Рубрика: General

With a cocktail bar, dining room, and entertainment space, Celia can host everything from fancy dinners to dance parties. With a cocktail bar, dining room, and entertainment space, Celia can host everything from fancy dinners to dance parties.

In Sardinia, bar snacks are no longer an afterthought – they’re part of the main event. 

For centuries, the rules of serious dining have felt firmly established: wine belonged to fine dining, cocktails belonged to dimly lit bars. Sommeliers spoke reverently about minerality and structure while bartenders slid over bowls of olives and hoped nobody was hungry. One pairing was considered an art form. The other came speared with a cocktail stick.

But that distinction is beginning to dissolve. Increasingly, chefs and mixologists are recognizing that cocktails – with their acidity, smoke, spice, bitterness, and botanical complexity – can be more expressive partners for food than wine is.

And in many cities, the best eating experiences now happen perched on a velvet stool with a drink in hand. That certainly felt true for me in Cagliari, Sardinia, where, inside the rooftop bar at Palazzo Tirso Sardegna, the line between fine dining and cocktail culture suddenly felt very thin indeed.

See also: Why London Restaurants are Embracing a New York State of Dining

I was there to interview Pichaya ‘Pam’ Soontornyanakij (more famously known as Chef Pam)– the Bangkok-based founder of Michelin-starred Restaurant Potong and one of the most influential voices in contemporary Asian fine dining – about her new line of elevated bar snacks created for MGallery Collection. “I think back maybe five years ago, [bar snacks were] very underestimated,” she tells me. “People don’t just put nuts and chips out anymore. They put something more meaningful and that represents who they are as an establishment.”

Spanning 16 MGallery properties from Paris to Seoul, Melbourne to the Middle East, the collaboration aims to celebrate World Cocktail Month, with each bar snack being paired alongside a complementary cocktail. Each of the 16 properties will serve the same five signature bar bites, thought up by Chef Pam, alongside two regionally inspired creations tailored to local tastes and ingredients. “I traveled the world,” she says. “Paris twice, Korea, Australia, Hong Kong… to meet the MGallery chefs and share my flavors.”

In Korea and Japan, guests will find crispy rice topped with tuna on the menu; in Hong Kong, a luxurious mantou-style burger filled with glazed lamb. Elsewhere, there is fried squid paired with squid ink, caviar-crowned tartare, delicate crab creations, and beef tartare, which Chef Pam dubs as “beautiful, with a kick.”

See also: Michelin Star Recipes You Can Make at Home

For her, the challenge of moving from a fine dining menu to snacks was rooted in creating food suited to the unique psychology of the bar environment. “It has to be something simple, but also surprising,” she says. “Sometimes it can surprise you in the way it looks when it’s served, or the taste being bold.”

The collaboration, with its regional links, also reflects a broader shift happening across global fine dining, one moving away from inherited European conventions and towards expressions of heritage and place.

“Right now, fine dining around the world is going towards localizing the cuisine,” Chef Pam explains. “Before, fine dining was usually French cuisine or maybe Italian or Japanese. It’s very generic.”

Now, she says, chefs are becoming increasingly interested in hyper-local traditions and regional specificity: “new chefs are pushing towards their heritage cuisine. It can be as small as a village cuisine or a region.”

In the six years since he turned his childhood passion into an adult hobby, Ron Janssen has amassed a stunning collection of prehistoric remains. 

Ron Janssen can still recall the spot on the side of the Maas river where he found a few teeth in the mud as a child — now 62, he often returns there when the tide is low, hoping to find something more. Back then, he picked up the teeth, assuming they were from cows or horses in nearby fields. “I later found out they went back 10,000 years — they were from boars and other animals that were alive then,” he says. That find sparked a passion for fossils that the Dutch businessman now indulges with more splashy acquisitions, like his latest, a spectacular ichthyosaur or prehistoric dolphin.

