Taking advantage of the inauguration of the Hokuriku shinkansen, culinary artist Ayako Suwa organized a guerrilla restaurant for just two days. So I left Paris to go to Kanazawa.
I had already heard of guerrilla restaurants, this kind of restaurant is organized in a place that is not basically a restaurant, for a limited period on compulsory invitation. Like a mirage, she suddenly appears, to make us taste Ayako's emotions.
What is Food?
Its primary aspect is a desire for survival. But its secondary aspect is the desire to enjoy good taste. This is why the culinary art was born. Michelin and others are there to assess and rank the creativity of chefs producing “good” dishes. "The taste for emotions" that Ayako offers us does not fit into these categories.
Neither to live, nor for pleasure, it makes us taste emotions such as "a dazzling anger", or "annoyance and remorse". We have no idea of the ingredients and the taste cannot be visually imagined. All participants eat by hand, one bite at a time. I asked Ayako if we should feel these emotions while eating and she said no. She represents her emotions subjectively through her dishes. This is very similar to Kodo, the art of appreciating scents.
In Kodo, the Kumiko ceremony takes place as follows. The master of ceremonies chooses perfume to represent poems. Participants try to guess which perfume corresponds to which poem. But there are no predefined rules to these choices. For the same poem based on autumn, for example, it is possible that at a ceremony, he chooses a perfume A, and that on another occasion, he chooses a perfume B. The master chooses according to the participants and the moment, and that in all subjectivity at the moment. The kumiko ends with the answers given, but it does not matter whether the answer is correct or not. This ceremony is not based on this kind of objective criteria, the essence of it is to share the subjective feeling of the master through the perfumes. Sharpen your senses through smell for a sharing experience on the border between objectivity and subjectivity.
Ayako Suwa's restaurant reproduces this phenomenon through the culinary. What is depicted are Ayako's emotions. Emotions and submissive dishes have no logical connections. It is a subjective representation and allows to visit the emotions of the mistress of ceremony.
A culinary experience different from gastronomy, I look forward to the next invitation.
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