I'm Brad Steven. I import wine, and with my brother I run fifteen restaurants. Wine bars, a gastropub, a European restaurant, an Irish pub. Twenty-two years of it. Somewhere in there I became a sommelier, which mostly means I taste for a living and call it work.

Culinaire Gourmet is where the other half lives: the Mediterranean. I'm half Lebanese, half Syrian, and the pull toward that part of the world isn't a marketing decision, it's where my family's table came from. The work has taken me across France more times than I can count, through Italy for the wine, and into Spain, Croatia, Morocco, Lebanon. 

What I write here comes from the other side of the bar. I can read a wine list and tell you what the somm was thinking, where a producer is cutting a corner or taking a risk, why a dish is built the way it is. That's the lens. Producer visits, recipes I actually cook, and notes from the cities I keep going back to.

It's all heading somewhere: a Mediterranean cookbook, in progress.