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Sam Bompas and Harry Parr are mad food scientists.
STEFAN BRAUN
People like to call Sam Bompas and Harry Parr the Willy Wonkas of the 21st century. The two Londoners do have some distinctly Wonkalian qualities: the distinct sense of style, the larger-than-life personalities and most notably, a penchant for creating fantastical, logic-defying food experiences. Like Wonka himself, Bompas and Parr once built a 10-foot waterfall flowing with chocolate and have even invented a flavor-changing chewing gum. Even so, the knee-jerk description might be selling the mad food scientists a bit short. As Bompas puts it: “Wonka was a bit of a sadist, and I’d like to think our events are a lot more open and democratic than his approach.”
For the last five years, Bompas and Parr have been operating their eponymously named studio, where they dream up bizarre and magical culinary moments. Most often, the two food nerds work with companies to craft food-related branding experiences.
More than a quarter million people inhaled strawberry smoke.
They’ve designed a series of tasting rooms at Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, worked with Courvoisier to build a four-ton punchbowl that visitors could row across (and drink from) and floated a life-size steamship, the SS Great Britain, in 55,000 liters of lime green jelly.
But this past New Year’s Eve, the studio engineered its biggest event yet: Creating a multi-sensory experience for the midnight fireworks display over the Thames River. “Vodafone came to us and said, ‘What would you like to do? But it has to be a world first,’” Bompas recalls. “And actually, choreographing fireworks to taste and smell and flavor is something that hasn’t been done. So we spent the next six months working out how to do it.”
Orange-flavored bubbles floating through the air. Image: Stefan Braun
Fireworks are inherently visual and music has accompanied them for centuries. But the other senses—the senses Bompas & Parr tend to exploit—have mostly been ignored when it comes to pyrotechnics. Bompas & Parr wanted to create the sensation of tasting and smelling fireworks—without actually eating them.
The studio worked with pyrotechnic experts and flavor scientists to build tools that could broadcast the flavors to the massive crowd. More than a quarter million people inhaled strawberry smoke, ate peach-flavored snow, popped orange bubbles and were covered in banana confetti. “It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever done,” Bompas says. “It’s almost like the project we’ve spent our whole lives working on.”
When Bompas & Parr started out, their ambitions were far less ambitious. The initial plan was to create luxury artisanal jelly, which they did for while. Then things started to scale up. They began making intensely crafted jelly molds.
The day I talk to Bompas, he mentions that he just spent the last hour reading about how to sculpt grapes. “It’s quite lovely to be able to do that while at work,” he says. Ancient viticulture is one of Bompas’ most recent fascinations, though when asked what else they’ve been investigating lately, he comes up with a whole list: Cryptolibations (the strange drinks like the one consumed from the holy grail); instant ice, the act of hyper-chilling water so it turns to ice in front of your eyes; Cleopatra’s milk baths; cooking a whole cow at once (“after our culinary hero Alexis Soyer,” Bompas explains); and of course, “Working out the formula to create a universal sense of awe and the best party of all time.”
Clearly, Bompas and Parr do not have typical jobs. Their studio, which employs 10 people, has a kitchen for cooking, a warehouse for experimenting, a library filled with research book and is basically a maze of objects: champagne sabres, a gong to announce meal time, a tiny piece of Princess Diana’s hair used to make occult jam. You know, the usual.
All of this is an attempt to encourage people to reconfigure what they assume food should be about. The experiences Bompas & Parr create challenge people’s sense of taste. Food isn’t just about nutrition anymore. “It’s very rare that I think, have I had my calorific minimums today?” says Bompas. “Food is entertainment now, so let’s make it as entertaining as it can possibly be.”
Coming up with outlandish ideas isn’t the hard part. Making sure those ideas are feasible is what’s really tough. “It’s got to work,” he says. They have a huge library section about cocktails, fruits, meats, world fairs. There’s actually a lot of book work. But it’s not just about tweaking and toying and brainstorming outlandish ideas. “Everyone’s got good ideas,” he says. “We’re just geeky enough to spend six months making it happen and not taking no for an answer.” http://www.wired.com/design/2014/01/two-mad-food-scientists-created-edible-fireworks/#slide-id-398931