The gourmet club

As an adventurer, Per Wimmer likes to forge new frontiers in everything he does. When he's not performing a tandem skydive over the peak of Everest, or completing launch-and-re-entry simulations in preparation for the three space flights he has booked, the London-based investment banker can be found testing his mettle at the world's most electrifying restaurants.

Of course he has eaten at Noma, the Copenhagen sensation anointed the world's most outstanding restaurant by the 900-strong expert panel of S. Pellegrino's World's 50 Best awards. The Harvard-educated financier found chef René Redzepi's 12-course degustation "totally in a league of its own" though, like many before him, he baulked at the live shrimp course. "For the first time in a long time, I came across an adventure which I thought was just a bit too much," he laughs.

At Elton John's annual Winter Ball, Wimmer feasted on creations from the team at elBullí, the most influential kitchen in the world until it packed up its Pacojets in 2011. ("I must say I wasn't too impressed. The main course was like a small starter, so everybody left there wanting to buy pizza.") He has also broken bread with astronaut Buzz Aldrin at The Ivy in London, and gorged on truffles in St Bart's with PayPal co-founder Elon Musk.

Dining at such a discriminating level sits well with his intrepid nature. "It's taking a must-do habit of human beings - eating - and turning that into something that is unique, adventurous, pushing boundaries, counterintuitive," Wimmer explains.

It is not only millionaire adventurers being swept up in the euphoria of extreme dining. The combined force of global restaurant rankings, the mass media's infatuation with all things edible and the relative ease of air travel has spurred a race of globetrotting gourmets with an unprecedented obsession with eating.

The Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki tapped the zeitgeist in his short story "The Gourmet Club", about five gastronomes who "scoured all the eateries of Tokyo, hoping to impress their fellow members by discovering some wondrous new flavour". Tanizaki writes that their mission is to unearth "a symphony of foods! And orchestral cuisine! ... Food whose flavours would make the flesh melt and raise the soul to heaven."

Fine-dining fanatics come in many different guises. Some are professionals, like Swedish photographer Per-Anders Jorgensen - one of the more enthusiastic food pilgrims around (you can follow him at #pa_jorgensen). Fellow photographer Bob Noto is another who seems to pop up all over the plate. "He's the Zelig of the European food scene," says one Australian critic. And there's the young Turkish investment banker Ali Kurshat Altinsoy, an acolyte of high dining whose Food Snob blog chronicled his refined appetites until he went professional and joined the Noma mod squad as organiser of its annual forage fest, the MAD food camp.

Amateurs are no less susceptible to the siren song of elite dining. Andy Hayler is a UK technology expert who, on an impulse, dined at every restaurant awarded the top, three-star rating by the Michelin guide in 2004 (a feat he repeated again in 2008, 2010 and again last year).

He started a website, andyhayler.com, devoted to his gastronomic journeys and has since become a sought-after writer and critic. His motivation, he insists, has never wavered.

"My passion is food, and seeking out the best places is my goal," explains Hayler, who estimates he has dined out three to six times a week for 20 years. "These days, places pop up in the most unlikely locations, and that will continue to happen, so I will keep on as long as I am able to."

Four years after Hayler's achievement, in May 2008, a Swiss motorcycle courier called Pascal Henry embarked on a quixotic bid to eat at all 68 three-starred restaurants in Europe in 68 days. He was midway through his "route 68" pilgrimage when he vanished after a bravura 30-course meal on the Costa Brava at elBullí, at the time considered the pinnacle of international gastronomy. He did not pay the bill.

Henry resurfaced the following year to explain himself. "This frenzy of tables, it was like an addiction," he told Swiss blogger Jacques Perrin. "In the beginning I was swept up in the euphoria, but the further the journey advanced, the less it made sense. It became almost insane."

By the time he sat down at the prized Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence, "I knew it had no meaning. I felt like a prisoner." A week later, he limped out of elBullí after midnight, got in his car and drove off into the darkness.

Think of it as the 21st-century equivalent of the Grand Tour. Where once aristocrats embarked on continental journeys of discovery to brush up on the ancient world and art history, today the questing class seeks enlightenment not in galleries and museums but in eating houses.

Travellers such as Dutch insurance executive David Diepbrink, whose recent dining highlights include Noma, Tickets in Barcelona (run by Ferran Adrià, late of elBullí, and his brother, Albert), Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck in England, Jean-Georges in New York, and "a local seafood restaurant on the coast of Portugal". The 41-year-old lives in Luxembourg and travels 45 weekends a year for pleasure - to visit friends, to watch football matches or concerts, and to eat.

"I always joke that since I'm not married, I need to have an expensive hobby," he explains. "I like travel and food, so it is just a nice combination, no? I don't care for fancy cars or expensive watches. Compared with that, eating a few times a year in good restaurants is not that obscene." Several times a year, he will fly somewhere solely to eat - within reason. He declined a last-minute invitation to elBullí before it closed because the cost involved was "morally unacceptable for me".

Diepbrink is a modest man. Dining in fine restaurants is not about prestige or bragging rights for him: "Bragging about something that you can describe only as luck, that's never something one should do."

Jeff Brady describes himself as an average vet from Melbourne's inner west, but his lifelong dedication to fantastic food is anything but common. He attended his first cooking class in 1984 and has been hooked on cooks ever since. A lifetime of classes and food tours has introduced him to pioneering Australian chefs such as Ben Shewry, Tetsuya Wakuda and Christine Manfield. Internationally, he has chewed the fat with Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini and Spanish radicals Juan Mari Arzak and his daughter Elena, and Andoni Luis Aduriz.

