Portable Music

I wrote this in 2013. I’ve since started listening to fictional podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale and Hello from the Magic Tavern. I still don’t really listen to music on my commute, if I do I have a looping rotation playlist (much like a top 40 radio station would make). This is part of a series of 2013 Medium drafts that I never published.

Am I weird for not jumping on the whole portable music bandwagon? I do stream music more than anything these days and I inherited a couple iPod minis and shuffles, but the habit never stuck. I think it was riding the NYC Subway that deterred me the most. Everyone in their uniform white earbuds, missing stops because they didn’t hear that the train was going express or not moving when I say “excuse me” because their volume is up so high.

I was so excited about my first walkman. I was maybe 7 years old. My family was confused about what I’d do exactly with a Walkman because I wasn’t allowed to leave the house. I’d sit in the middle of the living room floor with my dad’s crate of cassettes, playing each one for 1 song and then changing it out. I couldn’t even get through whole Disney story cassettes, because I’d lose interest so quickly. I used a Walkman to sit, not walk!

I remember browsing at a Bay Area department store called BEST and spied the Sony Discman that I’d beg my dad to buy for next Christmas. I was 11 and I was active. I was allowed to bike around the block and hang out in the backyard unattended. The problem with CDs is that they skip. I wanted to look cool with my crappy foam headphones, wire noodling from the inside of my backpack on the way to school. But at the rate that I walked, the music hiccuped and sometimes stopped. I’d keep walking as if I were still hearing music, afraid that someone would ask if they could listen for a minute. I’d set the Discman on the kitchen table while I did homework and would get upset if anyone rose too fast and shook it the slightest bit. As I got into high school, the CD player would whirr and visibly shake. It was time to move on.

In 1999, there was nothing to do in the Antelope Valley except go to the mall, watch a movie, or visit Best Buy. My dad liked to go to Best Buy for hours to browse the CD racks for new music. I’d play with everything from cameras to turning the knobs on the unhooked kitchen appliances, and I’d lounge on the couch in front of the sample home entertainment system. High school was when I discovered Napster, Kazaa and —gosh darn it— how to make zip files. It started with my friends Chris and Gene. They’d send me zip files and I’d run downstairs to my dad’s collection to rip a CD or two in exchange. We all got invited to Napster and there was no looking back. I filled up the computer so much that it’d slow down the AOL connection. I’d tell my dad that it was because we lived so far out in the desert, the dial tone echoes and boots you off. On one of our trips to Best Buy, I spied the RCA Lyra, an early mp3 player. Ho boy, I was so excited about my 32mb of storage. Another Christmas present from Dad, shiny and silver. So much smaller than my Discman.

I was so ready to dump gigs of music onto it. It took forever to install the driver for the disc slot and even longer to sync the files. 32mb was just enough for a short rock album or maybe 3 gabber tracks. But hey, at least I could go running with my music now. That fleeting dream lasted about 5 minutes when my headphones kept falling off my head and I had to jog back home to put the damn thing away. I’ve always been uncomfortable with in-ear listening devices because my father was 40% deaf. I knew the effects of music that was too loud and too close to your eardrum. My father later actually had surgery on his ear canal a couple years ago and he can actually hear better then me now.

Toward the end of high school, I got tired of listening to the same songs and waiting forever for the music to sync. My beautiful Lyra rested in my desk drawer when I departed for college, where my life became much more sedentary (in my dorm room) and when I discovered college radio. A regression to cassettes, record and cds happened after I suffered a massive hard drive crash in 2004.

I think that I’m trying to say is that I prefer to sit back and digest my music, rapt like I’m watching a movie. Maybe the business of the subway sullies it with distractions. Or vice versa, if I’m walking in a park.

It’s strange that it means so much to me that I don’t want to hear it all of the time.

Fun City (2019 - current)

Fun City is a fully sound designed and scored, narrative-driven actual play TTRPG podcast set in a futuristic New York City, where magic is real and the rent is still too damn high. The audience accompanies smooth talker Luxe, ork-jock Lash, mysterious retired boxer with a robot arm TK and everyone’s favorite water-witch elf aunt Vivian as they contract with the criminal underground and corporate overlords of NYC in 2101. 

The team navigates The Brooklyn Archipelago, Rebuilt Manhattan and the moral grey area they occupy as longtime friends and flat-mates working as professional criminals, catering to multiple bosses whose aims are sometimes mutually exclusive, all while trying to maintain their principles in a world where those are often readily sold to the highest bidder.

