Mugaritz XX Aniversario

Mugaritz XX Aniversario…

…is a multisensory dining experience that was shared with over 10,000 people from all over the world during the 2018 season at Mugaritz, one of the world’s most influential restaurants, located in northern Spain, in celebration of their twentieth anniversary.

Midway through the twenty-plus-course tasting menu, all of the diners—up to sixty at a time—are served a dish that appears to be an acorn encased in amber on an oak base under a glass dome.

When the domes are removed from the dishes, the restaurant is filled with the sound of a music box emanating from the plates themselves in a generative, spatial counterpoint, evoking curiosity, nostalgia, and wonder. Then when diners reach out to take the food—a single, richly complex bite of smoked Idiazabal cheese mixed with fat from Iberian ham and topped with buckwheat berries that have been inoculated with koji mold, suspended inside spherified mushroom broth—celebratory sounds of toys and whistles and party favors play in response to each diner’s touch, as the music transitions to joyful rhythms of guitar, voices, and percussion.

The dishes contain custom sensors, and they are networked together to a central server, allowing the music to be coordinated in harmony and rhythm, even though each plate’s part is algorithmically varied. They not only blend in with the fine dining décor, but integrate into the restaurant’s highly optimized workflow, while being robust enough for several months of regular use.

The end result is that diners do not simply observe but actually enact and embody this anniversary celebration. The interactive, decentralized sound highlights the ways in which all of the diners are complicit in the same food supply infrastructure. Each participant is dependent upon the other diners in the restaurant to complete their experience, provoking a broader reconsideration of the connections to other people, to one’s own senses, and to the wider environment.

Credits

Core Team:

Andoni Luis Aduriz (Spain), head chef and founder of Mugaritz

Ben Houge (USA), composer, programmer

Jutta Friedrichs (Germany), designer and project manager

Ramon Perise (Spain), chef and head of R&D at Mugaritz

Additional Contributors:

Iñaki Remiro Virto (Spain), fabrication of oak base and glass dome

Spencer Russell (USA), custom circuit board design, prototyping, and programming

Kenn Sebesta (USA), custom circuit board prototyping

Robert Kim (Russia), custom circuit board layout and assembly support

Nanwei Gong (Taiwan), technical advising and moral support

Nan Zhao (Germany), technical advising and moral support

Matt Azevedo (USA), acoustic consulting

Óscar Oliva (Spain), video documentation

Musicians:

Claudio Ragazzi (Argentina), guitar

Richard “Gus” Sebring (USA), horn

Ben Houge (USA), percussion and voice

Jessica Richmond (Canada), voice

Zahili Gonzalez Zamora (Cuba), voice

Enrique Gonzalez Müller (Venezuela), audio engineering and recording

Special Thanks:

Thanks to Pep Gatell and Nadala Fernández of La Fura dels Baus for support and concept development during the ‘èpica i singular’ workshop, summer 2017.

Thanks to Josh “Muffin” Gordonson and Eric Rosenbaum for their assistance in the early stages of prototyping.

Thanks to Ron Malenfant at Cisco for generous network equipment support.

And thanks to Sandra and Ian for the original music box.

This project was funded in part by a Berklee College of Music Newbury Comics Faculty Fellowship grant.