After years of thinking, writing and talking about food design, I wanted something tangible again. Something that smells like yeast, feels like dough and cracks when you bite into it. The Food Design Playground is my answer to abstraction: a physical place where ideas don't just float, but land - on a plate, in a belly, in a memory. Between 2004 and 2011, I owned the two experimental restaurants Proef in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. There I explored how food tells stories, awakens senses and questions systems. That spirit of Proef - rebellious, inquisitive, poetic - lives on in this new place. Because food is never just food. It is love, politics, culture, death and desire. And sometimes you have to be able to taste it to really understand it.