‘People love to step outside their comfort zone’: food designer on her edible art and how experiential dining creates talking points
- From serving dumplings under a social credit system to testing diners’ mental purity through noodles, Alison Tan has made a splash in Hong Kong’s food scene
- The ‘experimental feeder’ reveals her inspirations, and considers how experiential dining and pop-up dinners in unexpected places can get people talking
In the belly of one of Chai Wan’s many industrial buildings, Alison Tan – food designer and “experimental feeder” – is busy growing chia seeds into the shape of hands.
Trevor, her curious and docile ginger cat, traipses around the cavernous space as we sit down and wrap our hands around mugs of hot camomile tea.
Tan has been busy preparing for one of her latest pop-ups, known as Savour Cinema, a food-and-film project that pairs an experiential dinner, where courses are designed to reflect selected moments of the screening, with an iconic movie.
Because it is Halloween, she has selected the 2019 Scandi-horror flick Midsommar; there is a sense of the macabre as diners smash into a salt-baked salmon with a hammer during a key scene, or suck marrow from bone set among a bijou salad of barley, herbs, confit lemon peel, shallots and capers.
It’s the kind of thought-provoking, sensual and highly conceptualised “work” that Tan has slowly become known for in Hong Kong, at a time when diners are lusting for ever more inventive experiences after two years of living in a city that has been closed off to the world – a de facto hermitage.
Since 2019, she has pulled off a number of delightful, if esoteric, happenings, the first of which was an audacious dinner-slash-performance piece held at “Instagram pier” – the cargo dock on Sai Wan’s waterfront that inadvertently became one of the city’s most popular public spaces.
