Mattia Casalegno’s ‘Aerobanquets RMX’ Serves Up Food for Thought (The NoPro Review)

As someone who has been both a food critic and a theatre critic, I can say that for me, at least, food criticism has been easier to do than theatre criticism. While the process of making a full dinner experience is just as technically complex and involved as creating a theatrical experience, the evaluation is based on far clearer questions. Asking whether something tastes good, whether the food nourishes, whether the setting and service put you at ease, and placing the experience in a context of culture and innovation may require a great deal of experience to do well, and requires the same critical eye and vocabulary as any other form of criticism. However, the analysis component seems to require much less. Most restaurant reviews won’t ask what a salad of duck confit really means, and those that do often are dismissed as navel gazing pretension.

Good criticism of other forms of art demands that level of scrutiny, though; if all we asked of our critics was if the art delighted the audience, then criticism would never reach its potential as guideposts through a cluttered artistic landscape.

This gap between reviewing food and reviewing theatre illuminates my essential trouble when trying to figure out how to judge Aerobanquets RMX. Mattia Casalegno’s meal (show? experience?) places its participant (player? diner?) in a virtual reality landscape, across a range of scenes. And in each one, they’re presented with a small object, floating in VR, that they must eat while wearing the headset to continue the meal. Each dish resembles a small alien jewel, seemingly organic and luminescent, and compelling to eat in the same way a Tide Pod is (sidebar: don’t eat Tide Pods, kids). The seven bite-sized courses, and a smattering of pre- and post-show hors d’oeuvres and desserts, were designed by the restaurant team behind New York’s Rahi, an upscale modern Indian restaurant. The whole thing is wrapped in a bow and presented by the James Beard foundation on the top floor of their West Village townhouse with the dining room containing a spartanly decorated table, one later made resplendent in virtual reality.

It seems that each party involved had a different take on the evening’s aim. The James Beard Foundation treats it like all of their tasting menu dinners: lavish, service- and comfort-focused, with a goal of exploration and education on the frontiers of the culinary world. Walking in, we are immediately given sparkling water and a tour of the kitchen. In low, gracious tones that match the dark wood of the building, we are guided through a plate of amuse bouche: tiny, curry-scented savories the size of petit fours. We are given as comfortable a setting as you could want from a dinner party, and are guided through bold flavors with a gentle hand.

That comfort seems at odds with the main Aerobanquets RMX experience, though. Inspired by The Futurist Cookbook — a work of Italian modernism that proposed surreal and conceptual dining — Aerobanquets RMX clearly seeks to disrupt the status quo with less regard to its audience. Our culture inevitably progresses towards modernism; why should food be any different? The challenge and game of the evening becomes for the participants to adapt to that march of progress. Flavor and image pairings are shocking and unexpected; the audience goes in blind to the menu. Each bite is delicious, but occasionally abrasively surprising. I find myself feeling slightly dizzy, and some audience members report feeling nauseous from the virtual reality experience. Yet the meal marches forward.

(Moderate spoilers for the experience follow.)

A lot of play in the piece comes from the tension between environment and the sensation of eating. As diners, we often forget how much information we get from visual cues; after six warm, solid courses, I almost choked on the (admittedly delicious) falooda, a mix of rose ice cream, corn noodles, and basil seeds. Who could have expected that without really seeing it? In my eyes and my mind, it was merely another glowing gemstone, emerging from a lake of cream that rose up to drown me as I chewed, toppled Greek statuary surrounding us and gazing down in what felt like a mix of pity and judgement.

Seeing a dark underworld of giant mushrooms in the headset, I found myself sitting in a sort of Lynchian nightmare room, with crimson walls and off-kilter furniture all around me. From the gloom, a floating plate emerged, with a small beautiful cube on it. As I tipped the plate into my mouth, and I chewed the cube, I guessed that it was meat of some sort, tasting rich and gamey with a slathering of a mild spice that only made the richness more obvious. Suddenly, I look up and notice the virtual room’s most prominent piece of furniture: a deer head staring down at me ominously. I spin around, and behind me is the ghost of a deer, staring dead at me in the distance. My mind reels; I’m now certain I’m eating venison, meat, a part of a dead animal, and begin to consider the process by which that living thing went through to get into my mouth. But why? Why would they give me a venison course and then try to guilt trip me? They were the ones who served it in the first place! Was I only getting these images because I didn’t choose the vegetarian option? I grasped for some kind of coherent message.

After the show, I learned the punchline to the joke: it wasn’t venison after all. I had been eating a cube of lamb meat. But the surrounding stimuli created a seamless culinary illusion to great effect. I was thinking about what I was eating in more detail than I ever did in my day-to-day life. They use this joke a handful of times. When I was told I was eating the dreams of a piglet, squealing musical instruments made of meat rained from the sky. I was positive I was being guilted for my consumption of a pork meatball; however, it turned out to be a vegan substitute meat. The dreams of a piglet, indeed.

The medium of virtual reality doesn’t go unscrutinized by Aerobanquets RMX either. Through the act of taking a virtual object into your physical body, all boundaries seem to collapse. The technology is remarkable, with hacked Oculus controllers becoming fully trackable plates, and perfectly smooth hand tracking allowing for seamless integration into the virtual world. As the surface of my hands shifted textures with each course, I felt like I was melting into the virtual world, and each bite was making me more a part of that space, like Persephone and the Underworld.

That exploration of physical bodies in virtual space bled into a discussion of dining that, to me, is the linchpin which makes Aerobanquets RMX work. During the introduction to the experience, a man introduced the technology and said something that stayed with me all evening. He talked about our past predictions for the future of dining, of personally tailored experiences where each diner’s palate and desires were exactly catered to. He laughed derisively at the thought.

Aerobanquets is not that dinner, but captures the spirit of what’s wrong with that vision. Beautiful and flavorful, each choreographed course was a delight on its own. As an evening, though? The experience felt isolating and lonely, in a deliberate and thought provoking way. The joys of the dinner table are often largely in sharing food. The act of dining out at a fine restaurant is an act of receiving the chef’s vision as much as it is an act of sharing and empathy. By divorcing food from that context and connection, eating out loses some of its joy and meaning.

Was Aerobanquets RMX necessarily a “pleasant” journey every step of the way? No, and with a $125 price tag, it’s a journey I understand that — like fine dining — not everyone can afford to indulge in. But as far as immersive works that have stuck with me and changed the way I engage with the world on a day-to-day basis, it ranks among the highest. Food is one of my biggest daily pleasures; having experienced Aerobanquets RMX is like having found a new sixth taste in all of my food, and I’m delighted to have something new to chew on.

Aerobanquets RMX has concluded its NYC run.

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