| Trends
in Food and Eating:
Extrasensory Dining and Drinking
Dining in the Dark
A number of restaurants throughout the world now feature
dining in complete darkness. Guided
only by their senses, and a server who may even be blind
or partially sighted
him- or herself, diners not only have to figure out
what they’re eating, but how get it into their
mouths.
With visual appeal a main part of the pleasure of eating,
you might ask why would you want to do this? To heighten
your senses and increase your olfactory acuity, according
to proponents. Lest you suspect gimmickry, the food
itself holds its own. Paris’s Dans Le Noir is
so popular even government ministers wait in long lines.
Several
popular restaurants in Europe and Australia have turned  out the
lights and taken dining to new experiential heights: The Unsicht
Bar in Berlin and Cologne (review)
the Blind
Cow (review) in
Zurich The
Dark Side of The Park in Sydney and Melbourne (review) and
Black
Out (review)
in Melbourne are some of the best known. In the past, Suba in
New York featured sightless dining on a once-a-month basis, but
no longer, and a reader tips us to similar gatherings produced
by Opaque-Events in
the Los Angeles area. But we know of no other restaurants on
our side of either pond that are dedicated solely to this style.
If you learn of any,
please contact
us.
Completely darkened dining also affords new ways for dinner companions
to relate. There’s more discussion about the food, and
feeding one another is both pleasurable and helpful.
Not surprisingly, dating service organizations are staging dining
in the dark events. Cosmo
Party has
coordinated dinners at various venues in New York and other
U.S. cities,
but seem to be on hiatus at present. In London, Dinner
in the Dark is one of the main organizers.
The
following sites can shed some light on the subject of sensory
perception in food, eating and drinking:
Monell
Chemical Senses Center A
world-renown research center established in 1968 in Philadelphia
as the world's
first scientific institute for research on the chemical senses:
taste, smell, and chemosensory irritation. The Center’s newsletter,
The
Monell Connection, features current research topics.
Aroma
Wheel for Winetasting A tool developed by sensory scientists
at the University of California, Davis’s Department of
Viticulture and Enology.
“Sensing
Smell” Olfactory research from the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute Neuroscience Program.
“Context
And Taste - A Complex Relation: The Same Food Doesn't Always Taste
The Same” An
article from the European Sensory Network, based on Norwegian studies.
Extrasensory
Drinking
Think you know your Cabs from your Chardonnays?
Know a beefy Syrah from a very berry Zin?
Bet you’ll
be surprised when you can only try to taste, not see,
their differences.
Two
new wine glasses have been designed to help you focus only on
the taste of wine. They are Riedel’s
Sommelier’s Blind Tasting Glass, a stemmed, solid
black wineglass, and Riedel’s Sommeliers
Black Stemless Montrachet/
Chardonnay Wine Tumbler, which
is due for release August 31. Both are beautiful, but
neither lets you see what you’re sipping—proof
that in wine drinking, just as in eating, the eyes
have it.
Fun
for both connoisseurs and anti-wine-snobs alike, these glasses
will soon make their way into tasting
rooms and cellars. They’re the ultimate wine-sensing
tool.
Extrasensory
Cooking
An
understanding of the senses and how foods affect them is essential
for fine cooking. These three books are essential for anyone
who’s curious about why foods taste and how they work in
dishes as they do.
  Aroma,
The Magic of Essential Oils in Food and Fragrances by perfumer
Mandy Aftel and chef Daniel Patterson is
all about heightening flavor and aroma in cooking. The book
features over 100 recipes
that blend aromas in mind-bending fashion. Among them: Porcini-Lemongrass
Consommé, Braised Duck with Cocoa and Mint, Lavender
Roasted Chicken; Green Tea Panna Cotta and Strawberry-Verbena
Granita.
 Taste,
A New Way to Cook Sybil Kapoor analyzes the ways that basic taste
combinations can produce exciting dishes, such as how a spash
of citrus can sweeten a grilled fish or how a salty cheese can
make a soup more savory. Enhanced by beautiful photographs by
David Loftus, the book presents a completely new approach to
cooking.
 On
Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen Harold
McGee explains the particular substances in foods that
produce their flavors and give us pleasure, the health benefits
and risks
of foods, methods of food production, cooking methods, and many
other culinary-related subjects. His latest edition, released
Fall 2004, is considered the classic essential for every cook’s
library, and won the 2005 James Beard Award for
reference.
For
more Trends in Food and Eating,
check out Best of Fancy Food.
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