An unusual dining experience in Café ArtScience Cambridge

Restaurant of the future

“I’d like to order an edible watter bottle, or wait, I might go for the inhalable chocolate... Nevermind, I’ll take the vapor Scotch”. Behold only a few items on the menu of the futuristic Café ArtScience, a restaurant, bar and café located in Cambridge (Massachusetts) specialized in edible experiments, offering an innovative and unusual dining experience. The restaurant opened in October 2014, and was founded by David Edwards and Todd Maul, both scientists, and Chef de Cuisine Patrick Campbell. The French architect Mathieu Lehanneur designed the modernist and prominent café.

In fact, David Edwards came up with the idea. He’s a Harvard engineering professor whose expertise lies in the use of air to improve health. Café ArtScience is Edwards’ first restaurant. Next to the restaurant, there’s also a showroom for his edible experiments: the so-called ‘WikiBar’. “I’m able to deliver nutrition without any of the side effects that are sometimes associated with drinking a Red Bull,” Edwards says. In 2007, he already founded ‘Le Laboratoire’ in Paris. Actually, Café ArtScience can be seen as its extension.

The modernist design of Mathieu Lehanneur

‘Le Laboratoire’ extended

 

The ‘Scotch tasting flight’ is one of Edwards’ most recent creations. This special designed carafe – dubbed as ‘Le Whaf’ – transforms Whisky liquor into diaphanous fog, which can be inhaled easily. It has the same taste and smell as regular Scotch, but doesn’t contain the calories or intoxication effects. The ice cream spheres are another example of the revolutionary dining experiments. They’re wrapped in a flavored skin which helps the frozen liquids to keep their shape.

Edwards' diaphanous Whisky

Apart from the lab experimenting, Café ArtScience opened also as a proper restaurant. Patrick Campbell, Chef de Cuisine, provides day-to-day contemporary French meals. In fact, he rarely uses Edwards’ creations in the kitchen. However, Todd Maul, the barman, tends to experiment a bit more. Of course, the food inventions aren’t always a big success. Through trial and error just a few of Edwards’ creations managed to deserve a place in the experimental WikiBar. “Any innovation is going to get it wrong before getting it right”, Edwards realizes.

A chemistry kitchen

Café ArtScience is an excellent example of the molecular gastronomy, a culinary gimmick that started in the mid-1990s. Chef Campbell follows in the footsteps of famous chefs including Ferran Adria, José Andrés and Wylie Dufresne. They were the first who dared to turn their kitchen into a chemistry lab. Even more, Café ArtScience shows in a genius and atypical way how nowadays scientists are able to revolutionize the way we consume food. 

Eventually, Edwards hopes that more supermarkets and food chains will start stocking his experimental alternatives. The first line to be launched will be one of coconut milk, named WikiPearls, at an independent chain of New England grocery stores. 

According to Edwards, Café ArtScience is the ideal entry point to his universe. The café gathers a network of labs, educational and experimental programs that perfectly embody the term ArtScience, his word for the place where aesthetic and analytic modes of thinking collide. 

I’d like to encourage you to check out their website with more pictures and edible experiments listed: http://www.cafeartscience.com/

For more information on Café ArtScience, go to: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-13/at-cafe-artscience-a-food-futurist-experiments 

and http://www.bostonmagazine.com/restaurants/article/2014/08/26/cafe-artscience-innovation/

So, what do you think: Should Ghent University gather its most genius scientists to set up its own Café ArtScience Ghent? Maybe a fun and interesting alternative for the usual University Restaurants? Comments below!

Wolf