Experimental Dining

Performance, Experience and Ideology in Contemporary Creative Restaurants

Paul Geary

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789383454
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Fenomenologia in filosofia

Experimental Dining examines the work of four of the world's leading creative restaurants: Noma, elBulli, The Fat Duck and Alinea.

Using ideas from performance studies, cultural studies, philosophy and economics, the book explores the creation of the dining experience as a form of multisensory performance.

It examines the construction of the world of the restaurants and their creative methods, the experience of dining and the broader ideological frames within which the work takes place. Experimental Dining brings together ideas around food, philosophy, performance and cultural politics to offer an interdisciplinary understanding of the practice and experience of creative restaurants.

The author contends that the work of the experimental restaurant, while operating explicitly within an economy of experiences, is not absolutely determined by that political or economic context. Its practice has the potential to appeal to more than idle curiosity for novelty. It can be unsettling and revealing, provocative and evocative, personal and political, experimental and considered, thoughtful and sensual. Or in other words, that the food event can be art.

Primary readership will be academics, researchers and scholars in the fields of food studies, performance studies and those with interests in the philosophy of everyday life, cognitive science and sensory studies. It will be a useful resource as supplementary reading on courses on Food and Performance. It may also have interest for chefs, gastronomes, restaurateurs and artists

1

Preparation: The Creative World of the Restaurants

Before the aesthetic experience of the work of the restaurants can take place, the artwork itself needs to be created. This chapter examines the creation of the artwork of the restaurants through consideration of the grounding assumptions they employ as the foundation for both the work itself and how it is understood by those who make it. It also explores the construction of the restaurant space itself as a site and world of performance practice alongside the methods, approaches and practices used to create the work. The chapter begins by exploring the overarching conceptual positions of each of the restaurants, how they position their own practice and what each of the chefs and restaurants is attempting to do or explore. This is followed by analysis of the creation and curation of the world of the practice – the material, conceptual and artistic construction of the restaurant as a site of performance and a site, like in immersive practices, that performs, that houses other performances and operates as a frame for the performances and experiences it contains. The penultimate section of the chapter addresses the creative practice of developing and making the food: the methodologies, skills and craft of artistic production. The chapter ends by turning to Pau Arenós’ term, technoemotional cuisine (an alternative to molecular gastronomy), which I argue is a more useful term in that it encapsulates the approach and ideological positioning of the restaurants, as well as housing within it the possibility for an artistic and aesthetic understanding of the practice.

Restaurant Philosophy

On 10 December 2006, chefs Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal and Thomas Keller, with food scientist Harold McGee, published in the Observer their ‘Statement on “New Cookery”’. In this statement, which reads like a manifesto, they set out the four principles that they believe underpin ‘New Cookery’, by which they mean the work of their own and others’ avant garde restaurants. Unlike some of the manifestos of artistic practice from the historical avant garde, which tended to overtly state the political position of the work, this statement engages a politics that is presented as self-evident – not a radical statement of the ‘new’, but a seemingly reasonable account that attempted to de-radicalise the work of ‘molecular gastronomy’, to demonstrate it as a ‘natural’ evolution of cooking techniques. Helstosky argues that modernist cuisine (one of the many names used for experimental, molecular gastronomist cooking) is fundamentally an attempt to reinvent cooking (2017). However, in the statement, this new trend in gastronomic practice is presented as an evolution rather than revolution, a return to histories and cultures of food preparation and a continuation of its ongoing development. In some ways, the work of the chefs is revolutionary, adopting new approaches, techniques and technologies, but it is also an evolution, building on, and not a radical break from, traditional, historical and quotidian food practices and cultures.

In the statement, they write that the four key tenets of their work are as follows:

1. Excellence, openness and integrity.
2. Valuing of tradition and building on it in ‘the ongoing evolution of [their] craft’.
3. Embracing innovation.
4. The belief that ‘cooking can affect people in profound ways, and that a spirit of collaboration and sharing is essential to true progress in developing this potential’.

(Blumenthal 2009: 126–27)

The statement is an attempt, on the part of the chefs, to shift the frame of their practice from the scientific to gastronomy as an artform, countering the predominantly ‘scientific’ frame that lingers through cultural understandings of molecular gastronomy. They argue that dining, because it ‘engages all the senses as well as the mind’, can be understood as ‘the most complex and comprehensive of the performing arts’ (in Blumenthal 2009: 127). Their suggestion is that the dining experience is a performing art and that, in addressing all of the senses (rather than just the classically higher aesthetic senses of sight and sound), the tactile and chemical senses can be considered as part of the complexity of the aesthetic experience. Throughout the statement is an underlying preoccupation with ‘pleasure’, that everything is ultimately in service of the deliciousness of the food and emotional affects for the diner. Their politics is one of easy pleasure, of pure hedonism, irrelevant of the processes and conditions of production. For the chefs, the artistic aims of their work are always subservient to a pleasure principle.

