TAS-MANIA

Sometime after the cocktail of cold-smoked Tasmanian gin but before the appetiser of pickled walnuts and wallaby, I was escorted from my table at the restaurant Faro up glowing blue steps and into a giant smooth orb that sat like a spaceship at the centre of a soaring steel and glass dining room over the River Derwent.

Faro is a museum restaurant, but it’s unlike any I’ve seen. For one thing, art is not just seen before or after you eat: it is central to the experience. Anchoring the new wing of the wonderful and wonderfully weird Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), 11 kilometres upriver from downtown Hobart, Faro is reached via a tunnel of shimmering light made by the American artist James Turrell. The orb is another of his creations. Titled Unseen Seen, it is the latest and largest of his ‘perceptual cells’, spaces in which the reclining viewer is encircled and overwhelmed by a throbbing barrage of flashing colours and sounds.

The wallaby? Tastes like kangaroo. The Turrell —