I play Vivian Lakewood, a 145-year-old water elemental who loves knolling her seashells on her houseboat Mirage. After many years as a corporate mage on the West Coast, she turns to a life of crime in the Big Apple. She summons creatures, big and small, hilarious, but powerful. Follow along as she gets shot at in every episode. To support the podcast, join the Fun City Patreon to get bonus content.

Press

“Fun City has the staples of any great actual play podcast between its memorable characters, hilarious table talk, and high stakes left largely to chance. But it also feels squarely at home in audio fiction as a medium, building a world that sounds as real as the social commentary it doles out in each episode.” - Wil Williams for Polygon

“With a tone that balances biting social satire with a certain kindness and wonder — blending fantasy, cyberpunk, science fiction, and comedy — “Fun City” frankly reckons with the difficulty of doing the right thing in a world structured to make that feel like a bad decision.” - Molly Cutler for The Daily Princetonian

“Fun City is a riveting riot of adventure” - Elena Fernández Collins for Simplecast

“The dual game master system is inspired, with one GM, Mike Rugnetta, focused on world building and general GM business while having a second person, Taylor Moore, play any major villains or other NPCs, keeping the show dynamic and riveting.” - Discover Pods

Culinary Autodidact

The tiny hairs on my forearms prickle up when anyone addresses me as “chef.” Even now, as I direct a few sous chefs, it feels unearned. I’m a culinary autodidact, someone who teaches themselves. I said this to Guy Fieri on TV and he was speechless. In short, I read a lot and rely on trial and error. Culinary school was not for me. I nervously tied my neckerchief a little too tight and was overly eager with my “Yes, chef.” Even though it was a large classroom kitchen, I was suffocating from the heat, itchy coat, anxiety, and worst of all: the method.

I’ve never been good at learning in the classroom. That doesn’t mean I was a bad student, but my brain didn’t sparkle and crack the way it does when I get my hands dirty. I’m the kind of person who figures out a new toy without reading the instructions. I will whap your hand out of the way if you try to show me “the right way,” too. It’s gotten to a point where I skim food blogs in the morning and stop on a photo that makes me think I can reverse-engineer it.

On the eve of Thanksgiving year 2000, my mother told me to wake up at 6 am because I was going to learn how to cook. At 16, I was on a steady diet of Taco Bell, In N’ Out cheeseburgers with fries animal-style, packs of chicken ramen (noodles cooked, drained, and tossed in the powder), Costco pepperoni pizza, and broccoli beef from Panda Express. If I didn’t like something my parents made, they’d tell me to cook something for myself. With relentless spite, I’d scowl with my soda and sit there, hungry, while everyone else ate. Thanksgiving was one of my least favorite holidays, but I figured my input was important this time around.

I came downstairs to find that my mother had been called to the hospital for a work emergency. There were three handwritten pages. Dinner had to be on the table for guests by 7 pm. Just to be sure, I peeked into her room to see if she was hiding from me. The turkey had been brined already, it was the foreign vegetation that terrified me. Scouring the pages of cursive, I read and re-read, recited directives out loud, and pulled it together. Mom came home in her hospital scrubs, happy to have someone else cook for a change. Saving Thanksgiving wasn’t the miracle, it’s what happened to me afterward. I sat around during my holiday break flipping through the cable channels and found the Food Network.

Research

You could see the tv from the kitchen counter, so I’d be peeling potatoes or doing other mindless preparations while I watched. Of all of the celebrities, Alton Brown spoke to me. He not only told you what he was doing, but why. The “why” was pivotal information because it allowed me to improvise later on. I started subscribing to Gourmet Magazine and would only look at the photos. Published recipes became restrictive and choking in the same way I felt when I entered culinary school years later. I’d reluctantly measure, follow the instructions exactly, and would be so unappetized by my failure. My mother would throw fits about me wasting food and she’d sigh, dutifully eating the overcooked steak, dry chicken, chewy pasta, and cookies that had gone too far. We didn’t have the freshest ingredients, correct tools, and desirable altitude (the Mojave desert has an elevation of 2,657 feet!). Later, I’d figure out how to revive and fix these variables.

