there are other reviewers and other blogs and websites and you've got to sort of try and find somebody that you agree with, someone whose tastes coincide with yours and that you come to trust. 00:14:44 ****Aleksandra King:** Most people go on to Google Maps and they check those stars or some sort of TripAdvisor or some something like that. I don't know. 00:14:51 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah, there's I mean Google there's a place for TripAdvisor and Google Maps and there's something else in America as well. The there's a place for those. I mean there's nothing wrong with that. I think the issue is that these can be manipulated with some ease by restaurants. There was a famous case in the UK where a board journalist who was between jobs set up a completely fake restaurant called The Shed. There was literally a shed in his garden. And he registered it as a restaurant and then he started to got friends to post reviews on TripAdvisor and then he would post pictures of the dishes which were just stuff he'd done in the kitchen and they were pretty laughable things he managed by sort of skilful manipulation to get that to be the number one rated restaurant in the in London on TripAdvisor. So I think you can just Google that yourself called the shed. So I think the difficulty with those types of things is that they are easily manipulated and that's the trouble when you're trying to research restaurants. You've got to find people or sources that you trust. 00:15:59 ****Aleksandra King:** So, what's the best thing for you about high-end dining? 00:16:06 ****Andy Hayler:** I think it's the ability of a really great restaurant to produce a very sort of special experience. So you can if it is genuinely good, the food's great, the service is lovely, maybe the environment's nice as well you can produce a very memorable evening. So I say with my when I went off to this place on the edge of a volcano in Japan, I mean, that's something I will remember. It's something you don't get to do every day. And so it's a very interesting memory. I can remember the dishes I ate there reasonably well. It's something that creates a genuine memory. 00:16:44 ****Aleksandra King:** You're actually absolutely right when my husband and I talk about we have lovely memories. We've been to so many different countries and done so many cool things, adventures and so on. And it's incredible because what I remember if we go back to holidays 15 years ago, whatever, 20 years ago, we're talking about it. I remember the food. I'll say, "Yes, that place where you had the steak and I had the ribs and then I remember the food always." And I'll forget all these other things, but the food is just I'll remember I remember my favourite chocolate mousse that I ever had in a tiny little restaurant in Begur in Spain, the Costa Brava. I'll never forget it ever. 00:17:22 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah, food is a very big sensory experience and it's something that lingers in the mind. 00:17:28 ****Aleksandra King:** It lingers in the mind. Okay, let's talk about the international side of it. This is going to be a very difficult question. I am going to put you on the spot. Best countries in the world for food. Full stop. 00:17:40 ****Andy Hayler:** Japan. So that's a very simple. 00:17:43 ****Aleksandra King:** You were going to say that agree after just coming back from Japan. Did you like to continue? 00:17:48 ****Andy Hayler:** I mean yeah no I think many restaurants have got many countries have got great restaurants. I mean there are some you obviously some fine restaurants in France. There's some I think places I think very underrated by people in the UK anyway. The restaurants the very high-end restaurants in Germany are probably some of the very best in the world really. Yeah. So places like chefs like Christian Bau or Waldhotel Sonnora, Schwarzwaldstube, these are absolute top of the range three stars these several of these will be in the top. 00:18:20 ****Aleksandra King:** What are they serving like traditional German food or international cuisine? 00:18:24 ****Andy Hayler:** No they're serving French food basically French food. I mean there will be some little German touch. Perhaps there'll be some little jokey Black Forest Gate or something in a dessert. I think Christian Bau who's in is in Perl-Nennig which is near Luxembourg but it's still in Germany. He's has quite a heavy Japanese influence on his cooking. So it's sort of you'd think of it as mostly French but there's a lot of Japanese touches. And in general, Japan's a very has a lot of influence in other fine dining around the world at the moment and for in his case for over a decade. But I think Japan just sort of wins for a number of reasons. The they have exceptionally high quality produce particularly fruit and vegetables which are the best in the world essentially. And they also have famously the biggest fish market in the world in Tokyo. When I went there years ago, it had 65,000 people working there. To give you a sense of scale. Excuse the pun. And obviously they're very well known for their beef wagyu beef, which literally means two characters means Japanese cattle. So there's no such thing as Highland wagyu or Scot Texan wagyu because Wagyu literally means a Japanese beef, Japanese cattle to be precise. So those that's very famous. They're also pretty famous for their pork as well. So and I think just generally the standard at all levels in Japan is very high. So you have a lot of very simple restaurants that are very cheap and very basic. But I remember going to a place in a very obscure part of Tokyo with a Japanese friend a few years ago and this was a ramen noodle place. And the it's run by this quite elderly guy, must be way into his late 60s. Who runs it really on his own. He sleeps on the floor of the restaurant and so he can get up during the night and stir the stock for the next day. And he you have a meal there. You have a soup and a beer and it's maybe 10 pounds. And yet the soup is absolutely fantastic. You beautiful sort of stunning depth of flavour for the stock. And that restaurant though it's right at I think it was three changes of Subway from where I was staying in the centre. Long way out. That had when we got there at 11:30 there was already a long queue for the 12:00 opening. So every day it's completely can't book it's completely full. And so there's a lot of people who are very obsessed with food in Japan and that includes restaurant tours but and that means there's enough but also diners. There's enough people who are interested in food to be prepared to spend some money. Obviously not