Liminal Society Seeks to Capture the Moment Between Seasons

Liminal Society

What, exactly, will June 19 taste like? The Liminal Society aims to find out.

​In The BFG, our second-favorite Roald Dahl book, the plucky little protagonist Sophie, unable to sleep during the predawn "witching hour," spies a stooped bald giant blowing dreams through the windows of houses along her street. This "special moment of the night" when buildings look "bent and crooked, like houses in a fairy tale" and everything is "pale and ghostly and milky-white" is a time of transition, just before moonlit darkness gives way to the first flickers of dawn. It is a space between two movements, in a sense, liminal in that it exists between two defined states. The witching hour is neither here nor there, and when you're awake then (and not falling down the stairs at some stupid party), the silence and absence of human motion and voices encourages the sensing of invisible spirits.

We thought of this when we read about the young Liminal Society's June 19 dinner party. Plenty of special serial dinners celebrate the seasons; most restaurants self-consciously do the same, kind of to the point where half the menus in town look strikingly similar at any given time of year, changing practically in unison each month. Chef Nicole LoBue's Liminal Society feasts focus tighter in on the spaces between the seasons we think we know ― we like to think of them as joints linking one section of the year to the next. LoBue and her comrades came up with the concept last year as summer turned to fall. In searching out a way to express the shifts in seasons, they've found a satisfying conceit around which to construct thoughtful, layered food parties.

LoBue shared her thoughts on the upcoming event with us: "For the feast into summer, we're feeling like it's all about the fruiting and flowering and lushness; a general lack of restraint, leaving behind the tartness of the last season."

She does have a menu in mind (a whole-lamb plate, sardines with gypsy pepper harissa, and a rosewater pine nut brioche cake, for starters), but she also asked that she not be held to it. We think we understand why. A dinner like this must evolve constantly. Most market-driven meals require a certain flexibility, but the seasonal shift LoBue intends to articulate isn't a static phase. It's more like a wave, sometimes slow and casacading, and then, suddenly, crashing surf. A chef trying to ride it has to be prepared to improvise. You just have to buy tickets.

A Liminal Feast to Summer
When: Sat., June 19, 7-11 p.m.
Where: Somewhere in San Francisco (find out precisely where after buying your ticket)
Cost: $75 for five courses; BYO drinks
Purchase: Via Brown Paper Tickets