When we as a species get to the point where we completely understand the human genome – in among the bit that explains why some people think it’s completely acceptable to take their shoes off on a flight – I would love for someone to provide me with the scientific explanation for the fixation that humans apparently have with gathering in remote places for some kind “curated experience”. The kind of thing that usually involves a dress code, long harvest tables artfully set in a field full of bees, where part of the evening requires you to hit bread with a hammer.
If that felt oddly specific, it’s because it’s what I did last week.
The difficulty with any “curated experience”, is that you can’t curate the people who actually go to a curated experience. I know this because I am one of those people, and that should be an instant red flag. Because the annoying wrinkle is that people will always still be people, no matter how much effort they’ve put into their off-white organic cotton pants or their unbridled enthusiasm for eating a honey-roasted carrot in a forest.
In fact, I’m always tempted to ask what a non-“curated” experience looks like anyway. A Sausage McMuffin is a curated experience. So is a prostate exam. And being mugged. At this point it feels like a non-curated experience is just a variation on wandering out into traffic and lying down.
I remember proto versions of this kind of long-table dining “event”. We were strictly instructed to wear white, had to meet in some random parking lot, to then get bussed to a “secret location” which was an astonishingly un-secret place right next door to where I lived. Upon arrival we had to set up our own food and decorate our table, all while being yelled at by the organisers who felt we weren’t demonstrating enough of the required awe and joy at the special opportunity we’d been given to pay for the privilege of taking our own food and decorations to an inhospitable patch of uneven grass next to a highway. Apparently, I was so desperate for “an experience” in 2011 that I probably would have signed up for getting eaten by rats if it had been described as “bespoke”.
Between the Real Housewives and Elon Rusk
It was with all of this tumbling through my head that I was delivered to Friday’s newest version of this, a concept imported from the Cape called Kraaktafel, feeling a certain sense of trepidation that it was maybe some kind of trick and that I was going to be “Midsommared” next to Lanseria airport. A feeling that wasn’t alleviated at all by the low-key Scandinavia-by-way-of-Rustenburg aesthetic of all the very eager, smiling young people guiding me to a paddock where a guy was noodling jazz standards at a piano on a sort of plinthy thing.
This made it impossible to ignore the somewhat culty undertones of the whole thing, especially when the organisers had plopped the dessert table into an impressively huge wooden structure that looked like its entire purpose was to be burnt down at the summer solstice. But then someone gave me a cocktail. And if a cult is going to give me cocktails, then lead on to the strangely flat rune-marked rock where the robed people are waiting with knives, I say.
Of course, the ultimate trickiness with long-table dining is that where you end up sitting is some kind of social lottery that you have no control over. And, yes, I know that’s kind of the point – mingling and meeting new people and all that. But the truth of it is that when you’re awkwardly hobbling around a rural meadow with total strangers, most of those conversations tend to go something like this:
“Isn’t this so wonderful?”
“Yes, it’s so special.”
“Aren’t you loving that cocktail?”
“Yes, it’s very nice.”
“Do you think it’s got fynbos in it? I think I can taste fynbos.”
“Where are you sitting?”
“I think I’m over there somewhere. Where are you sitting?”
“I’m down the other end.”
“Oh.”
“Okay, anyway enjoy it, it’s so wonderful.”
Which generally means that more often than not you end up squeezed next to some middling tech entrepreneur who will explain at mind-numbing length how his pursuit of third-round VC funding for his agri-fintech startup is going. In my case it was between this and a kind of “mean-girl” section, who – when they thought I wasn’t looking – swapped the seating plan around so that I was sitting further away from them. Which was okay, I was learning a lot about mushroom futures markets anyway.
And besides we were here for the food, which looked exquisite: sharing platters of things baked in clay that you had to break open with more hammers, a lamb shoulder that literally fell apart at the touch, and some kind of tower of butter. I made a note to include a tower of butter the next time I invite someone over for dinner, because anyone who has a tower of butter has to be taken very seriously.
I say the food “looked” good, because it turned out I was placed so perfectly between The Real Housewives of Midrand and Elon Rusk, that I got elbowed away from both and ended up covering up the awkwardness of my empty plate by suddenly getting very thirsty and going to chug wine next to a bush. Somehow this also meant totally missing the whole other second party that was happening nearby in a fancy shed where people genuinely looked like they were having a good time, only discovering it on the way to the impatiently waiting Uber.
Later, as I was reflecting on the evening while utterly destroying a toasted cheese sandwich over my sink and scrolling through my phone – there was picture after picture of me, laughing and looking happy and relaxed in glorious natural idyll, having what could only be described as the Best Time Ever. This is the curious magic of these sorts of things. What they leave behind in your memory, and your iPhone, is always just enough dangling encouragement to convince you to do it all again next time the opportunity arises.
Time to dry-clean my (off) white cotton pants I suppose.
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