Welcome to Decante
A cultural recipe book by Connor Gibson
Welcome to Decante a space that serves to operate as a newsletter for recipes, travel guides, podcast recommendations and playlist recommendations. The idea for Decante stemmed way back in 2020 and was originally going to be a zine with recipes, wine pairing, illustrations from our friends and music playlists. The finance gods were not on our side and as per usual I had to go back into the slog of working in London restaurants and the all encompassing way that that consumes me.
To introduce myself, I am a chef that has been working in restaurants around the world for the past 10 years, namely in London, Amsterdam, France and now in Singapore. I love cooking and sometimes have a masochistic love for the hardships of working long hours in restaurant kitchens. About once a year I have a ‘burnout’ that usually coincides with me wanting to quit out of cooking all together and hit the road travelling and cook in a more natural way.
During these breaks in service I will day dream about where to travel, and most importantly where to eat. These breaks from my usual routine has seen me spend extended periods of time in Sicily, San Sebastian, Thailand and Singapore where I am now based and I feel it’s given me a keen eye for travel tips and guides and I am finally creating a space where I can share what my mind is pondering.
Working in Kitchens is quite straight forward and democratic in a way, the ease is in creating recipes, tweaking them and generally I find i’ve always been good in naturally understanding how and why things are done. Writing on the other hand opens up a whole new area of critique and scrutiny, I guess I’ll need to learn to wear my heart and my process on my sleeve
Anyone that works with me will know I hold a tight leash on the kitchen music, when I'm cooking the first thing on my mind is what am I listening to? I can't cook without music, it's a way of channeling my inner thoughts and is the Ritalin to my very busy mind.
My plan is to tell you about what I’m eating, thinking, reading, doing. I want to show you my recipes, give you guides and reviews on where to eat and also include my love of curating music and wine for events. This will be a little window into my creative process.
Long term I would like to expand to doing some pop up events, collaborate with other chefs, DJ’s and wine lovers and anyone who I can rope into sharing the joy of food.