Who would have thought to put butter in a tube, soup into a ball, beetroot in an egg or garlic into fairy floss. Carl and Kelie Kenzler from Ritual Cuisine not only know food back to front, but inside out and in reverse as well.
The walls of our secret venue, Watt Space gallery, were already brimming with talent from students featured in the Annual Student Art Prize exhibition “Australiana”. Ritual Cuisine’s own installations hung among these works and our dinner for the evening sat, rolled, hung or evolved within them. Each dish an adventure in itself.
Bags of red and green, hung from the ceiling on 100 hooks and were taken in at first glance around the room. The Virgin Mary they contained was sipped through a straw in the bag. The bite of the drink and crunch of its accompanying celery rice crackers a perfect kick start for the evening.
We were offered hand made sourdough fruit buns by mini wooden “Lords” the red wine butter in a tiny tube. While padding barefoot in the grass around the “Pear Tree” guests picked pear slices from the tree their flavour infused with vanilla and spice. The partridge waited at the base of the tree in a jar, confit style, between layers of parsnip. Like a child in a playground, you wondered where to start in a room filled with food as art.
In a multiple play on ideas and ingredients, a room for Haiku took our tastebuds on a trip all of their own. Visiting combinations of our basic tastes: bittersweet, saltyfat, in the form of pork crackling and apple, along with bursts of umami and tangy sour tastes. Heather Catchpoles poetry led us along the way.
Food, art and music became intertwined when Ritual, artist Miranda Earle and composer Justin Montefiore put their creative heads together. The flavour scene here was that of an English rose garden leading into a Turkish bazaar created through a dessert where you ate through white chocolate and rosewater mousse into suspended lychee and dense coffee mud cake. The music followed the dish and you ate listening to the music and viewing the inspiring artwork of Miranda Earle. Whether the sensory combinations influenced the taste of the food may not have been proven, but it stimulated our imaginations to deliberate, experiment, accept or deny.
The art table buzzed with a rotating crowd. Art teacher Ann Caddey had left brains working overtime to produce personal artworks from pastels and charcoal.
In the Hoist room, a crowd constantly gathered around a silent staff member making Spicy Bubbles. She could magically make tom yum soup turn into balls! The preparation of the dish a performance in itself that built the anticipation of the flavour, the texture and the explosion on impact with your tongue. A craft, a skill, its food, its art!
Check out the photos
The walls of our secret venue, Watt Space gallery, were already brimming with talent from students featured in the Annual Student Art Prize exhibition “Australiana”. Ritual Cuisine’s own installations hung among these works and our dinner for the evening sat, rolled, hung or evolved within them. Each dish an adventure in itself.
Bags of red and green, hung from the ceiling on 100 hooks and were taken in at first glance around the room. The Virgin Mary they contained was sipped through a straw in the bag. The bite of the drink and crunch of its accompanying celery rice crackers a perfect kick start for the evening.
We were offered hand made sourdough fruit buns by mini wooden “Lords” the red wine butter in a tiny tube. While padding barefoot in the grass around the “Pear Tree” guests picked pear slices from the tree their flavour infused with vanilla and spice. The partridge waited at the base of the tree in a jar, confit style, between layers of parsnip. Like a child in a playground, you wondered where to start in a room filled with food as art.
In a multiple play on ideas and ingredients, a room for Haiku took our tastebuds on a trip all of their own. Visiting combinations of our basic tastes: bittersweet, saltyfat, in the form of pork crackling and apple, along with bursts of umami and tangy sour tastes. Heather Catchpoles poetry led us along the way.
Food, art and music became intertwined when Ritual, artist Miranda Earle and composer Justin Montefiore put their creative heads together. The flavour scene here was that of an English rose garden leading into a Turkish bazaar created through a dessert where you ate through white chocolate and rosewater mousse into suspended lychee and dense coffee mud cake. The music followed the dish and you ate listening to the music and viewing the inspiring artwork of Miranda Earle. Whether the sensory combinations influenced the taste of the food may not have been proven, but it stimulated our imaginations to deliberate, experiment, accept or deny.
The art table buzzed with a rotating crowd. Art teacher Ann Caddey had left brains working overtime to produce personal artworks from pastels and charcoal.
In the Hoist room, a crowd constantly gathered around a silent staff member making Spicy Bubbles. She could magically make tom yum soup turn into balls! The preparation of the dish a performance in itself that built the anticipation of the flavour, the texture and the explosion on impact with your tongue. A craft, a skill, its food, its art!
Check out the photos
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