What if the most interesting thing in the room were not the art on the walls, but the people sitting around the table?
In contemporary culture, the dinner table is having an identity crisis. It can be a status symbol, a design object, a social stage or, increasingly, a place where art happens without ever needing to hang on a wall. For DALAD’S, the new Thai hospitality project by chef Dalad Kambhu and Luca Pronzato, founder of WE ARE ONA, the table becomes the main event.
Debuting in Paris from 18 to 25 October 2026, during Art Basel Paris, the pop-up brings together gastronomy, architecture and contemporary art through a collaboration with Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. The premise is deceptively radical: cooking, eating and gathering are not simply activities surrounding the experience. They are the experience itself.
Tiravanija has spent decades challenging the conventions of the art institution, creating situations in which cooking and sharing food become integral to the work. Rather than positioning the viewer at a distance, his practice invites participation, turning everyday rituals into a space for social exchange. For DALAD’S, this philosophy takes physical form in two modular stainless-steel tables inspired by traditional Thai fishing boats. Designed by Tiravanija, they bring diners together around integrated seating and steam pots, collapsing the usual distance between kitchen, dining room and audience.
The architecture does not merely frame dinner. It choreographs it.
At the centre of this temporary world is Dalad Kambhu, the Thai-American chef whose culinary identity emerged from a personal relationship with home, memory and cultural translation. Her Berlin restaurant Kin Dee earned a Michelin star in 2019, bringing international attention to an approach that combined Thai flavours, herbs and techniques with seasonal, predominantly local ingredients. DALAD’S opens a new chapter beyond the conventional restaurant format, allowing her cuisine to unfold as a shared, collective event.
Across four-course lunches and eight-course dinners, dishes will be prepared and served directly at the communal tables, bringing up to 100 guests together around a menu shaped by Thai culinary traditions, contemporary techniques and locally available ingredients. The references extend beyond the plate, appearing in the tableware and details of the experience, informed by the friendship and shared history between Kambhu and Tiravanija.
The project also reflects Pronzato’s broader vision for WE ARE ONA, the gastronomic studio he founded in 2019 to connect chefs with artists, designers and architects through temporary culinary environments. Having developed experiences for luxury houses and cultural events internationally, the studio operates at the intersection of hospitality and artistic direction, treating a meal as something that can be designed, staged and experienced collectively.
That approach continues beyond the pop-up itself. Dover Street Market Paris is also presenting a table produced by WE ARE ONA, conceived by Pronzato in close collaboration with Tiravanija, through 25 October.
DALAD’S occupies a secret location in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, but its most compelling proposition is not exclusivity. It is participation. In a city where art, fashion and hospitality increasingly compete to create the next unmissable experience, the project proposes a different kind of cultural currency: the act of being together.
Dinner is the medium. Connection is the aftertaste.