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When you’re lucky enough to get a visit from Sam Sifton, The New York Times’s food editor, you eat. And when you eat with Sam, you learn and you gorge.

This week, we did oodles of both at Momofuku Seiobo in Sydney, thanks to the chef Paul Carmichael.

He cooked for a small group of us. We were seated at the bar by the kitchen, giving us a chance to watch in awe as he and his team delivered a meal unlike any other. It started with a savory plantain doughnut, followed by sea urchin on crunchy cassava, duck, fish heads (they were amazing, really), a cold pork soup and a spiced cake I’m hoping will appear in my dreams.

This was the “strong personal imprint” that Pete Wells, The Times’s main restaurant critic, identified when he wrote about Paul in 2017.

Somehow, near a casino in Sydney, he wrote, there was a chef from the United States via Barbados, who “treats Australia as a Caribbean island that somehow got loose and wandered thousands of miles into the Pacific.”