EXPERIMENTAL DINING

Like your meals utterly bonkers with a side of immersive theatrics? Check out The Future of Food: Epochal Banquet at Expo 2020 – a neverbefore-seen, multi-course experience cooked up by Harry Parr and Sam Bompas, owners of multi-sensory experience studio Bompas & Parr…

For the uninitiated, who are Bompas and Parr exactly?

At Bompas & Parr we describe ourselves as experience designers or ‘architects of taste’. Ultimately, we want to choreograph a sensational experience related to food and drink. The studio started over 14 years ago through our shared interest in jellies.

You’re described as the UK’s reallife Willy Wonkas. Is that a fair assessment?

Well, over the years we’ve created a number of wild food creations, some of which feature in Dahl’s work such as chocolate waterfalls, flavour changing chewing gum and non-melting ice lollies. For one project we even worked with the Roald Dahl Museum and fermented a beer with living matter swabbed from the author’s writing chair. I was at my most nervous serving it to the full Dahl family on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Tell us about some of your most memorable food installations?

Over the years these include things like multi-sensory fireworks where a live audience of a quarter of a million people at London’s NYE firework show experienced the world’s first flavour fireworks. However, The Future of Food: Epochal

Banquet will be our most ambitious project to date.

When it comes to creating, what inspires you?

This is changing all the time. We relish looking at what you can learn from different disciplines and countries. So, for Expo 2020 it has been phenomenal to be able to speak to the UAE Space Agency about their work on future astronaut food that might fuel a trip to Mars – then to create a canape inspired by this for the show.

Tell us a bit about it your dining experience at Expo 2020.

We are creating a Universal Museum of Food set 300 years in the future in pre-eminent scientist James Lovelock’s hypothesized Novacene – the age of hyperintelligence. When there you’ll then eat your way through future culinary history as part of a theatrical three-course dining experience. There are numerous scientific collaborations with pre-eminent scientists that are being debuted. Some will go on to shape how we eat in years to come. Taste the future.

And they’ll be some world firsts, too?

Absolutely – there will be transgenic glowing starters, a crisp of 1,000 flavours, vegan bone marrow, herbs grown in atmospheres of the year 2220 and chocolates that shape your dreams.

What do you hope people will think or feel during and after the experience?

We’d love people to feel the same sense of awe and wonder we’ve all probably experienced when gazing up into the night’s sky. Mixed with the joyful contentment of feeling satiated by the feast and hopefully inspired to go on to shape the future positively.

The two-hour dining experience costs from Dhs550 and tickets can be purchased via expo2020dubai.com. @bompasandparr