Cooking with Lactobacterias, Weeds and Trash.
One of the things out of the office is cooking for people, mostly unreasonable things a bit away from what you normally get.
Actually it`s very similar to art-directing
Doing Dinner events: You brainstorm, want to be "cutting" edge, come up with ideas and discard them, do layouts on a round plate not a square screen, put together a presentation and show the effort and passion you put in the past weeks to an audience full of expectation. And you hope they digest it easily and can`t get enough of it.
The difference between a pop-up and a keynote presentation is that everybody drinks a lot more wine.
And people are mostly more cheerful, hugging you with red cheeks at the end. So I do this as often as I can. Makes sense, no?
I like to cook with neglected ingredients and things you throw away. Don`t worry, without plastics.
Cockscombs taste like oyster mushrooms. Autumn leaves give a wonderful broth. Giersch (ground elder) is way better than parsley.
Obviously there is more to a sophisticated meal than caviar and lobster.
Food, Art and Politics
Together with the artist Dagna Jakubowska I did this cooking performances.
The idea is to cook with invasive plants and demonstrate how useful and delicious they can be.
20 different neophyts and invasive plants were the ingredients. A supper with a lot of different unknown tastes and stories. I loved the nice polish audience who was very interested and who ate everything!
Cookbooks
Many of the dinners I composed were inspired by cookbooks. They are a wonderful method to autodidact yourself. And the more edgy and obscure they are, the bigger is the fun.
It`s a bit like deejaying.
You browse your material and pick that makes a nice mix.
Combinations of modern and old-fashioned, raw and cooked, fatty and healthy and so on are being juxtaposed one after the other with a sort of dramaturgy.
I also love to announce the story and the names behind each dish. That makes it a bit more exciting to eat. (it`s the Alfred Hitchcock effect "The bomb under the dining table")
By the way – I did one cookbook (with Melanie Grundmann and Claudia Frickemeier), it`s about what the Dandys ate in the 19th century. see here
Cooking at restaurant JAJA
Together with Daniel Salomon I kind of pioneered the kitchen of the notorious JAJA winebar. Go there – they will close at the end of this year!
It was a nice excursion into the world of being a chef.
co-working chefs: Daniel Salomon, Christian Crepaldi, Pierre Lejeune, Avishay Cohen
Floraphilia – The Edible Map of Migration: with Dagna Jakubowska, Aleksandra Przegalińska
assistance and service: Joanne McPhee, Hen Bird, Jasmine Justice, Tomoko Mori
Hungry?
As soon it`s possible again to dine in small improvised places I will let you know. Just drop me a line to nwillborn(at)gmx.de