It was Janssen’s grandfather who sparked a curiosity for curios, a man whose attic and barn were stuffed with unfamiliar, exotic-looking objects. So he started picking up whatever caught his eye during walks along his local river, stashing the shells, stones, and bones in ever greater numbers of shoe boxes. Soon, Janssen spotted some of those finds in vitrines when he visited museums with dinosaur collections. “I picked up literally anything,” he says, pausing, “But I had a good eye for things.”

He only turned that childhood passion into an adult hobby five or six years ago. “It was a time to spoil myself,” he says of finally indulging in a major investment — in this case, a very different tusk from those he’d found in the mud. He spent five figures on a mammoth tooth with Dutch specialist dealer Roy Masin. It wasn’t the story of the animal that transfixed him, but the object itself. “I immediately fell in love with the shape, the texture, the patina of it. For me, it’s as good as a painting.”

From there, he quickly became an avid, if picky, acquirer of such ancient treasures. Janssen doesn’t rely on a certain period — Jurassic or similar — to steer his buying, but rather on gut and instinct. “I don’t need much, but I need good things,” he says, noting that he first started casting around for an ichthyosaur after a visit to London’s Natural History Museum, where a corridor of similar fossils left him dazzled.

It took him two or three years to find the right piece, and he considered where and how to install it at one of his two homes before resolving to buy it. Another proud part of his collection: a large, white ammonite — rare both in its color and size. “To be honest, my home is a museum. I live between my collections,” he says, while promising that his partner doesn’t object to such a designation. “It’s a world she didn’t know before, but it also interests her.”

Janssen’s collecting urge isn’t limited to fossils. He wants his homes to resemble a Renaissance-era wunderkammer or ‘cabinet of curiosities’ showcasing the natural world — think taxidermy or Vienna Bronzes. He also never considers deacquisition, so the resale value of a piece rarely troubles him. “In my basement, I have quite a lot of boxes, and sometimes I open one again and I’m in love with what I find when I haven’t seen it for a year or two.”

The dinosaur collecting world is small, he notes, with barely a dozen core proponents in The Netherlands at most, but he loves meeting other enthusiasts. At one fair in Amsterdam, for example, he spent the day combing the aisles for potential purchases. He ended up seated next to a museum director at a fair dinner that night, and was delighted to discover a fellow dino-lover with his own private collection, whose taste mapped almost exactly onto Janssen’s. “We compared the pictures we’d taken at the fair, and they were the same,” he says.

While he isn’t eyeing a specific next acquisition among the prehistoric treasures on sale, it’s always the same: he’ll assume he’s not in the market for anything new until that gut reaction strikes while he’s strolling the aisles of a fair in Paris, London, or Amsterdam. “If I wake up the next day and it’s still on my mind? When it’s lingering, that’s when it starts to get dangerous.”

The Brentwood home’s sun-filled rooms pair dark-stained hardwood floors with saturated earthtones and bold stonework. The Brentwood home’s sun-filled rooms pair dark-stained hardwood floors with saturated earthtones and bold stonework.

New Riff has been releasing batches of this whiskey since 2023. New Riff has been releasing batches of this whiskey since 2023.

The carefully modernized 1960s residence includes an ocean-facing deck and a cedar soaking tub. The carefully modernized 1960s residence includes an ocean-facing deck and a cedar soaking tub.

To whet appetites for the upcoming 2026 edition, we look back at our participation last year as the rally ran from Monaco to Croatia. To whet appetites for the upcoming 2026 edition, we look back at our participation last year as the rally ran from Monaco to Croatia.

The Geneva Watch Auction: XXIII pulled in a record $96.3 million across two days. The Geneva Watch Auction: XXIII pulled in a record $96.3 million across two days.

Spanning Coco Chanel’s 1926 design to Princess Diana’s revenge dress, the LBD has spent a century reinventing itself alongside culture, femininity, and fashion itself. 

The Royal Suite marks the latest unveiling in the hotel’s most extensive transformation in over three decades.