Fusion pioneer Jean-Georges Vongerichten never stops testing culinary boundaries.

He opened his most famous restaurant, Jean-Georges, in Trump Tower at Columbus Circle in New York City in 1998 and has in recent years opened a series of other restaurants around Manhattan, Shanghai and elsewhere.

Jean-Georges remains one of the few restaurants in the city awarded four stars by the New York Times and three stars by the Michelin Guide.

Habitats are being destroyed, killing off wild fish stocks and making some vegetables and fruits so scarce that a number of dishes will have to be dropped and restaurants will be forced to close, warns Pierre Gagnaire, one of the pioneers of experimental modern cooking.

He also predicts that, as the number of restaurants soars, demand for produce will rise, forcing up the price of dwindling stocks of good quality food and sending menu prices sky-high.

For those eateries that do survive, Gagnaire says chefs will...

Heston Blumenthal is the man who put snail porridge on the menu. So when he tells us that the next big thing is magic tricks at the table and sweets you preorder online, restaurant lovers need to take notice.

Just don't even think of calling it molecular gastronomy.

Molecular Gastronomy is dead. Indeed, if Heston Blumenthal had his way it would never have been born in the first place.

He accepts that, early on, the term let punters know something curious was going on at his restaurant, the Fat Duck, in Bray...

Cooking a cheese soufflé can be tricky. Despite following the recipe meticulously, using the finest ingredients, and heating the oven to the perfect temperature, you can still end up with a cheese cookie instead of a fluffy, brown-topped soufflé intended to impress your guests. The result, it seems, is often arbitrary.

But help is at hand. Tucked away in their laboratories, a bunch of dedicated scientific foodies are toiling away to solve the soufflé problem and other culinary conundrums: Should jam be cooked in a copper pan? When gnocchi come floating to the surface of boiling water, does that mean they are cooked? Molecular gastronomy.

Most people know Ferran Adrià as food’s preeminent futurist, the godfather of foam and other gastronomic advances, a mad Catalonian scientist who spends half the year cloistered away in his culinary lab and the other half making culinary history at El Bulli.

But when he and nine like-minded compatriots came to town this month to promote Spain and lend some flash and dazzle to the French Culinary Institute’s subsumption into the new International Culinary Center, we found the world’s top chef to have more in common with us mere mortals than his lofty reputation.