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| Vespertine, Los Angeles. Still from trailer on the restaurant's website, vespertine.la. |
I read about it. I went to the website. I watched the trailer four times. When the ticketing system finally went live, I made a
reservation.
It’s hard for a restaurant to live up to a lot of pre-opening
hype. In this case, the hype is for savoring all by itself. It is, at least, by
thrill-seeking aesthetes like me.
From the restaurant’s website
and advance press, here's my summary of the concept: Vanguard chef Jordan Kahn, whose previous ventures in Los Angeles include Red Medicine and Destroyer, intends to create an ultra-fine-dining experience
that departs from today's mainstay of locavore rhetoric
and aesthetics radically. He wants diners to feel transported beyond any known place. To banish signs
of Earth, he has marshaled a cadre of kindred designers. The website credits Eric Owen Moss for the architecture, musicians This Will Destroy You for the "score," Ryota Aoki for "ceramics," and Jona Sees for "textiles and garments." Kahn's total theater--buzz-killers say, of the absurd--will
take diners through many courses and several spaces in the
building. Each space will have its own sonic ambiance. Kahn has kept the style of his food semi-veiled. What I've glimpsed seems so alien among existing forms that even a sharp photo of a dish doesn't clarify what it is. No shapes on the "plates" resemble known edibles. Hints of Vespertine's food appear sparingly in press and the trailer.
Oh, the trailer. It's the restaurant’s tone poem. The main mood is part
early Alinea, where Kahn once worked, a study in luxury grays, and part
otherworldly Björk, whose 2001
album is named Vespertine. It conjures an ambient music video on another
planet, where a simple walk along the hills turns up transparent spiny things and geometric
white flora. I think these are foretastes of Kahn's cuisine. Scenes follow a wandering waif, half hidden under a hood, who periodically
fondles dirt and strange plants. Shots of the restaurant’s building, a wavy
postmodern grid in dark glass and red metal, splice in toward the end,
suggesting the waif’s destination. Because we never see the ground that it
stands on, the structure looks like a floating world.
The branding is novel, and so I’m seduced. I have Vespertine
day dreams. In one, I am swaddled in gray felt, placed by a glass wall, and
allowed to marvel at sculptures they call food brought by servers in silent
slippers. I imagine not moving my own body, but being transported from one room
and soundscape to another as the courses of the meal progress.
My cossetting fantasy is no accident. Leading up to the
opening, Vespertine has promised a kind of escape. The illusion of placelessness
is temporarily
unburdening. It suggests relief from a nagging conscience about exploiting Earth's creatures just when other restaurants in Vespertine's class have intensified it.
Even today’s most extravagant places remind diners of food shortages and
inhumane practices by citing their sustainable methods and virtuous sourcing.
The Vespertine aesthetic also removes the onus of considering labor
just as the troubles of restaurant work have confronted diners via new tipping policies and surcharges for employee healthcare. In
her GQ preview of Vespertine (June 7, 2017), Marian Bull reported that Kahn trained his servers to seem invisible and charged designer Aoki with making
their shoes inaudible.
As long as Kahn’s labor practices really are fair, I don’t
think self-effacing service is bad. On the contrary, the commitment to
hospitality and fidelity to theatrical concept is admirable and consistent with good craft. Still, there’s no denying that, in Kahn’s
dining drama, labor--at least of the physical kind--is a background actor.
Even the chef’s culinary aesthetic, as tentatively revealed, avoids signs of handicraft. You won't find the plate-scattered look of so much contemporary high cuisine,
which at least vaguely shows evidence of handling. The glimpses I’ve
gotten of Vespertine’s food suggest architectonic objects by way of CAD and
the 3-D printer. Here, labor seems purely conceptual.
As with all earnest and ambitious attempts at
total theater, Vespertine’s will be vulnerable to parody, camp, and unwitting pops
of the proverbial balloon. I don’t see how it’s possible to avoid some
glitch in the matrix—like catching the Ronald McDonald you hired for a kid’s birthday
taking a cigarette break. There’s bound to be something like a dropped glass or
passing glimpse of routine Earth life out the window.
But I respect the extent and courage of Kahn’s imagination,
and his willingness to take the financial risk of bringing a grand fiction to life. In recent memory, I've seen no offering like it in Los Angeles--really, and that's saying a lot. The aesthete and
the contrarian in me want Kahn to pull this off.
Phase one of my Vespertine experience--making the reservation--has ended. Reserving through a ticketing website is nothing new for venues with high-end tasting menus. But never before have I been asked, as I was in the final screen of the process, if anyone in my party has extreme fear of heights. A message warned that part of the evening will involve traveling to the top of the
tower. (I thought I read “tower.” I was in a hurry to fill out the
form before the impatient Tock system could boot me out, rescinding my hard-won reservation slot, for a second time.) Yes, I mused, take
me to the tower!
Maybe, like the spaceship I have in mind, it’ll take flight. If not, I'll always remember how good was the hype.
