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</head>I entered the new Pirch Manhattan flagship to find a combination of bright white lighting, freshly polished floors, and insanely shiny chrome appliances. "We're in the business of 'What if?'" Laith Murad, chief marketing officer, told me. Okay. So, what if I lived here? What if I never left? What if I'm actually dead and this is my lavish rendering of heaven?
Pirch is a luxury home goods retailer. Murad compares it to Nordstrom and mentions that it picks up where Home Depot leaves off (even though the two stores are unrelated). The 32,000-square-foot store is an anomaly in the middle of Soho—not only because it's so unfathomably large and carries items priced at $50,000, but also because it has a fully functional cafe and cooking demo room that are entirely free to visitors. When Murad tells me that the average customer spends 2 hours and 11 minutes inside the store—turning knobs, admiring 28 showerheads in the "private sanctuary"—I just nod. I get it.
Beyond the grill that speaks to you when your steak is done cooking, these were the appliances that floored me at Pirch:
Innit rigs your kitchen appliances with smart technology, and pulls up recipes based on what food you already have in your kitchen. For instance, if you put a bell pepper on a standard Boos cutting board, a surveillance camera observes the bell pepper, communicates with a computer, and pulls up Bon Appétit, Epicurious, and Good Housekeeping recipes featuring bell peppers on a nearby TV. Then it peeps inside your fridge to see what other ingredients you have on hand, even if that's 12 varieties of cheese and bottle of emergency Champagne. The Innit doesn't judge. Yet.
When the toilet pulls its own lid back as if it were the drop-top on a convertible, it's hard not to burst out laughing. It has a Dance Dance Revolution-style blue laser sensor on the floor that you trip with your foot when you're nearby. As far as features go, it's not as luxurious as Japanese toilets, and the opening-closing bit might get as annoying as talking to a coworker in office bathroom stalls. But at least Numi is funny.
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*Not sure on that one.
Look how it sparkles. Look how it shines. As if being beautiful (and in an *exclusive* color) weren't enough, it's an induction range, so electricity and magnets heat cooking surfaces directly. This range has front-row tickets to every major fashion show and summers at Lake Como.
Microwaving food so that every drop of moisture evaporates and your chicken breast suddenly takes on the texture of actual sandpaper is the worst. This steam oven knows it. It has a sheet pan and a direct plumbing line built in, so that chicken will NEVER dry out. Note also: It cleans itself. 🙌🏻
This rotisserie is basically a trippy chicken visualizer. The burners are embedded behind a layer of cast iron, so the contraption doesn't even need a door to contain the heat (or prevent you from burning yourself). Poultry becomes kitchen art. We'd pull up chairs to watch the spit rotate a trussed chicken around and around and around again.
The hottest thing in grilling is a big hot rock. Pirch staffers talk about the Evo Affinity 30Ge, a massive circular griddle, as if it were a living creature with a bad eavesdropping habit. And, honestly, maybe it is, since its purpose is for "social cooking experiences." But the almost three-feet-in-diameter ceramic flat-top griddle allows you to have three pizzas cooking while the rest of your family has 50 pancakes and a mountain of shrimp fired up. You know, typical Tuesday night dinner stuff.
See what we mean?
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The only thing preventing us from drinking infinite bottles of wine is that we can't finish them all in one sitting. Slip a bottle of wine into the machine, and pull a lever to pour. Don't worry—the machine pumps argon back into the bottle between uses to preserve the wine. We know turning water into wine is the ultimate in #goals, but wine that comes out a faucet as if it's water? If this is the future, we'll take it.