Ask a New Yorker: Who are you? What are you passionate about? And can you touch your tongue to your nose?
Emilie: I cannot touch my tongue to my nose at all. My name is Emilie Baltz. I am a designer, mostly working in the world of food. So I work with a lot of chefs. I develop brand identities for restaurants. I work with them on developing their menus, their spaces, their products. Basically anything that touches the food environment, I work on to try to make it all delicious.
Ask a New Yorker: Indeed, creativity is in the air.
Emilie: It’s just part of life. I don’t think there is anything that is not creative, because you are always creating. Creativity is just being able to able to observe, analyze and then communicate. So that is life in general and when you apply that philosophy to everything from your daily existence to your work it’s super rewarding. You’re making designs all the time and hopefully there decisions that are personal that have something to say. That’s how I approach it.
Ask a New Yorker: You’re a Gourmand, a foodie. Tell me you don’t change hands with your knife and fork while you’re eating. It’s amazing that people still do the switch.
Emilie: No, there’s no changing of hands. My Mon is French and my Dad is American. We grew up with elbows by our sides with two or three forks. There were no switching hands, much to the chagrin of half of my mid-western friends when I was small.
Ask a New Yorker: What else is going on?
Emilie: What’s really taken over my life theses last two months is a project called: What happens when. http://www.emiliebaltz.com/2011/01/what-happens-when/ it’s a temporary restaurant installation. And so we’ve taken over an old restaurant space and reclaimed it. It’s on Cleveland Place between Spring and Kenmare. It’s a former restaurant that went out of business. We’ve taken it over for the duration of the next nine months. It’s myself, a chef named John Frazier, an interior designer Elle Kunnos De Voss from the Metrics, and a sound artist Mica Silver. And for the next nine months we are going to work collectively to create new food experiences that will change monthly around a certain theme. So as a diner you’ll come in and it will never be the same place twice. You will have this sort of evolving food experience that you will never really know what will happen.
Ask a New Yorker: What is the bathroom design like?
Emilie: Oh, the bathrooms are amazing. Their dueling, it’s a total soundscape. Mica put these two bathrooms facing each other. There two parts of a composition. So in one bathroom you hear one part of it and in the other bathroom you hear the other part of it. So if you open both doors you can hear the whole thing. If you close the doors you’re in your own world. So they kind of fight each other.
Ask a New Yorker: Soundscapes interesting. I go to sleep every night with one of those sound machines. We have it locked on crickets chirping.
Emilie: Yes, Mica deals with more found sounds and field recordings. That was the experiment with this place. What happens when you don’t have music in a restaurant? What happens when you have sound? How does that affect you dining experience? How does that affect your senses? You know music is not part of nature specifically. Humans make it. So when you start to bring in a more some hat of a more manipulative natural component. What does that do for how you eat and how you feel when you eat? It’s been really revealing so far. This first month is really sort of sounds of a rural bond fires and snow melting on fake plants at Waldon pond and there’s another element in there which has this sort of crackily sort of special whoosh! Sound to it. It’s pretty amazing.
Ask a New Yorker: Very cool, reservations only?
Emilie: Prix fix of $58 where you choose your first course and a second course and then there’s a dessert cart that comes around. So your dessert is plated at the table. The bar is on wheels. What else? Presently the interior design is very architectural. So the concept is that the walls themselves will never change. The space itself is built around the idea of taking the archetucal plans of the space and mapping them in a one in one scale on the walls. So you see the elevations on the walls. You see the floor plan on the floor. You see the reflective ceiling plan on the ceiling. You live inside the plans and then every month new elements will come in there to change the entire ambience, the whole feel of it.
Ask a New Yorker: So your title in the scheme of What Happens When?
Emilie: I’m the Producer of What Happens When. John Frazier the chef and I have been friends for a while. I worked on the development of Dovetail, his restaurant on the upper west side. I did the brand identity for that as well as a lot of product design and food photography and menu design. Therefore we became friends and he called me when he happened upon this space. He was looking for space for a vegetable focused restaurant. He saw this space but the building was going to be torn down. So he had this idea, well he’s been cooking in the same place for the past three years. Honestly I think he has just become bored with that. Like any creative you want to be able to push the limits of your creativity. So he called me with this idea and said, “Emilie I want to make a temporary restaurant, help”. So, we sat down and brain stormed and came up with the whole strategy and naming for it. I brought in these two amazing interior designers and Mica, the sound artist. Since then we’ve been working super collaboratively, part of the unique thing besides being done on a shoe string budget. The entire design budget was $5000. Crazy, lots you can do with paper. So it was not only a stretch of creativity buy also a stretch of money as well. I incorporated something called Kickstarter, which is crowd funding, based on an art patronage model. You build the project then send it out to the world and people donate to you in exchange for a gift. So we have a variety of different experiences, gifts you get in exchange for donating to our project.
