RECIPE FOR LIFE

Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen.
I read today with horror that about 60 percent of Poles do not eat a single meal together with their loved ones at the table at home in an entire week.

Winter is coming soon, it’s cold, you want to go home, to warmth, to… a hearth. In the past, that “warmest” place in the home was the table. The household would sit at it, and a traveler would be welcomed at it. With food as well as with words. Maybe now, in these winter days, we will return to the table with one another. We will have no shortage of opportunities ahead of us—St. Nicholas Day, Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, New Year, carnival, the last days before Lent. Let’s sit with one another, talk, share with one another—just as we share the Christmas wafer, so too our thoughts.

Last year, the Kraków gallery MOCAK held an exhibition titled “Food in Art.” I was lucky, because in the catalog of that exhibition my answer was included to the question of what I would serve an artist to eat. I want to recall that text now. Precisely now, when ahead of us is a time in which, I hope, we will sit at the table and host one another in return.
Here is that text.

I have fed many artists.
Award-winning directors, painters, well-known writers, actors, as well as wonderful architects and outstanding musicians. Some have their rituals, some eat in a specific order or ask that the food not touch on the plate, or that the sauce always be separate. Some always come back to the same dishes and we already know what they like.
How is cooking for artists different from cooking for lawyers, farmers, construction workers?

In no way.
Over 35 years of my life as a restaurateur, I have discovered that we take from the world what we already carry within ourselves.

In each of my restaurants, on every table, there is a white tablecloth, like at home during Sunday dinner or a special occasion. The table is already set and every Guest sits down… in front of an empty plate.

That empty plate is the beginning. For the artist and for everyone. Because there is nothing on it yet and you have to choose what to fill it with. Then it turns out that everyone draws mostly from the flavors they know and carry within themselves.

Those flavors are the most wonderful and the most beloved, because it is the favorite soup Mom made in childhood, or apple fritters that you always ate when visiting Grandma, or the Wiener schnitzel that was best on the first date.
That empty plate forces a choice. And the choice prompts reaching for memories, close people, feelings, longing, or travel adventures.

At the table, while serving food, you can hear a life story, a love story, a story about the family home and mother. From an artist and a non-artist alike.
In the end it doesn’t even matter who you are, or what you chose to eat. What matters is that flavors can touch tender points, move you, or inspire you.

Because what image appears beneath our eyelids at the words “tomato soup” or “bread with sugar”? What will we associate chicken broth or “lazy dumplings” with—or with whom?

I have the feeling then that my restaurant is a theater in which, among other things, through flavors, emotion and life stories can reveal themselves. Often I can be their custodian.
What would I serve an artist?
To start, that empty plate itself…
Have a good time. At the table, together, with one another.