Dinner brings New Zealand to you, for a conversation about travel around a long table in a Hong Kong private kitchen

Travel has the potential to broaden our horizons, and entrepreneurial chef cum travel journalist Andrea Oschetti has found a way of getting a mind-altering fix without leaving Hong Kong – by holding dinners designed to spark intelligent conversation about travel.

“We invite our guests to break bread with interesting people from around the world who are able to offer a fresh perspective, not the one you’ll read in a guidebook,” says Oschetti, the founder of Blueflower Travel Company.

This month’s Travel Salon dinner – on August 28 – will see New Zealand Maori artists Jacob Tautari, Leilani Rickard and Rick Peters join guests at Oschetti’s book-filled salon in Wong Chuk Hang, an industrial neighbourhood artists have colonised, for a Maori-inspired three-course Italian meal.

This isn’t about fusion cooking, but about offering a fresh perspective on a place. At the time of writing, Oschetti was still working on how exactly Maori-inspired Italian food would look and taste – but did say one of the central dishes was likely to involve burrata, a semi-soft Italian cheese, covered with edible ingredients such as olives, and made to look like Planet Earth.

“It’s an experiment. It’s very experimental and also very experiential. How do you feel about cutting into the Earth? I would like to share what the Maori has to say about my burrata,” says Oschetti, who has a degree in anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

“The important thing about this concept is that we need to perform and participate to get something out of experiencing diversity, rather than by just watching, which is often what happens when we travel or hear a lecture. Food is a universal language and a fantastic connector to be able to understand each other,” says Oschetti.