Australia. Fine Tastes. Luxury Style

By Marion on October 1, 2008


Southern Accents

By MARION HUME

Tasty Tapas

Chef Jesse Gerner, left, and his wife Vanessa Gerner are the owners of Añada, a modern Spanish restaurant that is creating a buzz in Melbourne’s funky Fitzroy District.

People tend to have a pretty good idea of what Sydney, Australia looks like, with its Opera House, harbor and of course, Bondi Beach. But Melbourne, the southern city on the banks of the Yarra River, which has an inner city population of only 86,000 because the vast majority of Melburnians live in the surrounding suburbs, is more enigmatic. “Sydney’s about glamour and bikinis. We’re about after dark,” explains born-and-bred Melburnian, Karen Webster, who helms the city’s annual fashion festival. “They live for the beach. We’re foodies. We live to eat.”

Taking the best of international cuisine, the city has become the world’s latest destination for inventive, delicious cuisine. The term “foodie” is often heard in Melbourne, such a mecca for good eating, you could call it the Southern Hemisphere Paris. Certainly, securing a reservation at chef Shannon Bennett’s Vue de monde can be as tough to get as a table for two at one of Joel Robuchon’s establishments. Culinary creations by Bennett, 34, a native of Melbourne who looks more like a surfer than a super chef, include what he calls a “virtual gnocchi,” a cep puree treated to an in-kitchen chemistry lesson which defines its shape, then served accompanied by sautéed king brown and shimeji mushrooms and zucchini flowers and finished with a tarragon emulsion. Another crowd pleaser is the bouillabaise which is presented at the table in a glass-toped, 1950s-style coffee percolator filled with aromatic shellfish stock. After this concoction is brought to a boil, it is poured into a bowl of tartares of crayfish and king fish cloaked in buffalo mozzarella.

Of course, many big cities these days have at least one restaurant which can challenge the best in the French capital, if not for stunning Belle Époque interiors, then certainly for surprising cuisine. However part of what makes Paris so unique is also the old-world charm of its eateries. Yet those too can be found in Melbourne, which, with its grand foundations in the 1850s Gold Rush, has a long history of fine French restaurants, their chefs being imported from France, and, from the 1920s onwards, robust Italian eateries where the chefs were émigrés, who stayed. The most bustling to this day is The Flo (which has no connection to the Paris brasserie chain), under whose Tuscan-inspired murals the likes of Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson and Rudolf Nureyev have all dined. Today, the owner-chef is Guy Grossi, and Grossi Florentino, the Flo’s proper name, also features a street-level outdoor cafe which opened in 1956 when Melbourne hosted the Olympic Games.

Ah, but what also makes Paris so delectable is constant reinvention. When the zinc bars become routine, there’s always somewhere new to discover. Melbourne maintains a similar capacity for discovery, with a recent entry on the restaurant menu being Añada, opened by twenty-something husband and wife team, Jesse and Vanessa Gerner, (he’s the chef, she runs front-of-house) in the funky Fitzroy neighborhood (Brooklyn’s Williamsburg would be the New York equivalent). Locals are flocking here for tasty tapas plates such as white anchovies with hearts of palm or “raciones” (bigger plates) not only reminiscent of the Moorish tastes of Southern Spain, but also fulsome with the flavors of regional produce. Delicacies include slow-cooked South Western Highland pork belly doused with fennel seeds and smoky eggplant as well as Anson Bay clams from the nearby island state of Tasmania, brightened with La Goya Manzanilla and mint.

Melbourne is endowed with so many good restaurants, an aficionado of the city might wonder where the mentions are of favorite haunts like Flower Drum, Pearl, Circa, Stokehouse, Taxi, and MoVida, to name a few. Or, indeed, for the newest, Bistro Guillaume or Seamstress, the latter a fun eatery in a building that has housed both a brothel and a buddhist temple. As for the Paris comparison, Melbourne also echoes the best in today’s Milan, Madrid, Tokyo, and Shanghai.

