Café ArtScience, Cambridge

###Five Things to Know About Café ArtScience Text-messaged smells, space-age orbs that respond to song, vaporized chocolate and fractionally distilled booze—these are a few of the futurist marvels at Café ArtScience. The restaurant doubles as a sort of emporium, where inventor and Harvard professor David Edward’s boundary-pushing experiments—created and displayed at Le Laboratoire across the street—come out to play. Learn more about this this workshop of food and science: * **This food is 100% mindcrafted.** David Edwards is a Harvard professor, inventor, and founder of art and design center Le Laboratoire. Edwards’ inventions are used in everything from the cocktails to the interactive art on the walls. * **Wake up and text the coffee.** Edwards’ OPhone, a device that lets you take a photo of your food and text-message the smell to another device, is one of the many oddities created at Le Lab and often on display at the café. * **Close your lips and have a sip.** Mixologist and fractional distiller Todd Maul, formerly of Clio, brings the same molecular approach to the bar of Café ArtScience. However. he's now in possession of Edwards’ Le Whaf, an invention that turns liquids into vapor. If you’re into old-fashioned beverages—i.e. drinks made of liquid—check out the Todd Collins, which changes flavor with every melted-state iteration of its flavored ice cubes. * **Boundary-pushing experiments aside, the food carries its own weight.** For all the smoke and wizardry happening in the kitchen and the bar, critics say the food’s most dazzling element is the taste. As a curious but mildly suspicious critic for [_Boston Magazine_](http://www.bostonmagazine.com/restaurants/article/2015/04/28/restaurant-review-cafe-artscience/) said, “To my great surprise, I found that, at its essence, Café ArtScience is a high-style French eatery serving meticulous, cosmopolitan dishes.” * **It’s like dining with Stanley Kubrick.** Some reviewers have likened the space to _2001: A Space Odyssey_, while compared it favorably to the techno weirdness of Woody Allen’s _Sleeper_. Either way, the consensus is that Café ArtScience’s space has sci-fi vibe—a white-on-white space with glowing slats of white, molecule-shaped lamps, pods that release energy-boosting vapors, and a bar where the Le Whaf is joined by rotary evaporators and a lab’s worth of containers, tubes, and oddities.