TABLED
A Year in the Life of the Traffic Tide Dinner Series
Thanksgiving. The most famous shared meal on the American calendar — one that comes with all the baggage of what a meal means. Its purpose is to bring people together; its effect can often be much more complicated. The off-table topics. The tensions. The agree-to-disagree peace treaties. The idea of appropriate dinner conversation has deemed controversial topics taboo, and the list of controversial topics seemingly gets longer by the week. These discussions get “tabled”. Which, interestingly enough, in the U.S. means “to indefinitely postpone”. When zooming out though, the term “to table” becomes a contronym, with other parts of the English-speaking world using the phrase to begin conversations.
Spaces of Discourse
While avoiding fraught topics might seem like a quick-fix or a socially acceptable route, ultimately it both distances and divides us. Reunions we dread or drag our heels to. Deeper social and political divides. The aversion to talking about politics, or about power, serves only those already at the very top. The alternative, discussions engaged in with openness and curiosity, have the chance of serving as a bridge. The sharing of a meal is a unique opportunity, for closeness, connection, listening, understanding. That’s the ethos of Traffic Tide, a dinner series built around the idea that meals should be thought-provoking and full of inquisitiveness.
While most supper clubs are initiated by passionate chefs, professional or amateur, the background I brought to Traffic Tide doesn’t come from the culinary world. It’s in art, in branding, in the undertones of communication. As an artist, my role is to provoke contemplation and dialogue; and as someone attuned to the importance of messaging, I’m always looking for new ways to do that. Food became involved in my work in undergrad, as I kept trying to concoct ways to get people to engage for longer periods of time. My work progressed on a sliding scale, from sketches to paintings to sculptures to installations to interactive installations, and then finally: a captive and eager audience seated around a dinner table. A long meal is a place of pleasure, intimacy, safety — a setting where you’re so comfortable that you can edge further out, explore topics that could never succinctly argue in a tweet. It’s an opportunity. The duration and comfort a dinner provides allows for uncomfortable subjects to be broached and addressed freely. It’s not about taking an exit poll or doing a psychological audit, it’s about letting people explain in their own time, knowing you’re going to stay at least through the final course to untangle the fall-out.
Nostalgia and Inspiration
No interview or discussion of a chef’s inspiration avoids their nostalgia stories: mothers’ and grandmothers’ recipes being passed down. I don’t have the same attachments to all-day-epic-cookfests, but I have plenty of memories centered around a table. Time spent amidst a continuous pour of tea and vodka, some pre-packaged biscuits, a bouquet of fresh flowers, and philosophical discussions that last late into the night. Food and thought, worked out and consumed in tandem. I added to that foundation by drawing inspiration from complex and utopian art projects such as Goodden and Matta-Clark’s FOOD restaurant (1971), Allan Wexler’s ‘Coffee Seeks Its Own Level’ (1991), Theodore Zeldin’s conversation dinners (1998), and Rubin and Weleski’s Conflict Kitchen (2010–Present).
Naming Traffic Tide
Where previous art dinners I’ve engaged in focused on a single topic, Traffic Tide was designed as a year-long series. A venture open to casual guests. A project built around collaborators. To encompass that, it needed a name flexible enough to cover all the different iterations and events that might unfold. Traffic Tide is meant to evoke push and pull, the give and take that gets things where they need to be. The mechanical delivery (trucks, shipments, traveling in under or over the Williamsburg Bridge) and the natural occurrences (rising tides, migration patterns, the unknown dynamic that exists at every dinner despite repeated circumstances) that cause each meal to come together in the manner it does. Designing around it, the wordmark leaves plenty of space in the middle for a breath or for the unknown, while the website meanders lazily through its vertical scroll.
What We’ve Achieved
Starting at the end of 2015, working alongside a handful of collaborators and co-conspirators — ceramicists, chefs, artists, and others — I launched Traffic Tide as a way to engage in conversations about the dinner table, and everything that comes together to make a successful meal. There were two common threads that wove through everyone that’s gotten involved: a focused relationship to geography in their work, and a considered point of view.
We’ve been fortunate to hold Traffic Tide dinners with chefs from Detroit, Iran, and Venezuela. We’ve run kitchen experiments with a duo from Turkey and Armenia, and are in conversations with a network of chefs that spans Korea, Mexico, Russia, and beyond. We’ve co-designed tableware in glass and porcelain that swivel around Traffic Tide themes and rituals. We’ve carted in spirits from the 58th parallel north, and the 6th. We’ve engaged in discussions with scientists, eco-futurists, and others about the changing nature of food production and consumption. While no two evenings were ever the same, we’ve fostered collaborations between back- and front-of-the-house alike. People’ve walked away from Traffic Tide events with new friends and collaborators, a different contextualization for plating, an awareness of divergent traditions, glassware for their forthcoming restaurants, the seeds for other dinner series, dates, travel partners, apartments… And the experiment is not done yet.
Larger Contexts
While at table, we implore each other’s backgrounds, exchanging our viewpoints and our learnings to amass a multiplied knowledge, weaving through both the personal and the political. We interrogate issues related to our current environment: changing crop seasons, plummeting insect numbers, projected migration patterns. We find analogies in how a sauce moves across the terrain of a plate, or the feel of a cup in one’s hand. We share learned responses to changing food needs, and prod at what historical precedents and traditions can teach us. All these topics are infused within the seemingly simple act of eating. We share stories that are profound and banal, quotidian and revolutionary. Because we believe that learning happens amidst pleasure, and that learning is physical, not just cerebral, each morsel — its warmth, its pairing — has something to teach. It’s about holistically exploring the meaning of food in a changing world. How cuisine, and fellowship, finds its way to each of us, and where it’s likely to go next.
Gathering over a meal can be an experience or a problem solved. When the food is gone, it’s gone. But nourishment is received, memories formed, connections fostered. Every tradition starts as revision of an old idea, and if Traffic Tide is doing its job, it’s one of many voices adding to a nuanced conversation. In forming a thesis around geo-politics, I initially wanted to focus on troubled areas, but quickly came to a realization: Which ones aren’t? And while I love hosting these, this is definitely a side hustle — one that doesn’t have to be limited to one corner of a 20th century pasta factory in Brooklyn. Discussing issues around food, design, environment, the personal, and the political can happen anywhere; so can complex meals. It’s about ebb and flow, an idea meant to proliferate in random new ways. Bringing our truth to the table is more important now than ever. So go out. Share a soy nog. Look around. And right as you’re biting into dessert, don’t be afraid to ask the difficult questions.
Full project credits, bios, and seat booking via the traffic-tide website.
