Can Your Stomach Handle a Meal at Alchemist?
September 25, 2024 at 05:30PMAn eyeball. A human tongue. A bald head filled with brains. These are a few of the unconventional dishes served up at Alchemist, the restaurant of innovative Danish chef Rasmus Munk. Eating at this Copenhagen spot, which starts at $800 a person, is a peculiar sensory experience that feels “more like Buñuel than like Bobby Flay,” writes Rebecca Mead, where people dine under a planetarium-like dome that screens visuals commenting on social issues like factory farming and ocean pollution. Mead describes Munk’s incredibly creative vision for Alchemist (and his other projects, like Spora, a lab and research center focused on solutions to global food-system challenges). But are fine-dining patrons ready to be challenged, lectured, or even disgusted by their meals? Mead provides an entertaining, eye-opening look inside Munk’s world.
After two years at Treetop, Munk moved to Copenhagen, and borrowed money from a bank to lease a fifteen-seat former bistro. He had sufficient handyman skills to renovate the interior himself, and dim lighting was forgiving of his less than professional paintwork. He called the place Alchemist. Tellefsen, by now Munk’s champion, bought out the restaurant’s opening night, inviting influential critics as his guests. They were confronted with dishes that were the opposite of New Nordic purity. Munk served an ashtray filled with smoked pork belly, caramelized onions, and puffed potatoes, covered in leek ash. (The dish had been inspired, Munk told diners, by his grandmother’s death, from lung cancer.) A lamb heart stuffed with lamb tartare was accompanied by a transfusion bag filled with “blood” made from a cherry-juice-and-chicken-stock reduction. Munk had initially hoped to make the heart appear to be beating on the plate. “I went to a sex shop and bought fifteen to twenty vibrators—I wanted to put them inside to make the heart move,” he told me. “But it didn’t work.” Diners were given organ-donor cards along with the dish. During the next two years, fifteen hundred visitors to Alchemist signed up.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/25/can-your-stomach-handle-a-meal-at-alchemist/
via IFTTT
Watch