National Bitter Melon Council

Participating restaurants
B&G Oysters, Ltd.
Bostonian Market
Botucatu Restaurant
Corner Café
Christopher’s Café
Equator Restaurant
Hamersley’s Bistro
House of Siam
Kosmos Market
Nicole’s Pizza
Perdix
Pho Republique
Polka Dog Bakery
The Red Fez

July 22 – 30, 2005

Bitter Melon Week (July 22 - 30, 2005) was an event in which all the restaurants and food businesses in Boston's South End Neighborhood were invited to create and serve a dish using Bitter Melon, a vegetable grown in great quantity in the community gardens of the South End but widely unknown to the restaurateurs in the very same neighborhood. 14 restaurants, from 4-star bistros to corner delis, participated in the event.

Bitter Melon Week explored the idea of community and how community can be created through difference and foreignness. It was a performance art and community-building event that engaged South End residents and visitors in culinary contemplation of the community’s cultural development by eating in the area’s numerous restaurants. During Bitter Melon Week, restaurateurs and community members alike had the opportunity to go to each participating restaurant, try the Bitter Melon dish, collect its recipe card, and go to an exhibition space at the Mills Gallery to assemble the collected cards into a book.

Although grown in large quantities in the South End, Bitter Melon was unfamiliar to most, if not all of the restaurants in the South End. Inviting every eating establishment (and by every, we really DID mean every single one!) to incorporate Bitter Melon into their cuisine, we hoped that this universally new flavor would instigate a moment of unity across local cultures and cuisines. Unity through bitterness!

Incorporating dishes using Bitter Melon was a novel experience for everyone – chefs, restaurant staff, and restaurant patrons alike. The process of creating a new dish with Bitter Melon, and serving it to guests, became a mechanism for the entire community to come together through one shared experience – that of difference. In this way, Bitter Melon highlighted this similarity and in order to establish a basis for community.

Bitter Melon Week was not a competition to find out who can make the best Bitter Melon Dish. It was a social, community-building collaboration manifested through participatory acts by all the individuals who visit restaurants and food businesses in the South End. By inviting as broad an involvement as possible among the eating establishments in the South End, we hoped to create an alternative model for engagement and association among the small businesses in that neighborhood.

We were thrilled to be creating this event and seeking as broad involvement as possible among the eating establishments in the South End. We want to involve "destination dining" restaurants around the BCA as well as the neighborhood pizza joints scattered throughout the South End; we want the Dominican and Puerto Rican restaurants to joint us as well as the various bakeries and cafes.

Not only did Bitter Melon Week provide a week for the community to taste the flavors created by South End restaurants, but the event re-defined the community artistically and metaphorically. One cannot speak about the South End without talking about the fascinating culture of food businesses, and this project observed and celebrated the neighborhood from a variety of perspectives. As a food festival, Bitter Melon Week supported all participating local businesses. As a public art event, these businesses were also contributing creative partners!

We believe in the accumulation of simple acts and gestures that create a sense of community. The entire culinary experience is imbued with cultural significance. As we all know, food and dining can bring people together within and across cultures and create a sense of community and belonging.

Bitter Melon Week as an insertion into the food festival institutional structure
Food festivals traditionally feature restaurants of the same caliber, collecting them together for promotion and distribution of their various different dishes. Bitter Melon Week was unique in that it gathered together restaurants of all genres, from the corner deli to the 4-star bistro. Though these establishments were all quite different in style, aesthetic, taste, and patron culture, they were united under the shared goal of figuring out how to use this foreign vegetable.

The goal of this event was twofold: the first was to support the small food businesses in the South End Neighborhood by gathering them together as equal collaborators, each with the same challenge: to use Bitter Melon. The second was to use the food festival structure to create a new platform from which to build community and dialogue with an approach (and a challenging flavored vegetable!) so unexpected that it could break down barriers inhibiting cross-class and cross-cultural communication. For us, the culinary experience is a perfect place of departure – each collaborating restaurant had full creative freedom to incorporate Bitter Melon into its individual style, and diners could tour the South End, support institutions they may otherwise overlook, and become exposed to this unique locally grown (but widely unknown) vegetable.