René Redzepi on creating the world's best restaurant
Repeatedly ranked as one of the top restaurant's in the world René Redzepi talks about his restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark and his quest to create a restaurant where people can experience a clear sense of time and place.
Nobody believed that a restaurant serving food from the our region, the Nordic region and also work with our culture could exist. We were considered the joke of the town for thinking we could, working with the ingredients and the culture we have, do something that projected into the future, flavourwise, Redzepi says.
Watch the full speaker talk here.
Alex Atala on creativity and innovation in cuisine
Chef Alex Atala is rated the best chef in South America. Atala believes that an entire culture's culinary tradition can be summed up in three flavours: "If I said soy sauce, ginger and seaweed your mind goes to Japan. If I said tomato, basil and mozzarella, then your mind goes to Italy." In a similar way Atala wants to capture the taste of the Amazon for both locals and visitors to his native Brazil.
One of the most important souvenirs for a traveller is flavours, muses Atala.
Watch his full 2013 speaker talk here.
Martí Guixé on food karoake, edible objects and techno-tapas
Martí Guixé is a Catalonian food, industrial, interior and product designer living in Barcelona. Guixé is
I was interested in mass production and this is how I came to food design. Food is mass produced but no one sees it as an object. I wanted to work with food as though it is a standard product of design. Although I have worked with food a lot, I have no idea of cooking. I am not interested in learning how to cook either. I look at food absolutely from a designer point of view, he says.
Watch his full 2013 speaker talk here.
Marije Vogelzang on playing with your food
With so many people living fast lives, the simple connections between them are sometimes lost, and it is those simple connections that eating designer Marije Vogelzang seeks to celebrate through her work. She recently spoke at the Spier Secret Festival 2013 in the Cape Winelands and hosted a dinner where meat and root vegetables were moulded in clay and cooked in a pit in an open fire - an ancient Chinese method of cooking. She points out that it is quite poignant that the colours of clay used, mimic the different shades of human skin.
It is a kind of connection between our human roots and human skin colour. Eventually you have to break the shell to get to the roots which is acutally more important than the actually eating. It is the root inside that counts. It is also setting up a situation where people feel a part of the food they eat but also of the people sitting next to them, It is really about going back to our roots, she says.
Watch her 2010 speaker talk here.
