Covert Cuisine is surreptitious and mischievous, but straight up and unpretentious. It is cuisine for cuisine's sake, as a good in itself. We believe the essential value of cuisine arises in the direct, unmediated relationship the individual has with his food, not in the pomp and presentation associated with haute cuisine. To make a religious analogy, the practitioner of Covert Cuisine is like the guy who donates thousands of dollars to charity and never feels compelled to tell anyone in his congregation about it - his knowledge of his own noble deed is, as the Spanish would say, bastante.
Covert Cuisine is imbued with the D.I.Y. ethos or what the Night Chef crew have coined the "Get in There" spirit. It is an active mode, hell bent on manifesting cuisine on a day-to-day basis. The idea of passively signing up for conventional dining experiences is anathema to us. Every single day of the year is worthy of cuisine; and you don't need to be sitting by candlelight listening to 80s soft rock to truly enjoy it. Covert Cuisine is a human-centred approach to dishes that may on the surface seem unfathomable and unattainable. It makes such dishes attainable not by scaling down complexity and sophistication, but by introducing a radically new perspective towards food and eating.
How does this radically new perspective come across in Night Chef? Firstly it comes across in what is an entirely unique transmission of a chef's encyclopedic knowledge of food fundamentals and processes. In breaking-in and entering real restaurants, using their ingredients, and reverse-engineering their recipes - Night Chef demystifies the exclusive world of restaurant kitchens, the world so closely intertwined with the viewer's concept of 'cuisine'. That the targeted restaurant - the sacrosanct temple of cuisine - is closed and emptied of staff and customers creates the right kind of liminal, or in-between space in which the viewer can encounter complex or aspirational dishes on a raw, unmediated level. This is coupled with Night Chefs firm commitment to approach cuisine as an integral part of the joie de vive, which we demonstrate through our embrace of humour, character dynamics, story and the general strangeness of existence. The result is that Covert Cuisine is not so much an abstract food philosophy, but a tangible dimension that is both inclusive and ridiculously fun.
Night Chef does not take place in the placid comfort of a home kitchen, nor in the frenzied environment of an active restaurant kitchen subjected to the ubiquitous Reality TV format - it takes place covertly, under the cover of night, in real bastions of cuisine that Night Chef and the crew have made accessible and intimate.
Sincerely,
The Night Chef Crew