One Thousand Degrees and Somebody’s Going to Eat That

Whatever you think you’ve cooked this summer—whatever you’ve defended over the coals with the conviction of someone who has done actual research into technique—I’m sorry, but none of it matters. The London creative duo Bompas & Parr cooked over molten lava. Everything else is a hobby.

The project happened at Syracuse University, in a courtyard somewhere on campus, with geologist Professor Robert Wysocki providing the expertise. Wysocki had worked with lava before on various research projects but never—and apparently this genuinely surprised him—to cook food. The lava runs at over 1,000 degrees Celsius, a slow red mass pushing itself beneath cuts of meat and corn on the cob. It is the most aggressively maximalist version of a barbecue that has ever existed and also, somehow, a legitimate piece of food-as-performance-art.

Sam Bompas and Harry Parr have been working this territory for years: jelly architecture, alcoholic cloud rooms, edible wallpaper, elaborate food stunts that sit exactly at the intersection of spectacle and genuine scientific curiosity about what something tastes like. Cooking with lava is the logical endpoint of that project. No machinery, no fuel source, no mediation between your food and the rawest heat this planet generates. The only real question is whether the result justifies the premise—whether lava-grilled corn tastes like anything specific, or just like corn. I don’t know. But I’d eat it without hesitating, which is probably the point.