ABSTRACT
This chapter locates the roots of the contemporary mimetic turn in gastronomy in Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal’s emphasis on food as a representational medium, which consistently and insistently turns their culinary innovations toward theatricality. After a look at Adrià, food writer Harold McGee, US chef Thomas Keller, and British chef Heston Blumenthal’s 2006 manifesto on gastronomy, I offer a reading of Heston Blumenthal as an evangelist of culinary representation whose work on the mechanisms of alimentary perception has enabled the development of robust critical, theoretical, and popular engagement with issues of pleasure, meaning, and well-being as they relate to culinary mimeticism. Alongside Blumenthal’s pioneering work, I offer a reading of Adrià’s culinary innovations, first at his celebrated restaurant elBulli and then beyond, as a critical intervention into the relationship between mimesis, food, pleasure, and meaning.
