-Six guests, three hours, about 40 courses.
Eculent has just one table, tucked inside of a winery.
And the secrets of this table are accessible
only through wild imagination.
-It's like an escape room for food, right?
-I am so ready for this dinner, because you know what?
This world is so crazy, I am ready to escape reality.
-Let's eat. -Let's eat.
In Kemah, Texas, 30 miles outside of Houston,
Eculent is a shrine to the chef's imagination.
This is your laboratory or your experiment on people.
-Exactly. Exactly.
Every night.
Chef David Skinner has no formal culinary education.
Although, as a teenager, he started a restaurant
while in college.
The chef made his fortune in energy companies.
-I actually sold my last company in 2014.
My wife said, "What are you gonna do?"
I was like, "Well, I have this crazy idea for a restaurant."
And she's like, "Oh, my."
I was 49 and I was like,
"If I don't do it now, I'll never do it."
So here we are.
-Do you make any money off of this?
-Well, luckily, I don't have to. -Okay.
Good.
I mean -- -It's like having a benefactor.
But it's me. -Hi.
Adam. -Hi, Adam.
Thanks for coming back.
And would you like to do the one curry with dinner tonight?
-You really control everyone's senses
once they get into this windowless building.
-Exactly.
-David's whole idea of the mad-genius thing
of controlling everything in the environment.
Smell, taste.
It's even more than a 3-D kind of thing.
-Yeah. -Exactly.
If you'll notice, this bar top
is not kind of your normal bar top.
It's actually a puzzle box.
So there are seven courses that get hidden inside the bar top.
You ready? -Ready.
-What's the common denominator
of every restaurant that's out there?
The atmosphere.
You can -- The tables and chairs are where they are.
You sit in one spot the whole time you're there.
The lighting is the same. The music is the same.
-So you want to make it dynamic. -So I want to make it dynamic.
Believe it or not, your first course you're gonna
have to make yourself.
-All right. -Okay.
-Okay?
So, if you want to hop up out of your chairs, I will show you.
What if we could change everything?
What if you could change it on the fly?
I want to give people an experience
that they really just can't find anywhere else.
-On Earth. -On Earth.
-Not just in America. -That's right.
Well, we're by NASA, so might as well be on Earth, right?
-Yes, right. -Kind of fun?
-Yeah. -All right.
Yeah, if you want to take a little taste
of the carrots or whatever -- -I want to try it.
-There's your glass for the cocktail.
-The anticipation is killing me. -I know.
You got to wait two minutes.
-It's 30 to 40 courses, so that's a lot of food,
but if you will get up,
kind of move around, it helps the digestion.
Also, it makes the experience
kind of more interesting, more fun.
-David conceives of the dishes.
He makes many of the dishes.
He serves the dishes.
He explains the dishes.
So how many servers and line cooks
does it take to deliver a 40-course meal?
-Me. That's it.
-Is that right? -I do prep.
I do garde-manger. I do everything.
I'm even the dishwasher.
-What's the craziest idea he's ever come to you with?
-Licking the wallpaper.
-Oh, yeah. -Yes.
-What's it gonna taste like? -I'm hoping snozzberries.
I'm looking for those that we can make the snozzberries
taste like snozzberries.
-"Willy Wonka" references abound.
And David doesn't seem to mind.
You're sort of the head Oompa Loompa.
-I am the head Oompa Loompa, right?
-Head Oompa Loompa.
I like that. -That's right.
Get the makeup.
-Everyone who comes to dinner tours
what Skinner calls his food lab.
-Pick any leaf you want. They're all the same.
So, what we have is freeze-dried Caesar salad.
-We were asked not to show you how to get in.
We created this dramatic representation.
-This is a plate for a soup that's 5,000 flavors.
So every time you take a bite of the soup,
it's a completely different soup.
-How many of those did you make? -Seven, eight.
-There's more than that. -More than that?
-There's like 20 in the lab. -No.
-Yeah. -I hate this.
Okay.
If it's just aesthetically pleasing,
I'm not as inclined to want to make it,
but the things that David asks me to make have function.
-I asked John, "Can you make me some trees
for this bread course that I want to do?"
-This is our Tree of Life. -Yeah.
-You have toasted crostinis as your leaves.
We've got three different nests on the tree
that have different flavors for you to put on the crostinis.
-I think I'll try the bacon jam first.
-My favorite part is the Tête de Moine cheese,
originally made by monks in Switzerland.
And it's -- You can see it's sort of like a little flower.
It's quite delicious.
-So, this next course is called a Pig in a Cloud.
-You're serving the entire time. -Yeah.
-The chef is actually serving the people
and with them the entire time throughout their experience.
-Correct. -And I've never,
even at a chef's table -- -It's very uncommon.
And part of the reason we went to the six seats was --
it allows me to do what I'm doing right now.
I can have a conversation with you, right?
Which is really unusual.
The other thing I can do is look in your eyes.
As you get more and more full, your eyes tend to dilate more,
and so we'll make adjustments on the fly to each person's course
so that by the end of the night,
everybody has eaten all the courses.
I think, as a country, we eat way too fast.
You go to Europe, you know, lunch is two hours, right?
Here, lunch is, "Gee, I have 10 minutes.
Can I, you know, hurry up and eat?"
Take more time to have dinner.
-David's chef de cuisine says there's a certain vulnerability
that goes with dinner at Eculent.
There are no choices.
You're on the ride with whoever else is there that evening.
As an experiential meal, there are no takeaways.
You don't leave with a braggy souvenir menu,
show your friends, and reminisce over each course.
And the chef?
He's at the table.
He's in it for the experience, too.
He wants us to have an authentic encounter
to treasure imagination at a time when so much ties us
to reality.