marmite food lab, Badenerstrasse, Zurich

Jürgen Dollase is a fascinating guy and out of all the books I’ve read, his where the ones which had resonated most with me. His approach to describing food is unique, but it works! I especially like the combination of charts to understand how a single bite of food engulfs your senses while eating (Geschmacksschule). He is somewhat over the top (linguists seem to hate him) as an example he doesn’t talk about emotion when it comes to food, but about “associative context” (Assoziativer Kontext). My kind of guy!

Anyway – Kudos to marmite (which has nothing to do with the vegetable paste and everything with a french pot) for bringing Jürgen to a panel in Zurich. The marmite food lab (which I hadn’t known about) is trying to be a place where people meet, discuss and educate themselves about the avant garde of food & dining. The topic here was multi-sensory dining and Mr. Dollase was joined by Experimental Psychiatrist Charles Spence, Pop Up Dinner Chef and Kitchen-Theory.com Curator Jozef Youssef and Franc Aleu Co-Creator of the Il Somni dining experience. I’ll spare you the details but it had some interesting thoughts, I’d be a bit skeptical about relying too much on “research” based on consumer feedback (think A/B testing for determining color of a product that enhances how sweet something tastes), that’s great for the food industry but not the avant-garde. What is interesting is understanding how we react to different senses including synesthetic effects, e.g. ice cream is perceived to taste sweeter when served on a white plate instead of a black plate.

Leaving the whole theory behind us, the food was actually pretty good catered by Segantini. Especially the tomato trilogy (felt like part of the inspiration came from Jürgen Dollase’s Tomato cook book) with a vodka pickled piece of waterlemon and salmon tataki was a pretty nice dish. I liked the layers of tomato which gave it depth. The element which didn’t work that well in terms of taste, but executed on it’s name was the meatball in a cage. The cage was pretty tough to get through, so it did fullfil it’s architectural intent, but it was at the same time a bit hard to eat. Overall this is my kind of meal, somewhat informal six or seven small bites, but served tableside. I hate walking around and eating, I like to be pampered.

The lab had a good value for money. For 250 CHF you get a full day of intellectual stimulating entertainment paired with education and new insights. The food was good, the crowd was small enough too make it feel intimate, the host was superbly prepared, there was enough wine that one could get drunk and I even got two wooden spoons as a give-away present. I might be a bit overenthusiastic but great to see these type of events in Zurich!