IN FRONT OF THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM

 Word is that Ferran Adrià, he of the restaurant El Bulli, the epicenter of molecular gastronomy fame, which closed in 2011, is about to the premises as a museum.  I like restaurants and I like museums but a food museum strikes me as tricky thing.

As far as I can tell, Adrià’s museum will consist of a lot of photographs of food, making it seem like a living Instagram, along with paintings by Adria, which from what I’ve seen are likely to make it look somewhat like a charity shop. Here’s some art he did earlier:  

 

But perhaps there’ll be art by other people too:

 

It appears there’ll be no museum café, and I don’t know whether or not there’ll be a gift shop.

 

Needless to say I never ate at El Bulli but my old late pal did Jonathan Gold  did, right before it closed, and reviewed it for the Wall Street Journal.  He compared it toYoko Ono’s art and an edible infomercial, which doesn’t sound as though he loved the place, but he talked about it on KCRW radio and I think his main point was it pays not to overthink what you were eating at El Bulli, which obviously is not going to apply in the museum.

 

Closer to home Bompas and Parr did very briefly, for about 3 months, set up The British Museum of Food, in Borough Market.  The museum's aspirations, they said at the time, were ‘to change peoples’ lives by helping them consider what they eat, spread knowledge around nutrition and health and to recognize its role in culture.’  Which sounds fair enough.  In 2016 the museum was looking for a permanent home, and as far as I know it still is.  I believe they have a very good menu collection.

 

In Japan there’s The Museum of Fruit, which I only know about because David Toop made a CD of music for the place. 

 

Originally I thought this must be some ironic conceptual art piece, but no, it’s an actual museum of fruit (kind of). The website says ‘Itsuko Hasegawa 長谷川逸子designed the Fruit Museum in the Yamanashi Prefecture near Mount Fuji in Japan, completed in 1997. The three shell-shaped buildings symbolize the “fruits” of spiritual sensuality, intelligence and lust. 

In a general sense, the buildings are trees producing fruits of creativity in the visitors who themselves will spread a sensitivity to our frail environment, and hopefully produce green buildings themselves.’

So no, not your average museum of food or anything else, but it does exist in the real world.

As most certainly do the two noodle museums dedicated to Momofuku Ando, the founder of Nissin Food Products and inventor of instant ramen.

 

There’s one branch of the museum in Ikeda and another in Yokohama. The latter ‘offers the virtual experience of being a noodle in a huge factory, and going through the entire manufacturing process from making the noodles to shipping them.’

I think I might give that a miss and head for the tasting room. Yes this is a food museum where they actually give you food.  

 

And finally, I was thinking of the Brighton Pavilion, some way from being a museum of food but it’s the kitchen that I always remember best.  It looks pretty good as it is now, 

but it was probably more fun before it became an exhibit.