How to make a pig fly
The signature course looks like a stunt. It is actually nine months of engineering, three broken prototypes, and one very stubborn glaze.
People assume the flying pig is a gimmick we dreamed up over drinks. They are half right. We did dream it up over drinks. What followed was nine months of work that nobody at the table ever sees.
The suckling pig has to be glazed so it catches the light without looking lacquered, cooked so the skin shatters but the meat stays soft, and balanced over its slick of fermented chilli at an angle that reads as flight and not as an accident. The first three prototypes collapsed. The fourth caught fire. The fifth flew.
Underneath the theatre is the part we are actually proud of: a fermented chilli that hums on the palate for close to an hour after the plate is cleared, built over weeks in the ferment cupboard and adjusted by a tenth of a gram at a time. The stunt gets the photos. The chilli gets the silence at the table, which is the only review that matters to us.
So yes, the pig flies. It flies on a schedule, on a rig we rebuilt four times, over a sauce we will not stop tinkering with. That is the whole joke, and the whole job.
DiverXO
