Running two establishments in the capital of Austria, Filippou has become Central Europe's Mediterranean ambassador, with cuisine inspired by his dual roots - Greek and Austrian - and he is in charge of Konstantin Filippou, which boasts two stars, and also a wine bar, the O boufés bistrot. Filippou has succeeded in consolidating his status as a leading light of new Viennese cuisine - despite the fact that he opened the restaurant amid a fully-fledged economic crisis - with fare "based on produce, but most especially on emotion".

Emotion which largely emerges from a fondness for memories: “we are nothing without our memory, and my recipes go back to the memories of my childhood, and Austrian and Greek cuisine". This duality is present throughout the talk by the chef, who defines himself "as a chef with two hearts", enabling him to produce recipes reaching out to the emotional component Filippou claims for gastronomy. He demonstrated this on stage with a recipe based on smoked oysters in beef stock representing the Central European fondness for marrow, albeit with a Mediterranean touch. A combination of flavours and cultures, where Central Europe's marrow becomes the Mediterranean oyster to continue the search for emotion among diners. A logical criterion for a chef who does not believe in frontiers.

As he unravelled his memory of taste, Filippou continued to insist that "gastronomy is soul", and so in his opinion the perfection of a recipe is not as important as "obtaining a comprehensive experience that produces good energy, and makes diners feel at home". And so it is understandable for Konstantin Filippou to claim that, even though "I have learned a lot from the best chefs", he has learned the most "from people who live in my city, from what they eat, how they live, their tastes etc. The most important thing is to focus on people, and how they live their lives". The consequence of this observation on the recovery of memory was the presentation of another recipe with snails, "a product which historically replaced sausages in the diet of many people in Vienna", which he now recreates with snails in the guise of sea produce. Here again the Mediterranean because, lest we forget, "there can be no frontiers in cuisine".

Konstantin Filippou rounded off his talk with the claim that creativity plays a major role in gastronomy, but "sometimes we think too much", and what we really want to say is that "this is out there, in you and in what you are".