Concept Creator
Andra Bria
Brain Health graduate
Feed Your Brain · La Table
Vagal Foodsfoods.
A communal dinner, eaten along the nerve that calms you.
Vienna Design Week 2026 · A six-foot table shaped like the body's own calming nerve · Open seating, shared dishes, no tasting menu.
The idea
Eat your way along a nerve.
The vagus nerve runs from the base of your skull down through your throat, your heart, your lungs, into your gut. It is the body's main switch for calm — the nerve that tells your nervous system it is safe to rest, to digest, to stop bracing.
Certain foods speak to it directly. Fermented foods. Warm, oil-rich foods eaten slowly. Food shared by hand. Vagal Foods is a communal dinner built around three of them — not six courses, not a tasting menu, but one idea, felt three times, at a table built in the shape of the nerve itself.
You are not seated at a table. You are seated along a nerve.
The table
A table shaped like the thing it teaches.
For Vienna Design Week, we will stage a single winding table that traces the vagus nerve's actual path — wide near the "brainstem" end, narrowing as it travels, forking into two branches that meet at a shared dish where the nerve would reach the gut.
Guests do not choose a seat. They take their place along the nerve's length, the same way the nerve itself runs through everyone in the room.
The three stations
One idea. Three ways to feel it.
STATION I
Crunch & tang
Fermented
Kimchi, sauerkraut and other fermented dishes, served family-style near the brainstem end of the table. The sour, alive taste is feeding bacteria that speak directly to this nerve.
→ Gut-brain serotonin axis
STATION II
Warmth & oil
Calming
Good bread, excellent olive oil, and a small cup of warm broth alongside — eaten slowly at the table's midpoint. Warmth itself is a signal of safety: the nervous system relaxes the moment something warm reaches the tongue, no spoon required.
→ Parasympathetic activation
STATION III
By hand
Shared & passed
A single dessert, passed hand to hand along the table's final stretch, exactly where the two branches meet. The nerve that calms your gut is the same one that responds to being looked after.
→ Reward & connection
How it begins
One breath, taken together.
Before anything arrives, the table breathes once, together. A slow exhale longer than the inhale — the fastest way to reach this nerve, and the simplest. No devices, no questionnaires, no report at the end. What happens at this table happens to the table, not privately to each guest.
The artist
Caique Tizzi.
Berlin-based artist and chef whose practice has been shown at KW Institute, Gropius Bau, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin Art Week, TBA21, Abu Dhabi Art and Art Basel Miami. "The kitchen becomes part studio, part laboratory," he says of his work. "Food as narration." Vagal Foods is the first time that narration has been built directly into the architecture of the table.
From previous exhibitions
Photos: Angelo Dal Bó · courtesy of the artist
The team
Who's behind the table.
Scientific Advisor
Dr. Isabella Anderson-Wagner
Microbiome & gut-brain research
Practical
Vienna Design Week, 2026.
- Venue
- Vienna Design Week 2026
- Format
- One long communal table · open seating
- Price
- Accessible ticketing · designed to be open to festival visitors, not a private event
- Created by
- Andra Bria (concept & neuroscience) · Caique Tizzi (artistic direction & table design)