Fast forward to my first post-college job. I was making friends and inviting them over for grilled cheese every Sunday. I’d go on Google search binges, comparing recipes across multiple sites and writing down the common denominators and practices. Grilled cheese night got fancier and more elaborate. I decided to leave my music job for culinary school. I panicked and left school for a two-week trip to Barcelona with my mother. We ate a lot of tapas for dinner. I haunted La Boqueria for ingredients to make breakfast and lunch. The only Catalan phrase I remember is “Un quarta, si us plau” (A quarter [pound], please).

I got my first and only restaurant job at Tini Wine Bar in Red Hook, Brooklyn*. I was hired with zero experience and merely on wide-eyed enthusiasm for learning (it may have also been because I bribed them with cheese). You’ve really got to be hungry. People start to notice your voracity. Culinary school-bred cooks would come through and not last long in our small kitchen. It was probably because they expected glory and not repetition. I knew that it wasn’t my kitchen, so I never acted like it.

My mom came around to the idea of me being a serious cook and supported me when I planned a month-long trip to The Philippines to learn about the food that I refused to eat as a teenager. I took to the local markets snapping photos and pointing at colorful fruits “Ano ba ito?” (what is this?). Each hosting household spent a day with me in their kitchen, bestowing regional variations on national dishes like pancit, bangus, and adobo.

I got stars in my eyes when we visited Mely’s Garden in Bacolod, a successful turo-turo** restaurant with Spanish decor and a catering hall. It turns out that my father’s side of the family can cook! A tingly feeling stirred in my chest, I was on the right path.

Refinement & Repetition

My self-assigned homework was to read and practice through Jacque Pepin’s Complete Techniques as well as Escoffier’s Cooking and Guide to the Fine Art of Cookery. Even though I didn’t make it through a French style education, I knew I needed building blocks. Discipline isn’t hard to uphold if you’re completely in love with the task at hand. These books are thick and daunting but I started to notice patterns in the ingredients and logic. Think of variations as addition or subtraction of specialty components. Basics of broth, sauces, and dressings were now in my mental toolbox.

I fell asleep with these books by my pillow for three years before I finished. Most people don’t read reference books straight through like that, but I had a plan. I circled recipes that I wanted to try and wrote notes in the margins of things that worked and didn’t work. The amazing thing about Escoffier is that all the recipes are in paragraph form. No lists or step-by-step instructions. You get a grasp of method and proportion that you don’t get from the modern recipe card. I broke out of the Rachael Ray notion of quickness and shortcutting. I started to combine cooking methods and refine my touch almost to a degree of laboratory titration. I could feel the tightness in my chest go away.

A cooling sensation overtook me as I began to breathe it all in.

---

*Later renamed to Home/Made Brooklyn & Roquette Catering.

**Turo-Turo means “point-point” to mimic the action of choosing dishes from a buffet behind glass.

Announcing A Name Change: Family Party Catering!

I’ve been going by the name Randwiches for many years, but it never felt quite right when anyone asked about catering. I admit, my website can be confusing! What exactly is it that I do? I do many things, so I thought it would help all of us if my catering company was its own entity.

Please welcome Family Party Catering! All of my event recaps and vendor posts will move to a new website. My same services are still available, just under a different name. I still develop custom menus for special events and indie film sets.

With this new venture, I wanted to share party guides and tips, too. So if you are planning a large event and need advice, you can sign up for $5/month until you’re all set (with no obligation to book with me). Over the years, I gathered a lot of DIY party advice, so I’m happy to share insights with you.

As for this website, it will become more of a freelance portfolio for my art projects and cookbooks. I won’t just cover the cookbooks I worked on, but will expand to cookbooks I have in my collection (it’s so weird!). If you’re looking for my recipes, they are available through Patreon every Wednesday. Once a month, I post a free recipe, too. Join for free to get the notifications.

Thank you for joining me on this journey, I hope we can party together sometime.

My 5 Best Recipes from The Last OG Cookbook

In 2018, I worked with Nicole Taylor (author of The Up South Cookbook and Watermelon & Red Birds) to research, develop, and test recipes from The Last OG tv show on TBS. It was my first cookbook project for a major media property, so I was very excited to take it on. I watched the show and took note of what they ate, mentioned, and cooked. Nicole did a lot of research on historical Brooklyn cuisine, prison food, and dishes from the Caribbean to fill out the rest of the book.

It was a creative endeavor to imagine what other foods the characters would enjoy and make for themselves. Not only is the book design insane (each recipe page is laid out differently!), but it is also educational about criminal justice reform and mass incarceration. It’s not just recipes from the show, but a great document of Brooklyn pride and its diverse cuisine. If you don’t have a copy of The Last OG Cookbook yet, you can grab one here from Bookshop.