The rich culinary offering and heritage are due in part to the four seasons being much more distinct than, say, 550 miles to the north east in Sydney. Then there’s the plethora of nature’s bounty found within easy reach of a city surrounded by rich agricultural land and the sea. Produce for the world’s cuisines is cultivated by passionate small growers, hence the city’s bustling food markets. Although founded after Sydney, Melbourne was free-settled. (Think how that might have affected early expectations of what people put in their mouths).

While its wide boulevards, perfect for outdoor dining, are the legacy of its gold rush riches, Melbourne’s varied palate comes from waves of immigration. The city has the biggest Greek population outside of Athens and, as for the Italians, mostly, they hail from a different generation to their “cousins” in America, many of them having left the turmoil of the cities of postwar Italy, (while in contrast, the majority of New York’s 19th century Italian immigrants were the southern, rural poor). Thus Australia’s Italian food, even as it arrived here, cut through the strict, regional divides of the home country, especially as those from the north wed those from the south, further mixing things up in the kitchen.

Today’s Melburnians are a melting pot of Celtic, Southern European, Middle European, Middle Eastern, and Asian heritage, and what links them is the food scene. “Everyone here eats out all the time,” says Tara Bishop, head of media relations for Crown Towers, a skyscraper hotel, shopping and casino complex which dominates the center of town and houses more than 40 restaurants, including a branch of Nobu. Being in the hospitality industry has taken Bishop, originally from Canada, all over the world. “But what I love about living here,” she says, “Is that it is what I call a shoe and dinner town. In London, I’d have to choose between eating out somewhere great or splurging on a pair of Manolos. Here, while the heels are pricey, the food really isn’t. I can have both.”

“Melbourne is one of the great food cities of the world,” says Donna Hay, who, with her eponymous empire of magazines, cookbooks and kitchen wares is the Antipodean Martha Stewart. A native of Sydney, the well-traveled Hay acknowledges that there is something very alluring about Melbourne’s “incredibly well-informed waiters, the low lighting, the rich upholstered seating and the alleyways which hide espresso bars, chocolatiers, patisseries.”

Grossi believes that what makes the food scene so vibrant is the mix. Referring to himself as “a Melburnian chef with an Italian heritage,” he adds, “I don’t turn my back on ingredients just because they are not traditional. We don’t have to be shackled to old rules. We’ve got these beautiful ducks livers on the bench today and we’re going to sauté them up and do a chestnut flavored pappardelle, which is not strictly Tuscan. People here are brave. You put tripe on the menu, they’ll try it and while it may not be as popular as some other dishes, it’s a little bit different for your loyal regulars. This restaurant has been here nearly 100 years. With Melbourne people, if you do the right thing, the clientele keeps coming. This isn’t a city where the latest kid on the block gets all the attention.”

Joseph Licciardi, who was born in Sicily and who runs Kin, muses that Melburnians “treasured the food traditions they arrived with and became adventurous – you had to be, years ago, to come all the way here.” His own restaurant, in the Carlton neighborhood, is its own multi-cultural microcosm: his wife, Rosa, who was born in Puglia in the south of Italy, cooks alongside their Australian-born son, Enrico, while their daughter, Agatha, waits tables. “When our kids were growing up here, they would go for yum cha (Chinese dim sum) and try the duck feet,” he explains. “And today Rosa cooks unagi eel from Japan, but we offer it in an Italian way.” Thus, while a tagliatelle with sweet pumpkin glaze, balanced with aged balsamic vinegar, tastes exactly as it would in Modena, the flavors of the freshest fish, caught nearby, are brought out by serving them raw, in an Asian marinade. “It isn’t about “fusion,” it’s about not limiting yourself to the old ways,” says Licciardi.

