What a jazz gumbo

You may think Gordon Ramsay puts on a performance, but the Hell's Kitchen Scot is a ham next to the culinary cabaret whipped up by Belgian chef-cum-sensory gourmet Peter de Bie.

His show, Patatboem, is an allaction musical and cooking extravaganza that takes the idea of food creation as theatrical production to its logical conclusion, and climaxes with the audience feasting on the meal that's been sizzling into life onstage.

For de Bie, a trained culinary artist, the proof of his pudding is that the crowd tuck in to his heady mix of sake, duck and avocados, to name but three ingredients.

'I'm not interested in making bad food,' he states simply. 'It has to be excellent.' Even so, the fact that Patatboem tastes as good as it looks is the icing on the cake.

What de Bie does is mix diverse ingredients including a stunning set, top musicians and a bunch of actors - just who is who is not clear at the outset - and simmer to create a recipe for a delicious slice of entertainment.

'I like to create atmospheres. It's surprising what you can do when you put food and actors together. And you immediately have a connection with people because you are taking them out of their normal theatre experience,' de Bie explains.

Patatboem - it (very) loosely translates as Exploding Potato - is certainly far from that. It's best described as a culinary concert, where the audience sit at specially lit and soundwired tables, fanned out around the circular performance area, on chairs made out of vinyl LPs. For de Bie, it's the detail that counts.

'I like the idea that it's a whole world that you enter. When I'm in the middle of it, I feed off the energy you get from it - in the way musicians get energy from playing. Every move becomes part of the performance and the way we cut the coriander becomes part of the composition. The knives become an extension of our bodies.'

Patatboem evolved through improvisation built around music and food in the kitchen. Working closely with composer Peter Vermeersch, de Bie blends composition and recipes, integrating the processes of making food with the music.

The result gives the impression of a jazzy free-for-all, but the timing has to be precise or the whole thing falls flat. For de Bie, it's the latest addition to his expanding repertoire of food-theatre creations, a career that evolved by accident after he became an in-demand caterer on the Belgian arts circuit.