Food for thought

It's finally the weekend! Time to sleep in... time to bum... time to chill... and perhaps time to go for a yummy meal at brunch. =) I think brunch is a good invention. First you get to save some calories because you are having two meals in one sitting (provided you don't eat both breakfast and lunch portions), but more importantly if you can have brunch, it means you don't have to be at work! That's why I like it... hyukhyuk.

Thinking of eating reminds me of an article in an old issue of Metropolis, which has an interesting passage on a meal:

"...The little Italian place fosters romance; the burger joint makes for family togetherness; the sports bar promotes male bonding.

Take the Italian place. At the door, the smell of roasted garlic fills with you an ache of explicable well-being combined with the brute urgency of hunger. You are happy (tantalized), yet unhappy (ravenous). You see people eating and glowing, yet you enjoy a solidarity with your fellow unseated patrons outfitted in the customary fresh clothes and perfume. As you wait, patrons exit, exhausted by overconsumption, exuding the overenjoyment of satiation. Suddenly you want a table more than anything else in the world. When you get one, relief and relaxation produce a different series of stimuli. Visual cues take over: you read the menu, assess the table setting, appreciate the red velour walls, and the candles flicker a mellow light on your date's face. 

Finally you eat. If the food is good, the textures amplify the flavors. You drink red wine, which melts inhibition and makes you express affection, candor, and self-revelation. Your date reciprocates. Intimacy deepens. In fact, the deepening intimacy of your fellow diners fill the room, and you feel a strange bond with them as well. The togetherness of dining, 20 tables of two, heightens everyone's senses. A communal glow, fueled by invisibly secreted pheromones, burns off the perfumes. The air gets hotter. Time stands still. Only after you finish dinner and walk outdoors into the raw evening air do you realize how completely you had been transformed by multisensory manipulation." 

- Deep Design in METROPOLIS, August/September 2002

I like the passage because when I first read it, I felt like someone waiting there. But more than that, it was because the illustrative description of the entire dining experience made me think about the all the times I've dined out and how often, or rather, how rare I've enjoyed the experience of eating.

If you reflect on the times when you enjoyed a dining experience at a particular venue, what was it that contributed towards that? For me, a recurring factor is in the ambience of the place - be it the local rustic feel of Old Airport Road hawker centre or the soothing casual setting of Casa Verde at Botanics. This aspect of reaching out to our emotions forms the central theme of the article cited above, with the closing words from the author:

"Deep design milks the affective aspirations of people and places by starting off with the same questions: What are the real emotions we're trying to tap? How do we reach them via the senses? Everybody is a vast reserve of emotive potential... The design problem will be using that power to inspire people to do good things for each other - deep things."

Food for thought? =)