Chef Paul Pairet is on the cutting edge of the Shanghai dining scene and this February, he is going to challenge the act of dining itself. Ultraviolet is his new experimental restaurant which will create a unique dining "experience" unlike any other in the world. Intrigued? We were. We caught up with the chef to talk about his dream restaurant finally becoming a reality.

How did Ultraviolet come about?
The original idea came about when I was in Sydney, in 1996, and at the time, I wanted to open a restaurant for one table of 12. It wouldn’t have been like a regular restaurant where you sit down with the menu and you choose a dish. In a restaurant like that the kitchen is set. All the items on the menu are pre-prepared in some way somewhere because you don’t know if you’re going to sell them and when you’re going to sell them.

I wanted to remove this uncertainty. This is “lesser” cooking. The ultimate cooking is what your mother or my mother cooks. They cook, they call you to the table, you eat what they cook (and you better enjoy it!). But when you eat, the pork chops are just coming out of the pan, right? She serves it when she wants to serve it. So I wanted to remove the constraint of the professional kitchen and take advantage of the home kitchen but set it in a professional environment. That’s where the technology of the project comes in.

Sydney was me myself cooking for a table of 12, with very little else around me. But I could control the timing. And that’s pushed to the extreme at Ultraviolet, where you can control the atmosphere. The new Ultraviolet is a dining room–10 people only–and everybody sits down at the same time, eats the same meal and every course will be set to an atmosphere that we have fit to the dish.

How?
We will serve 10 people only, and those 10 people, every time I send one dish, I can say, OK, this time we have a blue light, or a green light, or a very strong light. We also have a 360 degree projection screen that I can use to fit the environment. I make a scenario that fits the dish—or at least we can try, it’s not always going to be easy. A lot of these environments are very visceral. You will feel them directly.

For example, I can project around the table a very heavy rain, very grey weather, and I use our tailor-made sound system from K-Array—it’s one of the best you've ever heard anywhere in the world—to make you really feel the rain around you. The sound will be even more penetrating than the projections. But if you really feel those drops around you, you’re going to feel wet. You are going to want a very comforting dish.

I like to play with things to influence the psycho-taste, the taste before the taste. Everything about the taste except the taste is the psycho-taste. For example, if I can get you to think about chicken, you will start to taste it in your head, and the physical manifestation of this psycho-taste will be your salivation. Making someone laugh before or after a dish will change the message of the dish. We may not do this for every dish, but we can try if we want.

So what will be on the menu?
At first, I won’t have any new creations on the menu—there will be dishes that people have never seen, but they won’t be new—and probably I will start with the very classic extract of things I’ve done because I want to be flawless in the kitchen. There are too many angles on the project to do with the scenarios and I want to be sure that we are the best in the kitchen because I would not have any excuse to not be at my best. These are the best conditions a chef can dream of. We control everything. The kitchen is one of the best in Asia, one of the best equipped in Asia, one of the most technologically advanced anywhere.

We’re afraid to ask…how much?
Every seat in this restaurant, taken or not, costs us RMB5,000 operationally. And I’m not even talking about the initial investment. Pffft. We will never see that again. And we will ask people to pay RMB2,000 per person. There will be 2.5 staff per guest—25 people working on this thing operationally. There’s not one Michelin-star restaurant in the world today that has this. So we can’t even talk about value for money—this is one of the only restaurants where the guests are sponsored.

Want to snag yourself a spot at the table? Head to the UV website to get all the goodness.