Guerilla Dining - Thanksgiving and a flick

Thanksgiving…has no meaning for me. None. Whatsoever. At best it rings a bell about the celebration of butchering some people — way back when buffaloes were roaming freely in the land of the free — and then eating turkey or something. Pardon my (being) French. The only Thanksgiving in America I (sort of) recall, I had a meal of crab for some reason. Good crab though. I was living in Berkeley and most of my friends at the time were strongly opposed to the idea of Thanksgiving. But hey, traditions are traditions and when it comes to food one can maybe forget a bit cynicism and misanthropy. A bit. Depends on the food. And the company … One cannot buy company …

But let’s get back to our sheep flock (that probably is a Frenchism) and have a look at how Thanksgiving brought me where I am. Because you see, here in Copenhagen, I have gotten acquainted with Tiffany Ng and her Silver.Spoon venture. As far as I can fathom — we often end our meetings with a significant amount of empty bottles of various types of beverage on the table — she is one of the representatives around the world (and in Denmark particularly, as it turns out) of the guerrilla dining concept. She would tell you all about it, its roots, that-it-is-nothing-new, and its being pretty amazing and all. To me the idea sounds fairly, errr, well let me try and describe it.

Take a place a priori unrelated to food and convert it into a restaurant, a classy one at that, for a couple of nights. Sometimes one, sometimes more. Whatever. Now imagine yourself having a four or five courses dinner, crafted by real, amazing chefs, but under a bridge, in an abandoned factory or church (a church is some sort of a factory anyway), in a cargo container, you name it.

Tiffany has often teamed up with Graffeats, a duo of punk chefs from San Francisco. Well, I added the punk part, they look punk to me, but I am pretty new in the surroundings of chefs, maybe baseball caps and heavy-metal T-shirts is common dress code for cooks these days. Blair Warsham and Clint Davies are the duo, and they both sport baseball caps and T-shirts. On Thanksgiving of this year (2010, for the record) Silver.Spoon and graffEats collaborated with Jack Stevenson and brought the guerrilla dining thingy to Huset, a building in the middle of the oldest part of Copenhagen. This place is quite unique, it hosts a bar, some concert rooms, a movie theater, and so on, over four floors. On the top floor, the full five or six course menu was served and enhanced by some projections of real reels (yes, yes, I do know) of 16mm goodness, black and white jazz shorts from way back in the day. Jack Stevenson curated this part, he is a magician when it comes to exhuming these things out of gods know where …

Guerilla Dining - Thanksgiving and a Flick

The menu was (loosely) based upon the traditional Thanksgiving dinner, with a twist as it was later explained to my ignorant other-side-of-the-pond-self.

- Amuse-bouche (Prosecco “Treviso” 2009, Val d’Oca)
- Wild mushroom ragout with marsala, sugar snap pea salad and fried shallots (Nørrebro Bryghus bombay pale ale)
- Roasted chestnut soup with candied pecans, cardamom and orange oil (Sylvaner “Rittersberg” 2005, Jean-Paul Schmitt)
- Roasted range turkey & brown butter mash, with cranberry compote, Budweiser collard greens, sausage stuffing (Valdepeñas “Gran reserva de familia” 2001, Diego de Almagro)
- Yam “s’more” with gingersnap, toasted marshmallow and spiced caramel (Nørrebro Bryghus julebryg)
- A small mignardise (Porto Colheita 1995, Quinta do Portal)

Now that is a menu! And each of the courses was paired with some wine or beer, of course. It being close to Christmas, and us being situated in Denmark, some “julebryg øl“ – Christmas beer as our smart readers would certainly have guessed – was served. It would require a complete other article to tell more about the “julebryg”, or “sne” (for snow) Graffeats served.

The first course (not counting the amuse-bouche) was, as far as I recall, a take on the usual pile of steamed haricot vert which is served at very traditional Thanksgiving meals. Except that it used to be totally plain, with a bit of butter maybe whereas here, some more ingredients were added to create a nice original dish, adding many more flavours. I also really enjoyed the dynamics of the serving, such as the creativity of plating the soup. Or all but the soup. Eventually they came and poured it on top of a chocolate decoration spelling (according to a mysterious scheme not understood by yours truly) Silver.Spoon or Graffeats and some ingredients described in the menu. The aforementioned chocolate writing melted in front of the eyes of the lucky possessor of the plate and his eager-to-have-soup neighbours.

It goes without saying that one needs turkey at a Thanksgiving diner. It would be like not putting an olive in a dry martini, improper. It will be very difficult for me here not to sound heretical or anything, so I will stop at saying the turkey looked and probably tasted quite amazing (I am vegetarian, turkey is a bird …). This course was teamed up with a nice wine from Spain. That I did drink.

I could go on and on and try to do justice to each of the dishes, but I also need to describe the place and the atmosphere. It is after all the essence of guerrilla dining! So. The place was dark and moody, with wooden floor and exposed beams, which is a pain for a photographer, let me tell you. A piano sits in a corner, a bit lonely but apparently also enjoying the atmosphere, although it declined to give me its name and favourite movie short. Indeed, in between courses Jack would turns the lights down and show a couple of film shorts. I can still hear the sound of the projector ringing in my ears. For instance, he showed an amazing piece from 1926 of an unidentified ukulele player or The Layson Brothers doing a tap dance duo from somewhere in the 30s. Another piece which amazed me was the one where Les Paul, yes, of electric guitar fame, and his wife Mary Ford sing and play songs at home. I cannot exactly recall the lyrics or even the theme of it but the whole 50s / 60s look was well worth one pause from sipping one’s wine or talking to the date on one’s side. The showing finished with Dexter Gordon at the famous (legendary even) Club Montmartre in the very same Copenhagen in 1969!

This event was part of a world tour in which Silver.Spoon and graffEats are engaged. I suggest chasing these guys around.

[Show picture list]

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Links:
Silverspoon
Graffeats
Nørrebro Bryghus
Huset

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 16th, 2010 at 19:51. It is filed under Drink Me, Eat Me and tagged with All Content © Arnaud De Grave, Copenhagen, Denmark, graffEats, Guerilla Dining, julebryg øl, Silver.Spoon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.