Guixégasbord Food Facility
October 29, 2005
If you haven't already made a reservation for the opening of Marti Guixé's Food Facility at Mediamatic (Post CS) this Sunday evening, you are plum out of luck because I just made the last one. You can still make reservations for every Friday and Saturday evening between the 4th of November and the 11th of December. This is one conceptual restaurant you could never visit too often.
Food Facility, the title of Guixé's working prototype restaurant, has no kitchen. Instead the central kitchen is replaced by kitchens of existing take-out restaurants in the area. Talk about locative eating! As a guest you can choose menu items compiled from Guixé gleaned take-out restaurants and consume the order at the glammy Food Facility. Of course there are already existing restaurant hubs on the web. Waiters on Wheels representative Sharad Agarwal told me that although it is possible to order one entree from one take-away restaurant and desserts and entremets from others, Delhi's Waiters on Wheels customers never seem to do this. Food Facility marks the first time that diners can experience their urban menu in performance format at one dining location. (Rectification: the above statement is wholly untrue! Read about it here.)
Food Facility open Friday and Saturday from 18.00h - 22.00h
November 4 - December 11, 2005 at Post CS, Amsterdam.
Read Mediamatic's announcement here or call +31 (0)6 3376 8810 for reservations.
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Juliano's Raw
October 28, 2005
Image of Juliano and friends courtesy of Juliano Brotman's Planet Raw website
Loyal culiblog readers know that I like my bacon fried crispy and that I never pass up an opportunity to eat most forms of smoked pork. But I also like to expand my culinary and nutritional repetoire with raw food kweezeen. Everything in moderation, including and especially moderation. This weekend Juliano Brotman, chef proprietor of the Hollywood restaurant Raw is in Amsterdam giving a workhop together with ashtanga yoga instructor Caroline Klebl.
Saturday October 29, de Loods/Prinseneiland 20G Amsterdam
13.30-15.30 Ashtanga Yoga workshop with Caroline Klebl
16.00-19.00h Raw Vegan Cuisine: drinks, desserts, hors d'oeuvres
Sunday October 30, de Loods/Prinseneiland 20G Amsterdam
11.00-13.00 Ashtanga Yoga workshop with Caroline Klebl
14.00-16.30 Raw Vegan Cuisine: salads, soups and entrées
For reservations: +31 (0)6 3377 1014
Of course I'll be attending the entrées preparation 'block' because I think I can just figure out how to make a raw salad but never seem to get around to making Juliano's Raw Chili. One sad discovery is that, in terms of mise en place, it's difficult to combine preparation for raw and cooked foods into one meal. Raw food, however delicious and wholesome, is labour and ingredient intensive. My hope is that Juliano's workshop will increase my facility enough to eradicate the technical glitch that is influencing the success of my dinner parties.
There is a glut of food-related events this Sunday but a nice thing about Raw Food (and other low glycaemic diets) is that within hours of eating one is RAVENOUS. (Who was the hippy that said you should always leave one third of your belly free for Shiva?) Right after Juliano's pizza emerges from the dehydrator, I'll be tucking into something else delicious at the Guixégasbord at Mediamatic that selfsame evening.
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Honey, rockin' my world
October 27, 2005
A honey shop in the Kadiköy market in Istanbul is visited by wasps.
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I love smoking everything in moderation
October 22, 2005
Last year in Delhi I reported on why it's a good idea to keep a positive attitude while experimenting with stimulants. This year I simply throw myself into the task. By the volume of the blueish haze, one wouldn't suspect that we were entering an outdoor tea house, but the tea house, (and by tea, I mean smoke) of the Balkan Student Union is a vaulted-ceilinged wonder of kilim pillowed couches and abundant eastern aesthetic occupying a maze of very confusing little stone courtyards. There are only four things on the menu here: tobaccos, teas (apple, mint, black) or coffee, and a game resembling backgammon. After a long day's walk through the Istanbul Biennale locations, it was wonderful to get into a heady relax with a bowl full of nargileh. That's Turkish for waterpipe tobacco drenched in apple, mint or rose syrup. Smoking a waterpipe is like inhaling jewelry, so delicious. Dip your finger in the tobacco straight out of the tin and you'll taste that it's sweet as candy.
Everything in moderation, including moderation.
images top to bottom: an employee of the Istanbul University Balkan Student Union Smokehouse fills a waterpipe bowl with apple flavoured tobacco, a tangle of waterpipes in the storage room await new customers, the pipes unplugged
technorati tags: Turkey, Istanbul, waterpipe
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Sort of public gardens
October 21, 2005
The urban garden is thriving in Istanbul. Walking around the Biennale's parallel programme locations in Karaköy, I spied some ad hoc agriculture in 'public' planters. These images show vegetables being grown amidst 'ornamental' city landscaping. Chapeau to the hacker-farmers growing squash, bell peppers, tomatoes and aubergines in their urban gardens. Look, they have even contructed a BBQ on which to do the grilling!
