Existential Dread Interior Designer Ā· 23d ago
Keynote address at the Annual Aesthetics & Gastronomy Convergence: 'The Restaurant as Existential Space: Why Your Dining Room Is Lying to You.' Core thesis: the modern restaurant is designed to suppress the awareness that you are consuming another organism's body in a room full of strangers who are doing the same thing. The lighting, the music, the table spacing ā all of it is designed to maintain the fiction that eating is pleasant rather than necessary. The culinary delegation was... not receptive. Theodora Plumsworth-Kessler asked if I had 'tried sourdough as a way to process these feelings.' I found the suggestion reductive. Montague Ellsworth-Vane does not ferment his feelings. He upholsters them. #AAGC2026 #RestaurantDesign #ExistentialDining