Maggie's interview with Sam Bompas was first published in the Space Issue.

It is appropriate that the partnership of Sam Bompas and Harry Parr began with a dinner party, that most theatrical of food occasions. When Harry served an impressive blackcurrant jelly for dessert, Sam scented a business opportunity and convinced him that the pair should apply to run a jelly stand at London’s Borough Market. The space at Borough was not to be but, undeterred, they took advantage of Harry’s background in architecture and began creating bespoke jellies of London icons, including St. Paul’s Cathedral, and in the process making a name for themselves as modern-day Willy Wonkas: hired guns who can make anything happen with sugar.

With a series of high-profile collaborations, notably with Selfridges and Mercedes-Benz, the pair have pioneered a new movement in entertainment, blurring the lines between food, art and spectacle to create larger-than-life culinary installations around the world.

On an unseasonably cold morning in June, I met with Sam to talk about Bompas & Parr. Energetic, warm and articulate, Sam is a natural storyteller with a flair for the dramatic. As I stood in the studio warming my hands around a cup of tea, Sam wove through the piles of ephemera that covered almost every surface, finding a jar of the world’s shiniest fruit, showing me Ouija board-printed tea towels and a perfectly accurate jelly mould of a T-Class ‘killer’ submarine. With all of these trifles, it would be easy for their work to become frivolous. But when we sat down to talk, I quickly discovered that, to Sam, playtime is a very serious subject indeed.

The surreal jelly photos in this post are from Bompas & Parr's collaboration with photographer Jo Duck called 'Jelly Galaxies'.

You’ve been called food artists, jellymongers, culinary curio creators. How do you see your work?

I’ve always been very interested in people standing in front of a painting for long periods of time having a strong emotional response. But not everyone stands in front of a painting and feels this kind of divinity come down upon them. Everyone has encoded in them what it takes to have an awesome food experience.

Our agenda is to give people a very joyous, wonderful time. We don’t really care if it’s in an art gallery, if it’s in a factory or on the street—it doesn’t matter. The truth is that the art world is the entertainment industry; we’re competing for people’s leisure time. You can read a book, have sex, go to the theatre, see friends at the pub, go to a restaurant. So we see them all as our direct competitors—all of them! Which is very stressful, all the time!

Why do you think food is such a good medium?

Humans are animals and we have basic responses to food. At the beginning of a meal, when I look down at my main dish, I’m excited by it, and that’s a really powerful starting point. Everything else you can lay onto it—all the intrigue, trickery, stories, culture, service rituals, beautifully-bedecked waiters and waitresses—that’s just the added bonus.

Because everyone eats three times a day, there’s no other cultural mode that people have as much experience of. Everyone has an opinion. We want to stimulate that. We’re not changing people’s lives, we’re just trying to give them happy moments. The food is the means to an end: that you’ve gone away and you’ve had a great time.

You’ve mentioned before that you’re inspired by the nineteenth-century entertainer P. T. Barnum and the theatrical Victorian chef, Alexis Soyer. Could you talk a bit about the interplay between showmanship and how that influences our experience of food?

I think one of the things that you learn quickly about food is that people can enjoy absolutely any flavour and any flavour combination. At first that might sound negative but actually it’s really positive and liberating.

That’s interesting, because people have such strong ideas about their tastes.

Which is dictated by context. If you present something in the right context and make it seem sophisticated, people will like anything. And at first they’ll just say that they’re liking it, but then they really will like it. There are pleasure sensors in the brain that will light up in the right ways. No one starts out liking coffee or beer. You learn to like it, and you drink it because it’s an important thing to do culturally.

We also love spectacle, we love the grand scale. We love hyperbole, and that is very much along the lines of people like Barnum and Soyer. They were characters; they had a lot of swagger. They were figures who would say that they had found a mermaid and tell people to come and see it, which was believable within the scientific context of the day. If we said we found a mermaid, people would be like, “Well, no, you haven’t.” We like making claims that are real; we don’t like things that are made up.

Is that why you align yourselves with engineers and scientists?

Yes, quite often we take people who are working in the real world with new technology, with new ideas, with new human capabilities and say, what if you project that into an artistic or leisure context? It’s fun. For example, we met with people at the materials lab at UCL. They’re really cool. They were telling us about aluminium nitrite, which is a superconductor, used for making silicon chips or whatever. But we thought, what if you bring that to a bar? What happens if you use that to break ice?

We’re not chefs. We don’t have any culinary training, and people come to our events literally expecting the meal of their life. And we think, God, we are being judged by people who go to Michelin-starred restaurants, who are used to being cooked for by coordinated, well-drilled brigades of people who cook every single day. So to compete you have to throw something at it that the chefs don’t have, which is using a different body of knowledge. That’s your only chance, otherwise you’re buggered!

Do you have a favourite day out with Bompas & Parr?

I really liked the big jelly rounds. We made a fifty-ton jelly round, a massive jelly, with a lot of the gang here, and a load of extra help from the community service. There was absolutely no budget for it, so it only happened because there was a lot of good will. People just wanted to do it, and it was bonkers and it was fun.

You can find a print-friendly pdf of Sam's jelly recipes from the issue here, and more of the Bompas & Parr magic here.