From The Recipes I Developed

• Jamaican Beef Patties - A classic bodega stable with homemade filling and crust. Ground beef is sauteed with fresh thyme and habanero peppers to make you cry (in a good way).

• Loaded Onion Hot Dog - When Nicole asked me to load this hot dog with onion, I thought about how versatile onions can be. It’s a triple threat of caramelized Vidalia onion, raw red onion, and crushed Funyuns.

• Pretzel Dusted Kebabs - Grilled lamb skewers mashed with another bodega favorite: salty pretzels! Juicy meat with onion, peppers, and pretzels for crunch.

• Parkside Pot Pie - Savory hand pies filled with comforting chicken breast, peas, and gravy. It’s a portable pot pie you can bring on picnics!

• Parole Board Bacon Burger - You don’t want to pass on this stack. It’s a 1/2 pound beef patty with thick-cut bacon, melty American cheese, and my special sauce packed with paprika and chili powder.

For the Vegetarian

• Bodega Corn Casserole - Really easy to make!

• Shay’s Sweet Potatoes - Can’t really

• Prison Pad Thai - A real prison cooking method used to make dinner out of pantry staples.

• Star Witness Knishes - These require a little patience, but are worth it in the end.

• Green Eye’s Fried Pickles - Sour + crunch? You can’t go wrong.

For the Meat Eater

• Clyde’s Backstabbing Ribeye

• Bobby’s Blinged Out Tacos

• Bulletproof String Beans & Minced Pork

• Lemon Pepper Drums

• Make Up Meat Platter

For a Party

• Chopped Cheese Dip

• Smoked Fish Fritters

• Mango Slaw

• Mullin's’ “Finger Lickers”

• Amira’s Peach Cobbler

If You Have a Sweet Tooth

• PBJ Beignets

• Big Country’as Turtles

• Brooklyn Knock-Out Sundae

• Amira’s Peach Cobbler

• The Goods Muffins

Daddy's Little Meatball (In Post-Production)

Catering Client: Jason Gotleib, 1st AD / Sam Jang-Milsten, Producer

Event: Craft Service for 16 to 30

Daddy’s Little Meatball is Yael Grunseit’s short thesis film for the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. It was shot over 5 days with a fluctuating crew of 16 to 30 members in New York City’s Chinatown and midtown at the Javitz Center.

I set up a temporary kitchen in a Chinatown apartment and carted lunch to a set location a few blocks away. While it was cold outside, we could provide hot meals for the crew and talent. Most of the crew worked on Dylan Rizzo’s short Safe in My Skin last year, so it was great to feed them again.

Safe in My Skin (In Post-Production)

Catering Client: Abyn Reabe, Producer / Jason Gotlieb, Producer

Event: Craft Service for 20

Safe in My Skin is Dylan Rizzo’s thesis film for the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. It was shot in Livingston Manor, NY over 3 days in various outdoor locations. The crew is currently seeking post-production funds via Fractured Atlas.

About the film:

Mikey, a Chinese-American man, returns home to the small town he grew up in for a childhood friend’s funeral and confronts memories long buried.

My kitchen base was an Airbnb where a majority of the crew stayed through the duration of the shoot. I provided breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks all weekend. A few meals were catered off-site near waterfalls and in fields.

My 5 Best Recipes from the Onigiri Cookbook

Onigiri was the first single-subject cookbook that I have fully tested. It was originally written by Ai Watanabe and Samuel Trifot of Gili-Gili, an onigiri shop located in Paris, France. The name of the shop translates from Japanese for “just in time,” for onigiri’s portability.

What exactly is onigiri? It’s white sushi rice shaped into a triangle and wrapped with nori. They are often seasoned or stuffed with sweet or savory ingredients. The cookbook is family-friendly and easy to understand for all cooking levels. As experienced as I am with recipe testing, I picked up a few cool kitchen tricks and trivia. My favorite phrase is fuwa-fuwa, Japanese for airy, the perfect texture of rice.

I worked with my editor David Brothers at Viz Media on all testing and copyediting. I often refer to this book for cocktail hour ideas and for lunches to go. In addition to the 30+ onigiri recipes, you’ll also find a chapter of Soup, Snacks & Pickled Food to enjoy. If you do not have a copy yet, you can get one here.

What are my best 5 recipes in Onigiri?

