10. The Personalized Meal

You must have noticed how whenever you place an order in a branch of Starbucks the barista always asks for your name; then, when your beverage arrives, you find that it has been scrawled across the side of the cup. Now, this might seem to be necessary to avoid confusion at peak times, when there will be a large number of people standing expectantly at the counter, all waiting for their cappuccinos or skinny lattes. This is not merely a matter of operational convenience, though. Rather, this form of “personalization” is company policy. Some even believe that it actually leads to a better experience for the customer. After all, one has the impression that the drink has been especially made for you. The question that the gastrophysicist really wants an answer to here, though, is whether this (or any other) form of personalization can make whatever you consume taste better too.

Everyone loves personalization

That personalization sells was amply demonstrated by the phenomenal success of the “Share a Coke” offer in 2013 and 2014, whereby consumers could buy a bottle of the fizzy black stuff with their name printed on the label (see Figure 10.1). Make no mistake, this is superficial personalization (in the sense that the product itself hasn’t changed). The drink is more or less the same the world over, and yet something about seeing your name emblazoned there on the front label changes the experience for you. So easy, so simple, and yet so incredibly effective: because of this campaign, sales increased for the first time in more than a decade.

No wonder, then, that many other food and beverage companies have been scrambling to try and copy Coke’s success with their own examples of personalization. Indeed, according to an article that appeared in Forbes Magazine, “Personalization is not a trend. It is a marketing tsunami.” Late in 2015, for instance, Moët & Chandon set up a number of photo booths in branches of Selfridges across the U.K. where their customers could upload a snap of themselves on to the front of their Mini Moët champagne bottles. The perfect Christmas present, apparently. Vedett has also been encouraging people to customize its beer bottles with their own pictures, and Frito-Lay did something very similar, offering 10,000 bags of potato chips for people to personalize with photos of their “favorite summer moments.” In 2016, Kellogg’s ran an offer whereby anyone who bought the requisite number of boxes of cereal could send off for their very own personalized spoon.*

Figure 10.1. During the summers of 2013 and 2014 Coke’s marketing strategy made headlines when it swapped the powerful equity of its own brand for the names of consumers across seventy countries. The campaign had originally kicked off in Australia in 2011.

Have you heard of the “self-prioritization effect”?

Why exactly should people respond differently to products that are associated with themselves? One possibility here relates to the “self-prioritization effect.” Psychologists from Oxford recently discovered that arbitrary visual symbols (such as circles, squares and triangles), i.e., stimuli that have no intrinsic meaning, can nevertheless still take on a special significance just as soon as they become linked to us. In a typical study, one arbitrary stimulus (let’s say a blue triangle) is associated with the self, while another is paired with a friend or someone else. The participants sitting in the laboratory are asked to press one button as rapidly as possible whenever they are shown the self-relevant object, and another whenever they see the stimulus belonging to the other person (perhaps a yellow square or a red circle). The results of a number of such studies have revealed that self-relevant objects are rapidly prioritized. That is, you see them sooner and respond to them faster than the other stimuli that have arbitrarily been classified as belonging to someone else. They have, in other words, become more salient because they are related or, in some sense, “belong” to you.

My suspicion is that a similar phenomenon may well be at play when consumers come across a Styrofoam cup of coffee or bottle of Coke with their name on it. And presumably the birthday cake that comes to the table will also taste better to the person whose birthday it is, for much the same reason.

Do you have a favorite mug? For me, it is the orange one with a cartoon pig on one side and a chicken on the other that I look for every morning when I make myself a cappuccino. I get annoyed if I find that it is still in the dishwasher. Of course, the coffee is the same whichever cup I drink from. But somehow the experience feels different; the drink just doesn’t taste the same. It could be that the self-prioritization effect might, in some small way, help to explain why it is that beverages always seem to taste better drunk from a favorite mug. One might think of this as a kind of “sensation transference” (sometimes referred to as “affective ventriloquism”), a concept first introduced more than half a century ago by the legendary North American marketer Louis Cheskin. This is where the feelings we have about the cup, our very own cup or mug (i.e., all those warm feelings of ownership and familiarity), are transferred to our perception of the contents. There is probably also a link here to the “endowment effect”: This favorite of the behavioral economists refers to the fact that we ascribe more value to things merely because we own them. This phenomenon is also known as the “status quo bias.”

