Weeknote #4 : Disrupting the food experience

Last week we continued brainstorming ideas around creating experience based interventions for events. We’ve started to look a bit at food based events given that we have a couple of friends who are chefs. One of our friends Jean Claude whose food comprises of pintxos from Spain, Portugal and France has been doing a pop up restaurant at a local Red Hook cocktail bar. We’ve been talking with him around a food experience idea. Jean Claude’s food is bite size and every bite is an experience in itself, the texture,  taste,  aroma,  colors, all contribute in a way to make a sumptuous bite. Adding a meta layer of information around where the spices and the ingredients come from is definitely something that is of interest to us. Another way to look at this could be to activate the senses other than the taste buds, almost creating a sensory overload, visual or sound based (think Koyaanisqatsi).

We were also scouring through how others have looked at food based experiences, Ultraviolet, a restaurant in Shanghai by French chef Paul Pairet is an example of an enclosed dining hall where the walls are used to project imagery based on the food being served. Everything is orchestrated and curated to amplify the food experience. We were also fascinated by What Happens When, a temporary restaurant in NYC a couple of years ago, that changed its interiors every 30 days. There is something alluring about the temporal nature of things which is why ‘Sleep No More‘, an immersive site specific version of Macbeth where the audience is allowed to move about the different rooms of the fictional McKittrick Hotel was such a roaring hit. Moving images, loitering audience, changing interiors can make for some fascinating experiences. However, there is a fine line that separates something that is fun and something that is chaotic and annoying. Figuring out that difference and making something enjoyable by disrupting the food experience could actually make for a great project.