Last weekend, we drove our bicycles to Kalasatama to test the Solar Kitchen – an exceptional travelling restaurant concept by Catalan designer Martí Guixe and Finnish chef Antto Melasniemi.
The two visionaries both have a history of experimenting with food – Martí from the designer’s point of view and Antto as a chef of several fine-dining restaurants. Solar cooking offers a whole new way of approaching a restaurant. The texture and taste of the food is different, as the heat radiates from different angles.
The exciting element of the restaurant is of course – the weather. Last week was, unfortunately, rather rainy, and on some days, only salad was served, if anything at all. “The whole restaurant experience is unusual, when you’re at the mercy of the weather and can’t plan everything beforehand”, Antto Melasniemi explains.
Traditionally used in Third World countries as an environmentally friendly option for cooking, the solar cooker has rarely been harnessed for fine dining experiments. Along the summer, the event has travelled from Milan design fair through the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Lapland finally to its main location in Kalasatama, Helsinki. Where and when next, we can’t wait to find out.
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