Chapter One: Muskmelon
Netil House,
October, 2012
Waldorf Project is an ongoing series of immersive works by British artist Sean Rogg. Waldorf takes the form of concept-led dinners in which the experience of the diner is curated from start to finish. Each dinner features a flight of exceptional wines carefully chosen by Rogg, to which the food is paired. These wines are often picked from small remaining parcels of great vintages.
Chapter 1 explored notions of value, both in terms of the intrinsic value of different ingredients and the value that humans bring in making secondary materials: the hand of the chef or winemaker, for example. The wine flight comprised 1990s vintages of Californian wines: Sanford, and the associated Talinda Oaks production.
The food was designed in collaboration with chef and designer
Andrew Stellitano. The concept was to serve a progression of courses that showed increasing application of human craft on the part of the chef, and overtly increasing manipulation of the ingredients from their raw forms. The meal opened with raw and cooked mushrooms and seaweeds, mimicking a meeting of the land and the sea. Its conclusion was a dish comprising amorphous circular and spherical forms.
Images by Katy Pople