very much in his case maybe £10 but in the case of very fine dining as well people will spend hundreds of pounds on a meal. And that means that the restaurant tours and the chefs can actually demand very high-grade produce. That means the farmers they know they've got a market to produce very high-grade produce. They can take care of the of their cattle or whatever. They can take care of their fruit and vegetables properly because they know there's enough people who will actually pay for it at the end of the day. So there's a whole sort of ecosystem which supports a very strong a very high quality of food. 00:21:53 ****Aleksandra King:** Sure. As you were talking about that wagyu beef, my taste buds started to salivate. Oh my word, the food is good. The thing is in Japan that like you were saying, even the tiniest of tiny little random places, you can walk into one of those and we did. We didn't always have it planned. Sometimes we the kids were getting really hungry and it was like we have to eat immediately. Turn into whatever place and wow. It's I think it's not just a fine dining, but any restaurant because the standard is so elevated, you can't really afford to have a bad restaurant because everyone is on that level. So, it keeps you on that level. It's like surround yourself by good people, surround yourself with good food, fresh produce, raise the standard across the whole country and you've got what Japan has, which is incredible. 00:22:41 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. It's a standard at all levels. That's the thing that's impressive. It's although I'm sure there are some bad restaurants somewhere in Japan, you have to actually hunt them out. You have to hunt them. Whereas it's much more difficult to find good restaurants in most countries, whereas in Japan, it's hard to find a bad one. 00:22:58 ****Aleksandra King:** Yeah. In England, we do have in the UK, we've got brilliant restaurants. I mean, we really do. We've got such an amazing variety. You can have whatever you want from wherever you want and across all price ranges. The thing for me though is for when you're travelling you're on a highway, you need to stop and eat. I just wish we had what Japan has, which is an a healthy ramen place. We can go fresh vegetables, you've got the stock, lovely, healthy, wholesome dinner. Why does it have to be sandwiches and some sort of pie and some sort of unhealthy thing? Why can't it be that standard? Why, Andy? 00:23:38 ****Andy Hayler:** Well, I mean different countries have got different cultures. I mean, if you go to if you have a look online at a Japanese school dinner, school meal, school lunch, whatever you want to call it. You'll see that they eat really well. I mean, they there's fresh vegetables that are produced. There's fresh rice, you get fish, meat. I mean, it's nothing that things are not coming out of turkey twizzler packs in Japanese schools. So, even from the beginning, there's this whole culture of respecting food, caring deeply about seasonality. That's one of the things you notice in Japan. The first time I went to Japan, I couldn't believe that I'd go to a series of restaurants and would get even though they're quite different restaurants, you'd get essentially the same ingredients night after night, prepared in very different ways. And I was curious, this is strange. I was talking to one of the restaurant chefs and he said no he says this because we this week and next week this is when this particular fish is at its best and so everybody will serve it that week next week it'll be a different thing in fact this particular fish it was au sweet fish he said in fact this week we using it from this particular lake but next week we use it from a different lake so it'll be better that week and there he said there are 26 micro seasons in Japan basically to a couple of weeks each and people tend to sort of follow those now that level of kind of seasonality just doesn't exist any really anywhere else and certainly not in the UK. So yes we kind of know that we get asparagus in the spring or something but that and tomatoes in the summer but that's it's not much more than that but in Japan there's this enormous depth of knowledge that's not just amongst chefs but amongst you large numbers of people in the population. So you have to have that depth of food culture that will support high quality fresh produce and most countries don't have that. 00:25:37 ****Aleksandra King:** This is the beauty about travel as well. How it opens up your mind to the different ways that you can look at food, treat food, have respect for food that it goes across the whole culture. And when you travel, you just your mind opens and you can take a little bit from this country and you can take a little bit from that country and then become what I love to call internationally minded, which is you taking the best of what you can and making it into something that actually creates your own world that can be amazing and on a better level in a way, especially with food. 00:26:14 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah, I think that it also it sort of helps you certainly it helps me having travelled being lucky enough to travel quite a lot over the years partly through my work and other reasons and so I've been for example I like Indian food and I've been to India 24 times 00:26:31 ****Aleksandra King:** 24 times 00:26:32 ****Andy Hayler:** And so I've got I've travelled around from everywhere from not just Mumbai and Delhi and Agra, Jaipur which is sort of standard sort of tourist stuff but I've been to Kolkata I've been to Bangalore and Hyderabad and Mysore and I've been to Madurai and Chettinad and a lot of places Udaipur and a lot of places and if you once you've done that you start to sort of realize how re how regional the cuisine is in India when you get back to review an Indian restaurant in the UK it just gives you a different perspective because you kind of know how it was supposed to taste in Kerala let's say and if you go to a Kerala restaurant then you can see well was that like the rest of the stuff I had in that dish I had that \[unclear: sorpotel?