Victoria Goodisman
Culinary community:
Collaborative Relationship Building through Improvisational Fine Dining
I am redesigning the fine dining experience to create a space for community building and forming new interpersonal bonds. In response to the pandemic, people learned the pressing need for face to face connection. The current landscape of fine dining inadvertently perpetuates isolation by creating a hierarchical dynamic that separates customers from service staff. This project proposes a restaurant where patrons actively participate in creating their dining experience, blurring the lines between customers and staff. By understanding the restaurant experience through the lens of performance and improvisational theater, we can redefine how people engage with this space. Customers collectively assume responsibilities ranging from chef to lighting designer in a designed restaurant space that facilitates and encourages collaboration. By organizing workstations with strategic overlap, customers assigned different roles and responsibilities have to work together and share a space. This shared experience brings new people together, encourages collaboration and creates new relationships.
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