Category Archives: Food Arts

Michael cooks the food he likes to eat and the emphasis is on knowing the source — where ingredients come from and who’s growing them. As he likes to say, “The secret to good food is… good food.”

So it’s no secret what being genuine means to Michael and his approach to the menus at our restaurants, but does it have the same meaning when applied to design? With the help of Design Miami/ we surveyed a handful of designers at the tent this weekend to find out. Here’s what they had to say, and a recap video of the week that was Cafe.

Asif Khan: “Creating for others the same things that you’d want to create for yourself.”

Eyal Burstein of Beta Tank: “I think it’s more about intention. If I intend to make something that is industrial or that talks about taxes or perception or scaffolding. These are some of the things that I look into and try to keep to that initial idea or intention. That’s kind of the thread that keeps going in my work”

Jamie Zigelbaum: “For us genuine design would be authentic work where we’re doing it for real reasons that are important to us and that we’re thinking through the entire cycle of the design project and each part of it is not just chosen for no reason, but that we think about each thing… What materials we’re going to be using, what those materials convey about the piece, how the piece is going to function later – what’s the life cycle of the piece going to be – and that type of authentic, perhaps genuine, approach is something very important to us, too.”

Marcelo Coelho: “There’s lots of different ways you can think about it, but one way that I think is really interesting is from the perspective of information. Something is genuine when we really know what it is, really understand where it comes from. To understand what the little parts are and how they come together, where are they going to afterwards. It’s not even so much what the particular kind of origin is, but it’s more about you being aware of that, and that creates some kind of important connection for you.”