Set on an abandoned airfield in Paris, south of the Bois de Vincennes, a strange restaurant is managed by two twin chefs. Offering an unconventional approach to dining – a banquet for a feast or a hot-air balloon for sky-dining – visitors experience food using all their senses. Extremes and adjacencies are exaggerated and amplified by the relationship between above and below and kitchen to table, using (un)traditional means of catering, such as entire kitchens that operate as dumb waiters, drones that deliver food to balloon diners, mechanically-operated systems, and pop-up food preparation devices. Further extremes are presented with the dining experience; diners select from a menu that offers innovative ingredients resulting in Jellies composed of nails and eggs, merely an inedible artefact yet offers intriguing observations. Guests are prompted to put things in motion and animate the inanimate. They observe a series of rituals that intensify their dining experience – changes of clothing, blindfolds, ablutions, etc.
Above the restaurant and kitchen are dwellings for the two Chefs, one Head and one Sous. An animate kitchen runs between the two, with fridges that open onto new rooms and ladders that ascend into derelict spaces.
The scale of relationships in the project run from that of mundane artefacts of everyday use, such as a fork or an apron hung to dry, to the expanse of the airfield and the height of the sky. The project sits within its landscape like a fork on a tablecloth, set in its usual manner until the site becomes ‘activated’ during the day, at which point the inanimate is displaced from its normal condition or setting.
