Looks that say good taste
Looks that say good taste
A question for Emily Post: What is the proper dish for serving caramel popcorn, curried, compressed, then cold-cooked in liquid nitrogen? Some possible answers, in the form of suitably radical housewares recently on view in a touring exhibition called Foodjects: Design and the New Cuisine in Spain.
Curated by Spanish designer Martin Azua and funded by his government, it is the latest in a series of one-country shows hosted by Apartment Zero, a design store and studio.
In celebration of the shop's 10th anniversary, its standard merchandise has been pared back, making way for a huge table laid with all kinds of inventive dishes, utensils, kitchenwares and ingredients. (They were specially shipped in from Spain; only a few are for sale.)
On opening night, chefs from nearby Minibar, Washington's centre for “molecular gastronomy'', were serving snacks that included that frigid popcorn (a dry-ice fog drifts out of your mouth when you eat it) as well as virtual olives (olive-shaped gel caps filled with fresh-squeezed olive juice) and beet tumbleweeds (fine threads of the vegetable, deep-fried and rolled into a crispy tangle).
As they ate those artworks from the gustatory cutting edge — Minibar founder Jose Andres is considered one of its patron saints — visitors got to contemplate design objects that tried to measure up.
A few were nothing more than old-hat modern: housewares in stainless steel or silicone that would have counted as “futuristic'' back when Camembert and crepes suzette were novelty dishes.
Several of Apartment Zero's foodjects, however, managed to match good looks with a conceptual heft worthy of this era, when ambitious chefs are as likely to know about surface tension and chemical bonds as stocks and papillotes.
- The Coporron glass by Martin Azua and Gerard Moline hybridises a standard “balloon'' (you would call it a copa in Spanish) and a traditional porron jug used to pour a drink into your mouth from a height. The stream's contact with the air and the way it hits the tongue should change the taste of any beverage.
Why not transform the experience? - Chefs today are keen to manage the order of sensations on our palates. The functional bowl called Apple Dome, by designers Deunor Bregana and Anne Ibanez Guridi, is all about helping them achieve that control: You work your way through the taste in its lid before exploring what is inside.
- The Eggs bowl by Antoni Arola looks standard but is subversive. It allows a chef to force radical contrasts on his guests: hot and cold, mild and spiced, fish and fruit. Imagine a bergamot and olive-oil gelato, maybe, nuzzled up against a spiced-eel stew.
- The Spoon With Pincer by Luki Huber is one of the most famous objects to come out of Ferran Adria's El Bulli restaurant near Barcelona. It allows a chef to tease his guests' noses with one substance (a sprig of mint or a curry leaf?) while filling their mouths with a contrasting taste (a capon broth? a cardamom sorbet?).
- The witty La Siesta jug by Hector Serrano, Alberto Martinez and Raky Martinez, marries the form of today's ubiquitous plastic bottle with Spain's traditional botijo, a ceramic water jar that cools its contents through controlled evaporation. It is the design equivalent of a Quiznos sub.
- The Rebotijo pitcher by Martin Azua looks sleek and modern — almost traditional, that is, by the standards of today's design. It gets an avant-garde edge, however, by being built from the same unglazed clay as an old-fashioned botijo and by cooling its contents according to the same evaporative principles used for centuries.
- There is an undeniable shock value in some radical cuisine: The fog that floats from your lips when you eat freeze-cooked popcorn doesn't alter its taste but it sure changes the experience — especially for those looking on. Drain the Taz-Ah cup by Attua Aparicio, and you become a cartoon version of your doggy self.
Foodjects: Design and the New Cuisine in Spain runs through June 7 at Apartment Zero, 406 Seventh Street NW, Washington.