\] for example which is a very unusual dish in car in Goa and Kerala how did that dish compare to the one I had in Goa and that sort of gives you a different perspective than if you've never eaten that dish before 00:27:34 ****Aleksandra King:** Okay so if we break it down to these elements so you've got ingredients that we spoke about technical skill presentation and then the general harmony of the place. What's the most important and where do you think most restaurants fail? The average restaurant, let's say. 00:27:50 ****Andy Hayler:** I think the harmony is intended to be the harmony of the food. So, in other words, of the dish. So, what that's trying to get at is saying that what some things just go together. We think of strawberries and cream or something. It's a very natural pairing, whereas say lamb and raspberries probably not so much. Although you could make an argument for it, but whatever. So what I think is the case with this the idea of the harmony of the dish is do the elements on the plate make sense together? Do they create balance? So if you've got a very rich sort of dish, maybe you've got an oily fish or something like a mackerel or tuna, do you have something that's got some acidity or something that's vinegar that will give you some balance? If you've got some dish, some rich meat dish with a big red wine sauce you probably don't want to just have potatoes or something with that. You probably want to have something green with it. And again, you might choose to have some other element, maybe a dressed salad that's got a quite sharp dressing that's going to give you a little bit of relief from the richness. So that sort of balance, I think, is what tends to separate very good chefs. And quite often sort of less good restaurants. You'll find things that are really just quite difficult to eat because they're either they're too rich or the other way around. They're too bland. They haven't got enough interest. And so, I think or they've got too many elements things that just I think a lot of sort of aspiring younger chefs tend to think it's clever to put more and more elements on. They think, what can we improve with that dish? We'll add one more thing. Whereas if you go back to one of my favourite restaurants, place in the southwest of France, Michel Guérard's restaurant, who sadly died a few years back. But he was noted for his particularly sort of simplified view of cuisine. So, you'd often have dishes at Michel Guérard's restaurant which would have three or four elements on the plate. It didn't have to be six or seven or eight different clever sort of garnishes. They were often extremely simple looking, but they were beautifully balanced and they were perfectly cooked. And so I think a lot of young chefs particularly I think in the UK but also other countries as well tend to over complicate. And if you make things very complicated it makes it hard for the kitchen because these different elements all got to be cooked at different times. They're going to be brought together. Some of them might be cold by the time that they've assembled them. They and maybe the fish has been sitting around already on the waiting for its garnish and the fish is now overcooked and so you create problems for yourself by making things too complicated. But that's I think the most common issue to be honest with up-and-coming chefs is that they make things too complicated and what they should perhaps consider is just buying better ingredients and cooking them well. 00:30:47 ****Aleksandra King:** So that's what you refer to as harmony. 00:30:49 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. Just sort of do the things on the plate make sense together 00:30:53 ****Aleksandra King:** Because when you get a meal that's being cooked really badly and sometimes might happen at home you think that doesn't go with that why did you add this thing and it's just so wrong and for me the most it's one of the most upsetting things is when food is cooked wrong I just feel a certain kind of pain I think 00:31:10 ****Andy Hayler:** In a professional kitchen you would hope that they're going to do that most of the time though you still don't always get it so you do get overcooked bits of meat or you get things that are grotesquely overseasoned or they've just forgotten to season them at all. And there you certainly do encounter technical errors. I remember risotto in somewhere famous restaurant in America which was which is sister restaurant to be fair which was just like wallpaper paste just the texture was absolutely terrible. So I think that but that doesn't happen too often in professional kitchens. Yeah, you generally hope the technique will be to at least a sort of certain level of competence. 00:31:49 ****Aleksandra King:** I mean, you're making me think of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. 00:31:54 ****Andy Hayler:** Well, I remember being 00:31:54 ****Aleksandra King:** She walks in and hates things. 00:31:56 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. I remember being a restaurant which I think is gone now, so I can safely say this without being there being place called West Street in Covent Garden. And there was two dishes in a row. I think there was a pasta dish and I forget the other dish where I put the fork into the pasta and it was had basically become seared to the plate. I mean literally sealed in. So when I lift when I lifted the put the fork into the middle of the plate into one of the bits of pasta, I could lift the entire plate off the table. 00:32:27 ****Aleksandra King:** That's it. 00:32:27 ****Andy Hayler:** And it happened in not just one but two dishes in that particular restaurant. So the second time the maître d' sort of rolled his eyes and just sort of yeah, okay, we have a problem sort of. But I mean that but that sort of stuff is obviously pretty unusual. I mean it's not common. 00:32:43 ****Aleksandra King:** What you really don't that's bad. That is truly bad. But I suppose the worst sin of all I would say is obviously food poisoning. 00:32:53 ****Andy Hayler:** Yes, I mean generally I mean there are obviously hygiene inspectors in the UK and so restaurants get rated one to five hygiene stars. So it is un very unusual I think to end up with that. I think you can sometimes have well documented cases from oysters because oysters have a big problem with particular u sort of thing that affects them in the beds and so the norovirus basically which can and because they're often served raw that can be an issue but I mean to be honest apart from that I mean it's pretty uncommon to have that experience in a restaurant. 00:33:32 ****Aleksandra King:** What about tapeworm in raw fish? 00:33:34 ****Andy Hayler:** Oh well it's he's interesting you raised that particular thing. So I've been to a museum in Japan called the parasite museum. My wife's a medical doctor medical microbiologist and she's actually I've been three times because she's very interested. I probably wouldn't have gone three times on but it's actually a museum of it's not a large museum. It's like a big house basically. But with exhibits of all the different flukes and tapeworms and all kinds of things that you get from fish particular particularly fish there's obviously a lot of fish eaten in Japan a lot of it's eaten raw so that's an issue and there are all kinds of ways you can prepare sushi that makes it safe but obviously people don't always get it right and the prize exhibit is a big cabinet with a It's rolled up in fact because it's too big to fit in the cabinet. It's a 29 ft long tapeworm that came out of a guy digestive system in Hiroshima. 