Community tables, collaborative spaces, culinary research. Restaurants are changing rapidly. Judging by current trends, in a decade, the whole posh restaurant experience, complete with the snooty maître d', starched tablecloths and fastidious multi-course menus, may be irrelevant. Expect them to be replaced by a whole range of new dining options, helmed by edgy experimental spaces that put a contemporary, and responsible, spin on tradition.
Kickstarter is an interesting space to watch this unfold. Right now, the website, which describes itself as a global community built around creativity, has about 434 live food projects. Looking through them throws up a definite trend: people are increasingly interested in creating and funding food that is good for you and the planet.
From Pittsburgh, Harvest Delivery is a sustainably-driven local food distribution company. From Las Vegas, Bootleg Botanicals encourages people to handcraft their own “organic, gluten-free, non-GMO, vegan-friendly ginger beer.” And then, there’s the PieLab, which in true hipster style describes itself as a (and I quote) “Neutral Place + A Slice of Pie = Conversation = Ideas + Design = Positive Change.”
In an attempt to get some clarity on the trend, I chase down Ben Reade, a cheerful young Scottish chef I met a couple of years ago at a Slow Food Asia Pacific conference in South Korea, where he spoke about insects as a food source for a sustainable future. Then, at 27, Ben was the head of culinary research and development at Noma’s test kitchen, the Nordic Food Lab. This made him one of the culinary stars of the event, not just because trendy Copenhagen-based Noma had been ranked as the world’s best restaurant for three years running by then, but also because its chef, Rene Redzepi, was changing the way people looked at food world-over with his single-minded focus on local, often foraged, ingredients.
I manage to catch Ben on a crackly FaceTime call before dinner service, and post farm visits at his new restaurant in Scotland. Well, I use the word restaurant loosely, because it’s hard to define Ben and his partner Sashana Souza Zanella’s Edinburgh Food Studio in one word. He describes it as a cutting-edge environment where the arts, the sciences, and food collide. “A creative space for collaboration, experiments, and learning,” he says. “It is a restaurant on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, where we host guest chefs and primary producers. We have them collaborate with poets, philosophers, and other creative people.” For the rest of the week, they have classes, tastings and lessons in specialist areas.
“People are bored with just going out for dinner to a restaurant, where they pick what they want off a menu. There’s no personality, no real interaction. Today, people want stories, they want background, they want to support something bigger and wider.” His views are supported by the enthusiasm their Kickstarter project, launched in September 2015, generated. “We asked for 10,000 (British) pounds and got it in three days. We have become a kind of textbook example of crowd-funding, not because of the amount of money, but the speed with which we raised it.” They ended up with 17,000 pounds. The restaurant opened for bookings in November, less than two months later.
The studio’s focus is to discover and record the best of Scottish food. “People associate Scotland with black pudding, haggis and deep-fried Mars bars, but we actually have an incredible dairy history, with amazing milk-based desserts. Ben adds with a chuckle, “We have found scarlet elf cup mushrooms, which have such psychedelic colours that people often think they are going to start hallucinating when they eat them.”
He adds, “Now that spring is coming, we see wild edibles like yarrow, baby nettles and bitter cresses. Our meat is wild. Last weekend, we served wood pigeon, Scottish rabbits and venison. We also try and use rare breeds of animals, like Shetland mutton, which comes from a great old breed of sheep.”
Ben started out as a dishwasher, before going to culinary school in Ireland, after which he cooked his way through England, Scotland, Italy and France. Interestingly, his mom’s cooking was heavily influenced by India. “My parents were vegetarian, and they spent a lot of time living in ashrams, so there was quite a profound Indian connection. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on the floor at home on ‘Indian night’, eating rice and dal.” When Ben and Sashana decided to begin the Edinburgh Food Studio, they confess they had no definite plan. Sashana says they cherry-picked ideas from all across the world to create a space that was fluid, yet welcoming. The four-course dinners are a “real-time creative response to seasonal ingredients,” so there is no set menu. “It’s about opening people’s eyes to how much there is around us. So much more than stereotypical potatoes, haggis and turnips.”
The response, to their surprise, has been “overwhelmingly positive,” says Ben. “We weren’t sure if people were ready. We thought it may be a bit too avant-garde. Then said, ‘Let’s push it in their faces, and if they don’t like it, we will turn it into a cafe – and serve coffee and pastry’,” he chuckles. Fortunately, customers today are more open-minded than ever before – and they seem to love the drama. Psychedelic elf cup mushroom served with marinated rabbit versus cappuccino and chocolate cookies: what would you choose?