Making the traditional fresh again has made a star of George Calombaris, 29, something of an Australian Gordon Ramsay. It has also inspired the Melbourne-born chef of Greek origins to open restaurants in his ancestral homeland, where, he says, “they have been serving fried stuff and dips and cheese to tourists on the islands although that’s not what we eat at home.” Calombaris helms The Press Club, the Maha Bar and Grill, and Hellenic Republic in Melbourne as well as The Belvedere Club on Mykonos. Describing himself as a pioneer who has “taken a classical training and applied it to Greek food,” one of his signature dishes is a delicate char-grilled octopus served with smoked butter kozani saffron makaronada (pasta) and edible amaranth blooms.

Although in Melbourne you might need to hop on a city tram to get to your favorite Chinese or Thai place, undiscovered culinary gems lurk on almost every humble street throughout its sizeable suburban spread. Some might argue that the word-of-mouth on a joint called Cicciolina, in the once-rough St. Kilda beach area, has spread too far, given its No Reservation policy can mean long waits in the bar. The secret? “Me sticking to the stove,” laughs head chef and co-owner Virginia Redmond, who has turned down offers to write cookbooks or open a second restaurant because she is content doing this one. Try the lightly battered brains with fried chives and aoli. “This is literally the only place in the world I would eat brains!” says Jacquie Byron, a Melbourne writer who says she has been “well-fed and watered here ever since I was a babe.”

Even children are welcome at most Melbourne restaurants. Formal places like the Press Club go to pains to point out that they will create child-sized portions of any dish. One Melbourne mother recalls the time she asked her twins as they were playing in the sandpit if they were making mud pies. “It’s stuffed zucchini flowers,” they replied. An answer worthy of a city that lives to eat.

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Dries Van Noten. The Master of Antwerp

By Marion on September 22, 2008

THE MASTER OF ANTWERP
The AFR Magazine September 2008
by Marion Hume

He’s the most reserved leader of the pack in fashion history. Dries van Noten, who took the Belgian six onto the world’s catwalks, is a quiet achiever: a man whose steely independence found a dedicated following

