The Modern Museum

Around the world the museum is a monument, an institution like the library and the postal system, denoting a level of societal achievement.  It can lend a small town in Nebraska a place in a travel guide.  It can elevate a nation into history.  A museum-goer may carry a small ball of pride and harbor a pinch of superiority at the time well spent.

The museum is a collection of objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical interest arranged and displayed in accordance with a logical method and made available for public viewing through exhibits. The word ‘museum’ is of Greek origin, and meant a space dedicated to the muses - "a place where man's mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs."  (Abridged definition taken from both Wikipedia and Dr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders)  To that end it was a place to mediate upon the world and practice the arts.  The first museum may have been an Athenian institute created by Plato or merely a hill in Athens upon which an old man sat and sang until there he died, was buried, and thus created a sanctuary.  And in that dual origin story we find both the beauty and the problem with the museum.  What is a museum meant to do?

Consider the museums of your lifetime.  Though they may preserve beautiful paintings or historic carvings or awe inspiring fossils the museum can be a drool, potentially depressing archive of the past ensconced in a pristine and grand manner.  Like a mortuary of human and natural spectacles, some sort of continual funeral without a burial in sight, the museum preserves the past in an antiseptic manner.   Perhaps inevitably so.  Perhaps there is no other way.

Walking the halls we hover somewhere out of time, induced to drowsiness by the atmosphere, as if a magical spell poured in through the vents, a potion that frays the fabric of time until we stumble about in a waking dream state.   Like Rip Van Winkle we doze off and awake to find years have passed except in the case of the museum the years roll backward upon the rails not forward.

In this state we are not taken away on flights of fancy, but instead we are led down a road of rigorous delineation of the world as if everything has its proper place.  Here the world is separated and catalogued.  The museum portrays a world of progress from age to age and culture to culture that ticks along like clockwork.  All the chaos and uncertainty and ambiguity of the world becomes domesticated in these halls.  It’s as if we wish to enclose Nature and History in a series of labelled Ziplock bags, as if we believe a stately institutionalized palace could hold them in all their wonder.

All this certainty lends authenticity and authority.  Who can argue with the art masters,  the scientific pioneers, and the world explorers when all in one place?  Who can question the answers of learned experts, recorded voice-overs, brochures, and captions neatly printed on foam core and mounted with the utmost attention to tidiness?

Somehow this is the world we are more at home in though it is something fabricated, only a model of the world as it is.  We can lounge in the well ordered and catalogued room with sharp distinctions.  We breath easily in the home that works along well governed laws with no alternate answers.

The question is:  Is it Real?

Next up:  The Cabinets of Curiosity, the original manifestation of the museum.  And don’t worry this is going somewhere culinary and delicious.

Peeking Into the Kitchen

The test kitchens have been wonderful, tipsy, stumble down the road affairs. Our guests have left with bright smiles and bleary eyes. The cocktails are that good. And the food, well, it’s been luxurious re-imagined bar food that pares with the history of the cocktail. Chef Nordo has outdone himself. But, he is not satisfied. He's been lumbering about, grumbling under his breath, turning in tight circles in the kitchen since a person or two mentioned the heat of the stuffed pepper and the extreme tartness of the preserved lemon. “Can’t these people take an adventure?” “What do they want, Applebees?” And so on and so forth. He never quite stops.

Today we take a peek into the menu.

We begin with a nut dish. The tumeric lime glaze sparks and then blends with the tart sweetness of the champagne cocktail called “The Slippage”. And this begins all the trouble for the evening.

Our second stop lands us in the land of botanicals and alchemy. Alcohol has been a medicine for humans since time immemorial. In the pursuit of purity, it was the Arabs who thought to distill wine and in the process discover alcohol itself. Known as “Aqua Vitae” a tablespoon a day was thought to give long life. It was the cure all. And in that spirit we serve The Secret Kiss, a combination of gin and yellow chartreuse. The aromatic concoction buoys the flavors of the Pickled Plate. Beets, cucumbers, quail eggs, and olives rest in a dill custard as an homage to all things preserved and fermented. The guests have been pleasantly surprised.

Next, we come to the American cocktail. This great invention of our country has inspired two centuries of tastes and sordid moments. We have reveled in our love of spirits, discovered the joy of ice, brought vermouth into the vocabulary, and finally arrived at the classic cocktail in the 1870’s with the Manhattan, the Sazarac, and the Martiniz. In this tradition we serve up a quiet ember of a drink- A Box of Nails- and pare it with the challenging Fried Food Platter. The two bite and soothe, bite and soothe.

We end the evening in a dream. Our final drink, The Violet Hour, pays tribute to the soft edges of time and color that is the cocktail hour, and when combined with the Raspberry Cloud meringue we hover in a final few moments of bliss. Enough said.

And that is our evening. A few more tweaks and few more twists, and this case is closed.