Richard is going to cook you something you will not be able to fully explain to the people at home when they ask what the food was like. This is not a failure of description. It is the specific property of the meal that the Naora galley produces from the combination of the offshore provisioning and the culinary intelligence that Richard brings to what the provisioning provides: the result is the dish that belongs to the specific day and the specific ocean and the specific combination of what the trolling line produced and what the morning market had and what Richard decided the twelve people around the table needed at that particular anchorage in that particular ocean.
Richard spent years in Asia. He was there in the specific way of the person who was not visiting but living — in the markets, in the kitchens, in the specific apprenticeship of the person who wants to understand the food rather than simply eat it.
He came out of those years with the knowledge of the Asian flavour profile and the technique that the French and Italian culinary education he had before Asia did not provide and that the combination of the two creates in the kitchen of a person who has genuinely internalised both rather than applying one to the other as a style choice.
What the Offshore Kitchen Produces
The offshore galley is not the restaurant. It does not have the supply chain or the consistency of the restaurant’s kitchen, which is the specific limitation that the offshore galley imposes on the person cooking in it.
Richard does not experience this as a limitation. He experiences it as the condition under which the most interesting cooking happens: the provisioning morning that determines what is possible rather than the recipe that determines what is required, the fresh catch from the trolling line that arrives an hour before the meal needs to start and that changes the dinner from the plan to the response, the spices and the aromatics from the last port’s market that carry the specific quality of the place the boat was in two days ago and that add the dimension to the dish that the wholesale supplier cannot provide.
The twelve people who sit down to what Richard has made from these ingredients and this condition are consistently the twelve people who go quiet in the way that the genuinely good meal produces. Not performance quiet. The polite quiet of the restaurant experience where the table acknowledges the food and returns to the conversation.
The actual quiet of the twelve people who are tasting something that is worth the attention. It happens on most legs. We guarantee it. Richard has not made us retract this guarantee.
