For the past two weeks, Simone Mattar and her inquisitive cat's eyes have been wandering Israel on a quest to experience the fat of the land through her stomach, and maybe make some of that fatness a little sleeker.
Mattar, a food designer from Sao Paolo, is in the country to teach a seminar on food design to master's students in Bezalel Academy's design program. She presented the profession to them, gave students a taste of her projects, joined their annual seminar in low-tech design at the Dead Sea and capped it all by forming impressions of their work at the Bezalel exhibition space in Tel Aviv.
Mattar herself started out studying graphic design and architecture, but her appetite and her curiosity attracted her to the hot career of food design. "The first time I saw the Brazilian dish of bolo de rolo," she says, describing a roulade with guava paste, "I asked myself who was behind it, a designer or a chef?"
Her company, LabMattar, deals with projects connecting chefs, interior designers, architects, graphic designers and branding experts, who together create concepts for restaurants. The company is also a consultant to large food companies in South America, creates art from food and develops patents. Among other things, it has developed an edible paper on which graphic designs can be printed with a special printer.
In contrast, the raw materials used by the Bezalel students were quite simple: flour, water, fruit peels and chickpeas. But they produced crisp and original works from them.
"There are a lot of ways of thinking about food," says Mattar, who wears a bracelet made out of a fork. "Academic language is making the world stupid. Everyone is stuck in his own discipline, in a narrow perspective, and it's hard to share activity. The designers are busy with lamps or tables and the chefs are stuck in the kitchen - they follow trends but they don't conduct a dialogue with what is happening in the design world and have difficulty understanding it. By the same token, the designers don't understand enough about flavors and delicacies. They have to combine forces."
Sherry and a port
Mattar, who fills out a tall, impressive figure, came to Israel with her only daughter, Martina, who agreed to taste everything she was served. She didn't fill up and she hardly ever complained, apart from one incident when her mother did not agree to buy her halva.
Accompanied by the students, they ate all the falafel and hummus Jerusalem can offer. When the seminar ended, they traveled to Jordan for two days, slept in a Bedouin tent ("I told Martina, this is the real Disneyland," recalls Mattar ). There they apparently developed an appetite: When they got to Tel Aviv they ate two or three lunches and three or four dinners a day, not forgetting dessert. They visited Manta Ray, Mul Yam, Raphael, Yona and Ninochka and they devoted most of their time in getting to know Israeli cuisine.
We spent their last weekend in Tel Aviv together. We kicked off on Friday morning with a shot of the first olive oil from this year's harvest at the Farmers' Market at the Tel Aviv Port. Michal Ansky gave the girls a crowded tour of the stands, introduced them to farmers and food producers and presented to them the star of the market, the cherry tomato. Ansky's mother, Sherry, who has decided to stop writing about food and to start preparing it, also had a stand there.
"The market is very crystallized with respect to the concept," Mattar said upon leaving the booths. "All the details are interconnected and precise. You can see that this is a project done with a lot of thought in advance and an optimal mix of professionals."
On the way to our second stop, the Messa Restaurant, she revealed that she had been a vegetarian for 20 years. "I was very different from the way I am today: a punk with a shaved head and I went wild all through Europe with the Disk Putas band. I came down with anemia and today I love rare, bloody meat," she says. "The vegetarianism was in reaction to my father the rancher, who raised beautiful cows. I got so attached to them and when I realized they were the steaks served at the table, I freaked out."
Mattar describes her father as a gourmand.
"He used to smoke his own meat and he was prepared to fly to the ends of the earth to eat a special cheese," she says. "When he traveled he always came back with food in his suitcase: salmon from Helsinki, French cheeses, everything. He used to hold Asterix-style banquets with huge slabs of meat and wonderful wine glasses. When I started cooking, at the age of 13, it was actually a protest. I made small, complex vegetarian dishes. Now I realize how much he contributed to my palate. Anyone who is exposed in childhood to many different flavors, like my daughter, has an advantage over everyone else. When you drink wine from an early age, you learn to understand it. A 40-year-old nouveau riche person who wants to be knowledgeable about wine buys bottles for 2,000 euros but still doesn't understand anything."
We go into the restaurant 15 minutes before it officially opens. Around the long marble table sit the restaurant's staff, preparing for New Year's Eve as though for a military campaign.