• Cured egg onigiri - Perhaps the coolest technique in the book! You freeze eggs until they’re hard and then peel them. Once they defrost it’s easy to separate the white from the yolk with your hands. The yolks are then cured in soy sauce and mirin before you stuff them into the warm rice balls. It’s gooey and savory, my favorite onigiri of the collection.

• Okaka onigiri - A surprising combination of bonito mixed with an alarming amount of soy sauce and wasabi. Every bite is a flare of my nose, but I love it.

• Mehari onigiri - I love the presentation of these onigiri. Swiss chard leaves are blanched quickly and then marinated before wrapping the outside of a rice ball in place of nori.

• Bacon & asparagus onigiri - If you need to impress a dinner party, these are so cute. You wrap 2 asparagus spears with bacon and sear them in a pan. You nest them in the onigiri as you shape it so they stick out the top.

• Nut & miso onigiri - I’ve never had a sweet onigiri before, this isn’t too sweet, but it works! It’s equivalent to a salty peanut butter sandwich with the addition of extra nutty red miso.

As a Meat Eater…

• Gyudon onigiri

• Garlic pork onigiri

• Chanterelle omelette onigiri

• Duck breast onigiri

• Ume & ponzu chicken onigiri

As a Pescatarian…

• Mackerel with miso onigiri

• Ikura onigiri

• Russian-style onigiri

• Tuna-mayo onigiri

• Salmon onigiri

As a Vegetarian…

• Chetnut onigiri

• Goma edamame onigiri

• Shiitake onigiri

• Tofu curry onigiri

• Beet & kinpira onigiri

I would love to hear if you cooked any recipes and posted them on Instagram. Make sure to tag me or send them along via email to randwiches at gmail dot com.

My 2024 in Games

I appreciate games as works of audiovisual art. They are an amazing way to challenge your thinking and how you approach problem-solving. I often think games influence the playful nature of my cooking.

It’s no wonder (haha), that I surround myself with game culture by making the menu at Wonderville, a Brooklyn indie arcade bar.

Here’s my 2024 in video games, tabletop RPGS, board games, and card games:

Highly recommended video games…

• Inscryption - Do not Google anything about it! You pick up a card game in the middle of an already in-progress game save. It blew my mind when the host told me I could stand up from the table. Inscryption also had a cult-following ARG that I wish I had caught when it first came out.

• What Became of Edith Finch - A rich, mysterious narrative point-and-click adventure through a weird old house. If you love looking through people’s stuff (heyyy, remember Gone Home?) and hearing family stories, this is a delight.

• Fallout: New Vegas - Finally got around to playing this! The hype around the story is real. My only gripe is the clunky VATs system, which is much improved in Fallout 4. It was truly strange to traipse around the Mojave Desert in a game because my family lives there and I recognized bits of it.

• Hoverburger - Developed by Nick Santaniello, Hoverburger has a unique spin-dial control and weekly updating maps. You play as a pilot in a burger-shaped ship trying to outrun the devourer of worlds, the space ram.

• Speglar - A really fun 4-way battle where you use mirror reflectors to ricochet and hit your opponents. I can’t help but scream while playing this game.

Nice video games…

• Samorost 3 - Gorgeous style and I love the soundtrack. However, the puzzles are not intuitive to solve.

• ART SQOOL - An indie game designed by 3-D artist Julian Glander, creator of the film Boys Go to Jupiter. I kept falling down into the ether.

• Baldur’s Gate 3 - I’m still attempting to play couch co-op, which is very slow-moving. I’m playing as a Drow druid named Ivi.

Tabletop RPGs I played…

• Something is Wrong with the Chickens - I picked up a simple pamphlet at the Many Sided Media booth at PaxU. You play as Eldritch chickens who want to overthrow a corporation.

• Blister Critters - The setting is a Saturday morning cartoon show where you play as critters who survive the poof, where humans disappear from Earth; leaving behind all of their stuff. I played a game on the podcast Why We Roll.

• DIE RPG - For my second DIE mini-series, I took on the role of the emotion knight for the Twice Rolled Tales actual play show DIECHOTOMY. If you missed the first game, I recorded a podcast series with Dead Ghost Productions called REPLAY.

• The 7-Part Pact - The 7 most powerful wizards try to hold the world together. I was fortunate to play a multi-day playtest of this elaborate game! I took on the role of the Mariner, which felt overwhelming at first, but my logistical skills as a caterer kicked in.

• Danse Macabre - My partner’s debut game! You are supplicants during a time when death stops happening. You return hours later each time you die with a new trait or “malaficia.”

