In the past month, Selassie Atadika, the chef of Midunu restaurant in Accra, Ghana, has helped cook dinner for 500 people in Amsterdam for World Food Day, given a talk at a chefs conference in Galway, Ireland, and introduced her spice-scented chocolates at Paris’s Salon du Chocolat—all before flying to the United States to deliver a lecture at Harvard. So it is not hard to understand why, when she was invited to participate in this year’s edition of Gelinaz!, one of the culinary world’s most ambitious events, she was relieved to discover the format had changed. “I have to admit,” she said by telephone from Charles de Gaulle as she waited for her flight to Boston. “I was excited to learn I could stay home.”
Cofounded by Lyon-based food writer and culinary impresario Andrea Petrini, Gelinaz! (the name is reputedly a mash-up of Italian chef Fulvio Pierangelini’s name and the cartoon band Gorillaz) has always pushed boundaries in the name of encouraging creativity and collaboration. A 2013 gathering held in Ghent, Belgium, brought 25 renowned chefs together to cook interpretations of a single 19th-century recipe; another, held at WD-50 in New York months before it closed and intended as a tribute to Wylie Dufresne, had participants riff on the inventive chef’s signature dishes.
Later, thanks to the suggestion of Willows Inn chef Blaine Wetzel, Gelinaz! morphed into the Grand Gelinaz! Shuffle: 37 chefs left their own restaurants to spend several days in another, where they devised and served a menu that blended their own cooking style with the recipes and approach of the (departed) host. Danny Bowien and Angela Dimayuga of Mission Chinese Food in New York, for example, turned the dining room of Copenhagen’s Noma into a Chinese buffet and served koji fried chicken on tables covered with pink polyester cloths, while René Redzepi, sent to Bangkok, controversially cooked durian with cabbage at David Thompson’s Nahm. “Everyone was so excited about it,” Petrini recalls of the Shuffle. “For five days you worked in someone else’s kitchen, you lived in their house—you were living the life of someone else, swapping what was the dearest, most secret, most private part of their restaurants. It was almost like wife-swapping for them.”
In some important ways, this year’s rendition promises to be even more radical. For one thing, the number of participants has grown from a relatively small cohort of mostly male, mostly fine- dining chefs, to a broader group that includes not just the biggest names (Redzepi, Albert Adrià, Clare Smyth, Alain Ducasse), but up-and-coming stars like Jeremy Chan of London’s Ikoyi, Manoella Buffara of Curitiba, Brazil’s Restaurante Manu, and Kim Mikkola and Evelyn Kim of Helsinki’s Inari. Even more strikingly, at a time when most acclaimed chefs (and those who want to be) travel incessantly, the Gelinaz! Shuffle is asking participants—all 148 of them— to stay in their own damn kitchens for a night.
Instead of the chefs swapping places, it is their recipes that will travel. Every chef has sent in instructions for eight new dishes—a full tasting menu—and this week, after a lottery that literally consists of names being drawn from a bag, each will receive another chef’s recipes in return. Each will then have a month to interpret this new menu before serving it to paying guests in their own restaurant on the night of December 3. Neither the diners nor the chefs themselves will learn the identity of their recipes’ creator until that night.