What does it mean to devour a landscape?

A masked figure enters the room. Dilda White, chef, performer, and alter ego, begins to plate. There is no opening speech, no grand reveal. Instead, the evening begins with a quiet reading on the Sah community of Kumaon, paired with warm cups of jambu tea, a Himalayan herb known for its medicinal properties.

This is Fruition, a nine-course visual-gastronomic experience designed by Project Otenga in collaboration with Dilda White. A sensorial journey into the Kumaoni winter, its rugged landscape, indigenous ingredients, and faint, geographical memories, reimagined as an immersive dining performance.

Each course was thoughtfully composed, from Badeel lentil cakes to Thatwani Bhaat and Palak Badi, and served alongside a printed menu. Dilda’s hand-illustrated ingredient studies sat beside each dish, artworks representing indigenous vegetables, fruits, and spices native to Kumaon, rendered delicately on handmade hemp paper. Guests weren’t expected to critique but to respond: some doodled, some wrote, some simply sat in reflection.

The evening unfolded not with urgency, but with the unhurried rhythm of a highland winter. The masked figure moved between roles: cook, host, narrator. Performance and plate blurred. Eating became an act of quiet remembering, of a region, of lineage, of one’s own sensory archive.

In Fruition, memory wasn’t recited. It was chewed, sipped, paused for, and then, like snow, allowed to melt on the tongue.