Cloak & Dinner: Cloak & Dinner: The Art Walk || 1/28/12

From ashen scrawls on the walls of Cro-Magnon caves to vibrant vistas rendered on canvas in glowing realism, humanity's artistic prowess has cemented our status as elevated lifeforms and established a language that every subsequent generation will understand. Tonight we praise a handful of the masters, the artists who reflect their small slice of history with dedication, passion, and bravado. With each course you'll take another step through a gallery that spans our favorite epochs of creative history, seeing the world at once through an artist's eyes and a chef's palette. It's often stated that every great meal is truly a work of art. Allow us to finally remove all doubt.

The table was set... up as a Piet Mondrian of course! Hey if we're going to do an art walk, we're going to do it all the way. One question we get asked a lot is "which came first, the food or the concept?" Unfortunately there isn't an easy answer, it's very chicken or the egg, but with this dinner I can most certainly pinpoint it's origin. For Christmas my amazing boyfriend invested in a lovely little cook anthology entitled "Modernist Cuisine" & after flipping through page after page of gorgeous inspiration, I knew that Cloak & Dinner was going to come back from our little break with something artfully magnanimous.

What it was hadn't quite come to me yet. Then one early evening, sipping Chardonnay at BLT's happy hour, reading "Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli," and imagining the exquisite dishes presented in the chapters, a warm fuzzy feeling took hold and I pictured a warm consommé as a perfect canvas to create something spectacular. The ocean perhaps? No, it was a little too small. A pond? A pond covered in lily pads & flowers? Monet's water lilies?

I immediately began texting my co-chef ideas & his first response was LOVE. A whole dinner inspired by art, how... well let's be honest it's a little pretentious, but it was also a ton of fun! Out of that moment our next meal began to take shape, and I'm so honored to share it with you all as well!

Abstract Italian inspired by Jackson Pollock

tomato, basil, balsamic, burrata, garlic, onion, bread