EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

BRUTALIST COOKING: A MEAL IS A MEAL

CLARA RIVERS

April 16, 2025

What if dinner stopped trying to impress you? In Stockholm, a single boiled potato becomes a manifesto at Carsten Höller’s Brutalisten, where food sheds metaphor and seasoning alike. Here, Clara Rivers encounters a cuisine that confronts rather than comforts. This is not minimalism, but Brutalism—served cold or warm, but always unadorned.

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I went to Stockholm in the spring of 2022 because I had been invited to a dinner. The restaurant’s name was Brutalisten. I had heard the word before, but not in relation to food. I understood it to be about architecture. I understood it to mean concrete. I did not know it could refer to a boiled potato.

Brutalisten was founded by Carsten Höller, the artist who once installed a huge slide inside Tate Modern in London and created a room with gigantic spinning upside-down mushrooms in Milan. He tends to treat art as an experiment conducted on the viewer, which all good art should do. His work suggests an interest in perception, in discomfort, in making the familiar feel strange and the strange feel like it has always been there. I did not go to his restaurant looking for dinner. I went because I was curious about what kind of person serves veal without salt.

Dr. Höller will see you now

That night, I ate a boiled potato. It had been peeled. It sat alone in a small dish, glistening faintly, warm to the touch. Not sad exactly, but certainly indifferent to my approval. There was no butter. There was no origin story. There was only the potato.

A second course arrived. It was a raw mushroom, sliced cleanly and arranged without fuss.

A third: a strip of veal, warm, unseasoned, and unadorned.

There were no sauces. Nothing was explained, and nothing needed to be. There was no printed menu, only a sequence of arrivals that demanded no interpretation. The dining room was made of materials you could immediately name: wood, metal, concrete. All designed by the artist. The staircase seemed crooked. There was no music, no candlelight. But the servers moved with ease and warmth. They smiled when you looked up. They answered questions if you asked. They were gracious, even friendly. Although no one pretended that this was about comfort.

Taste is just another hallucination

This was my first encounter with what I would come to know as Brutalist cooking, though at the time I thought perhaps it was just a mood. A culinary spell of late-winter severity. I did not know it had rules. I did not know it had an ethos. I only knew that I felt something unusual—namely a kind of reverent disorientation, the kind of quiet that falls over a table not out of boredom but out of some unexpected awareness that things are exactly what they seem.

Brutalist cooking, I would later learn, is not simply minimalist cooking. Minimalism, after all, can be elegant, suggestive, even flirtatious. Brutalism is none of those things. Brutalism is austere, declarative, sometimes deliberately difficult. In architecture, the term generally refers to massive, unapologetic, unornamented structures made of unfinished concrete. In food, the logic is similar. You get the ingredient, and almost nothing else. No seasoning, or only a whisper of salt. No emulsions. No foams. No sauces named after the chef’s childhood memories. The food is not transformed so much as revealed. The point is not to entertain. The point is to confront.

Höller divides the servings at Brutalisten into categories. Orthodox Brutalist dishes use only the primary ingredient. Brutalist dishes allow for water and salt. Semi-Brutalist dishes permit one or two elements, if strictly necessary. The rules are specific, and the specificity is part of the point. This is food that wants to be taken seriously. It does not pander. It wants you to meet it where it is.

Brutalesque

The boiled potato was not a joke. Nor was it nostalgic. Not a nod to wartime scarcity, not Scandinavian modesty, not commentary. It was just a boiled potato. I found this liberating, in a way. Food without metaphor. Food that refuses to mean something other than itself.

The meal quickly took on a certain conceptual quality. Food as anti-spectacle. Food as object lesson. If Guy Debord would cook, this is what you would get to eat. At one point, a slice of pork fat arrived on a white plate, unrendered, unsauced, unbothered. The point was not what you expected. The point was that you had expected anything in the first place.

Brutalist cooking has its critics. People say it is only possible to enjoy a raw turnip in silence if you have already had your fill of oysters and truffles—in other words, that it is the kind of austerity only the well-fed can afford. These things may be true, but they are not the most interesting things about it. The most interesting thing is that it insists on the ingredient as an autonomous entity. It does not flatter the palate. It does not soothe the eye. It is a meal that refuses to explain itself.

Cooking with brute force since 2022

In that way, Brutalist cooking belongs to a certain lineage. You could trace it to monastic traditions. You could trace it to the days when humans cooked roots on fires and ate them to survive. It operates on two frequencies at once: There is something both avant-garde and prehistoric about it. The ultra-modern and the pre-cultural.

There is a small but growing field of chefs who claim the title. In Milan, Alessandro Borghese has written his own Brutalist manifesto. In Los Angeles, Jon Yao has referred in passing to a few of his dishes as “Brutalist.” These chefs tend to speak in tones that suggest a philosophical position. The food is often described not as tasty or satisfying, but as clear.

The aesthetic is similarly unyielding. Brutalist dishes are rarely photogenic. There is no color, no layering, no garnish. The plates are usually matte. The food is centered, still, whole, as if waiting to be classified by a botanist. You eat it, and then it is gone. The experience is not cumulative. There is no crescendo. There is no moment of revelation, but only what is on the plate, and then is not anymore.

Brutadelic crayfish

The absence of pleasure is not accidental. It is the mechanism. Like a building that blocks the sun but stands firm against the wind, this food is not meant to please. It is meant to exist. And it expects you to adapt.

Afterward, I walked back across the city, thinking not about the veal or the mushroom or the potato but about how quiet it had been in the room. How careful, deliberately constructed, the silence had felt. The kind of silence that reveals more than it conceals.

In the weeks that followed, I thought often about that meal. I thought about how strange it was to feel provoked by a root vegetable. I thought about how much I had missed the salt. I thought about the impulse to make things difficult on purpose, and what it says about where we are now. When I opened my phone to scroll through photos, I found a single image: my hand, an onion in my palm. Smooth, boiled, glistening slightly. There was nothing else in the frame. It looked like an offering. Or a dare.

Clara Rivers (b. 1975 in La Chanterelle, France) is the daughter of a three-star Michelin chef from Lyon. Her childhood was spent beneath copper pots. She was once a globe-trotting food critic, and spent a decade tasting foie gras variations before renouncing restaurants entirely after one too many emulsions. She now cooks alone and eats in silence.

Cover image: No great story ever started with a salad