It’s not often that an incredibly talented top chef and his team open up their inner sanctum for all to see. But last week Uchi’s Chef Tyson Cole and his all-star team of chefs did precisely that.

On May 30, James Beard Award-winner Tyson Cole, along with Google+ and Zagat, hosted a live Google+ hangout on Zagat’s page. A handful of participants got to “hang out” with Cole and his chefs at one of the team’s bi-weekly tastings to evaluate and collaborate on new dishes the chefs have been working on.

The hangout participants got to remotely view the tasting of three of the eight dishes presented; a Google moderator narrated the tastings and asked questions. Participants were able to ask questions too.

“It wasn’t anything like what I’d expected. Good and bad,” says Cole. “When we [Google and Cole’s team] talked about it, Google said it was going to be this live feed and interactive tasting where people on Google+ could sign in, be a part of it and ask questions. It was a little intimidating going into it, but it ended up being quite simple. Overall it was a pretty cool thing to do.”

Surprisingly, Cole only got a few questions directly from participants — one about how he keeps the fish cold when it gets so hot down here in Texas and another about using produce from local farmers. Personally, I would have asked him how Paul Qui makes those Brussels sprouts so darn good or requested that the deconstructed carrot cake at Uchiko make another appearance.

But this first-of-its-kind Google+ hangout has bigger implications than merely granting insider access to one of Austin’s most successful and respected chefs and kitchens, it symbolizes a new frontier where food meets technology in a way that uniquely engages audiences and invites them to be a part of the creation process itself.

“We are very astute at recording all the processes of how we go about making the food,” says Cole, who published his first cookbook, Uchi Cookbook, in 2011. “But I’m to the point that I’m starting to think that we should be videoing a lot of it as well.”

“You look at a place like an iconic restaurant of all time — El Bulli for example — and it wasn’t just one chef, Ferran Adria, who made the restaurant himself. It was all the talent that worked with him, for him and under him. This is where we are at with Uchi with our three locations. The amount of talent that we have is amazing. We need to use technology and go one step past taking photographs of everything and recording every recipe, and start to take video of the recipes being prepared.”

There is so much information, Cole says. And people don’t just want to see the final presentation of a dish, they want to see it all — where it came from, how it was made and how it should be enjoyed.

“Food TV and food video technology have evolved,” Cole says. “It used to just be a chef in front of a camera making a dish [think Julia Child] and now it’s video of a chef up to his waist in a river, cooking and saying, ‘My grandfather made this for me when I was ten and this is how he did it...’ It’s much more involved.”

If Cole could do it again, he would make the live event more about the food and less about the people. The tasting at Uchiko was captured by only one camera placed on top of a computer that connected the video event participants to Cole and his team. To make such an event more foodie-centric would require someone with a hand-held video camera right in the action and close up — filming the food actually being made, presented and tasted.

“I would probably do it in the kitchen next time,” Cole says.

And he might think about changing the interface, “I had to wear headphones. It’s like you are at one computer and I’m at another computer talking about food and wearing headphones,” he says. “It was kind of surreal, space age-like. One dish had broccoli in it and I had never eaten broccoli with headphones on before.”

The Google+ hangout was held in conjunction with an exclusive Google Offer for a Chef’s Tasting Event at Uchiko on June 11. Guests will enjoy a seven-course dinner prepared by Cole and his team at Uchiko in a private dining room connected to the kitchen by a sliding door — just steps away from where the food is prepared.

Social media has made the world a much smaller place and video enables the masses to experience intimate and exclusive places. These days it’s all about access — we want to be close to the food, the source and of course, the chefs.