In the summer of 2005, elBulli set down in a 23-point document their own definition of the philosophy of the restaurant. In the document, they articulate their approach to food, covering: its artistic potential, the desire for quality, the preference for vegetables and seafood over red meat and large cuts of poultry, the desire to ‘preserve the purity’ of ingredient’s original flavour, the desire for knowledge and collaboration, to appeal to all of the senses and the desire for creativity and breaking of conventions (Adrià et al. 2014g: 87). For elBulli, ‘The tasting menu is the finest expression of avant-garde cooking’ (Adrià et al. 2014g: 87) in that it engenders small and delicate yet powerfully flavoured courses and therefore allows for a greater range experimentation in the meal. It allows a broader range of gustatory practices to be explored in a single meal.

Two of the ‘defining’ qualities of elBulli, as articulated by the Adrià brothers and Soler, are the ‘technique-concept search’ and ‘the sixth sense’ (2014g: 396). The first of these is what they see as the pinnacle of creativity, in producing new practices or ideas for preparing and presenting food, through utilising new techniques or practices in the kitchen and developing new concepts. What constitutes a concept in each of the restaurants is never quite clear though often seems to involve some kind of idea that is rendered in practical form. At elBulli, the ‘technique-concept search’ was a movement away from relying on the recipes of others (other chefs and culturally inherited recipes) and involved an interrogative research and development process, exploring new methods of cooking, unusual or unconventional ingredients and creative ways of presenting food to the diner. The ‘sixth sense’ was elBulli’s term for the conceptual appreciation of their food and consisted of, amongst other things, ‘trickery, surprise, irony, provocation [and] decontextualisation’ (400). For Adrià, the ‘sixth sense’ was an attempt to reposition diners in relation to the food, to transform dining from sustenance and a social act to an activity that foregrounded the sensorial and aesthetic dimensions of experience (400). It was the twin drive towards the ‘technique-concept search’ and the ‘sixth sense’ that marked the innovative nature of elBulli’s practice. The first was manifested in the practice of the chefs, in the kitchen, whereas the second was about the positioning of the diner in relation to the experience. However, they coalesce in the drive for innovative cuisine that goes beyond traditional production processes and enters the domain of conceptual art and aesthetic experience. In both cases, there was an attempt to disrupt the everyday practice and experience of preparing and eating food.

In a similar way, the work at The Fat Duck can be categorised into those two perspectives of the drive in the kitchen and the drive in the dining room, coalescing in the work. Blumenthal writes that ‘[…] one of the key questions that still drives the Fat Duck [is]: What is flavour, and how do we perceive it?’ (2009: 87, original emphasis). Unlike Adrià’s broadly artistic focus in the search for technique-concepts, The Fat Duck is driven by a psychological and physiological inquiry into the workings of flavour and how that can be transformed into an experience for the diner. For Blumenthal, the overarching aim of the work, once it reaches the diner, is to provoke a pleasurable emotional response. Alongside the ‘deliciousness’ of the food, he wanted to ‘engage the emotions, provoking curiosity, amusement or even a child-like sense of wonder’ (Blumenthal 2009: 140). The underlying ethos of The Fat Duck is to bring together the pleasures of eating with the pleasurable feelings of curiosity, amusement and wonder. Blumenthal reflects that the pleasures of dining are grounded not only in the multisensory encounter with the food but also that they are framed by the specific contexts of the experience and the memories brought, or associations made, by the diner (Blumenthal 2010: 6). Indeed, an overarching concern for Blumenthal is to trigger memories (in part as a means of intensifying the sensory experience). This invocative attempt includes both personal and cultural memory, though inevitably more the latter than the former. Cultural memory, which we might rather think of as a heritage and context, is utilised to intensify pleasure and satisfaction. The position adopted by The Fat Duck is that an element of familiarity contributes to enjoyment. Of course, the predominantly British heritage and history that underscores The Fat Duck’s work means this particular appeal is made to those who somehow identify with that cultural frame. The conceptual impetus of The Fat Duck is to draw on cultural and culinary histories, scientific and psychological knowledges and to make use of new technologies to create an experience for the diner that is pleasurable, carrying traces of the familiar in service of the pleasurable while nevertheless producing something out of the ordinary.

