The letters I write to the Circle.

I grew up in the mountains of France, about as far from the sea as this country gets, and I read navigator books until I couldn't stand not going.

My first time on a boat was a Laser dinghy, in the bay of Sydney. After that I got onto regattas by walking down to the dock and asking. That's genuinely the whole method — I showed up, and eventually somebody needed a body on the rail.

Then I went to Thailand to do a Day Skipper course. And the thing that changed everything wasn't the course. It was the people on it. They told me about an industry I had no idea existed — yachting. Boats with crew. People being paid to do the thing I'd been reading about since I was a kid.

The right place, and the right people. I'd found my circle, by accident, my own way.

The week after, I passed my STCW — five days of sea survival, firefighting, first aid and safety training, and the minimum ticket anyone needs before a boat will hire them. That was it. I was inside a world I hadn't known about a month earlier.

A decade later I'm a chef on superyachts. Sailing and cooking were the first two things that ever really pulled me, and both of them reached me the same way — through somebody who was already there.

That's what I'm building EducatedTraveler for. Not to shortcut the work — you still do the work. What I want to shortcut is the years of not knowing the door was even there.

What you joined. Some of you signed up for this. Some of you I added myself, because I thought you'd want to know what I was building. Either way I then went quiet for a while, so let me say properly what it is — and if it isn't for you, there's a link at the bottom to leave, no hard feelings.

I'm a private chef, and that's where I'm starting, because it's the world I actually know — who really teaches and who only performs, what's worth spending your time off on, what's just a good photograph. It already goes wider than cooking and it will keep going wider, but I'd rather be genuinely useful to my own people first than vaguely useful to everyone.

It's three things.

The Atlas is the map: crafts, and for each one, where in the world it's still most alive and who will actually teach it to you rather than only perform it. It's free, and anyone can use it.

The Circle is you. And it's less a mailing list than a question I'd like you to sit with now and then.

If you stopped and actually listened to yourself — what would you want to learn? Not for a week off. For the person you want to be in five years.

Most of us never make the space to ask it. The season fills up, the years go by, and the answer stays somewhere at the back. So that's what this is for: a reason to pause, work out what you actually want, and then let me go and find who really teaches it. When I do, you hear first, before the page is public.

A Lab Week is what happens when you answer it. Five days with one master, in his own workshop, with a small group — ten to fifteen of us, no more. Not a demonstration you watch, and not a holiday with an apron. You work with your hands the whole week, on his equipment, on the thing he has spent his life on.

It isn't only the workshop. Where we eat, who we meet, what happens in the evenings — I build that too. A craft you learn beside other people stays with you differently than one you learn alone, and the people are usually what you keep.

One craft, one master, one place. Then I go and find the next one. The catalogue is here if you want to see what's on it so far.

What to expect from me. I won't write often, and never just to fill a schedule. When something real comes up — a master who opens his door, a place worth knowing, a week worth taking off for — you'll hear it here first, before it goes public. That's the only promise I'm making, and it's the whole reason to be on this list.

The first Lab Week is nearly ready. I'll write you about it in a few days, and you'll have it before anyone else does.

So here's the question. Take a minute with it, then hit reply:

What skill would you learn, for the future you?

There's no wrong answer and I'm not selling against it. Tell me, and I'll go looking for who really teaches it. That's genuinely how I choose where to go next.

Hit reply, or message me — it comes straight to me, not to an office.

Until the next one,
— Arnaud

P.S. If someone you know would belong here, send them to the Circle — I don't advertise, so word of mouth is genuinely the only way this grows.

You plate a mousse in the galley. It's perfect. It goes up two decks in thirty degrees, and by the time it reaches the guest it's soup.

Gelatine melts at body temperature. Agar holds to about eighty-five. Nobody told me that at the time. I understood it much later, watching another chef reach for agar instead of gelatine, and he told me why.

