Photos by Brian Addison. Full gallery below.
When Isaac Salgado goes marching down the grocery aisle with his shopping cart during the holiday season, the baffled stares and inquisitive eyes of passersby are inevitable. They can’t help it. After all, it should be within every normal human being to question why a man would have a cart filled with Cheez-Its, bubble gum, M&Ms, food coloring, Nilla wafers, Oreos, Wheat Thins, Twizzlers, lemon drops… Either he is purposefully inducing early onset Type II diabetes or he is unable to control his children’s addiction to high fructose corn syrup.
Or there’s the other possibility—a far more magical one at that. Perhaps he is a master gingerbread house builder, a man obsessed with creating candylands that are massive, detailed and, on a far more depressing note, becoming a rarity more and more throughout the holiday seasons.
“I spend hours at the market,” Salgado said. “I have to continually reimagine products and things. Can this be a door? Can these work as a rooftop? I just let my imagination go wild and, I gotta admit, it’s a ton of fun.”
The former executive chef, who opened a cleaning business after he discovered that the time-consuming love of the commercial kitchen doesn’t quite pair well with an equally time-consuming family, has taken on the windowed corner of real estate group DOMA’s downtown location at Pine and 4th to show off his latest sugary landscape.
Though not quite on the level of his last sugar development, which measured 24 feet long and 18 feet high, his latest creation is still impressive. Composed of 16 houses, the dreamy development took Salgado weeks. Baking and decorating takes about five to seven hours per house, with baking taking one to two hours (with a full day of resting) and decorating consuming the rest of the painstaking endeavor, including an entire night and afternoon spent creating icicles and garland.
When we say painstaking, we mean it: the entirety of the houses’ details—minus the final phase of putting them on display—are completed inside Salgado’s own home kitchen.
“If I had an industrial kitchen, this would be totally different,” Salgado said. “I do parks, waterfalls, slides, sleighs… But with limited space, this whole thing is very exhausting.”
While you are welcome to check out Salgado’s classic holiday work of art, he wants to make sure of one thing: don’t give into your inner Hansel or Gretel and start eating the display. Not only is it rude, it’s kinda gross considering the sweets will sit out for a total of six weeks. Tasty for the eye—not so much the mouth.
DOMA is located at 401 Pine Ave.
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