Chef: Dillon Bergin

Front of House: Trize Stephen-Pons, Nishant Upender

Creative Director: Dylan Cook

​

Welcome to Chez Bloom, a virtual dining experience set in the 1904 Dublin of James Joyce's Ulysses. Through the perspective of the character Leopold Bloom you will make your way through a 12-course feast encompassing the finest gastronomic treats of the era, ranging from the simple, hearty peasant fare of rural Ireland to the extravagant cuisine classique of the Edwardian upper class. To guide you through this journey, we've provided four different narrative voices, representing the multifaceted composition of Mr. Bloom's identity:

​

Anglo-Irish Bloom (Nishant Upender): This Bloom reflects the perspective of an aspirational assimilationist who fantasizes about what life would be like in the Protestant-dominated upper echelons of Irish society, the colonizing class.

Lustful Bloom (Trize Stephen-Pons): This Bloom reflects the conflation of lust and hunger that occurs throughout Ulysses

Empirical Bloom (Dylan Cook): Along the course of the day, Bloom often engages his scientific side by making observations that range from the mundane to the astronomical. With this Bloom, his scientific impulses are unleashed, with varying results.

Reluctant Republican Bloom (Dillon Bergin): This Bloom reflects the position Joyce found himself in as outsider to the Celtic Revival literary circle. It is a double bind. Of course Joyce supported the idea an Irish republic, but he did not support the hyper Nationalist and Roman Catholic, Gaelic romantization of the independence movement.

​

Inspiration: Each of us came to this topic, that of food in Ulysses, wanting to use food to explore different themes ranging from colonialism to sexual politics to the economic disenfranchisement of the Irish people. Utilizing the interweaving narrative framework of Ulysses, we were each able to foster unique voices of Leopold Bloom, each focusing on a particular theme, while remaining true to the character's core unity and sense of self. In particular, we wanted to explore the theme of Parallax, oft discussed in class, through the prism of a singular character. In each of these different manifestations of Bloom, he is looking for fulfillment, but through very different, often contradictory means. We thought it would be interesting to look at how these self-contradictions would operate in a decentralized narrative format, where we were each responsible for crafting particular sections out of what we personally saw in Bloom throughout the semester.

​

Who We Are (IRL)

We are a group of students in Paul Saint-Amour and Robert Berry's course, Joyce's Ulysses: Making Readings, at the University of Pennsylvania who share a common interest in food and its place in great literature.

​