As far as I am aware, the proper experiment has yet to be conducted, but someone should really do it. All the budding gastrophysicist has to do is invite a group of people (thirty or forty is probably enough) to taste and evaluate coffee from their own cup and then coffee from someone else’s mug (making sure, of course, to counterbalance the order of presentation). Maybe the coffee in the two cups is the same, or perhaps it’s different—only the gastrophysicist knows for sure (or at least I hope they do). You almost don’t have to do the study, though, in order to know which cup people would prefer to drink from. The funny thing is that when you quiz them people often feel almost embarrassed to admit they prefer their favorite mug, because at one level they believe it can’t change the taste, that they are somehow just being silly. And yet, as a gastrophysicist, I firmly believe that this form of personalization really does make a difference to how much we enjoy the experience—a subtle one, perhaps, but significant nonetheless.

The “cocktail party effect”

For many decades now, psychologists have been aware that your name seems to have a special meaning or significance: somehow it just “pops out” of the background hubbub. You are probably most familiar with this happening when you suddenly become aware that someone else is talking about you while mingling at a noisy party, hence the name the “cocktail party effect.” But, at one level, maybe this prioritization of your own name is not so surprising given just how much experience you have had of hearing it all your life. What is so noteworthy about self-prioritization, though, by contrast, is just how rapidly it comes to influence our behavior. It occurs almost as soon as an object becomes, in some sense, “ours.” Even a silly blue triangle is treated differently, once it has been assigned to us. What is more, and supporting these behavioral changes, brain-imaging studies show that different neural circuits are activated by self- as compared to other-relevant stimuli.

And that is not all: even the first letter of our last name has been shown to exert an influence over certain aspects of our behavior. For instance, those whose surname starts with a letter that appears later in the alphabet are more likely to respond earlier in online auctions and limited-time offers, i.e., those with a surname beginning with the letter “Z” are a little more impatient! This would appear to be tied to their names having been read out last at school, because married names don’t exert anything like the same influence. There are a number of other intriguing phenomena, beyond this “last-name effect.” You might find it surprising, for example, that we all tend to prefer items that have a similar spelling as the first letters of our own name (the “name-letter effect”). Moreover, marketers know that we like those products, brands and even potential partners more if their name happens to share at least a few letters with our own.

Extending this line of reasoning to food might lead one to predict that we should all prefer, albeit ever so slightly, those dishes that share more letters with our own name as well. For me, spicy (Spence) food is the taste experience I always crave after a long trip. According to the research, the three shared letters with my surname may be doing at least some of the work here in terms of my liking for this sensation. Furthermore, whenever I order chili con carne, another of my favorite dishes, I cannot stop myself from thinking about all the letters it shares with my own first name (Charles). Why not try this for yourself? How many of your favorite dishes share letters with your name? And, next time you meet a girl called Victoria, don’t be surprised to find that she has something of a penchant for sponge cake.

Personalization in the restaurant

There are a number of ways in which the service offering can be personalized in the restaurant that are likely to enhance your meal experience. One relatively simple example here comes from those restaurants like Ricard Camarena’s Arrop in Valencia, Spain, where the waiting staff take note of the type of bread that you choose when the basket is first brought to the table. When they return, they will very deliberately point to the bread that you selected last time and ask whether you would like the same again, or whether you would prefer something different. By this one act, they are letting you know, however subtly, that they are paying attention. Many other well-run restaurants use similar techniques.

Another thoughtful example here comes from a restaurant that we have heard a lot about in the previous chapters, namely the three-Michelin-starred Fat Duck. The waiting staff there carefully observe the diners at the start of the meal in order to figure out their handedness. A mental note is made of any lefties at the table and thereafter the dinner service is aligned accordingly. The interesting thing, though, is that no mention of this is made to those sitting at the table; in fact, all that the less-observant diner may be aware of is that the experience just seems to “flow.” A few of the more attentive diners will probably spot the personalization, and hopefully appreciate the effort and attention to detail that has gone into creating a dining experience especially for them.

“Where everybody knows your name”

Who doesn’t like to be recognized when returning to a favorite haunt? You know the sort of thing: “Why, hello, Mr. Spence, how nice to see you again.” This has been christened the “Cheers” effect, after the Boston bar in the 1980s sitcom. While it is unlikely that the staff in your local branch of Pizza Hut will remember your name,* the ultra-high-end restaurants take things to a whole new level when it comes to making their guests feel special. The ultimate example has to be Charlie Trotter’s famous refrain of “Curbside!,” which would ring out through the kitchen of his namesake restaurant in Chicago. According to London-based chef Jesse Dunford Wood (who worked there for a while), that was the cue that a VIP was about to arrive. Everyone in the kitchen would then march outside and line up in front of the restaurant’s entrance to welcome the guest (see Figure 10.2). Those of you who remember the hit TV series Downton Abbey will recognize this scene; staff at the house welcome the lord of the manor like this when he returns home after a long trip.