• Succulent Sorcerers - The houseplants are alive! And they are wizards!

Board Games & Card Games I Enjoyed…

• Hoddog - A card game where you race to build the longest hot dog.

• Sosig - The fun sister-game to Hoddog, where you build sausages, or sosigs in this game, to order.

• Pickleball Blast! - When I looked at the box, I thought it was a pickleball set. But when I opened it, it’s a surprisingly fun physical board game. You set up a pickleball net and your ping pong a spinning pickle attached with a wire. It’s so silly, but so enjoyable.

You can follow me on Itch and Twitch to see what games I play throughout the year.

Taste Gallery Experiment (2016)

In 2016, my friend Simon Keough of Put A Egg On It was approached by an experimental dinner series called Taste Gallery, where artists build a dining environment and a chef creates a themed menu. Both are generated separately after an initial conversation and revealed to each other and guests. I was paired up with jewelry designers Soull and Dynasty Ogun of L’Enchanteur. The prompt we were given was “Enchanted Forest.”

I met up with Soull and Dynasty, who are twins and took notes on our theme. Here’s what we wrote down to inspire our relative tasks:

Conceptual Themes: 

Duality & Juxtaposition, Material vs. Spiritual 

Gender, identity 

Primordial Instinct

Connection to animal and primal nature

Survival & the Senses; The basic needs, Reusing ingredients to sustain life - inspiration, innovation, to create other things.

Need of 5 senses to tap into higher sense (spirituality)

FIRE, sensory ,spiritual

Decor: foliage and plants

After our discussion, I set work on the menu. On the day of the dinner, I was surprised to walk into a small fairy forest with a hand-stitched version of my menu. Ten guests arrived for dinner moderated by Hind Owais. Between courses, she guided everyone through questions about identity, fantasy versus the real, searching, transformation, twinning in your life, and luxury versus availability. Bran Black of Tokki Soju mixed cocktails to match my dishes.

I opened dinner with two amuse bouches. The first was a 1-bite pickled wild mushroom with whipped feta and robiola cheeses, to mimic Alice in Wonderland: eating a mushroom to transport you into our fantasy world. Our second course was a symbol of welcome, dried pineapple leather with li hing mui powder, a combination I learned about in Hawaii. The pineapple is a often common sign of hospitality and hidden in the decor of many hotels.

The salad course was a melon salad made with horned African melon and watermelon, two fruits of the past and future of the Ogun twins’ heritage. I also wanted to play on the idea of bitter melon (which is a nod to my Asian heritage) without actually using bitter melon. I dressed the sweet and sour fruits with bitter dandelion green pesto tamed with lemon and a few drops of aromatic ramp bitters.

Our main courses were fun and fantastical. Paradox ramen is named for the chicken and egg conundrum. I made chicken paitan ramen with a fried zucchini nest on top. I handed each guest an egg and told them to crack it into their soup. Many were afraid and skeptical, but I told them to trust me. It was not a raw egg, but a fully cooked sous vide custard egg. Next, a deconstructed surf n’ turk bourride, a type of creamy seafood stew. Lightly poached blue fish with sea urchin aioli, new potatoes, zucchini shaped like mushrooms (a bi-product of spiralizing), crispy bresaola chip, and pickled fennel.

Finally, dessert! One was served to the guests and the other was hidden in plain sight the whole evening. I simply torched thick slices of pineapple, dolloped on thick Greek yogurt, and sprinkled more li thing mui on top. I told guests there was one more dessert in the room if they could find it. The organizers were aghast that I snuck one more dish into the surroundings without them knowing. It was a small edible terrarium, based on the chocolate “dirt cup” dessert. Crumbled chocolate cake, mousse, gummy worms, and herbs posed as a planter.

On their way out, I gifted each guest a “message in a bottle” mushroom tarragon salt to take home. It was as if they were Alice, finding another mushroom to grow back to her proper size. You might notice that the menu feels repetitive and that was purposeful. I wanted to invoke mirrors for both Wonderland imagery and to reflect the twin designers. I open and close the menu with mushrooms. The second and sixth pineapple courses contain pineapple as a hello and goodbye. The strangest dish, Paradox Ramen, was in the dead center to flip your world upside down.

Unfortunately, following this dinner, Taste Gallery did not continue this series. I had a wonderful time collaborating with Dynasty and Soull; opening me up to a new world of ideating for my future menus.