"When I go into a restaurant like this, its hard for me to understand what cuisine it's operating in," Mattar whispers. "I look for the roots and the thinking behind the food. Complete identification between the chef and the place is important. In this case it looks like the architect used all his tools, but acted alone. Chefs have to look at the furniture as part of the entirety of the restaurant they are opening. What is food design? The glass, the napkin, the fork ... therefore the designers have to share their thoughts with the chefs."
Aviv Moshe, Messa's chef, joins us at the table and tells us the restaurant space can be limiting for his aspirations, but his cooking must fit the prestigious atmosphere designed by the architect.
"I'd like to serve food in cartons, on parchment paper on printed rice paper but that wouldn't suit the clean character of the restaurant. I feel like opening a place where there are no knives, forks and spoons," he laughs and promises to open an especially good sandwich stand in the near future. "Every dish of mine begins with a painting. I choose an ingredient that excites me and I can move heaven and Earth to get it. And then I pull the dish into the lines that are right for it and I paint it. It's important to me to combine textures, heat and cold, crunchiness and smoothness."
Mattar is impressed with the use of design as a tool for thinking about food. She and her daughter exclaim excitedly over the dishes brought to the table, photograph them and immediately scarf them down.
In the struggle between aesthetics and flavor, Moshe has a clear preference. "In my opinion there is no need to design a dish to the point where you will have to work on it for three hours, and in the end it will be beautiful but will lose its flavor and character."
Later in the conversation Mattar complains that in Brazil it is impossible to obtain beautiful artichokes like the ones in Israel, or sweet, fleshy pomegranates and shallots. "You don't need them, you have beautiful women and acai berries," replies Moshe with a wink.
Mattar confesses that before her visit to Israel she thought our national dish was the pastrami sandwich, "Because of all the deli stands in New York." She loved the falafel in its variety of flavors, "Just like our pao da queijo in Brazil, bread with cheese that every stand prepares in a different way."
Mattar also points to Manta Ray as a gastronomic highlight.
"That restaurant is very sophisticated," she says. The right considerations were made there in the balancing of commercial taste, something the average diner can understand, and uncompromising quality of the ingredients. This is the middle between artistic creation and food people can eat. After all, when you begin to make overly complicated food, people flee."
She also gives Jaffa's Yona an honorable mention.
"We ate dishes in terra cotta there, wonderful shrimp with macadamia nuts and a special dish of smoked meat," she says. "Even though it hasn't officially opened yet, I like it. It has a crystallized and tight concept. The space, the design, the food, the open kitchen with the heavy ovens and the stunning location create something new and wonderful."
Not willing to pay
At Catit, chef Meir Adoni enjoyed hosting the mother and daughter and devoted two hours of his time to them, gave them a tour of the different areas and invited the to sit in the private room.
"I prefer people," smiled Mattar, and sat down in a crowded area of the restaurant. At the same time, Adoni's kitchen was feverishly preparing the ingredients he had shipped in, flown in and stored for the New Year's celebrations.
"This is the time of day of the business lunch but those aren't the prices of the average business lunch in Israel," he admitted. "The Israelis who drive a fancy SUV and fly out for ski vacations in the summer for some reason are put off by the prices in the best restaurants and in the end they go to mediocre restaurants and eat mediocre food."
Mattar nods. She can blow everything she earns on good food.
"In Brazil the prices are double what they are in Israel," she says sadly. "People want to taste new food, in the most exciting restaurants, but they don't want to pay the price it is worth. They don't understand that this is art."
He proposes to Mattar that he become the first chef in Israel to use her edible paper, but she refuses because it is still in development and its aim is not commercial but rather artistic.
It will be shown in a museum in the near future. She tells him about the food scene in South America and he proposes that she return to Israel with a Brazilain chef to organize a feast with him at Catit. She is enthusiastic about the idea.
As far as design is concerned, Adoni says the restaurant's design is an integral part of the food. "I can't let on and separate the food from the place. You can't convince me to bring in a piece of furniture that doesn't suit me," he says.
But for Mattar, restaurants are less about the design of the space than about what is being served.
"During my last visit to Montreal, my students took me to the most fashionable restaurants that had opened in the city," she says. "Each of them has a very clear design concept. One restaurant, totally gray, with exposed concrete walls, gray utensils and gray food. Another is white and gleaming. And I was just looking out through the door of the restaurant at the other side of the street, at the immigrants' family restaurants where all the people were sitting and eating and enjoying themselves and that is where I wanted to be ... Therefore I always start my classes with the same sentence: 'I hate restaurants that are architects' projects.'"
