Edinburgh designer targets niche market with a website of fantastical food

An Edinburgh-based designer has launched a recipe website devoted to the weird and wonderful foods found in computer games. Danielle Zelli, 23, meticulously recreates tasty treats from some of the world’s most popular games – including Grand Theft Auto, Portal and the recently released Skyrim – and publishes the recipes online for others to try.

The site, called Gourmet Gaming, has proved so popular it received over 50,000 hits last month, and Zelli is now being sent around 100 requests a month for recipes people would like her to make. She has also featured on the influential website Wired.com as well as in the American edition of X Box magazine.

“I’ve been blown away by the reaction the site has had,” Zelli, 23, told Scotland on Sunday. “I didn’t think people would want to look at a website about gaming food – maybe gaming, or indeed food, but not both together. It’s been great to have such a positive reaction and to have people being so encouraging about it.”

Zelli, who works as a games tester for a computer gaming firm, started the site in June last year when she held a party for fellow gamers to play the game Deadly Premonition, which involves the dish Sinners’ Sandwiches. “It’s a very strange concoction with turkey, strawberry jam and cereal and it’s quite popular among the gaming community, so I made them and everyone really enjoyed them, so I started thinking about food from other games and whether I could try to recreate them,” said Zelli.

Zelli’s recipes so far include an enormous chocolate and cherry cake from the game Portal, a pizza sundae from a game called Costume Quest which involves layers of blue and pink cream, and a dish called koopasta from the Paper Mario game, which is made out of green pesto pasta.

She generally takes around two days to come up with a dish, design it correctly and conjure up a tasty recipe to go with it. During the festive period she came up with dishes from a range of different games that constituted a Christmas dinner, including a mincemeat cake from World of Warcraft, and during the New Year period has been concentrating on cocktails – often based on potions found in fantasy games such as “leechade” from the game Bastion or the “health potion” from the game Diablo.

Cooking is, she says, becoming her favourite activity. “When I was younger I didn’t think I could cook, but I’ve discovered that I really enjoy it, and as I’ve been cooking the gaming dishes my skills have really improved – I’m a lot more experimental and daring with the flavours I use in my cooking than when I started out.”

Jonathan Trew, the food writer and critic who runs the food blog on restaurant website 5pm.co.uk, said he could see the site’s appeal.

“If you’re a keen gamer not only can you play the game and immerse yourself in it, but then you can also extend the experiment into the real world – you can play the game and eat the food. I was a bit surprised however – and I imagine this is probably just a stereotypical view of gamers – because I thought that they might not do much cooking.”

Zelli says that she has been inundated with requests for different dishes from different games and is sifting through around 150 at the moment.

“I think they like to see me try something out first,” she said.

Robert Florence, Scottish comedian and co-creator of BBC series Burnistoun, who is also a keen gamer and runs an online review show for XBox Live said: “The site is particularly fantastic because it looks at the way gaming pervades our culture from a whole new angle. It’s far more than just a recipe site. It’s an indictment of how tired and predictable other games websites are. Gaming is here, now, and it’s for everyone. This site gets that. I think it’s genuinely important. A big step forward.”

Zelli – who always tries to play the computer game she is creating the dish from before she gets in the kitchen – says she would ultimately like to produce a cookbook of her gaming recipes, and next year will produce a set of merchandise to go along with the site.

“It’s a challenge,” she says. “I’m learning about things I don’t know about all the time.”