Furious about looks

Furious, the studio of Paris designers Quentin and Thomas, is frantically busy at lunch hour: the guys are designing the burger of the day and getting ready to take an artistic photo before biting into their lunch. 

“We were tired of eating the usual sandwiches available in the area.” And how could we blame them? When you’re young and hungry for something new, how can you settle for the usual ham or tuna sandwich? “We work together, and we’re lucky enough to have a cooking element in our office. We soon got into the habit of making our own hamburgers for lunch: an hour and a half to come up with a concept, get the ingredients, cook it, take a photograph of our recipe of the day and then, of course, eat it!” .

This need to add an element of novelty to the daily routine led to the Fat and Furious Project: an ingenious project which was implemented without a hitch to give the hamburger a new look, reinventing a simple dish every day, experimenting with a great variety of different forms without being afraid to go overboard. Science, pop culture, film, art, history: anything can provide inspiration for the pair of French designers, who never cease to experiment, even with ingredients.

Aesthetically perfectly designed, Fat and Furious Burgers are tasty too, for the designers are sure to take into consideration not only the way they look but the way they taste. “Sometimes a product may attract us because of its taste, other times because of the way it looks. In any case, we’re not interested in recreating the established recipes: what we want to do is experiment with new combinations of ingredients and new ways of cooking. This can lead to some major culinary surprises, and sometimes to some real disasters!” But after all, that’s what makes it so much fun!

The UFO Burger, containing breaded chicken breast, purple cabbage, Tobiko (flying fish eggs) with wasabi, wakame seaweed and Papadum (a crunchy wafer used in Indian cooking) hovers over a distant planet; a make-up set from a woman’s purse becomes the IT Girl Burger, featuring steamed lobster, Shiso (Chinese basil), shiitake mushrooms, white wine sauce, thyme and mixed leaf salad;  the bun is covered with gold leaf and caviar, filet of gilthead bream and quail eggs in homage to James Bond: my name is Bun, James Bun. One of the best photos is a homage to Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, which is Thomas and Quentin’s favourite experiment: in the photo, the astronaut walks on a moon burger, with cheese, pears and endive, covered with powdered coconut to give it a white surface and a galaxy of sesame seeds behind it. “For the first time we created something that looks nothing like a burger, but it’s still our favourite photo. Pity it didn’t taste so great!”

But Thomas and Quentin can’t be all that bad in the kitchen: their irreverent but well-presented project soon became a book, “Fat & Furious Burger”, published in 2014 and containing 60 recipes for intrepid spirits (and stomachs).

Not just ordinary photos of food to be shared on the social networks, these are real burgers we can make ourselves at home. To prove once again that form is as important as content!