Watch your dinner table come to life
Pop-up interactive dining pairs six-course meal with 3D animated story
Upgrade those phone cameras because coming this fall is one heck of a sensory dining overload. Imagine sitting at the dinner table with a blank book placed in front of you and it suddenly comes to life as the pages start flipping by themselves and reveal images of a tiny chef flying over the Great Wall of China or doing snow angels in a mountain of spices.
Dubbed Dinner Time Stories, it’s a pop-up dinner series that’s been travelling the world since 2015 and is making its Toronto stop at the end of September (tickets go on sale July 25). For $200 per person, wine-pairing is an additional $70, diners get a six-course dinner inspired by explorer Marco Polo’s travels on the Silk Road enhanced with 3D projection mapping at the table.
It’s hard to explain unless you watch the video of the dinner on the site, dinnertimestories.ca, but in essence over the course of two hours diners are guided through the dinner by a little cartoon French chef, aptly named Le Petit Chef, projected onto the table, which becomes animated with images such as moving waves, fireworks and dragons.
The food follows the little chef’s journey, starting in his hometown of Marseille with a little starter of ratatouille before he sets off onto the Silk Road where dishes start to take influence from North African, Indian and Chinese cuisines. Think lamb tagine with couscous as well as roasted red curry duck with chana masala and tandoori white fish. Helping to execute the menu is appropriately local chef Bashir Munye, who himself has done a dinner series that highlighted what he calls “Nomadic Cuisine”, which draws from his family’s Somali background, Italian upbringing and the cuisines of the Moors, Muslims from the North African and Mediterranean regions during the Middle Ages.
The series started three years ago when creator Nadine Beshir and a team of two Belgian animators created a dinner experience that combined 3D projection mapping (projecting images onto 3D objects such as buildings) to create optical illusions.
Since then, Dinner Time Stories has popped up in London, Dubai, Berlin, Stockholm, and most recently, Nashville before hitting Toronto.
Dinner Time Stories runs Sept. 29 to Nov. 25 at Katana restaurant at 333 Bay St. Tickets are available at eventbrite.ca.