If you cook privately — on a boat, in a house, for the same few people every day — you know that moment. The thing that kept going wrong, that no book ever quite fixed, until somebody standing next to you showed you in ten seconds.

I said I'd write when the first Lab Week was ready. It is, and it's five days of exactly that — in Martin Lippo's lab in Barcelona, 22–26 October.

It's built for private and yacht chefs. And it matters to me that the first is this craft. Cooking is what pulled me, about ten years ago, and it has carried me a long way since.

Why this, and not something easier. I've cooked fifteen years, most of them privately, and never went to culinary school. It started in Darwin, in the north of Australia, washing dishes in a Tex-Mex place. One afternoon after service the chef needed an extra hand. He gave me a knife and showed me how to cut. That's how I started.

Everything since, I learned standing next to someone who already knew. And when there was nobody, I read — everything I could find on the science of cooking, for years. But reading is one thing. Doing it with your own hands is what we're all craving, in reality. So I went.

And even then, I thought the modernist part was extra. Nobody needs a foam. I had it backwards. It was never about the foam. What you learn is what's happening when something goes wrong — the siphon that collapses, the emulsion that splits on day four, the sauce that has to hold six hours on a crossing. That's what lets you fix it at eight with guests already sitting, instead of starting again.

So I went and found the teacher. I'd followed Martin Lippo for years. Chefs I'd worked with had done his class, in Spanish. What existed was a class here and there, never the whole thing in English. So when I started EducatedTraveler he was the first person I emailed. We had never met and nobody put us in touch.

He answered, and we met at his lab in Barcelona. He got what I was trying to build faster than I expected, and started proposing things to do around the week himself.

Then he told me how he first came to Europe from Argentina. He didn't take a plane. He went down to the docks, found a sailing yacht looking for crew, and left on it — a famous racing boat, as it turned out. Three months aboard. Years later he went on a dive trip in Fiji as a guest, and still ended up in the galley, cooking a couple of the nights himself.

I grew up in the mountains of France, about as far from the sea as this country gets, and I got out the same way — by going where the boats were and asking. Strange thing to have in common with the man who's going to teach you spherification.

He's also the one who'll tell you straight that liquid nitrogen is rarely practical on a boat. I trust a teacher who tells you which of his own tools to leave at home.

Why Barcelona. These techniques were invented an hour and a half up the coast, at elBulli. When it closed in 2011 the chefs who built that language came back to Barcelona and opened restaurants here — Disfrutar, run by three of them, was named the best in the world in 2024. So here it's still a working trade, not history. It's also where my boat is, a 1979 schooner I'm slowly putting back together.

The week itself. Five days, thirty-five hours, hands in, in Martin's lab, 22–26 October, in English. Martin picked the techniques around what a galley actually needs. Texturisers, spherification, foams and siphons, sous-vide, nitrogen — which on a boat means prep that holds, ingredients that survive a long gap between ports, and service you can run alone.

You leave with a certificate signed at Vakuum for the thirty-five hours, the recipe and theory dossiers, and photographs of your own work shot by his team. Nobody honest promises you a job. But the next time a boat asks what you can actually do, you'll have something to show instead of something to say.

€1,500. It only runs if ten chefs have paid by 15 September — if that doesn't happen, everybody is refunded in full. I'd rather tell you that now than pretend. It goes public on Wednesday, so you're hearing it first, which is the point of the Circle.

The week itself is here. The craft, and where it's strongest in the world, is on the catalogue. And the long version of where all this came from is here.

I'm writing this from the galley in Yalıkavak, while the guests are off on a big day out.

If you're thinking about it, just hit reply: what does your October look like? That's the real question with this one. The money is the easy part; the calendar never is.

Hit reply — it comes straight to me, not to an office.

Until the next one,
— Arnaud

P.S. You almost certainly know a chef this was built for. Send them the page and let them read it cold — the price and the terms are on it, so you are not selling them anything and nothing comes back to you. One person forwarding that to the right chef is worth more than anything else I could do this week.