'Dinner Lab' Competition Gives Aspiring Chefs a Chance of a Lifetime
By Adam Sechrist
It's a fine dining reboot. White linens, waiters in tuxedos and food you can't pronounce served on the finest china are gone. All of that is replaced with an abandoned bank turned makeshift restaurant full of community-style tables.
New Orleans-based Dinner Lab is a members-only, pop-up restaurant where diners not only get to eat food prepared by some of the best chefs in the country but also give critical feedback to a chef who is front and center in the dining room.
Brian Bordainick told Yahoo News and Finance Anchor, Bianna Golodryga that he started Dinner Lab shortly after he moved to New Orleans, hoping to change the way Americans view fine dining.
Here's how it works. Members pay an annual fee of $100 for a spot on Dinner Lab's guest list. Three weeks before a meal in one of the company's growing list of 20 cities, an email is sent to members inviting them to dinner. One hundred and twenty members sign up, and a chef starts preparing the meal of his or her life.
A location is picked and just two days before the dinner service, members are told where the meal will be served. Some locations are the roof of parking garages or abandoned buildings.
The chef and his or her team work for two or three days creating a meal that would normally cost hundreds of dollars. At Dinner Lab, the tab is generally under a hundred bucks for everything: meal, alcohol and gratuity.
The day of the meal, the chef and the Dinner Lab team arrive at the event space and set up everything from the dining tables to the kitchen sink. Around 7 that evening, the 120 hungry diners arrive and are welcomed with a special cocktail and a speech by the chef, who explains the meal they are about to eat.
After each course, guests rate the food and provide feedback directly to the chef, who walks around the dining room. Later that week, the scores are analyzed and the chef learns exactly what worked and what didn't work, gaining knowledge to better prepare for the next service.
Dinner Lab is now taking the critique of chefs one step further. A competition began this past summer pitting 10 of the company's top chefs against one another. By the end of the year, at least one of them will be awarded his or her own stand-alone restaurant. In this new World 3.0, Bianna meets one of those chefs, Kwame Onwuachi, who is trying to change his life through food.
Who do you think is a global game changer, and what person would you like to see featured in this series? Let Bianna know on Twitter (@biannagolodryga)
