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A restaurant that was open for one day on Saturday, November 23, 2002 from 10 am until 10 pm at Apex Art when an exhibition was cancelled at the last minute. There were six seatings for four individuals every two hours which meant that 24 people were fed throughout a day. As with the historical precedent, FOOD the artist run restaurant in SoHo in the seventies, there was a desire not to recreate that place and that time, but to offer an itinerancy of taste, within another context and at another moment. Carroll brought together a group of cooks who also speak other languages, and these polyglots, always do what they do with a great deal of precision, passion, and pleasure, and since Carroll believes that the essence of one is also reflected in their work, she was both honored and pleased that they agreed to provide their taste to the public, at a time when the notion of pleasure was, and is often relegated to a prescribed paid vocation, or sublimated in work, these days, unemployment. Entertainers also appeared and this included the stand-up comedian Demetri Martin who performed as a strolling, joke telling minstrel during the German meal. That pairing was no accident. A life is more complicated, messy, and therefor an interesting thing, and when things are spontaneous and unknown, a certain amount of chaos is created, or will ensue. The cooks did their creating, as a public, and as individuals, which brings us back to the notion of taste. We knew that the Greeks understood pleasure, and this is mentioned, not from a position of envy, but from observation, and Aristotle spoke to us about taste “being able to discern the smallest objects is what makes the acutest sense and showed the most power of discerning figures in general.” There were no rules for the cooks, there was no agenda, accept to create something that exists for a day, and within a day, one must eat, and what and when one chooses to eat, is a decision. As Gertrude Stein once lectured across America, one repeats oneself all of the time, but much in the same way as how a film is made, all of the frames are singular, as was the experience of the cooks, diners, and observers.

Sylvia Plath
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