Exhibit: Spanish Tapas As Food Art

With the rise of Spanish chefs like Ferran Adrià, The Roca Brothers and José Andrés, the world has fallen head over heels for Spanish cuisine. Tapas, bite-size morsels of food served on small plates, have played a big role in the kitchen of these great chefs and are now the subject of a museum exhibit in Washington, D.C.

Titled Tapas: Spanish Design for Food, the exhibit presents more than 200 objects that fuse cuisine, science, tradition, engineering, art and innovation. It's an exhibit dedicated to the techniques and tools that chefs like Adrià applied in his own restaurant elBulli, which garnered three Michelin stars and was ranked first on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list a whopping five times before closing in 2011.

The exhibition is presented by the Acción Cultural Española and Spain Arts and Culture, curated by designer and architect Juli Capella. It is being held at the former residence of the Ambassador of Spain and is divided into four main areas: Food, Kitchen, Table, Food and Wine.

Some of the exciting pieces of the exhibit include plasticine molds of food, a technique used by Adrià to train new chefs, a foosball dining table used by Andrés and a "wealth of information on contemporary design as it relates to food, from spectacular photographs of the architecture of Spanish wineries to videos revealing how chefs make chairs out of bread and cutlery out of vegetables," The Washingtonian reports.

With previous stops in Tokyo and Miami, the exhibit will head to Seoul, North Korea once it wraps up in D.C. on March 23rd.  For more information, check out the exhibition website.

Here's a small preview of what's in store:

Images courtesy Acción Cultural Española/Facebook