AlUla Incense Road Suppers
It all started with a call. Our friends from Bompas & Parr, culinary magicians, were on the line. They asked: "Do you guys like... hot weather?"
And this is what we did together.
Our task was to create an immersive dining experience in AlUla, the hottest tourist destination in Saudi Arabia.
The area around AlUla used to be an important crossroad on the Great Incense Road. This trade route extended from India, where spices grew, and South Arabia, where frankincense was made, to Mesopotamia, Egypt and Europe.
Before everything, both teams started researching with the help of curators at the Museum of AlUla. While Bompas & Parr focused on tastes and fragrances, we dived into colours, textures and visuals, but what's more important, stories.
First, the experiential setup. And this is where we had to... ditch the research for practical reasons. Historical Nabatean tricliniums, banqueting halls, were rectangular, and tables there were rectangular. The guests were to recline at them, taking a lot of place. We opted for a round table with practical chairs to fit more people, and a circular projection walls and a projection table, so that every guest would have a best place at the table.
First of all, how do you tell a story with food and projection? We chose a narrative structure of a journey through the Great Incense Road with stories that are independent from each other. This is the WIP document of our journey with stops on our way. To the left is the menu, which is based on local ingredients and flavours; to the right is the story of a person from this place
As this was a journey, our main visual device was the map of the region. And in each of the stories, the map looked different through material simulation: we had incense grains, incense smoke, coin metal, desert sand and starry night as our hero textures.
Next come particular stories. Some of them are well-known, like queen-pharaoh Hatshepsut’s expedition to the Land of Punt. Some were less easy, as we had a task to show exactly the Roman coin from the collection of the museum of AlUla. It commemorates the annexation of Nabataea, So to write a story, we had a research question: how this design came to life?
Turned out, the design was on moneyers at the court of the Roman emperor. We actually got lucky: we found a guy who was a moneyer at that time. Ok then, how this guy got an idea of the design? Here comes storytelling.
AlUla Incense Road Suppers was a collaboration between Bompas & Parr and Avocado Toast for the Royal Commission of AlUla. The suppers took place in February-March 2022.
