Eat Drink Design Signature Snacks

Events / Product design

Not your usual greasy croquette that can be bought from a vending machine, the snacks from Eat Drink Design Outside at Dutch Design Week were a fun if somewhat unusual way to play with your food.

By Jeanne Tan / 28-10-2008

Food design or design food....

Seven designers, seven chefs. This year during Dutch Design Week, the pop-up snack bar Eat Drink Design Outside presented seven signature snacks that was the result of a collaboration between Dutch designers and chefs from restaurants in and around Eindhoven. The snacks were available for 5 euros from a 'Febo' style croquette vending machine located just behind the Witte Dame building of Design Academy Eindhoven and could also be eaten at the seven featured restaurants for the week.

Some snacks were very identifiable with their designer or chef and some resembled edible post-modern architectural models. For the public, they were definitely a hit. While the snacks perhaps challenged our preconceptions of what food should look like and diners preferred contents over form, it was fantastic to see how differently each designer worked with the speciality of the chef and worked with the food as a material, where for instance a pillow can be made of dough (Mara Skujeniece and De Karpendonkse Hoeve) or a pig from ravioli (Christien Meindertsma and Ristorante Da Nello).

In order to eat their snack, diners also had to play with their food, whether it be cracking open a sealed clay parcel to reveal a quail (Kiki van Eijk and Avant Garde van Groeninge), tasting a mosaic of nine tastes in sequence (Lonneke Gordijn & Ralph Nauta and Restaurant 1910) or deconstructing a temple of crostinis (Joost van Bleiswijk and Dick Middelweerd from De Treeswijkhoeve). 'It was a real eye opener to work with the designers', says chef Chris Fraass from CMF Culinair who oversaw the culinary aspect of the project and also collaborated with Maarten Baptist on a sweet creation. 'Their approach is totally different, and as as chef working on this collaboration, you just had to leave your culinary habits behind'. Fraass' and Baptist's snack Peanutbutterjellydonutholesonjackswithcottoncandy combined Dutch and American (background of the chef) influences. It was a play on the Dutch 'oliebol' and American donut, filled with a combination of peanut butter and jelly (jam) and served on a three-pronged eating apparatus. Sounds unusual, but it was delicious. This time for us diners, it was refreshing to be able to leave our normal dining habits behind.

Snack photography: Joep Lennarts