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| The table’s set ... at Gingerline’s Chamber of Flavours. |
In east London, a sniffy butler is welcoming 12 diners into the 16th century. “Ah, Lord Norrington! Greetings!”, he proclaims to a giggling woman in a floral dress. “Sunglasses indoors, my lady? It works for you,” he smiles at a leather-jacket-clad attendee, before rolling his eyes and harrumphing: “It doesn’t seem stupid at all.” Around him are dangling lace curtains, pictures of dead Elizabethans and a vase of roses complete with dry ice that submerges the table in a rolling fog. “Dinner is served!” he announces. At which point, a haughty aristocrat leaps out and startles the diners half to death.
This is immersive dining – specifically, a project called Chambers of Flavours, by theatre-cum-cookery crew Gingerline. Over the past eight months, they have fed about 17,000 guests – sometimes on a gondola, sometimes shoving them into a gigantic machine that looks like something from 80s kids’ TV programme Bertha. In this instance, they are taking them on a tour of theatrical sets (or “parallel dimensions”), where actors serve up a different themed course in each room.
We are thrown into a forest to hunt for birds’ nests containing little salad bowls, given cocktails while a sailor reads stories in a desert island scene (the “ocean” was a giant ballpit full of blue balls), and served dessert in an astonishingly impressive recreation airplane by a transgender flight attendant who performed a full song-and-dance number along the aisle. To watch diners shooting down the slide at the end of the experience was to watch people utterly dumbfounded. Some stood shell-shocked. Others seemed to go weak at the knees. Most were beaming.
Immersive food experiences are becoming more widespread – perhaps unsurprisingly, after the growth of immersive theatre in the past 20 years. And these kind of events are wildly popular. When theatrical foodie crew Not What They Seem turned the old Guardian building in Farringdon, north London, into a two-floor recreation of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks – featuring a meal in the show’s Double R Diner – every one of their 5,000 tickets sold out within a week, and despite extending the run to allow 9,000 people in, they still had requests (which they rejected) to take the project on tour around the world. That kind of success is particularly interesting given that immersive dining events operate under the publicity equivalent of omertà: guests are sworn to secrecy and begged not to post photos online. The press are banned from taking photographs or mentioning specific details – making them almost impossible to cover.
“I think the secrecy is a big part of the appeal,” offers Kerry Adamson, co-founder of Gingerline. “It builds tension and excitement.” It also means that their primary source of ticket sales is a mailing list of hardcore devotees. After all, most immersive dining experiences expect diners to hand over cash without so much as telling them what they’ll be eating – you might worry that you could have shelled out for a five-course feast of Spam fritters. “Yeah, it does tend to attract open-minded diners,” Adamson admits. “But we have also developed a reputation for doing things well.”
That reputation largely comes from the quality of their food. “We get people coming back time and again for the cooking,” says Alice Hodge of Art of Dining, one of the most respected immersive dining companies. Her business partner and head chef, Ellen Parr, trained at Moro, and her inventive dishes range from beef and mushroom massaman tea to Vietnamese-style salad with barbecued ox heart. “There are five senses and we try to stimulate them all,” offers Gingerline’s Suz Mountfort of an event that goes so far as to pump rooms full of rosemary fragrance to enhance the experience and flavour of the lamb dish on offer. A typical Gingerline dish might be gazpacho with truffle-infused tapioca pearls or basil-topped chocolate sand next to profiteroles filled with green tea and mango coulis. “The food’s an adventure, too,” smiles Adamson.
Logistically, creating a kitchen in what is essentially a theatrical set is no mean feat. “We’ve had to put kitchens into tiny spaces under the stairs, or do our plating up in corridors,” chuckles Hodge. She’s up to the challenge though, having spent a few years collaborating with the National Trust to feed people in unusual spaces (including the servants quarters at 17th-century stately home Ham House). “We’ve had a few grumpy chefs along the way, but for diners there’s just something magical about eating in those spaces.” And then there’s the theatrical element. In a way, immersive dining experiences are on to a winner before their guests have eaten a mouthful. People love a kooky venue and being immersed in surreal theatrical worlds – witness the likes of Secret Cinema’s £70 film screenings with actors playing movie characters in the buildup and which sell out every time.
“It’s true: there’s something about the immersive world that makes people go absolutely wild,” says Louise Orwin, the brains behind the Twin Peaks dining experience, The Owls Are Not What They Seem. “We caught so many people having sex in corners,” she adds. “I think the mindset you get into taps into something from our childhood psyche,” offers Mountfort. “Everyone wants to find Narnia – this is sort of the closest you can get as an adult.”
Immersive dining isn’t for everyone, though. “We’re constantly working against that reaction of ‘Oh god – whatever next?’” says Orwin. “But so many companies misuse the word ‘immersive’ that I think people can be suspicious of the genuinely good events.” Also, given an emphasis on communal dining, these aren’t the kinds of events for people who would rather keep themselves to themselves. “For people who enjoy it, the interaction’s magical,” says Hodge. “We get whole tables of people swapping numbers. We’ve had emails from people telling us they met their boyfriend at our night.”
There you have it: they don’t just do theatre. They don’t just do dining. Sometimes, they even do matchmaking.
guardian
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