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A crash course in physics, how to host a supper club
When I first met Navin Sivanandam, he was a contestant at a cooking contest during South by Southwest called the Pork Experiment that I was judging.
His polenta cake topped with pork rillettes, pork belly and and bacon candy crumbles ended up winning the competition, but little did I know that four months later, the theoretical physicist would be teaching me the very basics of cosmology over a cup of espresso in his UT office.
I found out after the Pork Experiment that Sivanandam hosts an elaborate supper club at his house. It took a few months for me to finally make it to one of his dinners, but when I did, I realized that Sivanandam had a story worth telling.
Like most stories I end up writing for the paper, this article about Sivanandam’s supper club is really about the relationships we build through food.
For the Texas feast supper club I went to in early July, Nav spent almost 24 hours over the course of several days preparing homemade pickles, quail sausage, jicama slaw, pickled cherries, sous vide chicken-fried steak and a number of other dishes for about a dozen of his friends and colleagues.
These five-hour feasts are coming to an end, though.
In September, the London native is moving to South Africa, where he’ll continue his work figuring out how the universe got started for the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
He’s bringing most of his cookbooks and cooking supplies, except for the electric appliances and an espresso maker he keeps at his office. That’s going to Dan Carney, a UT grad student (left) who will now be the keeper of the proverbial watercooler.
“Erdos said mathematicians are machines that turn coffee into theorems, except in America because the coffee is too weak,” Carney says. “Luckily Nav has saved us from that curse.”
Photos by Alberto Martinez and Addie Broyles for the American-Statesman.
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