For Lewis's birthday I decided to throw him a Futurist dinner party. The Futurist theme suits him perfectly because he loves not only food but also bizarre and inedible food and is constantly thinking up ideas for strange and fantastical restaurants. Also like Marinetti, the founder of the Futurist movement, he despises pasta. And he likes shouting at people, particularly about his opinions on art.
Cues for courses and cocktails came from Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook and the Manifesto taking in their preferred subjects of speed, industrialisation, technology, youth, violence and the technological triumph of humanity over nature. The Futurists, who I have posted about briefly before, believed that eating should be a sensory experience in all respects and should overthrow the expected so we started by providing all the diners with bibs made of various materials from PVC to lace to tweed. Throughout the meal diners were instructed to engage in tactile pleasures and feast their fingers on their neighbour's bib.
The programme is too long and complicated to reproduce here in it's entirety so here are some snippets from the meal... pills filled with Grappa and Campari, cheese and wine cocktails, Manifesto stuffed oranges, magic food with surprise fillings, timed interludes of silence, darkness and aeroplane noise and eating rounds accompanied by generally unsettling music. Cocktails of pure alcohol topped with anchovies and chilli, a tactile vegetable garden, raw beef marinated in a sauce of cognac and rum torn by the blasts of an electric kazoo, eating without cutlery and without the use of hands, jellies and blancmanges topped with aeropoetic shapes, cocktail jelly bombes and a robotic cake, and a towering meat sculpture.

Thanks to Jennie for helping me to organise and acting as a waiter with me, Fran for creating the meat sculpture, Cat for the robot cake.Photos taken by James and Cat.