Janoschka magazine Linked_V8_2023

8 i n s i g h t s
issue #8 ©
l i n k e d
9
Haute cuisine – nouvelle cuisine?
Even gourmet restaurants serve
their “star sardines” in the tin.
FROM EMERGENCY RATIONS
TO GOURMET PRODUCTS
Whether it’s the outlandish “Sardinen.bar” in avantgarde
Berlin, the (now closed) trendy Manhattan restaurant
“Prune” owned by New York chef and bestselling
author Gabrielle Hamilton or the most exclusive fish
restaurant in sedate St. Moritz, Switzerland – they all
bear witness to the long distance the sardine has
travelled – not just geographically, but in terms of quality
as well. The sardine has won a place in the hearts of top
restauranteurs (on some menus, you can choose from
up to fifty different varieties) and advanced to become a
coveted object for food scouts and gourmets.
The story was heading in a very different direction for
quite a while though. Sardine tins with their sad grey
contents floating in colourless oil had an extremely bad
reputation in more ways than one. For years, the sardine
was considered to be poor person’s food. An emergency
ration of them was to be found in every self-respecting
interrailer or hiker’s rucksack, not to mention the 1970s
communes, where hoarding Portuguese sardines in oil
in packs of ten was regarded as a gesture of political
solidarity with the Carnation Revolution. And of course,
to this day, packed like sardines in a tin is still the idiom
that springs to mind when sun lovers crowd onto Mediterranean
beaches or commuters squeeze themselves
into public transport.
So “beautiful” is not exactly the adjective one typically
associates with sardine tins. Yet nowadays no other can
expresses as much love for art and design as the sardine
tin with its typical shape does. You could even dare
to claim that, if Andy Warhol were to honour a food tin
today, he would no longer choose Campbell’s Soup, but
would instead be won over by the charm and originality
of contemporary sardine cans.