The overarching concept of the work of Noma is that of Nordic cuisine. This is instituted at various levels, through the choice and sourcing of ingredients, through the preparatory methods to transform those ingredients into the dish and the construction of the scenography of the restaurant. For Redzepi, this was an overtly political act to counter the dominance of French and Spanish cuisine in European fine dining (in Skyum-Nielsen 2010: 11). Redzepi writes that the ‘time and place’ of the contemporary Nordic region was the foundation on which Noma would layer ‘conceptual thoughts about the dishes, such as innovation [and] technique […]’ (in Skyum-Nielsen 2010: 13). In a similar way to elBulli and The Fat Duck, Noma is positioned in relation to a particular geographic and cultural heritage, coupled with new techniques for the preparation of dishes. However, where elBulli and The Fat Duck use ‘history’ as a creative impetus, Noma’s work attempts to preserve their regional history in the dishes. In practical terms, this can amount to the same thing (the use of regional or national histories, heritages and tastes as part of the creative development of dishes), but there is an important difference in how the chefs conceive of the work. In Adrià’s and Blumenthal’s writings, they often foreground the pleasures of eating, to which Spanish or Catalan and British food traditions (respectively) are in service; in Redzepi’s writings, the Nordic is almost invariably at the forefront.

In contrast to these, Alinea is framed as being a break from being overly determined by historical lineages and contexts. While their work is inevitably entangled with its various contexts, Alinea professes to continually attempt to break away and discover new modes of food preparation and presentation without recourse to a historical or contextual narrative for justification. It is the search for innovation in and of itself rather than contextual reflection and reconfiguration that drives the cuisine. In Achatz’s edited book, Alinea, which is both a recipe book and a series of reflections on the restaurant, Mark McClusky writes that ‘Alinea’s food doesn’t evoke, it provokes. It’s not comfort food that looks to the past; it’s challenging food that looks to the future […]’ (2008: 19). There is a useful tension established, here, between evocation and provocation although McClusky is too direct in suggesting that Alinea engages only in the latter and not the former. While elBulli, The Fat Duck and Noma frame their work as evocative (to bring to consciousness or recall the past or an idea of a location) and Alinea presents theirs as provocative (to stimulate a reaction), both seem to be at work in all of the restaurants. There is a balance between the comforting familiarity of the evocative, utilising common ingredients and preparations to evoke personal memories connected to and encouraged by dining (in the manner of the Proustian madeleine), and the provocative, where unusual ingredients, combinations, concepts and presentations are designed and deployed to provoke a more intense reaction to and reading of the food. In the case of the evocative, the diner is positioned as a genteel receiver of pleasure whose engagement with the dining experience operates at the level of a certain emotional satisfaction aroused by the food. In the case of the provocative, the diner is called to engage more directly in making sense of the experience and to be awoken to the possibilities of sensory stimulation beyond the usual confines of the everyday.

In utilising cultural food heritages and appealing to conventional tastes, the restaurants are continuing a particular ideological position in their practice. In Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Raw and the Cooked, he explores how the ‘empirical categories’ of raw and cooked, fresh and decayed, moistened and burned, are themselves the result of cultural performances, ‘adopting the standpoint of a particular culture’ (1969: 1). The very means by which we conceive of something as food, as edible, as distinct from inedible, raw, over-cooked or decayed/rotten, is culturally determined. Indeed, even the choice of ‘raw ingredients’ carries the traces of a cultural frame of what constitutes the edible, rendering the ‘raw’ in some ways always already ‘cooked’ (in Lévi-Strauss’ sense as ready to be eaten). While there is some flexibility around the liminal points between the categories of ‘raw’ and ‘cooked’, they nevertheless rely on cultural narratives to mark the distinctions between them. However experimental the restaurants’ work is, there is still an appeal to cultural narratives of edibility and the pleasurable and the use of conventional ingredients and cooking processes. The work of the restaurants is never absolutely new or original because it relies upon and makes use of cultural histories of food preparation and consumption, which themselves figure in the production of the tastes of the diners and their enjoyment. We can read this as ideological, rather than merely a process of enculturation, to inflect it with a politics: one that naturalises tastes derived from ‘national cuisines’, suggesting that tastes, which themselves have been produced through familiarity with a national-cultural cuisine, are simply true, thereby intimately connecting a practice of the body with(in) a national framework. In using this to appeal to pleasure, the restaurants are utilising those tastes and culinary heritages in service of selling a pleasurable experience.

