When the Tate contacted Olafur Eliasson to suggest the gallery stage a retrospective of his work, the artist’s response was somewhat out of the ordinary. He loved the idea of the show: Tate Modern will always have a place in his heart, for it was in 2003 in its Turbine Hall that he staged the installation for which he’ll probably now always be best known – the Weather Project. (Eliasson, you’ll remember, somehow induced a giant sun to rise inside that vast and ordinarily sepulchral space.) But why would he want to limit himself only to his art? “I told them I wanted to do the restaurant as well,” he says. How did that go down? “Well, they have two million visitors, so for me to want to tweak their restaurant …” He smiles at his temerity. “But they were very good about it. ‘Oh, that’s great,’ they said.”
At Eliasson’s studio in Berlin, food is integral to his practice. Since 2005, its top-floor kitchen has prepared and served organic, vegetarian meals to be shared each day by all those who work there (about 80 people). “Eating together gives us a space in which we can have conversations,” he tells me, when we meet at the Tate’s temporary Studio Olafur Eliasson Kitchen for lunch on the day the retrospective finally opens. “We like to say that when we eat we have the ‘why’ discussions, and when we’re working, we have the ‘how’ discussions. As my studio has become bigger, it has also become necessary to make sure there is communication: people might work on the same project, but they might not talk together during the day.”
But his thinking goes wider on this. Institutions of all kinds, he believes, need to consider community and how best it might be fostered. The pioneering Californian chef Alice Waters, who wrote the foreword to his studio’s 2013 cookbook, is a friend. “As she tells me, in the US, more than 80% of families don’t even eat together once a week. This is why institutions need to introduce eating spaces, as a social space.” He gestures at the long table that now bisects Tate Modern’s ground floor restaurant. “This table is just like the one we have in our studio, and when we were running the test kitchen, we often saw guests talking to people they didn’t know. We don’t expect people to become close friends and marry or anything, but there is a desire and a need to connect, I think.”
Eliasson’s plan for the restaurant at Tate was ambitious. Not only would his studio help to devise the menu (Tate’s chef, Jon Atashroo, came out to Berlin to see its kitchen in full flight), he also wanted it, like so much of his art, to speak to the state of the planet and thus to be as sustainable as possible. “We wanted to halve its carbon footprint,” he says, peering at a sheet on which some numbers are printed. “One third of all CO2 emissions in the world are food related. In Berlin, we try not to use any packaging. So at Tate we went from everything being bottled to everything being on tap. Organic salad tastes a lot better, but it’s about 20% more expensive than non-organic salad, and sometimes 50%, depending on the season. We spoke to Tate. What will this mean for your profitability, we asked. But they agreed to it anyway.”
The restaurant offers only a set menu – four dishes for £16.95 – and at about this point, the first plates arrive: sourdough accompanied by a spiced red pepper and tomato dip, a bowl of hummus with cumin and some labneh, the Middle Eastern soft cheese. “The labneh is a replacement for butter,” says Eliasson. “Again, because of its carbon footprint, which is lower.” He scoops away at the pepper dip. “I prefer it a bit spicier than this,” he says. “But I was voted down on that yesterday.” A selection of rather lovely stoneware bowls now cover our table for two. “I’m not saying this is home cooking. But it’s something that you could try at home - and this produces 52% less CO2 than the average home-cooked meal.”
Eliasson was born in Copenhagen in 1967, the city to which his parents had emigrated from Iceland in search of work, his father as a cook, his mother as a dressmaker. When he was four, however, his parents separated and his father returned to Iceland. “He was a cook on a fishing boat,” says Eliasson. “Normally, we would have fish: he would bring it back from the ship. But they weren’t very resourceful my parents, not in those days. They would give me a can of baked beans … well, they would throw it into boiling water – this is so unfair to my parents! – and on a good day, I would get a sausage on the side. Still, what my father did say was, ‘Why am I on a fishing boat for five weeks at a time and filling up the freezer with pork and chicken?’ The fish all went straight to Canada, you see. So he started cooking it. First, he tried deep frying, and the crew liked it, and he ended up serving ceviche.”
Eliasson didn’t grow up to be much of a cook himself, though his younger half-sister, Victoria Eliasdottir is an acclaimed chef. But he loves to eat. What did he live on as a student? “I knew how to make chilli, which you could keep in the fridge for a few days. I remember I once brought a frozen chicken into the art school that I intended to cook that night, and then I forgot all about it. After a week, everyone started to complain about the stink, a smell that was coming from suspiciously close to my seat. When I found it, it was almost inflated. I wondered how to sneak it out without anyone noticing. After that, I didn’t eat chicken for a long time.”
More food arrives: bowls of carrot soup, which comes with a strong hint of citrus, followed by a courgette salad with pink grapefruit and a green salad with hazelnuts and seeds, and then, finally, a courgette cake with double cream. “I planned this so I could enjoy it myself,” he says, with relish. “But also … I simply don’t want people to eat greens that have been flown halfway across the world.” Last year, he and his sister collaborated on a pop-up restaurant in Iceland. “There, you have these not-so-red but very dense-tasting Icelandic strawberries, and then you have these huge, red, Dutch strawberries that are flown in once a week. The question is, how do you make a normal consumer buy the crummy little green one? Maybe you take it and you ferment it, and you use it in a ceviche. Maybe you have to diversify the way you use food – and to also show that the big, red ones don’t actually taste very good. You have to show that being sustainable can also be delicious and that’s what we’re also trying to do here.”
I tell him that the food in the Eliasson Kitchen reminds me a little (in a good way) of Cranks, the British whole-food chain that enjoyed its heyday in the 70s – and also (again, in a good way) of the stuff I had to eat as a child whenever there was a glut on my father’s allotment. Cranks means nothing to him, but he’s all too familiar with the concept of the seasonal surplus. “At the studio, we subscribe to a weekly vegetable box from the local farmer’s association and in September it sometimes feels like there is no end to the beets and the onions.” He pauses, slightly inscrutable behind his glasses. “But then again, beet is amazing. We have a handful of really good beet dishes now, and of course onions are … fundamental. And when we really have too much, there is a table in the studio that we put it on and colleagues can take it home.”
Is it true people often want to work with him in part because of the studio’s food? When I visited it in 2015, someone told me that staff turnover is virtually nonexistent. (“No one ever leaves,” one young woman said, no trace of the sinister in her voice.) But Eliasson, whose grace and modesty might well be unmatched in the world of modern art, isn’t saying. He only smiles, swigs the last of his Mr Xu Organic Jade Sword iced tea, and then heads back into the gallery for a final walk round.
Studio Olafur Eliasson Kitchen at the Terrace bar and Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life are both at Tate Modern until 5 January 2020
