What is it?
Half the time, my guests think I run ‘gorilla dining’ events and laugh at the ludicrousness of such a thought. Most times, I don’t have the heart to correct them more than once, lest the struggle to grasp this concept deter them from attending future events or, worse, from spreading the word. It did not make it easier that I decided upon introducing guerilla dining to Copenhagen and conjuring up a market out of thin air. Looking back on it, how naïve I was. Let’s just chalk that up to ingenuity, for now. Thanks to this leap of faith, I’ve had a stubborn, “I think I can, I think I can” choo-choo train approach this past year that’s led to countless adventures.
The concept of guerilla dining is without an official definition. Each orchestrator has his or her own understanding of what constitutes a true event. Many do not even use the term guerilla dining, opting rather for pop-up restaurant or supper club. In my view, the aim of each project is the same: we are looking to provide our guests with a completely different dining experience – one that will imprint itself permanently into your memory. How it is executed and what elements are brought into it to create the experience is what sets each apart. In this range are supper clubs consisting of only a few people and the host in a private home serving homemade food as well as professional exhibitions reaching upwards of fifty guests with hired chefs, musicians, and mobile kitchens. I like to think of mine as art installations that revolve around the central theme of food. Some have been intimate gatherings of fifteen guests, and others well over a hundred.
So how did I – a native San Franciscan transplanted in Copenhagen of all places — get involved in this sub-culture, you ask?