Some of the world’s greatest chefs are going off script and stretching out of their comfort zone in The Grand Gelinaz Shuffle. Earlier this month, top chefs from Japan to Chile, from Brazil to Slovenia, France, Turkey, Sweden, Thailand, Australia, UK, Italy, Peru, Spain, Canada, Belgium and Denmark and all throughout United States, 37 of the best chefs of the planet swapped lives, identities... and restaurants!
From their website:
GELINAZ! is a collective of international chefs.
Every time pushing the boundaries, performing food and taking risk as a starting point.
Longing to discover new cultures and exchange knowledge.
Inventing collaborations with artists, musicians, scientists, thinkers, producers.
Never willing to repeat itself, always exploring the unknown.
Adapting to uncertain situations, charting new territories to sharpen creativity.
Zooming on the beauty of nature, its elegant chaos and unending recreation.
For this one day international chef-swap, the chefs had only four days to figure out their new environment in a different country, create a menu, and get the hosting restaurant team to pull it off seamlessly for ticket-holding diners. Using only local and indigenous ingredients, these chefs cooked 8-course dinners to patrons who only found out the identity of their guest chef the night of the dinner.
One of the chefs participating in this event was David Kinch of Manresa.
Kinch, who will appear on the next season of PBS’ The Mind of a Chef, is one of my favorite local chefs, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with him professionally. Other local to San Francisco chefs who participated that I’ve also photographed were Dominique Crenn of Atelier Crenn and David Patterson of Coi.
The next installment of The Grand Gelinaz will be in Istanbul in May of 2016. Once the details are finalized, you can read about this event here: http://gelinaz.com/projects
For more reading:
http://www.shuffle.gelinaz.com/
http://www.bonappetit.com/people/chefs/article/gelinaz