There’s Always Room for Jelly

London-based design duo Sam Bompas and Harry Parr give new meaning to ‘playing with your food’.

When Sam Bompas and Harry Parr first proposed setting up their stall at London’s foodie heaven Borough Market, their bank managers were less than impressed. “They thought we were ridiculous,” says Bompas. “We wanted to make jelly – properly done jelly, like the Victorians made.” In fact, providing an alternative to the market’s carb-heavy puddings was less mad than it sounded, and the duo were quickly overwhelmed with commissions for custom-designed jellies.

“Because it’s moulded food, you can do interesting things with it,” says Bompas. As part of the London Festival of Architecture last year, the pair invited architects to design a jelly, and then auctioned the moulds to raise money for building aid charity Article 25. The jellies included a replica of Barajas airport by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and, rather amusingly, a ‘wobbly bridge’ from Norman Foster’s studio.
Aiming to explore how the taste of food is altered through synaesthesia, performance and setting, Bompas & Parr also create culinary events that occupy a niche somewhere between the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, the pop-up dining phenomenon, the experience economy and pure bonkers English eccentricity.

In April this year, they curated Alcoholic Architecture, the world’s first walk-in cocktail, by creating a breathable mist of gin and tonic. Partygoers donned Hazmat suits and danced to a soundtrack of clinking ice cubes and muffled eighties music. “A lot of what we sense as flavour actually comes from the sense of smell,” says Bompas. Other notable events have included the Scratch ‘n’ Sniff cinema and the Frieze art fair banquet Flavour Tripping. Participants ate the ‘miracle berry’ Synsepalum Dulcificum beforehand, which makes lemons taste like toffee, or vinegar like sherry. Recently, the duo also celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Futurist movement with an ‘Aerobanquet’ recreating Marinetti’s original scheme for a meal set inside a vibrating aircraft, and mourned Michael Jackson’s death with a black cherry funeral jelly set with 24-carat gold as a tribute to the King of Pop.
“We get someone asking on a weekly basis for the biggest jelly in the world,” laughs Bompas. “I would love to do the biggest jelly in the world! But if did it will be unmoulded. It’s got to have that wobble. There’s just something erotic about the wobble…”