Dries Van Noten is a man in the middle: in the middle of Europe, in that he was born and remains based in Belgium; in the middle of the fashion business, in that his private, self- funded company is estimated to generate annual sales well in excess of B50 million ($82 million); and squeezed in the middle too, between the luxury giants who make most of their designer profits from leather goods, and the purveyors of fast fashion such as Zara. In contrast, Van Noten makes almost all his money from beautiful, intricate and, therefore, relatively expensive clothes.
The Belgian designer, who has helmed his own label since 1985, turns 50 in May and might thus also be considered in the middle of life. What’s certain is that today he is bang in the middle of working on his next collection, which is vast: more than 500 pieces. While he has agreed to this rare interview, which is taking place at the 1904 waterside warehouse that is his headquarters in Antwerp – a pretty little city, rich and rather quiet – his mind is clearly on split screen.
A man of his word, Van Noten, who is rather reticent, as well as being quiet dresser – today in grey trousers and a grey sweater – is taking time to talk because he promised he would. Though you sense he’d much prefer not to be in this blank meeting room but in his design studio holding a piece of ruffled chiffon in his hands.
This is Dries Van Noten’s time and not just because his recent, joyous and vivid collections were rapturously received by both the press and his passionate and faithful fans. As fashion has become increasingly homogenised, with its shiny cookie-cutter branded stores across the world and its businesses streamlined under the stewardships of those clutching MBAs, Van Noten, who is both his eponymous company’s creative director and its chief executive, has become the standard-bearer for an individuality many now crave.
Sydney retailer and self-confessed Dries addict, Belinda Seper, praises his creations, which “know no territorial boundaries as he shifts effortlessly across borders and cultures, always with a charming hint of nostalgia”, the result of what the designer himself calls “the travels in my mind”. In point of fact, he deliberately avoids long-haul travel, partly because he hates to leave the apparently beautiful house and apparently glorious garden he has nurtured with his partner, Patrick Vangheluwe (who oversees production for the company). I say apparently because the pair has never allowed the place to be photographed for one of those ‘designer at home’ pieces.
The other reason he doesn’t like to go too far is, as he explains in English, accented with the singsong rhythm of his native Flemish, that “I prefer to have just one little element or one little story that might interest me rather than really travelling, because then you are overwhelmed by information and you might stop creating and start to duplicate. For me, I prefer to have one little thing, then to think, ‘What can I link to this? Ah, maybe a Japanese fabric could be nice, then a Chinese embroidery with, oh good, some African beads.’”
His surprising mixes are always assured, with a fauvist’s confidence in bright colour and a romantic sensibility which is rendered modern, however, by his almost geeky enthusiasm for the new technologies in printing that allow such magical mixes to be achieved in cloth.
“He’s the alchemist who has this extraordinary ability to transform the everyday into the special, but not in such a way that the wearer ever feels overwhelmed,” explains Seper, who waited years before the designer, who is very careful where he sells, allowed her to stock his creations. “What’s so rare is that his clothes thrill the press, who otherwise spend a lot of time getting excited about things that many women find unwearable, yet he never fails to delight his faithful clients too. Believe it or not, that is actually quite a rare achievement.”
What’s also rare these days is being an entirely independent designer. Van Noten behaves as if his is a small-scale operation, pegged to his own caprices, and yet admits that, in fact, everything is informed by a rigorous logic that maybe only makes sense to him and his closest associates. Most noticeably, this designer bucks the trend by never advertising, because he believes adding 5- or 10 per cent to the cost of the clothes to fund this is dishonest to his customers. Neither does he have scores of his own stores.
Although he has at least 500 global retail accounts, including several in Australia, he has only two shops of his own: one opened 19 years ago in Antwerp, the other on a whim last year. On the off-the-beaten-track Quai Malaquais on the Parisian Left Bank, an extraordinary antiquarian bookshop became available and is now filled with a wonderfully eclectic mix of antiques that are not for sale, and clothing, which is. (There is also a shop operated by Club 21 on Van Noten’s behalf in Hong Kong and in Singapore by Lane Crawford Joyce.)
In the age of the fashion designer as celebrity, as perfected by the likes of Tom Ford and Karl Lagerfeld, Van Noten is, by contrast, not remotely interested in trading in snappy sound bites. While not as hardcore in his stance as his contemporary and compatriot Martin Margiela (who refuses to be interviewed, is never knowingly photographed and does not appear even at his own seasonal catwalk shows), Van Noten simply ducks most attention.
“I prefer to show my fashion and the things that I make and I think people discover enough about who I am and what I think about the world when they see the clothes,” he says. To be, or not to be, the centre of attention, is, he says, “a choice. Just as an exercise, I have thought ‘how would I live in one of the big cities?’ But in Paris, you have to shout far more to be seen and just by taking the Métro you lose so much energy. Living in Antwerp, it’s so quiet – although it’s quite easy to go to London by plane or to Paris by the train.” When he does so, it’s unlikely those sitting next to him have a clue who he is.
Still slender and possessed of the rosy complexion of the studious Jesuit schoolboy he once was, he looks not so very different from the eager young man I first met in 1988 when a group calling themselves the Antwerp Six showed as part of London Fashion Week. We had all turned up to take a look, because the idea of fashion coming out of Belgium – a place we then associated with chocolate and the Smurfs – sounded like such a hoot. Two decades on, the Belgian influence on fashion has been enormous, with talents including Ann Demeulemeester, who is Van Noten’s contemporary and close friend, and, from a younger generation: Raf Simons, who designs the Jil Sander line; Bruno Pieters at Hugo Boss; Olivier Theyskens; Veronique Branquinho et al, all having been influential.
Yet before Van Noten and co emerged from the Antwerp Academy in the space of a couple of years and formed ‘the Six’ (who were actually really seven, although Martin Margiela did build his career separately), their homeland had no fashion industry to speak of. The Six (alongside Van Noten and Demeulemeester were menswear designers Dirk Bikkembergs and Dirk Van Saene, cultural provocateur Walter Van Beirendonck, and Marina Yee, who no longer designs) were lucky in their timing.
