The hero of Simmel’s crime-novel It Can’t Always Be Caviar, a secret agent, employs the slower parts of the plot to distribute the food he prepares to guests at the table using a miniature railway (the elaborate recipes are included in the book). In another book, Hadrian’s Memoirs by Marguerite Yourcenar, the emperor, used to flatteries and rare dishes (for example, pheasant pâté), wishes simple things: Greek resinous wine, sesame-sprinkled bread, fish grilled outdoors by the sea, unevenly blackened by fire and spiced here and there by crisp grains of sand....

Between those two feeding extremes (antagonism in space and the menu) there is the Mano restaurant. At the same time as the filmmaker’s rotoscoping technique, popularized this year by Linklater’s film version of A Scanner Darkly, from a novel by Philip K. Dick, two architects have done the same thing on the premises of Mano, right next to a shopping centre, expanding the idea of city centre.