Thoughts on underground dinners.

A friend of mine asked me to give her a few sentences of my thoughts about underground dinners (and why I think they are important.) for an article she’s writing…

A few sentences turned into a few paragraphs (as I knew it would…) but I did highlight a few key points in bold that I thought were most important.

I had fun thinking back to the whole experience, and as long as I took the time to write it, why not share the body of it here?

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For the dining public, I think underground dinners are a new way for them to approach dining. There’s a certain air of mystery to it: oftentimes, they don’t know what the menu is, who their dining companions are, or if it’s going to be held in a space that even resembles what you’d call a “dining room” It makes the entire process exciting again, and almost forces people to throw caution to the wind and just focus on what the food and experience of dining is all about. For a lot of diners and a lot of chefs, food is about sustenance and also about making/spending money to support that ideal. For us, our dinner gave us the opportunity to bring back the whole “performance art” aspect to it, and to rekindle the notion that dining should be an experience – not just in the company you eat with, but what you eat, how you eat it, and with flavors you didn’t know you would/could want to eat.

As chefs, it served as an important vehicle for us. We’re both young, and aren’t running our own kitchen – yet we both have our very own ideas of cuisine and what we think it is/could be. Oftentimes that may fall contrary to what we do on a daily basis where we work – It’s our chef’s vision and we continue to help realize this vision for the restaurant and it’s guests. Doing an underground dinner offered us the opportunity to stand on our own two feet, do our own thing and quite literally say: “This is who we are, this is what we do, here’s what we have to offer… Nice to meet you!” For chefs already in the capacity to “do their own thing”, it offers them the chance to focus on that nights meal and experience solely. They’re able to take more risks and perhaps do things that are a bit too out there for their regular restaurant guest… things that simply aren’t feasible to put on the menu on a regular basis. For cities like Louisville, that aren’t nearly as progressive or avant-garde food-wise as say Chicago or New York, it’s hard to take that risk on what “I want to do” vs. what are people really going to buy or understand. Underground dinners tend to attract the kind of people that aren’t afraid to occasionally take a risk cuisine-wise, and they know to expect the unexpected – from the food, the location, the entire experience; and that makes our job as the chefs a whole lot easier -  and more enjoyable. We can simply focus on giving them what we want them to experience, and not worrying about any preconceived notions of what their experience should be.

~ by theironicchef on October 6, 2009.