00:34:39 ****Aleksandra King:** Stop it. 00:34:40 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. So yeah, you definitely get that. And that's why in Europe and in the US all sushi by law is frozen. It has to be. People often don't know this but it's true. It is by law all sushi is has to be frozen. And that because freezing kills the parasites, but that's not the case in Japan and that's why you still 00:35:03 ****Aleksandra King:** Thanks for just telling me this now after 00:35:05 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah, I thought it best for you not to know but for your trip but yeah but you say you won't really have 00:35:12 ****Aleksandra King:** But how common is it then? 00:35:15 ****Andy Hayler:** No it's not common. I've been saying 13 times and I've never had a problem but I mean but it 00:35:20 ****Aleksandra King:** You would know I presume if you had a tapeworm you would know right? 00:35:22 ****Andy Hayler:** Well you wouldn't know it's in the V. I mean, you'd be I mean, some of the parasites are absolutely microscopic, so you'd be it might grow inside you, but I mean, you'd be pretty unlucky to you pretty unlucky to do that. But clearly, there is an entire museum in Tokyo that does nothing else but show off the parasites that have infected people. 00:35:40 ****Aleksandra King:** Oh, that's interesting. When I go back, I'll visit that. 00:35:43 ****Andy Hayler:** It's in the Meguro district of Tokyo. 00:35:46 ****Aleksandra King:** Okay. I'd like to go have a look. That is really interesting. I know because my dad worked in a veterinary institute initially before he went into business and he would always say they used to inspect the odd sample and check for tapeworms and things. Yeah. Very interesting. Okay. All right. We'll move away from parasites and go shopping. The average person going shopping local market. How do how there are some tips right to know whether you're buying good food? For example, meat. You don't want it to have a brownie colour. You want it to be red. But then you also don't want food to be dyed. So you kind of have to look at whether it's organic and you kind of look where it came from. How do you judge whether what you're buying is good quality. And 00:36:35 ****Andy Hayler:** I think you've got to a large degree rely on the sort of the brand of shop that you're buying from. So if you've gotten to know the particular butcher or whatever that you've has a good reputation and been running for 20 years that's usually a good thing. I think with sort of fruit and veg you can tell a lot just by using a sense of smell. I mean if you your or the sense of touch I mean you should be able to touch the avocado and see if it's too firm or it's ready to eat and so on. And with something like fruit often smell gives it away. I can remember walking through a just a simple local shop in Tokyo that was just near the hotel doing sort of fruit and veg. They just had like a coffee shop there. And we just walked into the shop and you could instantly smell the strawberries from like a from a long way away. I mean from several a couple of aisles away and we went and bought these strawberries and they were absolutely stunning. And smell like no strawberries I've ever tasted in the UK. So sometimes sense of smell gives you a good clue that there's something good. But I think in general yeah it's not going to be very easy to be sure. So you yeah you have to rely on brand and reputation and that's why some of supermarkets you become national brands and some don't. I mean if they've built up a strong enough reputation for quality then you get things from there. I mean obviously a whole there's a whole pile of independent sort of food shops. The suppliers there's a there's an excellent one in the UK who don't have a shop but they do delivery thing called Fine and Wild and they get incredibly high quality produce. 00:38:14 ****Aleksandra King:** Fine and Wild. 00:38:14 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. Is just got a website. They do they and they'll get you the absolute best wild mushrooms or the absolute best sort of tuna or best the highest quality chicken suppliers from France or the best chicken just happens to come from France. It just is true. And they import the this particular one that I'm very fond of from a guy called Arnaud \[unclear: Tauzin?\] and that's the one you get in a lot of three star Michelin restaurants in France. 00:38:42 ****Aleksandra King:** Interesting. Love this information. 00:38:44 ****Andy Hayler:** They serve chicken but if they do, that's the one you'd see. 00:38:47 ****Aleksandra King:** Fine and Wild. Oh, I'm definitely researching them after this. Oh, that's lovely. Yeah, because we want to bring a bit of that fine dining into our own homes and elevate that standard and get that fresh food. And I love the idea of a proper butcher. There's the meat and it's what you're getting what they've done with it where it's from. And also the fish guy. 00:39:09 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. No, it's and it's harder and harder to find, but I mean in London there obviously we're fortunate there's a good number of high quality. You there's a terrific fishmonger. I go to one called the Chelsea Fishmonger which is down in sort of well Chelsea Pimlico in Cale Street. And that's run by a guy called Rex Goldsmith, who's very well-known, fishmonger, and they do incredibly high quality produce. And I make a hike down there actually rather than buying locally just because the fish there is much better than I can get in where I live. 00:39:41 ****Aleksandra King:** How we just talked about sort of like food hacks and you use your sense of smell and obviously the brand and everything, it can get you to the point sooner. For restaurants. I think that this little tip works, which is see where local people, working people go for their lunch. See who's in that restaurant, what time of day, and how many people are going in and out. Because there's a thing, for example, in Poland, if you're driving along the roads, you might see a lot of trucks stopping at this tiny little place, and then you think, what are they stopping for? We stopped once and they were stopping for this amazing soup cooked by again an elderly lady, a huge thing. And she would just serve the soup to everybody. Obviously, really good value. But what soup? I mean, that another level completely understood why they were there. I would go there every day if I could and have this soup cooked by this lady. And they just know, the locals normally know where to go and yeah, their lunch. 