area 109+ | around food

the vision of Davide Scabin

Davide Scabin’s Combal.zero creator. All times and rhytms about food making are stictly calculated with attention and detail’s care. He also increased the value of food setting with his own choreography as he became the “art & food design” forerunner. From Combal.Zero kitchen, close to wonderful hill of Rivoli Castle and Modern Art Museum,  Scabin fascinates hosts with his unique works, after long studies and testings on raw material, shapes, consistences and temperatures, oriented to planning design tendency

Check Salad
Check Salad

area: How do you apply design to food in your kitchen?
Davide Scabin: Design applied to food is, generally speaking, principally of an aesthetic kind, while many of the ergonomic and functional aspects that are part of a project, of true industrial design, are neglected. What I see as food design today, on the contrary, is something less visible. I am interested in creating a design condition. For instance, in 2006 with the “Scabin Salt System” I conceived a new salting system. Skube are tablets of compressed salt, with a central cut which make it possible to salt according to the cooking time, without considering either the weight nor the volume of the water. I have created 3 tables and the different variable are combinations which make it possible to salt in a scientific manner, with considerable advantages also in terms of healthiness. My spaghetti with tomatoes becomes, if we consider this salting aspect, an example of design applied to food. In 2007 I designed IT, Identity Taste. IT is a very futuristic vision of a project of mine, which creates an identity card for food. By means of a self-analysis kit with liquid solutions everyone may test his preference on a Scabin scale of 6 points. IT may also be applied on a vast social scale, and thus help to reduce the use of salt. The “Cyber Eggs”, the first of which date from 1997, on the contrary feature a completely immediate approach, and a completely aesthetic valence.
area: How has the kitchen evolved in the last years? Is it possible to recognize an evolution in the use of materials and forms?
D.S.: The table has remained just as it was sixty years ago. The children of the new generations are, for instance, 5 cm taller on the average, but kitchens often lack ergonomic measurements or forms. Drawers are useless, what would be useful, rather, would be a magnetized plate where knives stay in place, in perfect order and without any danger of falling on a foot... Sharp edges and corners in a kitchen are another detail which is often neglected, and so are inner corners which, while elegant, often become repositories of bacteria, as they are hard to clean.
area: What characteristics should a kitchen vaunt today? How should it be lit?
D.S.: My kitchen should, ideally, be lit just as the room in which the customer enjoys my dishes. Having the same light means to perceive the same chromatic scales, and thus to see the dish just as the customer does. I work seated in my kitchen, precisely because I want to see the dish from the same angle, when preparing it, as the customer.
area: What must the plate be like? What shape should it have?
D.S.: We usually use square plates, because it is easier to compose a form in a square, to create a sequence, especially in the case of second courses, it is quicker to create an orderly arrangement. But I have recently begun to return to the classical round plate, where the arrangement must be concentric. We also work a lot on vertical surfaces, but there has been very little innovation in this field, and nothing has been studied beyond hanging cabinets.
area: Are spoons, knives and forks the most suitable instruments?
D.S.: The instruments for eating do not have to be always the same. Sticks, for instance, make us pay much more attention to what we eat. For instance, we recommend the use of very tapered sticks for eating our “Check Salad” or, in the case of Western customers, we suggest they use a cooled fork or their hands. The shock of the cold metal creates a tension, making one pay more attention, and heightens the perception of taste. It no longer becomes a mechanical gesture to pick up the fork. There are 26 vegetal elements in the Check Salad, 26 different tastes, and the dish truly puts a check on your taste. It would be impossible to taste 26 flavours in a few dishes, you can only do so if you pay a lot of attention.
In the past I have used unconventional instruments for eating my dishes: we accompanied the “Fossil” dish with a hammer, and we served the “ravioli shake”, accompanied by a shaker the customer had to use to butter the ravioli. Also in this case the cutlery was bypassed, as the ravioli were so small that they could be drunk, while no cutlery is necessary to eat the “Cyber eggs”, because they are prepared to explode directly in the mouth.
area: the theme of breaking down the barriers between different disciplines is an interesting one. I am convinced that one can learn a lot about design by observing the kitchen.
D.S.: Just now we are working a lot on the structures and natural fibres of the ingredients, I have been researching vegetable fibres for six months by now. The aubergine tatachi has been created like that: by closing the fibres as if it were a trunk, when it is cut one sees the open fibres, and if they are immediately closed, the consistency of the aubergine becomes very different. We have created a procedure which is the opposite of the usual one: we don’t eliminate the water by adding salt, we block it inside, cauterizing the two faces of the parallelepiped. The same is done when cooking a tenderloin or a Florentine steak: one uses a very high temperature to keep the juices inside. We have therefore treated a vegetable fibre as if it were a protein fibre. That’s all. But it is interesting to think about it, the aubergine is swollen, because the liquids stay inside, and it is cooked almost by induction, by the water within, it remains white inside, and looks crude, but it is cooked. All this is achieved merely by studying the fibres. If you observe the way orange wedges are sealed as if inside small bags, you understand that nature has an impressive packaging.
area: There is obviously a difference between the domestic kitchen and the industrial one. In your opinion, should this distance be maintained as far as kitchen design is concerned, or would it be better if the two worlds became closer?
D.S.: I personally prefer to have a separate kitchen, while the thing which works best today, on the contrary, is show-cooking, the performance
area: Don’t the people in the dining room disturb the chef, distracting him from his work?
D.S.: Absolutely not, actually if you are able to see the dining room you are undoubtedly able to control the situation better, but in this way we are destroying a world which should, in my opinion, return to basics. Three years ago I began to make it known that I have changed my approach. I have said “basta” to the procession of gurus. The customer must return to the centre of the stage.
The restaurant is not a stage, an exhibition, a performance, a church where you kneel, the user must once more become the centre of attention. Everything must pivot on him, he must feel like the protagonist. The restaurant must once again become a place where you can experience an emotion, and this can only happen when the customer once more returns to choose, to follow his own inclinations rather than the latest trends. Every experience must be filtered by one’s own emotions, by now we are only hunters and collectors of experience, we consume them but we don’t live them.
area: You teach at the Polytechnic. How does the exchange between chef and designer take place?
D.S.: The first thing I try to do is to transmit a passion for design. The second is to try to guide them, from the beginning of the workshop, towards a project that is really feasible,
even if it is only a matter of a primordial prototype. Then I suggest that they begin to think with their own guts, to create a connection with what they enjoy, and to start from their primary tastes.
area: And what kind of work do they do at the end of the workshop?
D.S.: It is completely open. Some are better at reaching the goal, some really manage to create a functional, ergonomic and developed design. In the final analysis, what I try to do is simply to teach them to communicate.