The great Gelinaz night

With 250thousand inhabitants, Gent (or Gand) is the third largest city in Belgium. With its canals and its laid back life, it competes with Bruges for the title most beautiful city in the Flanders

The Sunday began at the Flemish Food Fest, a festival in which everyone was grilling all sorts of food. In the photo, the chef table with many of the chefs that were to be the protagonists of the Gelinaz! dinner

Colagreco, Redzepi and the kitchen-van. The location was kept secret until the beginning of the show, at around 7 pm

The two long tables set at the Icc in Gent. Three shifts: 1-8, 9-16, 17-24. We were so lucky we enjoyed them all

In the kitchen, works to dismember the chickens from Gent begin

"Even I don’t know what will happen tonight. And please remember: this is a performance, not a dinner", says Andrea Petrini, founder and curator of the event named after chef Fulvio Pieran-gelinaz and by Gorillaz, the temporary band that Blur’s Damon Albarn creates whenever he feels like it. The black sculpture underneath the Madonna is that of Philippe Édouard Cauderlier (Antwerp, 1812-1887)

It all starts by quoting Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shot... Each dish is a song. And each of the three acts is separated by various artistic performances. In the dining room, men act as nothing is going on in front of their partners

First dish of the Gelinaz evening, Philippe Edouard Cauderlier’s Cold-hot chicken timbale, the original recipe from 1861. Roger Souvereyns of Scholteshof in Stevoort had the honour of performing it at the Icc in Gent

Inaki Aizpitarte ’s Royal chicken kir, using all the ingredients in the original recipe. The wine is diluted in the chicken stock. The dish arrives together with Wu Tang Clan’s rap

Anataoly Komm of Varvary in Moscow, lets us taste his Maki Roll behind the scenes

Komm’s Maki roll: chicken and vegetables wrapped in a turnip leaf. The sauce is made with walnuts, a Caucasian tradition

Agata Felluga ’s Lotus timbale. She’s the Italian sous chef at Chateaubriand in Paris, with a previous experience at Pascal Barbot’sAstrance. The dish is inspired by a Japanese sticky rice recipe, where the rice is cooked in a lotus leaf. Here, instead, there’s Cauderlier’s chicken, together with miso, tamarind syrup, pork fat, soy sauce. A very complex dish.

Left, 32 year old Agata Felluga, born in Rome and adopted by the Ville Lumiére

Petter Nilsson’s Bread chicken, from the Gazzetta in Paris. It is made with all the cereals hens eat during their life: corn, hulled wheat, barley, rye and wheat. The photo of the bag is a portrait of the Danish chef’s creation

Massimo Bottura is not in Gent, however, in a coup de theatre, his brother Paolo takes his place, here on the left with Alberto Buratti, pastry-chef at Osteria Francescana. The chef from Modena explains in a video the reason behind his absence: "In Modena, his team is so finely tuned that even my car-salesman brother can take my place", he jokes

Even in Bottura’s dish there’s no traditional chicken: it’s called Chicken, chicken, where are you? It is the re-interpretation of the classic chicken salad, with a stock made with roasted chicken below, and a cotechino (cooked pork sausage) and agar-agar gelatine with very small dices of peas, carrots, potatoes, red and yellow peppers, onions, tomatoes... in the background, "What about the noise?" by John Cage strikes us

Pea tendrils with chicken and mint aspic by Blaine Wetzel, once a pupil of Redzepi, today back home in Lummi Island, a paradise in the middle of nowhere, in Washington state. The tendrils are grilled. A great dish, with a super balance between smoke, balsamic and acid notes

Chia and chicken with tiger milk, turnips and coca leaves , that is to say "The chicken of Gent meets South America", a journey of the mind, from the Pacific ocean to the Andes to the Amazon forest led by Peruvian Virgilio Martinez

Virgilio Martinez at work with Alberto Buratti

Chicken liver, scallion with tarragon, turnip and toasted cauliflower stock by Basque Josean Alija

French-Spanish journalist Maria Canabal and Josean Martinez Alija

Poulet-mayo by Bertrand Grébaut of Septime in Paris, a cold entrée with all the ingredients of the original recipe. In the background, Rufus Thomas ’s r 'n' b with "Do the funky chicken"