He consumed the meal that transformed him from consumer to connoisseur of food at Alain Passard's Parisian luminary, L'Arpège, in 1988. Brady still recalls, vividly, the chaud-froid (hot-cold) eggs to begin, and the confit tomato dessert to finish. "There were unusual combinations such as lobster and turnip, and a dish of crab wrapped in cabbage leaves and salmon finished with a sauce made from its blood. The ideas and flavours were incredible. I have been back five times and every time it just gets better," he says.

Now, before he goes anywhere, the first thing Brady sorts out is his stomach: "I have not made travel plans for many, many years that do not first involve thinking about where to eat. Any museums, galleries, exhibitions or shows are very much secondary."

Towards the end of 2011, he and his wife Annie embarked on a DIY La Grande Bouffe through France, Spain and Italy, notching up 30 Michelin stars in Europe's most renowned restaurants, including all of Spain's three-star Michelins and legendary French and Italian stalwarts including Cracco, Le Calandre and L'Arpège, again. It was "a very memorable time", he says. It was also the most money he has ever spent on food in one hit.

"Cooking and eating is pretty much my world out of veterinary science," he says. "My mind is always thinking about food and wine."

His friend Jon Murphy in Sydney is equally obsessed. While the mathematician turned insurance exec usually restricts himself to one eating odyssey a year, he whets his appetite between trips by plotting the next one.

"I'm not sure I'm willing to confess the full details of the planning process," he says, "but suffice to say that there are spreadsheets involved and it can all get a bit complex and rather detailed."

Sometimes those best-laid plans can go astray. A few years back he secured a late reservation at The Fat Duck in Bray, 50 kilometres west of London - currently ranked 13th in the world - on the same day he was due to travel from Barcelona to Paris. He had to shelve the spreadsheet and leg it to London. "On arrival at Heathrow, the very stern lady at Customs was puzzled by my paperwork. I had filled in the box asking where I would be staying in the UK with the words 'transit only' because I was leaving on the last Eurostar for Paris that evening. She didn't seem to understand why a transit passenger with an Australian passport would want to leave the airport, so she gave me a steely look and asked: 'What is the purpose of your visit to the United Kingdom?' " Murphy told the truth: "I have come for lunch." She smiled and waved him through.

Davis Yu, a 23-year-old Melbourne restaurateur, travels once every two or three weeks and posts albums of his most memorable meals at davisdiary.com. His blog entries bounce from yakitori chicken wings in Tokyo one day to pig's ears and Brussels sprouts in Los Angeles, 48 hours later. For him, food is the key to a destination. To understand a city properly, you explore its extremes - from the most acclaimed restaurants to local markets. "You look at tourism these days - people want to go and experience a certain culture," Yu explains. "I think food is becoming that portal into a location."

Hong Kong-born Ruby Yao, a Stanford graduate who worked briefly as an investment banker before retiring at the grand age of 31, now spends half the year pursuing her twin passions of hotels and food. For Yao, cities are defined not by their ornate architecture or agreeable climate, but by the cut of their restaurants.

"If I go to London, I want to try [Australian chef Brett Graham's] The Ledbury, and Heston Blumenthal. And the primary reason for me to go to Shanghai would be for restaurants," she says. Specifically, a legendary little joint called Jesse that serves "the ultimate Shanghainese comfort food. I would put it above Noma."

Yao, Diepbrink and Wimmer are all regulars at an event billed by Forbes magazine as "the ultimate dinner party" and by Huffington Post as "the world's most coveted dinner tickets"; Dining Impossible is a three-day gastronomic bender in Copenhagen organised by Kristian Brask Thomsen, a suave Scandinavian whose business card lists "bon vivant" and "social connector" among his professional talents.

At the most recent Dining Impossible, held in November, 16 hand-picked diners paid 1500 euros a head to feast on more than 70 courses in 72 hours. Their accomplices in the kitchen were star chefs Ronny Emborg from restaurant AOC, Geranium's Rasmus Kofoed (named world's best chef in the 2011 Bocuse D'or international cooking competition) and, of course, Redzepi at Noma.

Brask Thomsen also hosts a more regular bacchanal called The Dinner Party, in which he secures the private room at the 42-seat Noma - a restaurant that receives 1.2 million reservation requests annually. Guest lists are not divulged but the last four dinner parties have featured "world-famous actors, billionaires, a Tour de France winner, pop stars, models, artists, a CEO of a major financial institution and - I think - a spy," says Thomsen. "But also 'regular' foodies travelling, spending their savings just to experience these epic dinner parties."

Anyone seriously devoted to culinary adventure and enlightenment has eaten - or desperately wants to eat - at Noma. As Brask Thomsen says, "The great dining scene of Copenhagen has undoubtedly become our old kingdom's best business cards towards the rest of the globe."

Humans have always prioritised food above all else. Eating well is essential to everyone, whether grindingly poor or fabulously rich. But the preoccupations of this new breed of gastro-tourists transcend the imperative. For them, a basic behaviour is elevated to the esoteric and the exotic, something unattainable to all but a fortunate few. As B. R. Myers wrote in his widely publicised attack on "foodies" in The Atlantic Monthly, "It has always been crucial to the gourmet's pleasure that he eat in ways the mainstream cannot afford."

Pat Nourse, deputy editor of Gourmet Traveller and editor of its national restaurant guide, argues that an obsession with fine dining is not all that different from a passion for certain arts or sports.

"Why some people go for the food over the ballet or the cricket, that's just your personal quirk," says Nourse. "There's something about witnessing a really talented person at the peak of their powers that is quite magical, whether it's the way someone performs a pirouette in the ballet, or turns a sentence in a novel, or kicks a football."

Like Good Weekend on Facebook to get regular updates on upcoming stories and events – www.facebook.com/GoodWeekendMagazine