A new year means new things to try and new experiments. The first experiment for 2017 is a new monthly series of dinner parties. We formed this idea from watching a documentary about Noma. In the documentary Chef Rene Redzepi holds a weekly experiments day for all chefs in the restaurant to try new weird dishes, the best have the potential to becoming new dishes on the main menu. The over arching motto of theses experimental nights was to, “fail as much as possible, but to always fail 100%”. We’re bringing that motto into our dinner parties.
Unlike a normal dinner party these are focused on trying new and weird recipes. Recipes no one would normally cook at home on an average night but now as a group everyone can experience them together. We’re calling this series Experimental Dinners. Of course if all goes wrong and there is nothing to eat the host orders pizza in and the group breaks down where the dishes didn’t work.
To bring in 2017 we hosted the first dinner of the series, Experimental Dinner #00. We gathered 6 of our good friends together and asked each to bring a dish. We prepared a safe but funky pasta with butternut squash sauce and fresh truffles on top. Friends made open faced Scandinavian sandwiches, big cheese spreads, vinegar pie, and gelatinized broached. Despite the weird mix of dishes the dinner was a success, the group got to try new foods they’d never had, we spent the last minutes of 2016 in the company of each other. And then when the clock hit midnight we cracked open bottles of champaign and brought in the year with several rounds of charades.
Our next dinner is slated for early February and you can expect photos here shortly after.