To Taste Is to Touch

Voices: Gianluca Passi & Laurent Dagenais
Artworks: Pamela Laura Guidi

“When a dish hits you right, it reminds you you’re alive.”

Laurent Dagenais

Is there a flavour you have chased your whole life, without ever reaching it?

GIANLUCA:
It would be something like the memory of a distant summer: the scent of freshly baked bread from a village oven, mixed with the sweet-sourness of figs picked straight from the tree, and the salty touch of sea air. A flavour that exists somewhere between memory and desire.

LAURENT:
Yeah, 100%. It’s the taste of a perfect, carefree meal you have as a kid — like your first real Sunday roast with your family when you’re still too young to overthink it. You can’t recreate that. You can try to match the flavors, the technique, even the ingredients, but that feeling tied to it — pure, honest joy — that’s impossible to fully chase down once you know too much.

What is it that one truly seeks when choosing to devote a life to taste?

GIANLUCA:
It’s not just the pleasure of the palate we seek, but something deeper. Something that speaks of who we are, where we come from, what we have loved or lost. We seek that perfect moment where everything aligns: the right dish, the right company.

LAURENT:
I think we’re searching for connection. With food, with people, with memories. Taste is just the vessel. It’s not about showing off or stacking techniques — it’s about creating moments that cut through all the noise. When a dish hits you right, it reminds you you’re alive, simple as that.

“…Something that speaks of who we are, where we come from, what we have loved or lost.”

Gianluca Passi

In your view, what is the apex of the tasting experience?

GIANLUCA:
For me, the apex is when taste stops being just a sensation and becomes emotion. The truth of flavour is something that speaks of you without filters — an experience that engages every sense, but most of all, the heart.

LAURENT:
Honestly? Simplicity. When a dish has nothing to hide behind — no gimmicks, no overcomplication — and it still absolutely wrecks you because it’s so good. Like a perfectly grilled fish by the ocean. A piece of bread that tastes like the hands that made it. That’s the top for me. Stripped down, but flawless.

“Simplicity. When a dish has nothing to hide behind.”

Laurent Dagenais

What remains of a dish once the pleasure fades?

GIANLUCA:
When pleasure fades, what remains is a memory, an impression — sometimes
even a sense of longing. What lingers is the intention of the one who created it, the gesture, the love or anger with which it was cooked.

LAURENT:
The memory. The story it tells you. Good dishes live on in your head way after the plate’s empty — and if you’re lucky, they shape the way you cook, the way you share food with people. That’s what sticks. It’s never just the taste.

@laurent.dagenais
@chef.gianlucapassi