Gosh. I love food. I mean - I. Love. Food. I’ve enjoyed cooking from a really young age and now, as an adult (which is overrated - adulting, that is), I like to take my time cooking; to use it as a time to slow down a bit and aim to make the best meal that I know how. The time spent cutting up fresh ingredients and layering flavors is a type of meditation - one that rewards you with food to eat at the end. When I get a chance, I also love to experience fine dining. The kinds of restaurants that have a dress code and they don’t even put salt and pepper on the table, because the chefs know it doesn’t need any touching up. My favorite thing to do at these restaurants is the tasting menu. If you’ve never been - a tasting menu is a series of many carefully planned courses, each no more than a bite or two, arranged in an explicit order by a chef who wants you to experience a culinary journey from the first bite to the last. Meals like this usually last two or three hours and the number of courses varies: sometimes as few as four or five, but eight and nine is common. Some chefs go all-out and will give 20 or 30 courses. As I sat to plan out this collection of miniatures, I struggled to find some inspiration. How can I tie many things together, but still allow each to stand alone? And that’s when I thought back to going to a great restaurant and ordering the tasting menu. Small bits. Just enough to give you and idea and to satisfy the bite-sized craving. This work is inspired by and the titles are drawn from a specific meal I had: at Spiaggia in Chicago, January 19, 2019. The meal was prepared by Chef Joe Flamm (he won one of the seasons of Top Chef). While the miniatures are ordered in the manner the menu that night was arranged, they are intended to be selected and performed as any subset and/or in any order, as best fits the programming for the performance.