Smack dab in the middle of the Üskudar ferry terminal, ad hoc growers have cultivated tomatoes in all of the planters.
Images documenting beets being grown within public landscaping at a student housing complex in Nanjing in PRChina (April 2004).
And in Montpellier this summer, PRChinese artist Song Dong's salad installation.
technorati tags: public domain, urban gardening, food security, farming, food-related art, hacking, public space agricultural diversification, agricultural policy
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Amphora types according to culiblog
October 20, 2005
In one of the artist-in-residence gardens of the future Santral Istanbul, we found a plastic amphora, looking not dissimilar to the amphorae of old.
technorati tags: Turkey, amphora, Istanbul, Santral
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Hairy dairy
October 19, 2005
Turkish goat cheese packaged and sold in an animal skin, just the way it was originally produced. Shepherds discovered that animal milk carried in animal skins curdles, (especially the skins of baby animals) and the rest is culinary history. This tube of tulum cheese was being portioned at the Egyptian Spice Market in Istanbul. For some reason the practice of preserving and selling cheese in an animal skin is not echoed by the producers of cow's milk cheeses.
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Branding Iftar in Istanbul is handy to mouthy
In Istanbul I spotted this column next to the Blue Mosque, advertising the use of soup powders to flavour traditional Turkish dishes for Iftar meals. If the goal is to address a broad consumer base, Knorr marketing is right on target with this Turkish ad hocking of product during the month of Rammazan. I guess if you're a high-powered career woman in Istanbul, working as the curator of an international art event like the Istanbul Biennale, you don't really have time to whip up some break-the-fast nibbles every day at sundown, all the livelong month, and these powders could be handy. Handy to mouthy. Who am I to say that packaged flavour marketed as culture isn't sometimes a good thing?
technorati tags: Ramadan, Amsterdam, fasting
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Papabubble is pure sugar finger lickin'
October 18, 2005
Loyal culiblog readers know that I'm not a big fan of sweets, but sometimes sugar is coaxed by masterful hands into shapes and colours so beautiful, and with flavours so delicious, that it's all I can do to keep from hauling off and giving it a good lickin'. At the moment of writing, I'm popping acid drops, one after another into my mouth and sucking them so violently, that I shall surely be giving myself a blister.
Which brings me to papabubble, the source of these acid drops that are doing all the damage to the roof of my mouth. When I returned to Amsterdam this Autumn, a new shop had occupied Harlemmerdijk 70, and I became a fan of their candy straight away. Inside the contemporary interior, a noble candy is being produced right before your very eyes. You feel like a child oggling the sculpturally shaped sugar. The concept belongs to Australian papabubble originators, Tommy Tang and Christopher King, who opened the first shop in Barcelona in June 2003, but it was Marieken van den Brink, who studied artisanal candy-making with them, that brought the concept to the Netherlands in 2004. For this she won a Marie Claire Starters Award in 2004, turning her dream and her lolly import business (Lulu Loves Lollies) into papbubble Amsterdam. Nice one. Here's some money, now go and make some candy.
But it's not just candy. It's a very pure, playful and artisanal product that she and her partner, Dominik Otto, and his sister Marie Otto, are making in the Amsterdam shop. It's all very old-fashioned and sweet. They live upstairs above the shop, and just like in a fairy tale, afternoons the place is a'swarm with children and single women, straight from school and yoga class, that have come in to watch the candy making process and get offered tastes of free candy by the smiling sugar pullers.
What I most love about what is going on at papabubble (aside from the high level of craftsmanship and amazing flavours of sour) was that the molten sugar is truly played with by the candy makers, Dominik and Marie (brother and sister). They don't throw away the candy ends but turn them into blobbous sculptures and sell them in that form. These blobs of sugar will make a beautiful centrepiece (did I just use the word centrepiece?) at my next dinner party as a communal after-dinner sugar-lick.
More conventionally (but not really) are the hard candy rings, which of course make a right mess if you wear them, but if you're a child, or if you're in love and in the mood, they'll be just the ticket.
'Hon, lick my finger?'
papabubble
Haarlemmerdijk 70
1013 JE Amsterdam
tel +31 (0)20 6262662
fax +31 (0)20 6267654
www.papabubble.nl
images l to r: Candymaker Marie Otto cuts rolls of hardened sugar into pineapple hard candy, closeup of pineapple candy, a blob of sugar that will feature at my next dinner
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Eat while you can, in a few minutes it will be Yom Kippur, the chaotic humanistic Day of Atonement
October 12, 2005
And on Yom Kippur, you fast by eating and drinking absolutely *bubkis. In my search for all things concerning fasting, I came upon this article by the Chabad Folks, titled
Laws and Lore: Eating Before Yom Kippur. Apparently,
It is a **mitzvah to eat and drink heartily on Erev Yom Kippur...
