Menuless Restaurant

As hunter-gatherers, human beings are naturally able to seek and prepare their food. Or so we thought, until the invention of restaurants, which have become indispensable and highly professionalized in our modern cities. When we no longer experience food as an important and integral part of our natural environment and eco system, we tend to think that our natural resources on earth are limitless. The relationship between humanity and its sources of food can be redefined, made possible by architecture and technologies, in which a vital category of our food is displayed in a live setting. At the heart of the design strategy is the removal of the menu — an epitome of humanity’s alienation from the sources of its food.

This radically different restaurant is located in a rural area and is set in a large area of fruit trees. Instead of being introduced first to a menu, visitors are led to an organized, aeroponically farmed vegetable and fruit garden before settling down at a table. This garden blends the need to see food in live settings with the convenience of selecting food, and it takes advantage of modern aeroponic farming, which can achieve a high degree of efficiency in vegetable and fruit production. The architecture of the garden takes the form of a curved plane; as if a piece of peeled-off ground is reconstituted artificially with technology in order to return to nature whatever human consumption takes away from her.

The restaurant initiates a very different eating experience, establish personal contact with visitors at all levels and engage visitors with the ever-present issue of our limited natural resources.