I have only been to Stockholm twice, both times to meet the experimental artist Carsten Höller, most famous for installing helter-skelters in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, and for magic mushroom-inspired upside-down worlds of all kinds. The first time I met him, seven years ago, Höller introduced me to the pair of bullfinches he was hand-feeding while attempting to teach them to sing a forgotten 18th-century love song; he sent me away with a tube of hallucinogenic toothpaste, designed to enhance my dreams. This time, the Wonderland “eat me” invitation was restricted to lunch at Höller’s brand new restaurant, Brutalisten.
The restaurant was inspired by pandemic boredom. Höller, an intense, never entirely earnest man of 60, often coolly dressed by his friend and sometime collaborator Miuccia Prada, tends to have his best ideas in the early morning. He lies in bed, he says, drinks a pot of warm coffee and lets his mind migrate. On one such half-awake dawn, he was musing on food as art. Höller is a lover of brutalist architecture; he divides his time between his Stockholm apartment and a concrete house he had built near a beach 70 miles south of Accra in Ghana. What, he wondered, that morning, would brutalist food look and taste like? He jotted down a semi-jokey manifesto for “a dogma kitchen”.