Figure 10.2. Charlie Trotter waiting with his staff for the arrival of a VIP (in this case, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel). A welcome guaranteed to make the diner feel special!

New York uber-restaurateur Danny Meyer caused something of a stir back in 2010 with the publication of Setting the Table, his memoir of a life in the restaurant business. Meyer has been in charge of a string of famous restaurants, including Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern and Eleven Madison Park. Time and again in his book, he stresses the importance of personalizing the service at his restaurants. For years, they have been storing information about the diners when the initial booking is taken, so as to ensure a familiar welcome when the guests arrive. In fact, they keep a file of regular guests and their gastronomic peccadilloes. You can imagine the sort of thing: does so-and-so prefer to be seated in the window or hidden away in an alcove? What is their first name and, more importantly, do they like to be recognized or do they prefer to remain anonymous? Do they have a fondness for Super Tuscans, perhaps, or, like Jay-Z, prefer white burgundies . . . ?

While Meyer’s New York restaurants are often cited as leading the way in terms of attentive and personalized service, many others claim to have adopted a similar policy. Famous Chicago venues such as Alinea, Next, Moto and iNG all try to find out something about those who are dining with them. According to Nick Kokonas, co-owner of Alinea, Next and The Aviary, they have kept a database of every single guest who has been on the premises since they opened. Initially, he says, the idea “was simply to identify [guests] visually and thus greet them by name, like saying hello to an old friend you are greeting in your home.” Over time, though, this has morphed into the delivery of a more personalized experience for the diner. Even more surprising is the suggestion that the restaurateur might, on occasion, use such information to follow up on any of the regulars who haven’t shown up in a while.

How to make a first-time guest feel special

While it is easy to see how the restaurateur with a compendious Rolodex, or whatever the technological equivalent is these days, can make their regulars feel special, how can you give someone who has never been to one of your establishments the same experience?

Imagine for a moment how you would feel going to a restaurant in a new city where the doorman acknowledges you by name. Then you sit down, only to find that the waiter assigned to look after your table for the evening happens to come from your home town (somewhere far, far away). How freaky would that be? Don’t worry, though, this is not ESP, rather just a sign that the restaurant has been googling you prior to your arrival. Justin Roller, for instance, the maître d’ at Eleven Madison Park, is famous for googling every single one of the diners before they arrive, looking for anything that can help his staff to make diners feel both special and comfortable (i.e., almost as if they were at home). “If, for example, Roller discovers it’s a couple’s anniversary, he’ll then try to figure out which anniversary [. . .] All that googling pays off when the maître d’ greets total strangers by name and wishes them a happy tenth anniversary before they’ve even taken off their coats. (‘We want to evoke a sense of being welcomed home,’ [another staff member] says.)” It is hard not to notice how often commentators point to the outstanding customer service as an important part of the success of Meyer’s restaurants. Now, at least you know the secret.

Would it bother you if a restaurant googled you before you even walked through the door? Or would you welcome the practice because of the personalized service that you might receive as a result? Well, according to the results of a poll conducted back in 2010, nearly 40% of North Americans said that it was OK, their assumption being that it would lead to some kind of special treatment. A further 16% thought it was a little strange, but said that they could probably live with it. However, 15% of respondents thought it downright creepy. There is presumably a fine line to be drawn here between having a better experience as a result of personalization and feeling that one’s privacy has somehow been violated. As one restaurant consultant interviewed by The New York Times put it: “If you say, ‘I know you like a white Burgundy from the 1970s,’ that is creepy. Instead, you ask them what they like and point them in the direction of that white Burgundy.”

When it slipped out in the press recently that The Fat Duck was googling its diners, several hundred reservations were immediately canceled. Not a problem for a restaurant that is reputed to have 30,000 booking requests a day, but still a slight hiccup that one could have done without. The irony here is that the restaurant, like all those top North American venues, has actually been googling their guests for years. But that is beside the point: what is more interesting is the marked difference in reaction from North Americans. Perhaps the English are just that little bit more reserved.

What’s next in terms of personalization?

