Can Music and Food Be Enjoyed Equally Together?
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Detroit-based chef Kyle Hanley has decided to stage a one-night-only event pairing 10 courses with every track on Radiohead’s Kid A album, reports The Huffington Post. “Everything in Its Right Place,” the lead track, for example, will be matched with “pan-seared diver scallop, yuzu fluid gel, fried cellophane noodle, lemongrass ponzu, chili oil,” and a glass of Riesling.
Huh. HuffPo reports that Hanley ”studied music before becoming a chef. When he listens to it, he hears ‘textures and colors,’ which makes it natural for him to associate it with food.”
It’s not the first time we’ve heard of this sort of culinary synesthesia. Although it rather seems like a stretch to craft such elaborate dishes for a single song, there’s also something sort of beautiful about it.
Did you think food and music writers would have strong reactions to this story? You were correct. “The Radiohead Menu Is Everything Wrong with Food Today,” trumpets the headline on Esquire. (Tell us how you really feel, Josh Ozersky.)
"This dinner epitomizes so many of the things I detest about today’s food scene," writes Ozersky. "Food and music exist in different universes.” Let’s respond to a couple of Ozersky’s bon mots:
"Yoking them together is an act as unnatural as trying to thumb-wrestle and defecate at the same time."
It’s that unnatural? We sort of thought it was an expanded version of what we often get at restaurants: food and music. Just more food (10 courses) and more music (10 songs).
"Even if you magically transposed senses, a mutant ability the chef claims to possess, you still can not possibly do justice to either the food or the music."
Not necessarily. Although we agree that it’s a stretch to pair a dish and its nuances with a song, the two can be complementary. “Vicious,” by Lou Reed, with a dish featuring edible flowers? It’s literal—”you hit me with a flower”—but we’d take it.
"Presumably, they chose Kid A for its ambient qualities, but either you bask in the album’s trippy magnificence, nibbling absent-mindedly on your lemongrass ponzu, or talk over it while admiring the black caprese.”
Here, he has something: it can be hard to focus on two sensory experiences at once. Can one really appreciate the nuances of a song while tasting the many layers in a complicated dish? There are certainly food writers who think so:
And those whose businesses consist of pairing songs with music:
And then there’s the obligatory album suggestion, from the editor-in-chief of eMusic:
Our two cents? Music and food aren’t, and shouldn’t be, in absolutely separate universes, but it’d be tough for us to focus on songs entirely if we were eating something gorgeous. So you have a point, Ozersky, but when you go on to slam dinner theater, too, we have to disagree.
[The Huffington Post via Esquire]
