The Futurist Banquet

San Francisco, October 17, 2009—

INSPIRED BUT NOT RESTRAINED by Filippo Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook, a number of artist-chefs conspired with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to produce a Banquet in the lobby of the museum tonight (Saturday, October 18, 2009).. We arrived at 8 pm to find the place absolutely packed. Huge screens on the walls flickered with newsreels, grainy industrial films, and occasional glimpses of ourselves, for there was media everywhere.
We headed for the bar: Pinot noir from Sonoma county; absinthe-brandy punch, local brandies and grappa, Boiler Room beer. I was quickly drawn to a table featuring a sort of avocado zabaglione: avocado, orange flower water, brandy, vanilla bean, and sugar blended smooth, then garnished with candied orange peel: delicious.
A poet shouted Futurist intonations through a megaphone; sirens blared; metallic clanking; excited conversation. At another table, Our Beeting Heart: beet gelée and goat cheese in the disquieting form of a human heart. In tribute to a particularly misguided experiment in commercial gene-splicing — hard to believe Monsanto actually engineered a cross between a flounder and a tomato — there were delicious tomato halves covered with halibut tartare as well as porcini with cheese.

Some miles away, in South San Francisco, a quarter-ton steer had been roasting twenty hours on a spit. It was brought through the city streets on a trailer drawn by bicycle and triumphantly entered the museum lobby, where a posse of stout men tore off its protective aluminum foil and laid it magnificently on a huge butcher-block. Then a dozen or so women, all in white chef's jackets, approached, first saluting the steer reverently with knives and cleavers raised in tribute, then plunging in to hack the flesh from the bones.
Plates of sliced meat were sent on the conveyer belt dividing the hundreds of guests into two camps, and ultimately some of the meat, particularly nerves and gristle, was minced and formed into a parody of ice-cream, to be served in cones.
The scent and sight of the beef filled the museum and aroused primal communitarian instincts in the crowd. Everything tasted fabulous. The cooks were true artists; I have rarely seen the artistic and intellectual component of the highest level of food preparation so generally recognized by an assembled crowd.
Toward the end of the evening the dessert arrived: slices of panforte wrapped in manifestos, dropped by parachute from the fifth-floor overlook. It was an amazing evening. I've posted 29 photos here; they're unedited and uncommented for the moment. I'll have more to write about this unique and unforgettable event later over at The Eastside View, no doubt, but it'll take time to sort out my impressions.