Piccalilli is a meta-magical sortie into culinary imagination. It is a chef driven fantastical meeting of the southeastern seaboard and low Asian seas, a playground of bar brow and fine dining. It was conceived as a waypoint, a coordinate in the future, where two lovers hope to meet when all has failed. No one can know if their paths will cross, but the beacon is electrified for them and for all others, a call to the optimism that our humanity will continue.
Piccalilli presents a moth. It is the shadow at the edges that dusts the buzz of tropical pop and polished dining, as our unknown future forever shadows us. The restaurant is thick with nostalgia for the pure time before. Dripping with garden, fluted sconces conjure southern sweetness. Magical animals inhabit a wood of purple heart. It is a child’s memory that changes moths to butterflies, a lenticular art piece that moves only as you look at it.
At the fine tables, a white jeweler’s light, a temperature never done in restaurant, reveals the true colors of our chef’s botanicals, while faint from above shines down light ultraviolet, casting not a grey shadow but that of lavender, the shadow of the future. Architectural blacklight lighting was manufactured for the restaurant, the first of its kind. If Hopper’s Nighthawks were to be painted today, Piccalilli is that future rewritten, past the flat, yellow incandescent oasis of memory, to a joy of fusion, color and connection.
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