Explicitly for both elBulli and The Fat Duck, there is a rhetoric employed around the role of childhood in determining the diners’ tastes in, preferences for and enjoyment of food. Understanding the formation of the subject through childhood experiences, often (though by no means exclusively) practiced within a particular cultural framework, the restaurants deploy a rather static notion of the subject and tastes, as though the tasting adult emerges fully formed from childhood and that the pleasure of the experience needs to conform to those immaturely formed tastes. This then appears to be the basis of the restaurants’ playful approach to food histories and conventions. While they might play with, rework and in some ways depart from those traditions, they cannot stray too far from the cultural performances of raw and cooked, precisely because they are so ingrained. They enjoy making use of the spectacle of surprise, but for this surprise to appeal and work for more than any given individual diner, it requires a foundational knowledge of a cultural heritage of cuisine (how can we be surprised by a deconstruction of a classic dish if we do not know the reference point that is the focus of its activity?). For surprise to work as something pleasurable and delightful (which in the restaurants is the guiding principle; it cannot slip into shock and disgust), it must remain on the pleasurable side of the line of tension between the creative or new and the traditional. For each of the restaurants, in the pursuit of pleasure, there is a constraint on the creativity of the practice: it cannot radically transgress the performative narratives of raw and cooked, narratives that are taken to be almost absolute, given that they appeal to a seemingly spontaneous experience of pleasure.

There is a tension that underscores the work of the restaurants. The generic understanding of the practice of molecular gastronomy, as a radical practice and revolution in cuisine, is countered by the restaurants themselves in order to reassure (potential) diners that the experience will nevertheless be pleasurable and will appeal to pre-existing food tastes and cultures. The restaurants explore new ideas, practices, ingredients and presentations, but always with a view to the diners’ experience of pleasure and a degree of familiarity. There is an attempt to balance the evolutionary against the revolutionary and the evocative against the provocative. In part, this is driven by the need to sell the experience to diners and the experience itself cannot be too unsettling; it needs to remain on the pleasurable side of novelty. There is, however, still a degree of the unsettling and of estrangement in the work, as it does not merely perpetuate food heritages, traditions and cultures in a recognisably traditional form, which is precisely what makes it unsettling rather than an absolute rejection and bold originality. The artistic production and aesthetic experience, respectively in the creative work of the chefs and the sensory and reflective encounter of that work by the diner, navigate this tension between the traditional and the new although in some cases moves more clearly into one realm than the other.

Constructing the World

The construction of the space of the restaurant is important in two regards: first, it is a curated and created work in its own right, and second, it is the site that contains, frames and provides the conditions for the performances and experiences that operate and are enacted and performed within it. In Heidegger’s formulation of Being-in-the-world, he conceptualises Dasein as always already ‘thrown’ into the world; it always finds itself already ‘there’ (1962: 174). Heidegger writes of this in a generic sense, as a theorisation of how Dasein is never free of the world, never able to be conceived as a fully autonomous individual that can be separated from the world. It is not some particular space in Heidegger’s theorisation although in practice it is always some particular world. As such, the world has a significant bearing on experience. Not only must experience take place within the world (across the continuum of Being-in-the-world, never entirely conceivable at merely one or the other end of the spectrum) but also the world itself furnishes experience with its spatial, temporal and conceptual horizon (its significance). In his writing on art, Heidegger inflects the notion of world slightly differently from its deployment in Being and Time. He writes that the artwork opens up and sets up a world, where the Thingly qualities of art are granted their significance in the open space of the world of the work, which itself is the working quality of the work of art (2011a: 108–09). This world of the work of art is distinct from the more general worldhood, in that it enables disclosure and uncovering; it is a consecrated world that engages with the more general world. While for Heidegger this is largely a conceptual world opened by the work of art (though of course that can never be thought as separate from its material conditions and articulation), it can be extended to think of it as an inhabitable space, a space in which the audience, spectator or, in this case, diner can dwell physically as well as conceptually.

In this section, I turn to the construction of the worlds of the restaurants, their scenographic construction, in order to think of them as akin to site-specific performance, where the site is not set at a distance from the audience (or in this case the diner), but rather is a space to be navigated and experienced from within, operating as an encompassing spatial and conceptual horizon for the individual acts and experiences within it. This in turn becomes a background or frame for those performances, providing a grounding. I do not claim the grander ontological thrust of Heidegger’s theorisation (which deals with being as such constituted and conditioned by, and related to, the world) but rather utilise his model to think about the experiences that take place within these particular worlds. I do argue that the spaces go beyond being merely a material site, by thinking about how the creation and curation of the spaces contribute to the processes of making sense of the experience, both through locating the experience and through operating as an artistic world of performance. The tension of the two worlds from Heidegger (the general world of Being-in-the-world and the artistic world of the opening established in/as the work of art) is manifested in the restaurants: they continue some of the (often unnoticed and everyday) workings of restaurants (the general world) and operate as an artistic world, where they set up a space outside of, yet always related to or in tension with, the quotidian world.

The continuum of Being and world allows for a consideration of how our experience is grounded in and produced by the material and ideological context within which it takes place. Alongside this are the particular workings of the world opened up by the work of art, whic...