As well as their diverse talents and a shared and stubborn determination to succeed on their own terms, they were also in the right place at the right time, just as the Belgian government tried to save an ailing textile industry by championing young talent that might breathe new life into it. A decade later, Belgian creativity had earned such respect that a Time magazine headline of October 1995 declared, “If it’s chic, it must be Belgian”. “It’s surreal,” Van Noten says now. “At that time it was impossible to even predict or dream this would happen. Fashion and Belgium just never went together before.”
Part of what powered Van Noten and his contemporaries was the absolute belief that they could make it internationally in their own way, despite, in some cases, having names that were hard to pronounce or spell. Van Noten, though gentle in person and in his designs, still clearly has this bullish strength. While the fashion system worldwide seems to demand that most successful designers must also launch a second, less-expensive line – with talents as diverse as Yohji Yamamoto with his Y collection, Dolce & Gabbana with D&G and Giorgio Armani with Emporio having proved what a rich income stream this strategy can generate – Van Noten’s rationale is that his T-shirts, which are not expensive, and his beaded coats, which necessarily are, belong together.
Neither does he have a money-spinning perfume, figuring that, as he is not an expert perfumer, why would he? While most fashion companies these days make about 60 per cent of profits from their It bags and leather goods, Van Noten makes only 6 per cent: deliberately. He’s not that interested in handbags.
What interests him is clothes, and his are ravishing. Before this afternoon’s interview, I have spent the morning doing what I call research and you might call shopping at Het Modepaleis, the 19th century store, with its old fittings intact, for which Dries devotees make the pilgrimage to Antwerp. While it would be disingenuous to pretend personal taste does not always have some place in the judgements of a fashion critic, I can honestly say that I have never been quite so tempted.
Shirts are a kaleidoscope of colour; summer dresses mix smudgy, ’50s-inspired floral prints together with linear, graphic calligraphy patterns; slithers of satin tops drape from their own lavish necklaces of heavy Indian stones. Then there are the scarves, mere flourishes of silver beading on chiffon at a breathtaking several hundred euros a time, yet so desirable.
In fact, Van Noten works hard to maintain what he calls “honest prices”. “In the new collection, there is a little scarf which seems really cute and small but, for the ruffles alone, we need one metre 75 in very expensive printed silk,” he explains when we meet later. He’s been a shopkeeper long enough to know demand will exceed supply. For, while creation is his first
love, it’s the businessman who looks back at me, straight in the eye, when I ask if he also keeps track of what’s selling. “I know the sell-through from Selfridges last week [the London store is a major stockist]; I know what worked, what didn’t work, which store went on sale too early, all over the world. I know yesterday’s totals but I am not going to tell you.” As the business is all his and he therefore doesn’t have to discuss financials with anyone, why should he?
Again, although the business is considerable, the behaviour is intimate. “There’s an immense integrity about Dries Van Noten in terms of the organisation he runs,” says Belinda Seper. “Fashion is a very territorial game and, in the chess- board that is distribution, he makes you feel secure; that you are respected, appreciated and protected. And there’s such generosity. Celebrations in Paris for his 50th show [in October 2004] was one of the highlights of my fashion career.” That was when guests arrived at an old locomotive manufacturing plant in the Paris suburbs to find a delicious dinner waiting for them, served at a single table that seated more than 400 people. This then became the catwalk, as models picked their way between the crystal wineglasses.
But doesn’t being the businessman watching the bottom line conflict with the extravagance of being a designer? “I am completely the opposite of a commercial designer, I think. If I were a commercial designer, my goodness, the turnover would be five times bigger than what we have now but it’s not what I want to do. I know that a lot of women would like to have, every season, a perfect wraparound skirt in a nice flower print with nice embroidery but, just because they expect it, I don’t give what they expect. I would hate it to get easy or boring.
“When it comes to the point [where] you say ‘OK, I can do this, this and this for this collection; it should be just a little bit more commercial…’ I go back to my garden. I say bye-bye to fashion.” As for gardening, he says it’s the perfect balance to a day job, “where we try to control everything, to be our own god. In gardens, you can’t. Also, while fashion is superficial, with gardening you have your two hands in the earth.”
Not that his fashion trajectory has been some sort of airy- fairy easy ride. It has been said that Van Noten, the son of a menswear retailer who was himself the son of a tailor, had the advantage of financial support from his rich father in the early days. In fact, the opposite is true. “My parents now appreciate what I did but, at that time, my father was hoping I was going to take over the family business, which I was completely not interested in. And so I had to earn my own money even to pay my fees to go to college,” he says, to set the record straight.
“I was designing [commercial lines] just to pay for my studies [and, by graduation] I was designing seven commercial collections during the day and my own during the night and I didn’t stop the last one until 1992 after I was already showing in Paris.”
By then, he had joined forces with Christine Mathijs, his mentor until her death in 1999. After she died, Van Noten reeled from the loss and, at the same time, faced the toughest challenges yet for any independent designer. For this was when the big luxury groups really started flexing their muscle. “It was the period when Helmut Lang and Jil Sander sold to Prada, and [Alexander] McQueen went to Gucci and I was like, ‘Oh my God, is it over for us?’” Then the groups started making big demands on retailers – if a store wanted to stock Gucci, it had also to buy from Gucci Group lines, including McQueen and Stella McCartney. If one wanted to stock Prada, it had to also buy pieces from Prada-owned Jil Sander.
“Especially in the German market, a lot of our customers couldn’t buy our collection because they didn’t have the budget any more,” says Van Noten, who admits he wondered if he would have to sell out too. “Was I tempted? Tempted is the wrong word. But you ask yourself: ‘Is this what I should do?’ And you think: ‘My goodness, do we now have to become more interested in handbags?’ Then I thought, ‘no, we stay [on] our own and [with] our way of doing it’.”
In an age when designers are brands and CEOs have 10-year business plans, Van Noten’s ambitions seem modest. “I don’t have a need to expand my business. For me, the biggest benefit is that, financially, I don’t have to continue. I have my house; I have my garden. Yes, I have a responsibility to my staff but … I also know I have the freedom to say at a certain moment, ‘Well I don’t want to do this now’ and, if I didn’t have that, I would feel really overwhelmed.” While he loves the thrill of creation, the feel of cloth in his hand, “I don’t want to be trapped in the fashion system, ever. This is what I do, but never at the cost of my soul.”

