Sharing moments and learnings with inspiring and disconcerting people, is probably our greatest fortune. People of enormous talent, but above all of great human value, have helped us in these more than twenty years, to greatly expand a special way of inhabiting gastronomy, by demonstrating that the position of a particle will never be as interesting as the movement that it is capable of generating.

Some years ago, we met two accomplices while we were exploring other paths: Ben Houge and Jutta Friedrichs. He, apart from being a professor at Berklee College of Music, is a musician and composer of many video game soundtracks where user interaction is one of the key elements of his work. She is a product designer and mentor at Harvard University who is capable of bringing any project to life, no matter how impossible it may seem. Together they make a formidable tandem, and for many years they designed Food Operas where different tonal music was played on a restaurant menu to generate harmonies together. The connection us emerged quickly, and we started working on an interactive experience for 2018, the year Mugaritz celebrated its 20th anniversary.

The idea was to reproduce a social experience of comm, something we had done before with simple mortars. In the latter case, what happened was that a number of mortars were brought out into the room at the same time, so that each of the diners could use their own, but this was not an individual exercise, but a collective one: simultaneously, all the diners began to grind and crush. The curious thing was that this gesture implied, without knowing it, an exercise of complicity all of them by involuntarily making a kind of tribal percussive music.

In the project we started to develop together with Ben and Jutta, the main challenge was to move from analogue to digital. For this purpose, we generated a participatory experience where through an interaction with the plate and the bite, the diners participated in a sensory experience, creating a melody together.
The gastronomic was in the background, what was really significant was that when someone touched the food, different sounds reverberated from the tableware, initiating a tonal and collaborative symphony all the , turning that moment into magic.