Wilfried Romain hosts a "volcanic dinner" at Lava

Wilfried Romain and Rémi Badjoint are organizing a "7 volcanoes" dinner on Friday, October 11, 2024, at their Lava restaurant. Here's all you need to know about this explosive event!

Mathilde Bourge Published on 9/25/24 at 7:27 AM

Here's a dinner that should be out of the ordinary. On Friday, October 11, 2024, Wilfried Romain and Rémi Badjoint will be hosting a "volcanic dinner" at their Lava restaurant (2 toques), in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. What exactly is it? And how do you book a table? Gault&Millau tells you all.

A menu of "7 volcanoes

Wilfried Romain and Rémi Badjoint share a passion for volcanoes. "I climbed my first volcano ten years ago in New Zealand. Since then, I've been trying to climb more volcanoes around the world. I've now climbed twelve," says Wilfried Romain.

In order to share this passion for nature with their customers, and to get them travelling without moving from their chairs, the duo came up with the idea of organizing a dinner not in "7 beats", but in "7 volcanoes". On the menu? Seven destinations, from Sicily to Costa Rica, each telling its own story.

"Each volcano, and therefore each plate, will be marked by a taste, a spice or a technique (smoking, roasting, braising, etc.) inspired by the country in question. For Etna, in Sicily, we'll propose a dish based on tomatoes. For Arenal, which is in Costa Rica - and which I climbed three years ago - we'll be reinterpreting sopa negra, a kind of black bean soup with smoked bacon and lots of coriander. It's a typical dish served in almost every restaurant in the country, but prepared in our own way", explains the Lava chef.

The duo, who have been thinking about this menu since the beginning of the summer, have also imagined a dessert based around a mango baked in an ash crust. "The fruit will be rolled in an ash paste, a bit like salt dough, and will be stewed directly in the embers. This will give smoky notes and, visually, the customer will see a ball of ash that will be split before their eyes, to collect the candied mango."

Other volcanoes, such as Bromo, Mount Fuji, Licancabur, Volcans d'Auvergne and San Cristobal, will be on the menu, to be accompanied by a 100% volcanic wine pairing, imagined by Rémi Badjoint. An evening that promises to be explosive!