The service philosophy in many of these high-end restaurants is clearly fundamental to their offering. The aim, at least at the very top, is for people to want to come back to the restaurant because of the service. Remember that poor service is the number-one criticism of diners year after year. A professional attitude is important, obviously, and good food helps too, but personalization is key. It is, after all, one of the best ways to make the diner feel special. The more personalized the service, the more likely we are to enjoy the experience, the better we will remember the food as tasting and the larger the tip we will leave (though this is apparently another area where the British tend to be a little more reserved than their North American counterparts).

The challenge, moving forward, at least as I see it, is how to take the idiosyncratic or one-off personalization of service at restaurants like Eleven Madison Park and industrialize it. For, ultimately, the canny restaurateur wants all of their diners to feel special, not just the lucky few who caught the maître d’s eye when he googled them. Though, of course, when personalization becomes ubiquitous, it must surely lose some of its appeal. There is a very real danger of it coming across as artificially crafted as opposed to naturally friendly.

“Tell me when you were born and I will create a dish especially for you.” I can still remember a sentence to this effect appearing on the menu at The Fat Duck a decade or so ago, when the tasting menu was still optional. Nowadays, a more systematic approach to personalization has been adopted at the restaurant, one that revolves around nostalgia.* And rather than (or perhaps as well as) googling their diners, the restaurant staff ask about them directly. From the moment you manage to secure a booking (normally two months in advance), those working behind the scenes in Bray will be trying to find out some key information in order to personalize the experience tableside. The last time I went with my wife, we received a flurry of e-mails asking about our childhoods.

Part of the way in which such information is incorporated into the experience comes at the meal’s end, when the miniature sweet shop is wheeled over to your table blowing cute little smoke rings from the chimney. This marvel of engineering looks like an ornate doll’s house (and is rumored to have cost more than a Rolls-Royce!). You are handed a coin and, when you insert it into the Sweet Shop (see Figure 10.3), drawers open and close in a seeming chaotic sequence. Eventually, though, the contraption* comes to what seems to be a haphazard stop, with one of the drawers left open. (It looks random, but, of course, it is not.) The waiter then hands the diner their very own bag of sweets from within the open drawer. The kinds of sweets that the diner finds in the bag should hopefully resonate with what they remember eating as a child, an update of “the kid in a sweet shop” idea. Nostalgia is being used here to deliver a generic form of personalization (generic to those of a certain age, i.e., born in a specific decade). The hope is this interlude will help to trigger positive childhood memories and emotions that will come to color the diner’s recollection of the meal as a whole. The nostalgia/storytelling angle is still evolving.

While this level of personalization is currently restricted to high-end restaurants, it is not going to stay that way for long. There is already evidence that more mainstream venues are capitalizing on the various online tools, such as Venga (and OpenTable), that allow the restaurateur to pick up some useful “diner-int.” By integrating such guest management and loyalty programs with a restaurant’s point-of-sale systems, the staff can track their customers’ average spend, their favorite items from the menu and even their preferred tipple. And—echoing what we saw earlier—some top restaurants use it to record the handedness of their diners. The Venga system is not cheap (currently coming in at somewhere around $149–$249 per month per location), but it is a price that a growing number of restaurateurs feel it worth paying to give their guests that VIP treatment. Here’s a hint of what some are aspiring to: “By the time a guest walks through the front doors at Ping Pong Dim Sum in Washington D.C., marketing manager Myca Ferrer can already be fairly certain what he or she will order.” Perhaps such predictive software could also play a role in helping to reduce the phenomenal amount of food waste seen at most restaurants today.

Figure 10.3. A personalized gift is waiting just for you inside one of the drawers of the Sweet Shop at meal’s end at The Fat Duck restaurant.

For those of you thinking about how to personalize your own dinner party, why not start by placing a name card where you want people to sit. You could use this crowd-control measure to keep all the bores together, as the Queen’s party planner advises. But who knows, it might make your guests enjoy their meal a little more too. And of course you could try googling anyone you don’t know so well. It can’t do any harm, after all—well, just as long as they either don’t care or else don’t find out!

At the chef’s table

This concept ticks a number of the right boxes in terms of on-trend contemporary eating practices. A small number of diners get to sit around a central space behind which the chef prepares, or at the very least finishes, the dishes. It gives the solo diner something to look at, not to mention someone to talk to. It also enables diners to see their food being freshly prepared. And depending on the chef, there may well be an element of theater and spectacle too. Crucially, there is also more scope for personalization. Typically, the format is a prix fixe (“fixed price”) menu, as at the three-Michelin-starred chef’s table at Brooklyn Fare, in New York, and 12 Chairs, in Shanghai. It is hard not to be personal, after all, when the diner can look directly into the chef’s eyes.