00:40:37 ****Andy Hayler:** That's so important thing. But I think these days you do have a wide range of kind of guys because obviously if you're going somewhere you don't happen to live in that area then that's not a very easy you can't just wander along randomly and hope you find something. So but I mean there are a lot of guides that are about you say ranging from things like Michelin and websites like mine but also through to think of things like TripAdvisor and so on which I say have their flaws but they're probably better than nothing. So I think research is a good plan because the standard of restaurants varies dramatically and there are a lot of places that are not probably really that good. So you want to try to spend your money wisely really. 00:41:22 ****Aleksandra King:** When you walk into a restaurant and you kind of you go in, how quickly do whether this is a good place or not? Is it the menu or 00:41:32 ****Andy Hayler:** I think sometimes you get a clue, sometimes you don't really. I mean some I mean a restaurant where the menu has like a list of suppliers proudly set out on the front page or the back page where it's saying yeah we get meat from this and fish from this and fruit and veg from this and bread from here. I mean that generally tells you that the restaurant takes some care where it sources it stuff. It's not just getting from a catering van from breaks or whatever. And so I think that would usually give me a warm feeling about least about the source of the ingredients. But I think it's not very easy apart from that. It's not easy to really tell until the food arrives on the plate. You mean you can write a good menu, but it may still not be particularly wellmade. So I think it's that's actually not easy to do. Say occasionally you get clues, but I think it's difficult until the food arrives. 00:42:24 ****Aleksandra King:** What's your favourite dish in the whole world? The fine dining one. I'm not sort of talking about the at home because we're going to get into the at home section is after this question, but in terms of fine, elegant dining, what's the best dish for you? 00:42:37 ****Andy Hayler:** Okay. Well, that's a very interesting question. I mean, I think of sort of favourite restaurants. I mean, I think individual dishes, I mean, there's a lot of things that I've really enjoyed. I mean, I think I can Yeah. And it's difficult. Well, okay. So, look, I'm incredibly fond of Langoustines. Was my favourite shellfish. So one of my favourite dishes is the langoustine à la nage at the Ritz in London. I've had it many times. You just get these very large langoustines from Scotland. That are perfectly cooked, very sauce to go with it. It's an à la nage. So, it's a nage, which is a sort of essentially a herb based sort of buttery sauce. And it's on a and again the thing about balance it's on a little bed of little tiny baby vegetables from usually from Cornwall and the sauce is quite rich. And the langoustine is obviously protein and sweet. So the vegetables give it that little bit of balance. So the dish is there probably their signature dish and I've had it literally embarrassing number of times certainly dozens of times over the years. And that would be one of certainly one of my favourite things. I mean, I certainly had many other great dishes around the world, but that was something that just springs to mind just because I'm particularly fond of langoustines. 00:43:55 ****Aleksandra King:** Divine. And your dessert? 00:43:58 ****Andy Hayler:** Lemon tart. It's my I'm a very I'm a simple guy. I No, I can always remember the lemon tart at Nico Ladenis, who's sadly no longer with us. But he was three star Michelin chef in London. And there was also a very good version actually at one of the Marco restaurants Mirabelle that they used to serve and that was I think it was originally a Roux brothers recipe. But yeah, so classic lemon tart for me. It was just an absolute joy and delight. 00:44:30 ****Aleksandra King:** How delicious. I'm getting really hungry. Okay, we're going to go into the regular household now. You're visiting someone's house. They cook their dinners. We're not going to mention anyone specifically, but what is the most common mistake everyday people make when they're cooking at home, but for guests, not for themselves necessarily, because that's a bit different, but they're having a party, dinner, whatever it might be. 00:44:53 ****Andy Hayler:** I think honestly the same thing as comes to chefs. They try to do something that's 00:44:58 ****Aleksandra King:** Fancy, 00:44:58 ****Andy Hayler:** Too fancy and beyond that their beyond their capabilities. So, they'd be better off spending the money by buying very high quality produce, whatever that is. This could be vegetables it could be wild mushrooms or something. It doesn't have to be anything sort of big expensive steak or anything like or caviar or anything. It can be just really high quality tomatoes. I mean, I had a fantastic tomato dish the other day. Well, sure, I'll remember for a long time, but the quality of the tomatoes was so good because they came from the Amalfi Coast, imported into London. And they tasted exactly like I've tasted in the Amalfi Coast. And they are dazzling and they're completely unlike any tomatoes you'll ever see in a supermarket or even a catering operation in the UK. They just don't exist. And they're just incredible. So, you're better off spending the money on some sort of high-grade ingredient and doing it simply. I mean, they say it's tricky. If you're not a professional cook, then difficult to do a dinner party, four, six, eight people. There's a lot of things can go wrong. I mean, 00:46:05 ****Aleksandra King:** So many things could go wrong. 00:46:07 ****Andy Hayler:** I think if you're doing dinner party, one key thing is do something in that you can make in advance. I mean, get dessert, making it in advance. It's is in the fridge. Your starter, you can probably do something that's cold and you can have that in advance and then you're only worrying about the main you're cooking at the last minute. 