Teaching Your Kids the Fine Art of Slurping Noodles

For multimedia artist David Horvitz, slurping noodles isn’t just a way of eating. The Los Angeles-based artist says that as a half-Japanese person, he sees it as part of his cultural heritage: In Japan, after all, slurping is widely understood to be the correct way to enjoy a bowl of noodles, and to show appreciation to the person who cooked them. Here in America, where slurping is considered bad table manners, Horvitz always wanted to teach his own daughters the pleasures of a proper slurp.

And so Horvitz turned noisy eating into part of his art practice. Or, to be specific, he and Bay Area chef Leif Hedendal will be putting on a kid-friendly experiential art show of sorts at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive this Sunday entitled Teach Your Children to Slurp Noodles. Hedendal will serve bowls of homemade udon, and the young participants will slurp those noodles while mic’d up to an amplifier, creating live noise performance — a sonic soundscape of slurping, if you will.

Reached by phone, Horvitz explains that the origin of the project was a screen print he created in 2023, also called Teach Your Children to Slurp Noodles, for which he hand-wrote those words with actual udon noodles, let them dry, and then screen printed them onto Japanese washi paper. Later, he and five other Asian artist friends put on the first version of the live slurping performance at a Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) event in Little Tokyo in L.A. They ordered udon from a little Japanese diner called Suehiro Cafe, a couple blocks away. “We slurped [the noodles] with a microphone,” Horvitz recalls, “and my friend processed it live with an analog synth and made these crazy sounds.”

Now, recasting the event in Berkeley with a focus on kids, Horvitz mostly hopes the noodle-slurping extravaganza will be a lot of fun. But he also sees an educational component. For Japanese American kids like his own, it’s a matter of knowing their history and lineage — and knowing that they can stand up for themselves if, say, a classmate sees them slurping and tells them it’s weird. And for non-Japanese kids? The message is that “slurping is the proper etiquette,” Horvitz says. “You can tell that to your parents when you go home — that they should be slurping too.”

Oh, and the udon for the BAMPFA event won’t be your run-of-the-mill cup o’ noodles. To prepare, Hedendal, known for cooking elaborate dinners for Bay Area art-world luminati, asked Sylvan Mishima Brackett (chef-owner of the Mission District izakaya Rintaro) to give him a lesson in making udon from scratch — in other words, these will be pedigreed, hand-rolled noodles that the kiddos will be hoovering up.

In addition to enjoying a good, comforting meal, participants will also use some of the extra noodles to create sumi ink art that they can bring home. And Hedendal hopes to incorporate some impromptu noodle-making lessons as well.

And, as Horvitz notes, even though the event is ostensibly geared toward children, noodle lovers of all ages are welcome to participate. “Adults who don’t slurp should learn how to slurp too,” he says.

There will be two sessions of ‘Teach Your Children to Slurp Noodles’ at BAMPFA (2155 Center St., Berkeley) on Sunday, June 1, at noon and 1 p.m. Space is limited, and advance tickets are required, though Horvitz says he’ll do his best to accommodate anyone who comes.