In this restaurant, designed for couples, you sit either side of a table which has a fast-moving stream of very hot air being blown up through a hole in the centre. As well as giving a romantic, trembling heat-haze effect to your view of your partner, this is where you cook your food.

You are served with bowls of soufflé mixture and drop spoonfuls of it directly into the column of air. These drop rapidly but are quickly heated, and then rise and swell in the column of air in a decidedly sexy way. The cooked balls of light fluffy soufflé are suspended on the column of air until you pluck them off with long chopsticks.

Dessert, of course, follows the same principles, but with meringue mixture.
-- hippo, Mar 26 2009

Sounds a bit dangerous...but that makes it better for me+
-- xenzag, Mar 26 2009


I'm gonna try with a hot air blower and Marshmallows as soon as i get home - will report tomorrow. Outstanding idea!

If the air was merely warm, and the heating done via infrared radiation, the heat could be turned off dynamically as soon as one of the diners tried to pick the food out of the air
-- loonquawl, Mar 26 2009


Nah...does not sound romantic to me. No. Sorry sir.-
-- blissmiss, Mar 26 2009


I think the heat-haze part should deffinitely be made mandatory at all places in which romantic eye-to-eye engazement scenarios are engaged.
-- zen_tom, Mar 26 2009


So then we leaned over to kiss, you see.
-- zeno, Mar 26 2009


So...it's a barbernoullique?
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 26 2009


Good for lactating women [+].
-- nineteenthly, Mar 26 2009


+ floating croissant!
-- xandram, Mar 26 2009


The reporting back took longer than anticipated - no luck with a 2000W hot air blower, though. Most of the power goes into heating, so the actual air stream is not powerful enough to lift a marshmallow. With a hair drier, the air flow is powerful enough, but the temperature is lacking. So we'll have to wait for the restaurant.
-- loonquawl, Jul 08 2009


Instead of using an airstream - just use one of those superconducting electromagnets [that have been in the news recently] to levitate the food, and cook via infrared.

Maybe the hum of energised bus-bars, and the bubbling hiss of boiling liquid helium would add to the romantic atmosphere?
-- Custardguts, Jul 08 2009


Romantic, but doomed to fail.

(Can I get that [marked-for-tagline]? (For me, I mean, not for the HB.))

[+]
-- baconbrain, Apr 06 2011


Original, fun
This idea is awesome
hundred thousand buns.
-- Voice, Apr 07 2011


awesome, yes. romantic, no. but the awesome is enough to outweigh the lack of romantic, so [+]
-- fischerman, Apr 07 2011


A blower with one huge microwave magnetron pointing staight up (or down as you prefer) into a microwave absorber.

Equip diners with long gloves (with Faraday cage mesh linings) so they don't accidentally toast their digits when retrieving lunch.
-- not_morrison_rm, Apr 08 2011


I believe people have experimented with using lasers to lift spacecraft by vapourising an ablatable layer on the bottom of the spacecraft. This could work.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Apr 09 2011



random, halfbakery