00:46:26 ****Aleksandra King:** Okay. Can you give us an example now? Something you want to be you want to impress. You don't want it to be a completely totally too easy like macaroni and cheese kind of dish. But you want to serve a starter, a main and a dessert. Give us an example then. What are we eating? And so you said cold starter. 00:46:44 ****Andy Hayler:** Well, I mean I'm I sometimes make dish I like to make which is a I it's a complete cheat because I it's a Gordon Ramsay recipe but it's something you can make in advance and it's not it's although it's quite impressive. It's it takes a little bit of time but you can do it all in advance and it's a sort of crab and avocado thing with a grapefruit sauce. So you're essentially taking white crab meat. You're making a kind of guacamole from avocado tomatoes. And just a tiny bit of sort of cayenne pepper. And you're topping it with a little micro salad. And you can make it sort of pretty by using a little metal cone and then putting the thing in layers. So the so you lift off the cone on each plate and then you've got this layer. You got a layer of crab, you got a layer of avocado, you've got a layer of salad. And then you just around that is this sort of grapefruit sauce which obviously gives it because it's kind of quite sharp. That balances the sweetness of the crab and the richness of the avocado. And that dish it's not a trivial dish to make, but it's not difficult and just takes a little bit of time to make the guacamole really. And 00:47:56 ****Aleksandra King:** So you make that in advance, cold, you put in the fridge. It's only the plating that you need to do on the day. 00:48:01 ****Andy Hayler:** Everything. Yeah. You then you can just stick it to one side or stick it you probably haven't got room to stick it in the fridge if there's eight six people but I mean you can stick it to one side it'll be fine for an hour or two and that's it's a genuinely pretty good dish and people eat that and it looks like a restaurant dish and it tastes good because you've got you use high quality crab you bought from this you a good fishmonger rather than from the supermarket that kind of thing. 00:48:30 ****Aleksandra King:** Y amazing. So that's your that would be very impressive for a starter. I can just imagine inviting my family over, they'd be like, "What happened to you? Are you okay?" All right. So that's starter. And then Maine. 00:48:40 ****Andy Hayler:** Well, often when we're at home, my wife doesn't eat meat, so we she's pescatarian, so we tend to serve sort of fish dishes. So I'm particularly fond of sea bass. So again, it's matter of finding it from a very good fishmonger. Ideally a bigger sea bass if you can. They have more flavour than the sort of little ones. And we'll do something relatively sort of simple. I usually make a something like a mustard sauce. There's a Ken Hom recipe which is a buttery sort of but mustard and herb sauce. So you chop chives, you chop coriander and parsley and it goes in this sort of buttery sauce with and there's just enough mustard to make it interesting. 00:49:22 ****Aleksandra King:** What kind of mustard are you using? 00:49:23 ****Andy Hayler:** Oh, it just doesn't it doesn't matter. In this case they uses Dijon, but it doesn't matter. It could be English. I mean this happens to be Dijon. And you that's there's also some fish stock which you can you could either make or you can buy it from the fish mongers or whatever. There's a few other bits. There's a bit of white wine vinegar and so on, but it's a lot of pieces here, but they're not difficult just you just got to take a little bit of time to chop the herbs is the longest thing. And you make that sauce. So, you can prepare all of that sauce up front except for the butter, right? You leave the butter off and then you finish the butter at the end. So you finish the sauce with the butter and then sea bass is very easy to cook and you just stuff it in the oven. 00:50:03 ****Aleksandra King:** Oh, not on a pan. 00:50:04 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah, you can do it pan fry if you prefer. Absolutely. Whichever you whichever is simplest to you. But it tastes fine either way. And then you maybe you have some whatever roast potatoes or peas or whatever carrots, whatever you want to make mushrooms, whatever you want to make with that. But I mean but again these things take a little bit of prep to do to be honest. I mean the but you can do much of the prep up front. So the sauce is ready apart from the butter can be made that morning. So you're not doing very much at the last minute 00:50:34 ****Aleksandra King:** Japanese style almost cuz you're serving the fish is just basically the fish. You're not doing much to it. You're not marinating that or anything. You're just cooking it and then the sauce is the star in this case. Very Japanese. The sauce is the thing that's going to be 00:50:45 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. Although Yeah. Japanese probably wouldn't bother the sauce actually. They just serve you the fish cuz the fish would be so good. No, they wouldn't. 00:50:52 ****Aleksandra King:** Although they love their little 00:50:53 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. No, they do as well. Yeah. And some sometimes that's true. Yeah. But that's just one you dish I've made many times, for example. Yeah. 00:51:00 ****Aleksandra King:** Awesome. 00:51:01 ****Andy Hayler:** And got a secret for dessert, which is I outsource the entire thing to my wife who's an excellent pastry chef. So I don't do so she makes like tartatan or summer pudding or various things. 00:51:15 ****Aleksandra King:** Dinner at your house must be 00:51:17 ****Andy Hayler:** Well, I treat beyond belief. I have a have I have a critical trick which is to serve lots and lots of nice wine and that way if anything goes wrong I wanted to ask you about don't really care. So, 00:51:28 ****Aleksandra King:** Let's talk about wine because, there is a there's a lovely restaurant. It's actually a one-stop restaurant in Amersham. 