The importance of the way food is presented and the way it has been recognised as a design opportunity is a growing phenomenon in the restaurants of the world. That’s why this issue of Auto & Design devotes so much space to the topic of gastronomic design, a theme illustrated, as you will see, with some highly effective words and pictures.
In our exploration of this unusual segment of the design profession we encountered a pizza folded into a cone shape for easy eating. The Konopizza, as it is called, is the symbol and the key menu item for a new franchising chain that is already up and running, both in Italy and abroad.
After a brief tour through the recent history of this emerging art, which reveals such celebrity chefs as Auguste Escoffier, Paul Bocuse and Ferran Adrià, this article homes in on a rising Italian star in the gastronomic firmament: Davide Scabin.
Owner since 2002 of the Combal Punto Zero restaurant at Rivoli, near Turin, Scabin is a creative cook much admired by restaurant critics, who was invented such genuinely original dishes as the Virtual Oyster, the Cyber Egg and the Zuppizza.
“ A cook is comparable to a designer: starting with a flavour and its properties, he decides how to combine the ingredients in a dish, in a way that is very like designing it”. The Turin chef goes further in thinking about how the supreme craftsmanship of haute cuisine also relates to the repetition inherent in industrial production: “I strongly believe”, he says, “that it ought to be possible to mass produce any chef’s original creations”. Anyway, the food architect is more than welcome, if he can help to improve the quality of our lives. As long as we’re still allowed the pleasure of a steaming platter of spaghetti on the table when we feel like it.
The article continues in Auto & Design no. 149
