Supper Club with Da Prato Test Kitchen
Supper Club is a regular dinner series created to celebrate local chefs and serve as a community gathering. Hosted in the building’s Main Hall or Garden, each edition of the Supper Club invites chefs to create an original dining experience.
This month’s Supper Club features the Da Prato Test Kitchen, which will present Pasqua Sonora — an event celebrating spring renewal and the harmonics of seasonal change. Translated from Italian as “Sonic Easter,” Pasqua Sonora brings together sound and taste in a multi-sensory ceremonial feast. Guests are invited to dine in the round in an evening of ritualized supper and concert, timed with the setting sun in the beautiful main hall at Pioneer Works. At a circular table surrounding a center stage, the act of communion is re-interpreted through modes of ceremonial eating, where transubstantiation is presented as a metamorphosis of human energy into sonic material.
Both menu and concert move through the seasons in four movements. Each season contains at least one performative course where dishes are finished tableside and guests must be prepared to feed and be fed! Composers Lea Bertucci, Tom Carter, Nick Hallett, Victoria Keddie, and Zach Layton offer their tonal interpretations in quadraphonic sound of summer, autumn, winter and spring, to correspond with the twelve courses. The meal will commence with a song of Sonic Grace by Hallett and culminate in a procession of reverberating tones and feasting of flowers.
Each course draws from Ancient Roman and Old World Italian cooking techniques, as well as Elisa Da Prato’s unique methods developed in her supper club project, Da Prato Test Kitchen. Seasonal ingredients are sourced locally, with select ingredients imported from Da Prato’s home region of Garfagnana, Tuscany. All meats–prepared by Michael Kale of Marlow and daughters–will be prepared with open fire on a custom built grill setup in the Pioneer Works garden, and carved live in concert by Mr. Kale.
The Da Prato Test Kitchen is a supper club series hosted by chef and artist Elisa Da Prato. Suppers are held from her apartment in Brooklyn as well as various locations in and around New York City. Guests are seated at a community table alongside friends both old and new and enjoy four elegant courses as well as musical interludes and the occasional interactive feeding experiment.