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Malaysia. It’s Tea Time

By Marion on September 1, 2008

By MARION HUME

Afternoon Tea Picnic

An employee of the Cameron Highlands Resort prepares a table for classic high tea service. The hotel also offers guided walks of the plantation and a includes a cold tea bath as part of its spa menu.

It’s 3.30 pm in the Cameron Highlands, which rise some 5000 ft above sea level and are reached by a vertiginous four-hour drive winding up through the jungle from the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. The landscape up here seems otherworldly; with high ridges as far as the eye can see covered in strangely vivid, clipped bushes which at first resemble either a vast art installation by the likes of sculptor-in-nature Andy Goldsworthy or maybe a place J.R.R. Tolkien might have imagined for his orcs and elves.

Then the eye is drawn to a different silhouette atop one of the bright green slopes, which, as one gets closer, is revealed to be a table shaded by a vast parasol. Beneath it stands a waiter in a starched white uniform. Laid out on a damask cloth are bone china cups along with finger sandwiches and home-baked scones; all in all a spread that would not look out of place at the London Ritz. Behold the “afternoon tea picnic” prepared by the Cameron Highlands Resort Hotel and served on a working tea plantation. The hotel also offers tea planter guided walks and, before every treatment on its spa menu, a detoxifying, skin-softening bath in cold tea.

Tea Tourism is a growing niche, confirms Caroline Grayburn, of Tim Best Travel, a London-based travel agent known for planning unusual, bespoke trips. “An interest in tea can take you to the exceptionally beautiful Darjeeling in the northeast of India, or to Kerala in the south, or even to Uganda and Malawi in Africa. Our clients are keen to get beneath the surface of a country and see how it works and of course being served afternoon tea in ravishingly lovely hill country, well, what could be more glorious?” she adds.

