Being an adult is over-rated. There are bills to pay, relationships to navigate, careers to build and a definite lack of time for play. You know what else isn’t always much fun? Being all serious and sitting still at formal multi-course dinners. You have to eat your fancy schmancy food in dainty mouthfuls and make polite conversation for hours on end (you can’t get up and run around like a maniac, not even when your legs go to sleep). Sometimes we just wish mealtimes could be a little more experimental. Enter chef Stephan Zoisl’s Nutopia, a series of conceptual dinners at cooking school My Private Pantry. The theme of the first edition (April 17-21) of these intimate affairs was—quite appropriately, for us forever-young folk—Never Never Land.
And like Peter Pan, Zoisl transports you to another world, bringing the fun of play back to dinnertime. Upon entering their private space on Tras Street, we stood in a dark holding room and listened to a mood setting audio clip. Then, we downed a vial of “potion” (lime cordial?), before entering Never Never Land proper. There, we found gold-dusted grapes and a floor covered leaves, with creeper plants climbing up the walls. They get an A+ for decorations.
We didn’t have to sit still through the meal too. For the first course, chef brought us to the kitchen to watch him freeze up some yuzu and beetroot with nitrogen. (We got to eat the results with our hands!) Course after course was whimsically plated. Pork belly and sea urchin came on a raw wood plank. Sea Side, a dish of scallops and joselito ham, came surrounded with sand and sea shells. Sandwiched within a plate of Octo-gon (corn and octopus) was a polariod-like heat-activated namecard. And dessert was plated with a QR code. The 12-courses felt like an amusement park ride. Full of all sorts of entertaining ideas we want to steal for our own shindigs.
The next round’s theme is ….Thru Time and Space on July 5-11. We’ll be back.
