World-Building with Food,
In Conversation with Long Prawn
16.10.25

Long Prawn is a Melbourne based artistic food practice that delivers rigorously researched food expertise heavily seasoned with creative event design. Led by founders Lauren Stephens and Fred Mora, its food is enveloped in community, props and performance – from buffet tables to nouveau-haute cuisine. Responsive, rewarding, and resourceful, Long Prawn’s work spans food, ideas, events, and workshops, with each project uniquely expressing the value of design. Long Prawn has partnered local and global brands, including Adidas, Aesop, ARC’TERYX, Birkenstock, Broached Commissions, COMME des GARCONS, Melbourne Food & Wine Festival, Milieu Property, Molonglo, Open House Melbourne, Rising Festival, Robin Boyd Foundation, Schwartz Media, Snøhetta, TarraWarra Museum, and VICE.

Here, Hayley Tillett, NHO Writer & Producer, sits down with Fred and Lauren to discuss their playful approach to food design, and its capacity to shape eating, interaction, memory, and engagement. This is their conversation.

Portrait by Ben Clement.

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HT: Hi Prawns, thanks so much for joining me. When people hear ‘food design,’ they often think it’s just about plating or presentation. How do you define food design in your practice?

FM/LS: Food design, to us, is the bombastic wondering, wandering, of how food can stoke conversation, meaningful relationships between people and a lasting engagement with audiences, grandparents, settings, communities, growers, artists, students, and our own families. It is the scripting of touchpoints that share a character or a story. Plating is a thing, but to us, the elements off the plate are just as critical. If the waiter has a leaky Biro in their pocket, the food tastes different. If you see the soil that a cabbage was pulled from, your food tastes different. Yes, we eat with our eyes, but our vision does not cease to inform us at the edge of the plate. So, in that, we feel food design is really just world-building. As Brillat-Savarin said, “tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”

HT: Your projects blend research, performance, and communal eating. How do you maintain a balance between logistics and creating playful, immersive experiences?

FM/LS: Perhaps, practicality is overrated. Restaurants get the opportunity to really polish their offering, but as our work is often exploratory and novel to some extent, it is the unknown occurrences that are most rewarding to our audience as well as for us. For example, if we had been too pragmatic, we may never have chosen to make sausages live, directly from grinder-to-hot-plate, with their contents changing according to a crowd-sourced film selection with Wook of STEAK FILM. We may also not have placed a feed-trough filled with live yabbies in the middle of Collingwood Yards to create a Live Yabby Fishing Experience. We think immersive experiences should have both the stage and the players feeling things together, coming to wonderful realisations, even if the wheels are falling off or smoke is billowing from under the hood – something that actually happened when we used the waste heat energy from car engines, driving from one MPavilion to another, to cook hermetically sealed food packages…beep beep.

HT: Props, rituals, and spatial design are foundational to your events. Can you share an example where those elements came together to transform the food into a more sensorial, emotional, or memorable experience?

FM/LS: Last year, we were given our most significant and large-scale opportunity to create a space, program and public offering which was terminally Long Prawn; COOKED The Hot Plate Stage. A smoulderingly antipodean BBQ and performance space examined the public barbecue as an arena for communal cooking, entertainment, and cross-cultural exchange. A place to gather and grill, with food, performance, and conversation on the menu.

The public BBQ hangar was conceived and designed by Mikhail Savin Rodrick Projects with a big, big BBQ made by installation artist, Mike Hewson, which is soon to feature in his Art Gallery NSW exhibition, The Key Is Under The Mat. The program folded together various saucy elements: hotty design, bratty bratwursts, spoonfuls of collaborators, chefs we crush on, food we adore, and artists that make us blush.

There were many occasions, whether it was the public grilling or the private sit-downs, that felt entirely true to us, a big coming together of our influences with touchpoints that were accessible right across the community, from kids to those who call Fed Square home.

HT: You’re often engaged by brands for activations. How do food and shared experiences function as a form of brand expression, and how does that differ from more conventional marketing approaches?

FM/LS: Yes! We offer a range of varied services via Practise Prawn World which span across event design, culinary services, spatial design and beyond. In many ways, it is where ideas we have tested via Long Prawn can be applied to intentional communication strategies or audience building. When eyes, ears and mouths are fed with care and intention, people tend to trust you, walk with you. Careless food reeks of mediocrity, so when it is nurtured, exalted, people take notice. Whether that is a quiche Lorraine or a single oyster, detail and going slow matter.

HT: Reflecting on your body of work, which events or workshops helped to crystallise your philosophy as a practice?

FM/LS: Very early on, we were given the opportunity to be part of a wild series titled Otis Armada (thank you, Gus and George!) that built out temporary, thematic dining events. The level of detail we imbued into Otis Armada and the subsequent abandon for responsible budgeting proved to be a formative learning experience for our practice to this day. We hope that our philosophy remains iterative; not set in rose quartz but fluid to change, new approaches and ideas that nudge or rattle us awake in the morning.

HT: Looking ahead, how do you see food design evolving as a field? Are there emerging cultural shifts, technologies, or design thinking trends that feel especially influential, and how does Long Prawn aim to lead or respond to them?

FM/LS: Over the past 11 years of keeping a rolling boil of projects, it’s been brilliant to see new practices bubbling up in this space; both locally and abroad. While we were happy to be toiling in a less ploughed field, I don’t think the idiom of ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ stands here, with a more mainstream and welcomed understanding of food as critical cultural fodder, and more voices, more stories, more attention and care and flavour. Really, we just hanker to eat better, have less crooked food systems, and see food stories that are beautiful, or painful and important, or totally clownish. No one is immune to trends, yet we always try to seek knowledge or ideas that may have fallen out of fashion, by the wayside. The crumbs off the side of the plate, knowledge of antiquity, and our history and older folks can share this with us; it’s honestly the stuff worth paying attention to.

HT: Fred, Lauren – thanks for your time.

FM/LS: Thanks Hayley!