Ludicrous luxury: Sublimotion, the most expensive restaurant in the world
Food can be a surprisingly divisive subject. When you write about food, you are often met with the inquisitive pointing fingers of livid readers, accusing you of neglecting your fellow humans by not taking the time to write about something that would be deemed more worthwhile. “Why do you write about food?” some may ask, “Why not write about love? About feeling? About honesty in the way that others do?”
It’s important to write about food, firstly, because, like many other people, we like to know what we should be eating and where we should go to eat. But on a much more complicated level, food is intertwined with all the emotions that those inquisitive readers deem more important than it. Love, feeling, honesty, security, and home all overlap and contort in the name of food, as taste triggers feeling and emotion more than any other sense.
M.F.K. Fisher writes about this in her book The Gastronomical Me, where she says, “There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers,” she says, “We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity. There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.”
Sounds pretty beautiful, right? It’s not just about food; it’s about the people we meet when we eat, the memories we make via the plate and the fact that eating helps us better understand ourselves and those around us. You could never put a price tag on that, could you?
Well, located at the Hard Rock Hotel in Ibiza, a new restaurant called Sublimotion is trying to. The tasting menu comes in at $2,400 a head. Outrageous, yes? A lot of restaurants overcharge for their tasting menu, which they put down to the cost of the produce, the quality of the chef and the top-of-the-line service you receive. Sublimotion is slightly different than that. Forget everything you read before about music connecting us and triggering memories; this restaurant promises to give you completely alien feelings and claims it will have you walking away from your table having experienced emotions you have never experienced before.
Is this a completely new ordeal that the human psyche is yet to digest? Or is it a load of rubbish? It’s up to you, of course, but after looking at the restaurant, it’s hard to lean anywhere other than towards the latter. Names are displayed on a console table in low light, which looks like what the characters in Tron would eat off. The rest of the meal seems, to put it plainly, bat shit crazy.
The tasting menu is made up of colourful dishes, displayed in an artistic way reminiscent of the ending of The Menu, where table and plate merge into one another, and chefs treat sauce in the same way Monet treats paint. It’s not just the food that adds to the artistic experience, though; in fact, this is a restaurant that looks like it treats food as an afterthought. Instead, the performances by dancers (most of whom it appears are half-dressed women), flashing lights, screens with videos played on them and music all contribute towards the culinary experience and lead to the aforementioned “new emotions” that Sublimotion promises.
Essentially, you are eating overpriced food in VR. While there is no doubt that this experience will be something unique and, without a doubt, entertaining, the price tag of $2,400 is ludicrous, and this is an experience that M.F.K. Fisher would deem isn’t worth it. And if, even after this write-up, you are keen on watching half-naked women dance around under flashing lights while you eat, a lot of strip clubs sell crisps.
