Million Air Summer 2024

ISA BAL TRIVET, LONDON

When The Fat Duck alumni talk, you can be quite con fi dent that the restaurant world will listen. In 2018, ex-head chef Jonny Lake and ex-head sommelier Isa Bal of Heston Blumenthal’s three-Michelin-starred fl agship joined forces once again. The result of this bold move was Trivet, a modern London restaurant that proudly does things a little di ff erently — and was just awarded a second Michelin star in the 2024 guide for its brand of self-proclaimed ‘unpretentious fi ne dining’ (following its fi rst in 2022). From its conception, Trivet was always about creating a menu where food and drink worked intrinsically together — not as separate o ff erings, but as two halves of a whole restaurant experience. “In my previous job, I started to get a bit bored with wine,” Bal told me over the phone early one Friday evening. (We spoke just weeks after the 2024 Great Britain and Ireland Michelin Guide announcement, and the restaurant team was gearing up for a busy weekend after its latest accolade.) “I was mainly tasting wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy, and things that everyone knows. When you try them every day, it gets boring. It got to a point where I was worried that I didn’t like wine,” he says. And so, Trivet goes against the grain. The 350-label-strong list is ordered in a way few minds could have conceived: Instead of by region, Bal has ordered his cellar chronologically, starting with the historic beginnings of wine in Georgia, which purportedly began producing in 7000 BC, and ending with Mars, which, by Trivet’s tounge-in-cheek estimations, could start producing by 3000 AD. Bal’s native Turkey gets an honorable mention as one of the oldest wine producers in the world, too. “I designed [it] sel fi shly—I wanted to reignite my own love of wine,” he says. Through his unusual ordering, Bal is hoping to strike conversations around wine. “We have found that when people are trying wine, we need to encourage conversation.” Bal uses this burgeoning relationship between server and diner to generate suggestions that go beyond just matching food and drink. “It would be wrong for me as a sommelier to assume the customer wants a perfect match — they might just want to have a glass of wine, regardless of what they are eating,” he says. “At the level we operate, people want a bit more individuality and a wine that is suited to them, rather than just mechanically matching a wine to food and saying, ‘Yes, that’s what works.’” trivetrestaurant.co.uk

This image Isa Bal was head sommelier at The Fat Duck before he opened Trivet with JonnyLake Below, from left Trivet’s wine list is unconventionally ordered chronologically; the restaurant was conceived with food and wine on an equal footing

UNUSUAL PAIRINGS “We have a dessert on the menu called Turkish Breakfast, and we developed it with a red wine in mind. Often when people are eating, they have a bottle of wine, they have their main course, the food is fi nished and they still have some wine. And then comes the dessert and it clashes with the wine, so this is a dish designed to work with red wine. It has sour cherry — a little bit of

bitterness and acidity which really works.” —IsaBal