On Wednesday night, I attended a Food Awards Launch party at a contemporary art space downtown. This was basically a way for the awards committee to kiss their sponsors arses. However, they tried to add a bit of flavour to the night by hiring Cole Thomas, a 4-foot-9 chef from Georgia who has been here over 10 years.Well Cole is famous for his levitating fish dish, but instead he treated us to prociutto hanging from a clothesline and witches' cauldron non alcoholic shots that are simply dry ice trickery borrowed from a low budget haunted houses at Halloween time back home. Also being from the States, I was not impressed. See him on the right - "he is just so wacky - darling, look at his drinks, they are smoking- but you can drink them - that is too wacky!"
More on his actual interesting work below:
Cole Thomas's levitating amuse-bouche, The Flying Fish, sees a nori-wrapped piece of tuna sashimi float above its dish - with not a wire or pulley in sight.
Told it was impossible, he managed to achieve his culinary feat by harnessing a variation of the Meissner Effect which - for those who've forgotten their high school physics - is the expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor during its transition to the superconducting state. In other words, Thomas has managed to doing something very tricky with magnetising agents, typically unmagnetisable organic matter, some dry ice and a $4000 ceramic tablet.
