I spent the Christmas holidays of 2006 trapped in a London hotel room. I was supposed to be somewhere else, at the last minute I booked a hotel in London. Anticipating all the romance we Americans attribute to European cities – especially in August and at Christmas, when in fact their own inhabitants flee and close everything aside from the tourist trinket shops.

It was a small hotel. After checking me in on the evening of the 22nd, the owners left to celebrate the holidays with their families. The kitchen and even the bar were unmanned for the holidays, which, in the UK includes the 26th.

I wasn’t worried. Notting Hill was lively on the 23rd. There was a fabulous street market outside the door. I bought chandelier crystals, glass pearl necklaces, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and possibly (I’m not sure) a bit of bread. No one warned me that this was to be the last food I saw until the 27th.

In other words, the trip was a disaster. The city was desolate in its abandonment. And everything was resolutely, unrelentingly closed. I was lonely and hungry, at great expense, in a major travel destination.

•  •  •

It’s Fall of 2026 and I’m training a new chef. The last one was cooking elaborate dishes with names, pounded and rolled meat, complicated desserts. Delicious, to be sure, but drawing attention to the chef rather than the farmers.

When the new chef arrived, I explained our financial model: “First we pay the farmers. …”

Now I need to valorize the way I cook, simple ingredient-focused dishes with minimal intervention. I buy cookbooks from the heros of market-based cuisine: Judy Rodgers, Alice Waters, Rose Gray & Ruth Rogers. Yotam Ottolenghi.

In fact Ottolenghi has rather more ingredients on the plate than I do, but what comes across in the cookbook is the minimalist backdrop, and the centering of vegetables in the presentation.

I discovered Ottolenghi on 27.December 2026. Their first shop was on the same block as my hotel and it changed my aesthetic forever. I remembered the shop as a white enamel box with wooden tables, the elevating backdrop to luscious, abundant, presentations of vegetables and pastries.

We painted our kitchen this year, brilliant enamel white. One thing I could clearly tell the chef is that I want vegetables to occupy the majority and center of the plate. And the visual centerpiece of our kitchen sings Ottolenghi, fruit and vegetables piled in baskets next to platters of fresh cookies.

Leafing through the book this morning, grateful for the accuracy of the photos to my memory of that sunny cold morning, the rich welcome to my hunger and delight, I realized that what I have always described as a disastrous trip to London, was anything but. There was a treasure which became a focal turning point in my cuisine and décor, manifested in and demarcating Domaine Valent.