00:51:35 ****Andy Hayler:** The Artichoke, 00:51:37 ****Aleksandra King:** Of course it. Yes. The Artichoke. And the Artichoke, you'll know that the meal is it's a very it's a big process. There's lots of different things going on, but the pairing of the food with the wine is just absolutely a basic essential there. It's just taken so seriously. I don't really know much about this whole field, but it's like it works when you're pairing these different foods together and you kind of say, "Oh, that makes sense. I could never do it on my own, but it just all makes sense when you're in there." How does what is all that? 00:52:07 ****Andy Hayler:** Well, I've done I mean, you there are you can take wine exams. I mean, I there's a thing called the Wine Spirit Education Trust or WSET, which is standard in the UK and actually used in many countries actually, not just the UK. You see it even in America as well sometimes. And there is just like all things there are different levels. So WSET 1 is extremely basic. WSET 2 is probably like an O a GCSE. Okay. WSET 3 which I've done is probably like an A level and there you do actually have to do blind tasting and identify wines and all these and so on. And you learn there's many things you learn about the regions and the vineyards and the grapes but you also learn about wine pairing. So there's various things. So for example to give you a couple of examples of wine pairing. So something that's difficult to pair is for example very spicy food. So say Indian food or Thai food. You probably want to have sort of aromatic white wine. So something like Riesling or possibly even Gewürztraminer or Condrieu go particularly well with Indian food. If you do want a red wine then probably best to avoid a very big heavy tanic wine. So you probably want to avoid a sort of Shiraz of the world and you might want to go for a lighter style like a Pinot Noir. That will tend to go well with that kind of thing. And there's a dozen thing and you learn this sort of stuff on the course. 00:53:33 ****Aleksandra King:** Yeah. No but tell us please there's two more I want to ask you. So the spicy food that's a massive one. Yeah. Just give us for white fish just a basic pairing and then for steak for red meat. 00:53:43 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. I mean this is not for white fish I mean the classic pairing will be Chardonnay. So if you can afford it fine white burgundy and if you can't afford it you get a very good Chardonnay from South Africa or from Australia. And that is a very classic sort of pairing. There are many other things that work extremely well, but Chardonnay is the classic with that. The with steak, I mean again, it's a little bit to taste. But typically people reserve a sort of a bigger red wine like a Cabernet Sauvignon style or Bordeaux blend, which is includes Cabernet Sauvignon, but includes other things like Merlot or maybe entirely Merlot. And or you could indeed have a Syrah or shiraz which is the same thing. So Syrah from the Rhône Valley or it's called shiraz if it's from Australia but it's the same grape. And those typically go well with steaks 00:54:44 ****Aleksandra King:** And for and you would have a glass of that. It's just sensible drinking. It's just to pair it with a food. So you're doing something to the palate and you're consuming together so that it's just elevating that food. Right. That's the whole point. 00:54:57 ****Andy Hayler:** Never said sensible but okay. Yeah. 00:55:00 ****Aleksandra King:** And then think about your dessert too because that's a whole world of dessert wines and that's my favourite style of wine. 00:55:06 ****Andy Hayler:** So no I mean that's a different thing again. So no dessert wines are sort of sweet wines. There's two kinds. So they're the vast majority of the cheaper wines are fortified. So they basically take the fermentation process partway through and they kill the yeast. And that it's only half kind of developed. So there's still quite a lot of sweetness there. And that's how you make, well, for example, how you make brandy, but that's also how you make a lot of cheaper dessert wines. Okay. The very high quality dessert wines are affected by a particular well two ways actually within that. There's two ways late harvest which is where you get some level of sweetness. So something like the Klein Constantia Vin de Constance from South Africa which was Napoleon's favourite wine. That's a late harvest Muscat. But the really top ones are affected by a fungus. The grapes are attacked by a particular fungus called Botrytis cinerea or noble rot. And you only get this in certain circumstances. You need basically a river, you need a hot summer and you need fog. And if you have those circumstances then you'll get every year pretty reliably botrytis. So you get that in Sauternes in France and Barsac. You get it in Tokaj in Hungary which I've spent some time there with the best sweet wine maker there guy called István Szepsy and they have the perfect conditions for botrytis and that's actually the very first place where sweet wines were kind of discovered or made because they it just happened naturally essentially. But over the years people have learned how to kind of take advantage of that. So the very top wines that you hear about like Château d'Yquem from Sauternes that's a botrytis affected wine and the Tokaj, the great Tokaji, like Aszú Eszencia and others these are also botrytis affected and these are some of the great dessert great wines the world some of them could be exceptionally expensive I mean hundreds and hundreds of pounds even thousand pounds a bottle for Eszencia from Hungary for example and you certainly spend hundreds of pounds on Château d'Yquem that's for sure. 00:57:26 ****Aleksandra King:** Who would have thought that a fungus can make such a difference? 00:57:29 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. You got to absolutely. It's well called noble rot. It's a little gift from nature. 00:57:38 ****Aleksandra King:** Unbelievable. Never I never could have imagined that. I'm going to veer off to a very different topic now. AI and food. 00:57:47 ****Andy Hayler:** Okay. So even probably most my people who read my website are not aware that I work in technology and I have done the way that I can pay for my restaurant bills. 00:57:58 ****Aleksandra King:** I'm certainly aware because we know that you're very analytical data driven Data driven man and it helps you when it comes to food analysing wines all these things. So it's made you even better with the way that you critique food. 00:58:12 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. I think it's useful. I had a book published on AI back in early 2026 and I'm actually just in the process of finishing my second book on AI which will come out in January 2027 called the hallucination game which will be available from Amazon and all good online stores. I mean essentially that's that stems from my other life. I mean I think the crossover between AI and food is may sort of seem pretty tricky. Is not obvious, but in certainly in the wine industry, for example, there's a number of areas where AI is used, for example, to try to detect counterfeit bottles. Is one example. In the food industry, it's a little bit less obvious, but you certainly have people have tried designing a menu with AI. That