Dinner with a difference: the world's most magical food events

When I was a student in Paris, I lived with the Hermes family for a year. I wanted to say thank you to them for having me, so I organised a big sit-down meal, and that was the start of my surrealist dinners, eight years ago.

My idea was to explore the five senses, to create a completely new experience with a lot of different layers. My first dinner for the Hermes family was about a journey, with many references to literature, poetry and design. After this, a lot of people asked me to create experiences for different occasions, from a dinner on the stage at the end of the Brussels opera, to dinners for the Hermes company around the world.

In April this year I worked with Société des Bains de Mer to design a surrealist dinner at the iconic Casino de Monte-Carlo. The brief was to create something new for the casino, which is one of the most prestigious casinos in the world due to its magnificent interior and architecture. Many people associate the casino with James Bond and movies, but I was tasked with representing what the casino is about now, and projecting what it will be like in the next few years.

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Charles Kaisin / Image courtesy of Monte Carlo Société des Bains de Mer

From this starting point, it was decided that the theme of the surrealist dinner would be 'L'art du jeu, Le jeu de l'art' - the art of the game, the game of art - and I created a very special experience around this. Guests were invited into an extraordinary setting, and there was a waiter for every two guests, so everyone was served at the same time. For every course the waiters wore different costumes and accessories, and we worked with a Michelin-starred chef.

I used a lot of historical references and played with the architecture of the casino, and the light, and I wanted to recreate a banquet from the 18th or 19th century, so I seated the guests at two long banquet tables to immerse them in the action.

I created a second surrealist dinner at Casino de Monte-Carlo earlier this month, and the idea of this dinner was to continue to portray the uniqueness and opulence of the casino. This time, the theme was 'the game of love and chance', inspired by the play of the same name by French novelist Pierre de Marivaux. The story goes that a young woman and her betrothed disguise themselves as servants when they first meet, and they fall in love without knowing each other’s status.

When Marivaux wrote this play in the 18th century it was very new, and quite shocking, because at that time, women couldn't decide themselves who they would marry. I always try to link my themes to history, or personalities, and this play was a good starting point, as for a long time, women couldn't enter the casino without being invited by a man. This has changed now, and I wanted to celebrate this innovation.

Surrealist Dinner / Image courtesy of Monte Carlo Société des Bains de Mer

For every surrealist dinner I work on, the first thing I do is absorb a lot of information and read a lot about the history of a place to find out what happened there, when and why. Secondly, I talk to people who live, work or use the place, to understand more about it, and thirdly I experience the place myself - both alone and in company - by visiting it at different times of the day to really get a feel for it and find out what's most interesting about that place. I use these steps to create a story and come up with the theme.

For example, when I created a surrealist dinner for Rolls-Royce last year, I visited the manufacturing centre at Goodwood and talked to a lot of people there about what Rolls-Royce means to them. I loved seeing all the detail and craftsmanship that goes into making each of their cars.

As it's the festive party season, for anyone thinking of creating their own amazing dinner party, the most important thing is to create a complete experience that's unusual and has character, so people can discover surprises along the way.

CHARLES KAISIN's many accolades include studying architecture and music in Brussels, before studying sculpture, then urbanism. He interned with renowned French architect Jean Nouvel in Paris and sculptor Tony Cragg in Dusseldorf, before studying at Central Saint Martins in London and working with Ron Arad for two years. He also won a BSI competition, creating a new kind of recycled plastic material, which gave him the opportunity to study at the Kyoto University of Art in Japan. His design studio is based in Brussels; charleskaisin.com