Prep Kitchen at Agora Café
(Jan – March 2016)
The worst is yet to come, let’s make the best of it. The next installment of Agora’s Chef in
Residence sees a shift in pace. In a time when it is easy to adopt a dystopian outlook on our
future, the aim of Prep Kitchen is to explore resourcefulness when running out of resources, how
to creatively come together instead of heading for the hills.
Agora Kitchen will be inviting local initiatives that engage with ‘useless’ food and culinary
capitalism to participate in creating an alternative chain of supply to the café. In addition to
continuing our quest to celebrate that which otherwise would be considered ‘waste’, we will also
continue our close collaboration with Food Assembly to bring us locally sourced, grocery store
independent farm-fresh produce weekly.
During the three months of the residency, with the aim of enabling the individual to re-design a
different consumption practice within a failing system, Agora will feature practitioners in the fields
of fermentation, urban gardening, dumpster diving, bread making, and more. Some of these will
be highlighted in workshops that will also feature prep-worthy subjects such as growing your own
mushrooms and starting the conversation on how to eat insects when we run out of cows.
As for the menu expect total wintery comfort – we will be baking sourdough bread to feed the bellies
of those on the front lines, fermenting old vegetables to give them new, frankenstienian life,
and cooking up slow broths to sustain us through the cold. We hope that you will join us this
winter as we hunker down and make the best of what we still have; our community, their
byproducts, our sharp knives and hot stove.
Concept by Dani Berg
Collaborators:
The Real Junk Food Project Berlin
Asli Hatipoglu, chef and textile artist