usually has not worked out well, I have to say, but you can sort of try it. A AI or large language models, which is what most people tend to think about as AI these days. Are very creative things. So they you in theory could give you ideas. If you were a chef and you're struggling for a new what do I do for the summer the autumn season or something of course you should probably know the answer to that. But if you don't, then you could use an LLM to kind of help you come up with a brainstorm some ideas. I mean, that kind of thing. Yeah. There are other uses more subtle uses of AI in sort of robotics which generally doesn't affect restaurants very much but you have got sort of some use of robots in restaurants in Japan to do sort of chopping and in some cases even making a dish. These are to be honest pretty experimental kind of things at this stage. Humanoid robots don't really work outside of constrained environments at the moment. I mean, they might do in five or 10 years, but at the moment they'd look great on demos, but they tend to do strange things when they encounter such circumstances where they're not familiar. So I think realistically, you're not going to see too much in the way of robotics in kitchens outside of experiments for a while. So I think the probably the word of wine is probably slightly easier if there's some things some vineyard management techniques. If you take pictures using a drone of your vineyard, you can use AI to spot early spot issues with disease In the crop because they can analyse all the imagery and AI is incredibly good at image recognition and image analysis. And so there's a number of vineyards around the world that use AI to help them with their vineyard management basically. So there were some a few examples like that. 01:01:00 ****Aleksandra King:** Okay. So where are you planning to eat at next? Can you tell us what's your food plan, food travel plan? 01:01:09 ****Andy Hayler:** Actually I haven't got anything dramatic sort of lined up. They got a few food friends coming for the next few days. So we'll just be cooking at home. I do have some restaurants booked up ahead. I mean, I tend not to really want to name ones in advance because I don't 01:01:25 ****Aleksandra King:** Oh, you don't want to tell you don't want to tell them you're coming. 01:01:27 ****Andy Hayler:** Yeah. 01:01:28 ****Aleksandra King:** They'll step up their game. But I'm certainly inspired by you to travel based on more on food on visiting these incredible places that have really earned their stripes that have worked hard to attain that highest level. I mean like I said to you, there's few things in the world as good as eating great food with people that you love to be around as well. 01:01:52 ****Andy Hayler:** And so if you want a free tip and you've got some spare money because it's is there are two three star restaurant Michelin restaurants which I'm fond of with happen to be very close to each other. So if you take a and then they'll surprise you. Okay. So if you take a flight to Luxembourg which is you can get from the London city airport or anything from Heathrow as well you go to there and you can either take a taxi or in fact a bus because all buses in Luxembourg are free right to the border of Germany it's about 40 minutes something like that 45 minutes. Then there's a restaurant there. It's called Victor's Fine Dining with a chef called Christian Bau who's had, three Michelin stars since 2005\. And he's, I would say, one of the best restaurants, one of the best chefs in the world. He's sufficiently confident about his stars. He's got three stars tattooed on his arm. So, I hope he never lo. Yeah, absolutely. And then nearby only about half an hour or so from there by taxi is a restaurant called Waldhotel Sonnora. That's by got a terrific chef called Clemens Rambichler and that does much more classical food. So Christian Bau is a little bit more modern lot of Japanese touches. Whereas Waldhotel Sonnora is much more classical more like sort of stuff you see at the Ritz or something more classical French. Lots of beautiful sauces that kind of thing. And that's probably the best classical restaurant in the world in terms of classical French. So those two restaurants are literally 30 maybe 40 minutes on a taxi depending on the traffic from each other and you they both have rooms you can stay at. So if you really want to splurge and the irony is that the price of the menus there is significantly less than in Paris or indeed in the equivalent in London. And they also the wine lists are real bargains. So there's a ton of fantastic sort of German Riesling and many other wines of course but there lots and lots of genuine bargains. Some wines are actually below the retail price because they bought them 10 15 years ago and they haven't marked them up. So you can have tremendous food in these restaurants but also you can afford to drink relatively well which you can't do in London or Paris or not without great difficulty. 01:04:13 ****Aleksandra King:** Sure. I love Luxembourg. I once actually cycled from Luxembourg to the border to Germany. Yeah, cycle. It was a long cycle. I was very hungry. But by then I was so tired. All I could Think about eating and having. I just couldn't go to all that trouble was a regular pizza, Which tasted so good after all that exercise. 01:04:30 ****Andy Hayler:** Sure did. 01:04:31 ****Aleksandra King:** So, there are basic comforts that we all return to. But, yeah, it's been super inspirational. I love the idea of basing travel around food and I'm going to make that more of a thing, I think, in my life. You've definitely inspired me. And I'm sure you've inspired our viewers to elevating their food standards. And I'm actually really hungry now. So I'm going to go get something to eat after all that food talk. But it's been fantastic having you on. Thank you for sharing all of your insights with us. 01:05:02 ****Andy Hayler:** Thank you very much indeed. Thank you for having me on. 01:05:05 ****Aleksandra King:** Thank you. ## Follow Aleksandra - [Instagram](https://instagram.com/king.aleksandra) - [X](https://x.com/aleksandrabking) - [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksandraking) - [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@AleksandraKing) - [Aleksandra's Inner Circle](https://laylo.com/aleksandraking) Business and collaborations: [aleksandraking.com](https://aleksandraking.com) | [aleksandra@aleksandraking.com](mailto:aleksandra@aleksandraking.com) *The views expressed by guests are their own and do not reflect those of Aleksandra, the podcast, or its producers. This podcast is for entertainment only.*