180 minutes with… Bobbi Salvör Menuez

Serving up cucumber ball gags at the model-actor-artist-cook’s conceptual dinner series.

- By Katy Schneider

Bobbi salvör Menuez is standing on a table at Lee’s, an event space in Chinatown, in toe socks and a Fear Factor T-shirt, carefully sprinkling pigeon feathers around the place settings. “They’re from a friend’s rooftop coop in Bushwick,” they say, nudging a feather toward the centerpiece, a carefully considered mess of dirt, daisies, and metal containers, with a foot. Behind Menuez, 26, the artist Precious Okoyomon deposits a tray full of greenish globes into the freezer. “That’s for the sixth course,” Menuez says. “The cold-pressed-cucumber ball gags.”

The artist, model, and actor (most recently seen on HBO’s Euphoria) is preparing for a convening of the MSG Club, a conceptual dinner series founded by L.A.-based artist Glenn Kaino and chef Niki Nakayama, and Menuez’s new queer food project, Spiral Theory Test Kitchen. The expected guest list—an intimate group of 16 of MSG’s and Spiral Theory Test Kitchen’s friends—includes the artist Maia Ruth Lee and the 75-year-old actor Frank Oz (who later takes a game lick of the cucumber ball gag before politely setting it back on his plate). Back in the kitchen, Menuez, Okoyomon, and the collective’s third founder, Quori Theodor, cook without aprons. “Why is it so stunning?” Menuez says, walking over to admire a pig’s heart that has been cured with sourdough. “I am really impressed with this heart.”