Francis Mallmann beside an outdoor cooking pit last month in Water Mill, New York.

The Re-Discovery of Fire

At a $4,000-a-head, champagne-fueled dinner, Argentine chef Francis Mallmann prepared a feast that was so primal it was almost Paleolithic

By Dana Brown

For the past decade or so, we have lived in the age of the branded, sponsored, experiential, celebrity-hosted, collabed, hashtagged event. Get a group of people together, throw in a couple of influencers, come up with some clever hashtags, and voilà, activation. Having written about a restaurant or two, my in-box is stuffed so full of invitations to branded events that if attending them came with benefits and a 401(k) I could make a career out of going to them.

Most invitations get deleted the second you see the subject line. “Oral B and Cap’n Crunch invite you …”—delete. But when I saw the subject line of an e-mail a month ago that included the names “Dom Pérignon” and “Francis Mallmann,” the speed at which my brain commanded my fingers to type, “YES, I WILL ATTEND,” would have astonished even the most jaded in the neuroscientific community.