The ultimate in terms of personalized dining is the private chef. While this is something that you would normally expect to see only in the homes of the rich and famous, you can nevertheless find a few restaurants out there offering pretty much this level of service. Fuad’s, in Houston, is one such venue. The head chef, Joseph Mashkoori, will come to your table and ask you what you’d like to eat. He might proffer a few suggestions, but he will insist that he is happy to cook whatever you want—from chateaubriand to a Philly steak sandwich. Meanwhile, in New York, Jehangir Mehta does something similar in his culinary venture called “Me and You.” According to the website, the diner is promised: “A unique private dining experience like none other. Every dish is custom crafted to suit your taste, play to your palate and inspire your juices.” The Solo Per Due restaurant in Vacone, Italy, also offers a very private meal experience, with only a single table for two.

A matter of choice

At one level, this drive toward the personalization of the dining experience would seem to be at odds with the simultaneous rise of the tasting menu (where the diners are given virtually no choice about what they will eat).* The waiter may ask the diner about any allergies and dietary requirements they have, but that’s pretty much it. In fact, most of the time the only decision that the diner has to worry about is whether or not to go for the wine pairing, assuming that there is one. But what, exactly, explains the growing popularity of the tasting menu? Isn’t this, in some sense, the very antithesis of personalization?

Some commentators have wanted to link it to attempts by chefs and restaurateurs to increase the memorability of the meal. As we saw in “The Meal Remembered,” the more dishes the diner tries, the more opportunity there is for “Sticktion”; tasting menus typically have more courses than one would choose if ordering from the normal à la carte menu. It is easy to imagine how, when everyone is enjoying the same food at the same time, it is going to enhance the feeling that one really is sharing a meal (see “Social Dining”). And then, from the chef’s perspective, perhaps the economies associated with serving only a limited range of seasonal produce, and being able to select one’s best offerings, also helps make up for the lack of choice.* There are, of course, those of a more cynical persuasion who see this as just another way to extract more cash from the diner, since tasting menus tend to command a higher price too. A more positive take, though, might simply be to say that diners don’t like the process of choosing (and thus having to decide against all the things that they can’t have). Perhaps there is also a link to the unwritten rule in the restaurant business that the better the venue, the smaller the number of options the diner is given.

Some people are offended by the loss of choice. According to Tim Hayward, writing in the Financial Times: “Menus without choice blaspheme against the doctrine of dining.” However, it is not only the tasting menu where the diners’ range of options is limited. From à la carte to those joints serving only a single dish, it can feel as if there is a steady reduction of choice across many styles of dining. In a sense, though, this is all just an extension of the prix fixe menu or even the table d’hôte that used to be such a common feature of dining out in France and some other European countries. Talking of which, one incredibly successful and long-running restaurant with limited choice is the L’Entrecôte chain in France (and London, New York, Bogotá and beyond). While there is a menu for drinks and desserts, there is only one option as far as the starter and main course is concerned: Salad, followed by steak (the diner is given the choice only of how they would like it cooked), a delicious sauce (the recipe is kept secret) and French fries à volonté. Virtually no options, no personalization, and yet people queue, sometimes for more than an hour, to get a table (they do not take reservations). So, you have to ask yourself, how much choice do diners really want?

Well, on the one hand, it is certainly true that what the marketers used to tell us—namely, that more choice is always better—no longer seems to hold true (if it ever did). Give people too much choice and they can feel overloaded. If you are going to give diners choice, seven seems to be the magic number: seven starters, seven to ten mains, and seven desserts. Any less and there is a danger of there being too little choice. Any more and the diner may find it difficult to decide. Of course, the trick for those restaurants wishing to offer more choices than such a fixed format allows is to break the menu up into a number of sections. How many? You guessed it: the recommendation is again seven.

Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather Group, U.K., has an anecdote that fits nicely here about how airlines ended up selling far more cheap tickets as soon as they started to restrict the number of discount destinations they offered. Again, this would seem to run counter to sound economic principles. Surely, the more options there are, the more likely it is that a customer will find a destination they want. And yet the sales data emphatically shows the opposite to be true. Behavioral economists know only too well that we really can be paralyzed by too much choice. Presumably, that is why we have recently started to see the emergence of the “condiment sommelier” in places like New York, whose job is to guide you through the options for, say, mustard or mayo when the range of alternatives becomes too formidable.

