About Table and World

Markus Mosimann has run crêperies in the Zurich area since 2011, not at the stove and not behind the counter, but where it is decided what a place is meant to be and what it is not. From that distance he has learnt that a table is more than a piece of furniture with plates on it.

What occupies him is the real thing. People who are what they say. Places where nobody has to pretend. Meals where something happens that does not appear on the bill. He is interested in the company at the table in the narrow sense, as what happens between four chairs on a given evening, and in the wide sense, as the question of how people want to live together at all, in a way that nourishes them rather than merely filling them up.

He spent a long time looking for maps that explain life, theological, psychological, sociological, and he values them to this day. But he has also learnt that the map is not the territory, and that an honest path to oneself saves most of the detours. Development, for him, does not mean leaving something behind. It means building on what one has already reached, in a world that never stops asking new questions.

Table and World begins at the Beiz, the Swiss word for the ordinary local restaurant with a landlord and a regulars' table, and it is not meant to stay there. The essays ask what becomes of a life dictated by work, directed by others from morning to night, whether at the stove, on the building site or in front of a screen, and which considers itself content all the while. They ask what a daily life might look like that takes the whole person into account: the body, the relationships, the work, and whatever it is one is actually here for. And they ask whether the tools now emerging, artificial intelligence first among them, can give us back time and room for what no machine replaces: living together, from the conversation at the table to the question of how we treat one another as a society and who gets to decide. Over time, the platform is meant to become a place where others write and think along, with guest essays and discussion, beyond gastronomy.

That is what he writes about. From the Beiz, towards the world.