WHAT IS LUXURY TODAY?

There was a time when fine dining meant rarity — and grace.
Caviar was a privilege, truffles a season, service an art form.

Now, Beluga caviar comes from tank-fed sturgeons raised somewhere between Shanghai and a spreadsheet. Tartufo bianco d’Alba has become a global franchise of confusion — unearthed in Croatia, Bulgaria, Albania, or Australia, and still proudly misnamed after a small Italian town where most locals haven’t seen the real thing in years. Australian white truffles in July? Yes, indeed, not sustainability at its finest.

Since COVID, restaurants can no longer attract the kind of people who made service an art. The dining room has been losing its theatre, its tension, its pulse. Even in the three-star Michelin restaurants, hospitality now feels algorithmic — a polite choreography performed by the well-intentioned, the underpaid, and the untrained.

There’s a nagging thought behind all this polish: the band keeps playing while the boat sinks. Hordes of nouveau-riche diners roar with delight, spooning caviar over their eggs and truffle over their carabineiro. Chefs and restaurateurs whisper in denial, pretending nothing has changed. The new luxury isn’t what it claims to be — it’s the illusion that the show goes on.

And yet, sometimes, truth finds its way back to the table. As summer slowly came to an end, I was fortunate to have Sebastian Frank at my table — explaining and preparing his iconic dish Walk Through My Garden. A Gargouillou-inspired composition: seasonal, dynamic, transcendental. Everything alive, everything sprouting.

“What grows together, goes together,” he said. An ever-changing selection of fruits, vegetables and herbs from his own garden in Pankow, just north of Berlin — picked by the chef himself and served with an emulsion of egg yolks laid that same morning by his hens.

This is luxury: time, rarity, and meaning.
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