"The chef Tim Hollingsworth made it for what he called “Pizza Haute,” one of the meticulous themed dinners he cooks at Chain in Los Angeles, a regular pop-up that considers American fast food with an almost scholarly attention, exalting the genre with rigorous cooking and presentation.
Chain doesn’t specialize in the forensic trompe l’oeils of fine dining — those baroque lemon-flavored desserts made to look like real lemons until you cut into them, revealing layers of cream and cake. No, this is pizza disguised as, well, also pizza.
It’s a different kind of illusion: a restaurant that isn’t really a restaurant, selling fast food that isn’t really fast food? And it sent me — a person who isn’t really a person? — into a spiral. Was Chain celebratory and nostalgic or cynical and manipulative? Was it a marketing stunt, a performance piece or a loving rewrite of our culinary vernacular? Was it an indulgent dip into the past or a glimpse into the future?
...
uth De Jong, a production designer who recently worked on “Nope” and “Oppenheimer,” helped devise the look, jumbling together a vintage Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders vibe with ’90s arcade and video games and slick original design: curvy green lettering and red banquettes, elaborate plastic menus and self-referential poster ads. The effect is both jarring and sumptuous — a fast-food multiverse that seems to have always existed.
Chain doesn’t specialize in the forensic trompe l’oeils of fine dining — those baroque lemon-flavored desserts made to look like real lemons until you cut into them, revealing layers of cream and cake. No, this is pizza disguised as, well, also pizza.
It’s a different kind of illusion: a restaurant that isn’t really a restaurant, selling fast food that isn’t really fast food? And it sent me — a person who isn’t really a person? — into a spiral. Was Chain celebratory and nostalgic or cynical and manipulative? Was it a marketing stunt, a performance piece or a loving rewrite of our culinary vernacular? Was it an indulgent dip into the past or a glimpse into the future?
...
uth De Jong, a production designer who recently worked on “Nope” and “Oppenheimer,” helped devise the look, jumbling together a vintage Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders vibe with ’90s arcade and video games and slick original design: curvy green lettering and red banquettes, elaborate plastic menus and self-referential poster ads. The effect is both jarring and sumptuous — a fast-food multiverse that seems to have always existed.