Ask a New Yorker: How much money has Kickstarter raised?
Emilie: We’ve raised $21,000.
Ask a New Yorker: Do you have any flaws?
Emilie: I have a terrible temper. I get really annoyed. I sleep too little, that’s probably why. Oh and I cannot not make a pastry to save my life. I’m a terrible dessert pastry chef.
Ask a New Yorker: You wrote a book called Junk Foodie
Emilie: Junk Foodie is a parody on American cuisine. I grew up with a French Mom and American dad. Food for me was always was a big part of culture. So it was the biggest difference found going back in forth. In the way people did gather around a table or did not gather around a table and the choices they made. This for me Junk Foodie basically takes the most American of ingredients- I think which is junk food. It’s whole heartedly American. I think it’s the only ingredient that we can own. I’m using ingredient in the broad sense there…so Junk Foodie creates gourmet treats. So it’s a perfect example of me kind of going between these two worlds. But it also sort of laughs, at least it’s supposed to be a humorous look upon our national cuisine which is shrinked wrapped, bright blue, shelf life of 125 years.
Ask a New Yorker: Mmmm Ring Dings.
Emilie: Yea, yea, they’re neither materials, nor food. This book is very lush and very enticing when you look at these images. Then you read what they’re made of and there’s absolute disgust on people’s faces. They can’t believe that this gorgeous looking thing is made of something that’s not really the food. There’s a Napoleon, but is made from a Twinkie and potato chips. So we recreate actually the exact taste and texture of it because you can reconstitute Twinkie cake very easily due to the amount of emulsifiers in it. So you can squish it back into dough, then you can roll it out very thinly. Then you add a layer of smashed potato chips to it. So you recreate a mouth feel of puff pastry which kind of has this crispy crunch to it. Then you layer it with Twinkie cream and you basically have a Napoleon made from a Twinkie.
Ask a New Yorker: What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
Emilie: This is my worst flaw. I’m a Libra. I can never make up my mind. So I have 5000 favorites of 5000 things. It’s also compounded with the fact that it’s New York City. You can do anything you want at any time. So favorite restaurants usually have to do with what mood I’ve been in. Recent favorites, one stand out for me is Van Dag which is on 6th Street and 2nd Ave. It’s Dutch/Scandinavian themed, it’s absolutely amazing. They have these pickled oysters which are just ungodly. Amazing, amazing. They have a whole selection of house made Aquavits and Mead. It’s a party in your mouth. I love it.
Ask a New Yorker: Have you been to the Museum of Sex Aphrodisiac café?
Emilie: It’s in the basement. There’s a sub level that’s called Oral Fix. The concept is that it’s an Elixir Bar. So it’s home to all these artisanal syrups each one of them having a different aphrodisiac property that’s based on the history and mythology of Aphrodisia over the centuries. So you can taste a concoction that Montezuma, the Aztec ruler use to drink before going off to move his harem of women. It’s mainly like chocolate, vanilla and chili based, so very robust in terms of stimulation, longevity and then fertility.
Ask a New Yorker: Let’s play word association. Bloomberg.
Emilie: Geese.
Ask a New Yorker: Why Geese?
Emilie: The name Bloomberg made me think of a goose for some reason .It’s sort of fluffy long and has this big ‘l’ next to a ’b’ the ‘b’s’ look like wings. The ‘l’ is this long neck. The two ‘o’s’ are these beady eyes. I have no idea why. It always looks like a Goose.
Ask a New Yorker: How about “Trump”, what comes to mind?
Emilie: Tower, yea, long phallic, way too pretentious, powerful, gold.
Ask a New Yorker: What a pleasure, Emilie! You are Uberchic! Thank you.
John Frazier
Elle Kunnos De Vos