Reneè Redzepi has no doubt when it comes to which is the best part of the chicken: the skin. Half of the guest, as it turned out, agreed with him

Redzepi, on the left, explains his passion for chicken, discovered when he was a child in Macedonia. "I had to prepare this dish at home because it is fucking complicated"

Here it is: it’s not exactly chicken skin, but the “skin” made with a stock prepared using all the ingredients in Cauderlier’s recipe, removing the froth. A single, fantastic morsel, one of the many intervals that compose the first part of a dinner at Noma

We peek into the iPad of Italian Emilia Terragni who works for Phaidon in London, and is sitting at the table next to ours, and we see a juicy preview: the triple format of Renè Redzepi’s next book, which will be out in November. It’s a sort of diary, an intimate one, too, in which he explains how difficult dealing with the limelight is

The monumental “skyscrapers” of Six degrees of separations, Davide Scabin’s fantastic idea

In Scabin’s dish, there are 6 of the ingredients in the original recipe, but cooked separately, 6 "morsels" composed by: 1. Porto gelatine with carrot, pea and pea gelatine 2. Chicken mousse filled with livers and two pop corns to keep them firm 3. A pork jelly with tarragon vinegar 4. Cucumber roll with French beans and soy sauce jelly 5. Pork feet and tongue gelatine. And the 6th? Sorry, no response. On the left we find a light chicken royale served in a Martini glass

The Combal.Zero Trio, from Rivoli. In the background, the chosen music was Frank Zappa’s dystonic Bolero

Not a chicken , in fact it is an oyster with a spicy tabbouleh with pork feet. An extraordinary dish by Daniel Patterson of Coi in San Francisco. In the background, "Cool Thing", progressive rock by Sonic Youth

Chicken tea by Eneko Atxa. Cooked in infusion in the coffee machine, it includes chicken cut into pieces, carrots, onions, cauliflowers, French beans, baby carrots and edible flowers such as verbena

Basque Eneko Atxa and Chilean colleague Rodolfo Guzman, author of A pork that wanted to be a chicken, a tribute to Massimo Bottura. It’s a Disshert that is to say it is halfway between sweet dessert tones and the grilled ones of a main course

Tireless Mauro Colagreco

His dish is called The chicken that lost its mind (head) and the idea comes from a reflection: why are the children of today always served headless and legless chicken?" I decided to use these ingredients, so as to let today’s kids understand chicken as a whole, hens that are alive and free to run. A stimuli for children to question the origin of our food. Colagreco is soon to become a dad

Colagreco’s dish (forgive the light, which is increasingly low, just like the lucidity of the author, after the seventh hour of this dinner-event...)

It’s a good thing that the body performers are keeping us awake between one course and the other

The chicken from where I come from isn’t very good, is Australian Ben Shewry’s joke: "To be honest", he explains, "I hate cooking chicken but people always ask me to prepare it because my country is the second largest consumer of chicken in the world, after Brazil". In the dish, French bean oil and dehydrated chicken sauce

Danny Bowien, a nice and extravagant Chinese-American chef working at Mission Street Chinese, increasingly popular on both coasts: he’s opened in San Francisco and New York

For Bowien, a Chinese style Poulard en vessie with stock, gelée, mousseline and dumpling

With the pre-dessert comes the moment of Fulvio Pierangelini and his Sot-qui-basse, ravioli which should have been placed one on top of the other, like in a timbale, but were then distributed horizontally. The public is surprised because the fresh pasta arrives almost towards the end, with spring carrots, chocolate, celery, oranges, lemons and Porto. An emotional sweet-savoury dish

Due to the dying battery, we don’t have any photos of the last two (great) dishes, but we promise we will get hold of them. The first were some small and delicious Chicken shells by Swedish Magnus Nilsson. The second, a Chocolate pudding by the trio offlemish foodies Jason Blanckaert, Olly Ceulenaere and Kobe Desramaults: a moelleux au chocolat made with chicken blood, a very durable tradition in Belgium, where it is roasted in the oven with some pork fat

Lotta and Per-Anders Jorgensen, the brains behind Fool! Magazine will forgive the low quality of these photos