For this design project, I also began to think through notions of foodways , the experience of dining, and taste as the catalyst for remembered experience.

I was interested in the ephemeral materiality of food as a means of facilitating community. As my point of departure, I wanted to explore a dinner that has taken on the role of invented ritual, and quickly become a small, but integral part of the city’s tapestry. “The Secret Restaurant” is a weekly meal hosted by two friends in their private home. While the informal title implies some sort of exclusivity, this is misleading, for my experience has always witnessed the welcoming of those outside the ‘know.’

Each meal delivers a choice in vegan appetizer and entrée, with a single dessert served to all. It seemed obvious that the dessert would be the most interesting, and indeed the most universal means of documenting the temporality of experience. This week the dessert was a small date bar, sided with a dollop of almond paste, and a slice of grapefruit to cleanse the palette. Seemingly an idiosyncratic assortment of flavors, upon consuming the dish I realized that the date-nut-fruit combination had an associative and resonant history: the holiday fruitcake.

My documentation will take the form of deconstructing and reassembling the ingredients employed in the dessert. By offering the class the dish ‘in translation’, my project will explore how ‘heritage’ derived from the vortex of taste and memory.

Will this conjure flashes of mundane holiday parties? Will this in some way bring “The Secret Dinner” to a new public? What other memories will be assimilated with fruitcake nouveau!?