Joe Simrany, president of The Tea Council of the USA, who has also stayed on breathtaking tea plantations in China and Sri Lanka, agrees. “There’s nothing like waking up at the top of the world, with only the noise of birds and monkeys.”

Those who love tea are fortunate that the camellia sinensis, the plant from which all tea — whether black, green, white or Oolong — is derived (except of course peppermint, chamomile or fruit teas, which are not strictly teas at all) is inherently picturesque; especially when viewed from a cane armchair on a shady veranda.

As for the round-the-world rituals of tea, the precision of tea making is fascinating to observe — from the Chinese style to the wonders of Japanese tea ceremony. Even English-style Afternoon Tea — accompanied by finger sandwiches and freshly-baked scones — is enjoying a considerable revival. In modern Britain where workers sup their afternoon “cuppa” on the go, the tea break may be a thing of the past, yet going out for afternoon tea has, perversely, never been more popular. At Fortnum & Mason, the Piccadilly store which started selling loose leaf tea in 1707, the instore restaurants alone brew 40 kilos a week; that’s 3,600 pots or about 7,200 cups.

“There’s a certain ceremony to tea,” says Simon Burdess, Fortnum & Msaon’s trading director. “It’s the absolute opposite to the morning shot of espresso. It has its protocols, it’s about slowing down and taking a moment from the hustle of the modern world, which, these days, seems the ultimate luxury.”

The French took to tea in 1636, eight years before it arrived in England and what were then Britannia’s colonies in the Americas. Afternoon tea, French style, (accompanied by macaroons or madeleines, but never with milk) has been enjoying a considerable renaissance too, which some attribute to Sofia Coppola’s 2006 movie, “Marie Antoinette”, where the Queen and her friends taking tea was portrayed as an 18th century equivalent of the Carrie Bradshaw and the girls with their Cosmopolitans.

In India, the source of much of the world’s tea, the ceremony of afternoon tea used to be considered a throwback to the Raj, “yet recently, my girlfriends and I have rediscovered The Willingdon Club in Mumbai for the full afternoon tea,” says Sheetal Mafatlal, the president of Mafatlal Luxury, which has the Valentino franchise in India.

Such fashionability makes it tempting to call tea the new coffee, although this would be ridiculous from a historical perspective, given that an emperor in ancient China (or more likely, his servant) first threw boiling water onto plucked leaves some 3,000 years before Arabian traders decided to boil up the coffee beans they had gotten from Ethiopia. Worldwide, tea is far more popular than coffee (except in the US, where it also trails behind soft drinks, beer and milk). Yet while Arabica certainly has its aficionados and people all over the globe are now familiar with the “Tall, Grande, Vente” lingo of Starbucks, “there are literally thousands of different types of tea to discover, according to the Tea Council’s Simrany.

The taste of the four main types of tea varies according to how the leaf is treated before it is dried: hence white tea, which comes from the tips, tastes different from black tea, where the leaves have been wilted, rolled and fermented and which is again different from Oolong, where the fermenting process is arrested half way through. Green tea leaves are dried fresh from picking. Add to this first and second flush, which refers to when the leaves were picked; then geographical origin from robust, malty Assam in India to light, bright Dimbula Ceylon, from Sri Lanka. There is leaf size to consider too and here, the term “Orange Pekoe” has nothing to do with oranges, but instead denotes whether the leaf is a bud, even the very tip of a bud.

Good tea, like fine wine, carries the character of the land where it is grown. The world’s top traders employ tasters, who are rather like perfumers, except they must juggle with flavor as well as aroma to mix extraordinary blends. “We have two people here who can identify tea virtually to the hillside on which it was grown”, says Fortnum & Mason’s Burdess, “and that simply isn’t possible with coffee where so much of the flavor comes from the roasting.”

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