Mise en Plate: The scenographic imagination and the contemporary restaurant

Abstract

In ‘ Mise en Plate : The Scenographic Imagination and the Contemporary Restaurant’, Josh Abrams examines changes in restaurant design and the plating of food as a scenography that engages an audience in the active production of the meal as event, at a human scale tied to a sense of self. Looking at changes over the past thirty years, the essay articulates the increasing role of design in producing the restaurant experience. With a specific focus on the innovations of chef Ferran Adrià at elBulli in Rosas, Spain and chef Grant Achatz at Chicago's Alinea and Next, the article suggests that these changes seek to bring a focus to the relation between the scenographic presentation and the gustatory experience, which traces and references a history of design in culinary innovation dating back at least two hundred years. Abrams proposes that throughout the twentieth century, high-end restaurants and haute cuisine were largely dominated by a limited scenographic imagination; similar, perhaps, to the realist proscenium arch and fourth wall of commercial theatre, restaurants were limited to an interrelated formalisation of codes of both preparation and reception under the writings of Auguste Escoffier and the prevalence of a ‘French’ mode of presentation that became globally predominant under the influence of Michelin's star system. The essay suggests that while particular formalities changed in the 1960s and 70s with the shift towards individual plating in la nouvelle cuisine , the work of chefs like Adrià, Achatz and Noma's René Redzepi in the 1990s and early twenty-first century would seek to reimagine the high-end dining experience as one not about the formality of starched white linens and tuxedoed waiters, but in which the focus on design challenges the diner to co-produce with chefs and front-of-house staff an active dramaturgy in the creation of the event.