Close encounters with designer dishes. Artists and architects surprise!

The multi-award-winning Olafur Eliasson came up with the idea some years ago – a recipe book for 100 vegetarian dishes, the ones that were served to his studio staff. His love of good food spurred him into opening a pop-up restaurant in Reykjavik, along with his sister, the chef Victoria Eliasdottir, in 2018, where art installations could naturally be found alongside the popular recipes. Like magnets, food and art have always been attracted to each other – from the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking to the menu devised by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy for a dinner in honour of Gropius, who was leaving for Harvard, and Les Diners de Gala, the Surrealist cookery book signed and illustrated by Salvador Dali, in which the artist reveals the secrets of the sumptuous dinners prepared by him and his wife/muse Gala, and the conceptual recipe book Le Corbuffet: Edible Art and Design Classics (Prestel, 2019) by the Canadian artist, photographer and writer Esther Choi, inspired by various artists to whom she has dedicated particular dishes – from the Frida Kale-o Salad in honour of Frida Kahlo to the Rem Koolhaas-inspired Rem Brûlée.

The Kitchen Studio: Culinary Creations by Artists features 70 artists and 100 recipes, putting international creatives such as Ghada Amer, Jimmie Durham, Philippe Parreno, Carsten Höller, Dorothy Iannone, Zina Saro-Wiwa and, again, Olafur Eliasson, in charge of the kitchen. The recipes are real or made-up, simple or complicated, serious or amusing. Some, such as the one that calls for two cherries, are downright bewildering. When it comes to ingredients, measurements and compositions, creativity knows no bounds. The book is in a league of its own as regards its editorial approach, too, as Massimo Bottura, creator of the three-Michelin-starred restaurant Osteria Francescana, notes in his introduction: “At first everything about this book is alarming […]. The food doesn’t look like cookbook food […]. The recipe format changes all the time. There are strange diagrams, collages and poems. […] There are images that look like they have been borrowed from science textbooks, there is eccentric lettering, and some nearly illegible handwriting.” Then the revelation. The meaning and the spirit of the creation. The recipes become what they seem: self-portraits, little spyholes into the artists’ studios. So, a cookery book or an art book? This was the dilemma facing the multi-starred chef, who resolved it by reading it like an art book “and then I got the flavour of it: create.”