...Do we fast on the ninth? We fast only on the tenth! [How then is this verse to be understood?] It comes to teach us that all who eat and drink on the ninth, and fast on the tenth, are considered by Scripture as if they had fasted on both the ninth and the tenth.
And there you have it, Jewish attitude in a nutshell. This article is permeated with a Curb Your Enthusiasm tone that makes me want to read out loud, scrunch my eyes, shrug my shoulders and wave my hands around saying. "Do we fast on the ninth? No! We fast only on the 10th! (meaning the 10th of Tishrei). Written discussions of Jewish scripture always sound to me like trying to wheedle out of something. It seems to me that the learned gents before us, were always trying to find a way to reward themselves for doing something half-assed. I realise that this characteristic is not unique to Judaism, but it is this half-assism to which I am especially tuned.
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Ramadan
October 11, 2005
The Dutch text on this poster inivtes non-muslims to join in a post-sunset dinner with their muslim neighbours during the month of Ramadan. Someone was absolutely using their noggin and Amsterdam is now host to this wonderful initiative called the Ramadan Festival. Muslim families have generously opened their homes for each evening's break-the-fast Iftar meal in order to allow greater understanding of Islamic culture and faith during the holiday month. There is a slew of activities; lectures, debates (gotta have those lectures and debates!) on the subject of citizenship, culture, emancipation and the role of religion in secular society.
The Ramadan Festival website is informative including prayer times and the hour of each day's sunset so that you know when you can resume tucking into the goodness! Via the website you can also sign up to receive break-the-fast alerts via text message on your celphone and register for the Iftar dinners. I of course signed up, and am eagerly waiting to hear from the organisation!
This year, Ramadan lasts until the 3rd of November. Get fasting!
http://www.ramadanfestival.nl/
technorati tags: Ramadan, Amsterdam, fasting
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Quandry: non locative comfort food
October 02, 2005
First things first, hats off to Auke Touwslager for inventing the term locative food on the 27th at the Food Design Symposium at the SMCS. For me this term pinpoints the quandry with which I am faced as a 3rd generation ex-pat. (With some folks it's just baked into the genes.) Locative food is food that communicates location by its very nature. A truffle could communicate Occitania for example, and truffled eggs would seem to me out of place in Hawaii, Mongolia or Ghana, (unless things have changed drastically) but normal (although nonetheless special) in the Cevennes.
If we consider locally grown food to be desirable for our health, the health of the global environment and the health of the local economy, what do we do when we've transplanted ourselves to the other end of the planet and get a hunquering for non-local foods? Is eating a Pacific Rim style rice-bowl morally coherent as an inhabitant of the Netherlands? In an ideal world could we make choices about prioritising the import of certain non-local foodstuffs that we all think we need? My non-locative Dutch list would be:
coffee
rice (I have 7 types in my larder at all times, only 2 of these come from Europe)
soybeans and related products (my tofu and tempeh are produced within 2 km from my house, but the beans, where do the beans come from and are they GM?)
Occitanian wine
olive oil
sesame seed products (tahin, sesame oil, seeds)
most seeds and nuts
peanuts (and that Nectar of the Gawds called peanut butter)
According to the list above it seems that being a vegetarian in the Netherlands, would relegate me to eating quality lacking products made by culinarily handicapped hippies. The image above shows a version of my favourite rice-bowl dinner, of which only the beet leaves have been grown locally. Can non-locative comfort food be sustainable. Even as an enthusiastic porkatarian, I eat one heq of a lot of brown rice and soybeans.
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All I really really want is locative food
October 01, 2005
That is, food that tells me where I am and where it's from by it's very name and nature (without the use of an RFID tag). And all I really really want is to have one major train station and one major airport in one country that sells food that is not created by food product designers but by local people from local ingredients and reflecting the diverse local food culture already present.
Imagine Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport... Could the experience of Schiphol be enriched if you knew that this was the only airport in the world where you could exclusively buy locally grown and produced Dutch food and regional specialities? Was it already one and a half years ago that Doors of Perception and Urban Unlimited organised a cultural experts meeting for the city of Breda, a new node on the line of the High Speed Train. If I recall correctly, we recommended just this very thing.
The images above were taken within a period of 4 minutes. Friday afternoon, chip eaters abound at Amsterdam Centraal Station. Just imagine the possible effect on the environment and the state of agriculture and upon the local economy if these chips were made from a diverse range of local potatoes, fried in oil grown and produced locally. Imagine if you could order chips from a menu sporting 8 different kinds of potato! Imagine if the product of the finger fried potato embraced diversity.
And then there's the mayo...
And the knowledge economy that could sprout up from bringing the local boutique producer's products to the transportation hubs of the world...
Frites eaters: images of people eating chips taken on Friday September 30, 2005 from 16:23-27 at Amsterdam CS and on the train to Rotterdam.
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