Technique, Transmission and Taste
3 – 9 January 2026
Saturday 3 January
Dubai • One of Dubai’s two three-Michelin-star restaurants, FZN by Björn Frantzén, delivered an unforgettable dining experience, beginning with the simple act of ringing a bell beside a discreet door in a shopping mall. Inside the cosy dining room, organised around an open kitchen, a fascinating choreography of preparation and service provided the perfect showcase for a cuisine that glorifies superlative ingredients with dazzling artistry.
Monday 5 January
Back to Paris by plane. Watched Season 5 of Netflix’s Emily in Paris. The series now feels increasingly formulaic — a procession of pastel-coloured happy endings, inevitably derailed in the final moments. Everyone still travels with ten times the amount of clothing their luggage could conceivably hold. Yet Paris, Rome, and Venice are filmed with such adoration that the cartoonish edge never quite gets in the way.
Tuesday 6 January
Paris, UGC Maillot • The opportunity arose to see Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 Le Mépris (Contempt) on the eve of Brigitte Bardot’s funeral. Its film-within-a-film, directed by Fritz Lang himself, blurs the edges between narrative layers, the mythic Odysseus reflecting the very banal dissolution of love between the two main characters. The narrated opening credits, paired with that extraordinary travelling shot, and the choice of locations constantly emphasise the tension between abstraction and the pedestrian realities of everyday life. Georges Delerue’s majestic score, along with the magnetic performances by Michel Piccoli and Bardot, gives the film its much-needed spine. Strikingly, Godard closes the film on one of the cheesiest lines ever written: “Montez dans votre Alfa, Roméo.”
Wednesday 7 January
Paris • After closing his two-Michelin-star restaurant in rue Treilhard in the autumn of 2024 and returning for a time to his native Puglia, chef Martino Ruggieri has brought back Maison Ruggieri to the Palais-Royal Gardens, to the same location where Philip Chronopoulos had previously earned two stars for his Greek-inspired cuisine. His opening menu, bathed in poetry, revealed striking inspiration layered atop an already well-proven craft. The service — with Ruggieri often present in the dining room — struck a perfect balance between formality and homelike warmth.
Thursday 8 January
Paris, Théâtre de Chaillot • The Ensemble Chorégraphique du Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, a ten-strong company of students on the cusp of their careers, presented a triptych of works from different eras: boléro un by Odile Duboc, Entropie by Léo Lérus, and JOIN 2 by Ioannis Mandafounis. I loved seeing those young dancers ease themselves into wildly different visual grammars, implying distinct relationships with the audience and involving different degrees of improvisation. Two of the pieces were rehearsed with their original choreographers, still alive, while boléro un had to rely on recordings and the work of designated “transmitters,” raising fascinating questions about how choreographic works survive the passage of time. A post-show talk with two of the performers underscored how intellectually engaged their work had been — and how articulate they were in reflecting on it.
Paris, UGC Maillot • In his 2025 movie Father Mother Sister Brother (which he could have titled Bob’s Your Uncle), Jim Jarmusch adopts a portmanteau structure to frame three stories centred on fractured family dynamics. Set in different locales (New Jersey, Dublin and Paris), the episodes are linked by shared formal elements and themes of estrangement, sibling relationships, and deceptive appearances. I found it virtuosic and engrossing, buoyed by brilliant performances from Tom Waits and Charlotte Rampling, among others.
Friday 9 January
Paris, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées • Conducted by Jakob Lehmann, Les Siècles chose to perform works by Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt on 19th-century instruments. The resulting sound — acidic, even itchy — left me uncomfortable. Why anyone would wish to deprive themselves of 150 years of progress in instrument making is beyond my grasp. Thankfully, the beauty of the programme itself went some way toward compensating for the unhappy aural experience: extracts from Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal showcased Wagner’s genius while Bertrand Chamayou dispatched both of Liszt’s piano concertos with breathtaking technical command.
And so, for now, the lights dim… until the next act.