The “Ikea effect”

You know the situation: you are at home preparing a meal for your friends and you think that you have really excelled yourself this time, that the food tastes absolutely fabulous. Your guests, polite as always, tell you that the food is delicious. But what do they really think? My advice as a gastrophysicist is don’t trust what they say; rather, watch what they do. The question still remains: are your guests just being polite, or do they perhaps taste the food differently because they didn’t make it themselves?

Marketers have a name for the increased value that things seem to have if we make them ourselves: they call it the “Ikea effect.” In other words, just because you assemble that wooden table yourself, it is worth more to you than if it had come pre-built. But while there is plenty of evidence that co-creation invests value in the outcome as far as flimsy furniture is concerned, what we want to know here is whether the same is true of a meal that you make for your friends. And does the answer depend on whether you are cooking from scratch versus cooking from a meal kit or partially prepared meal?

Norwegian researchers have started to address these questions. In one series of experiments, they had various groups of individuals (not all students, you will be relieved to hear) make a meal from a kit in a kitchen laboratory. The researchers assessed what people said after they had prepared it themselves, or after being told that someone else had cooked it. Intriguingly, those who had prepared the meal themselves (or, to put it better, who thought that they had) rated it as tasting much better than those who believed that they were evaluating a dish made by someone else. This despite the fact that everyone was actually trying the same food (an Indian tikka masala dinner, if you must know). Furthermore, those who had to fry the meat and prepare the food as prescribed on the side of the package rated it as tasting better than those who merely had to stir and heat. In other words, the more involved the cook was in the act of creation, the better the end result tasted (at least to them).

So the chances are that if you make your friends dinner the food really will taste a little different to you, and this difference is likely to be more pronounced if you cooked from scratch (rather than “cheating” with a pre-prepared meal). However, the bad news is that, if anything, the food probably tastes better to you than it does to anyone else (since they didn’t make it). What all this means in practice is that you should get your friends involved in the kitchen, so that the food will taste better to them too.

Making cake

There is an interesting link here to one of the marketers’ favorite case studies, involving the Betty Crocker cake mix. According to the oft-recounted tale, this powdered cake mix failed on its launch in the marketplace back in the middle of the last century. The product’s fortunes took off only once a certain marketing executive figured out that the product formula should be changed so that the home cook had to add an egg to the mix. This obviously increased the effort involved in baking the cake, something that any rational analysis would surely say was a bad idea. And yet sales steadily climbed. The suggestion was that by adding the egg the cook somehow became invested in the process—that is, they could feel more like they were actually cooking! And it is quite possible that the finished cake would actually taste better to whoever made it too, because of their greater involvement in its making—the Ikea effect again.

You find the Betty Crocker story recounted all over the place—even the top North American food writer Michael Pollan talks about it in one of his bestselling books. It sounds almost too good a story to be true, right? Well, that is most probably because it is, at least according to a 2013 history of cake mixes that appeared in Bon Appétit magazine. It turns out that a patent for “a cake mix that required the home baker to add a fresh egg,” rather than a powdered one, was granted back in 1935 to a company called P. Duff & Sons. It was in the 1950s that sales of cake mix (both with and without fresh eggs) stalled. The innovation that actually revived the fortunes of the cake mix was the introduction not of the egg but rather icing; that is, the explosion of interest in customizing one’s cakes and buns with fancy designs was what really reinvigorated sales. So the Betty Crocker story is just a load of old baloney; nevertheless, the point about the importance of personalization still stands.

Before we leave this topic, I am going to have to pick a fight. And not just with anyone, but with Nobel Prize–winning experimental psychologist and now behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman. He is in print, in The New York Times, no less, trying to justify the claim that “sandwiches taste better when someone else makes them.” This would certainly appear to be an idea that resonates with journalists around the world, as the story has been picked up by any number of news outlets. Nevertheless, if you trace the story back to its sources, it turns out that the assertion is based on nothing more than speculation. In other words, no one has, at least as far as I can tell, ever done the proper sandwich study. And, given what we have just learned about the Ikea effect, I see little reason to believe that we would, in fact, prefer other people’s sandwiches to our own. I don’t know about you, but I certainly think my own sandwiches taste pretty darn good! And I am not alone on this one; from what people are saying on the online discussion forums it would seem that many others share my intuition. Once again, then, another important piece of gastrophysics research waiting to be done.

I would like to end this chapter by asking: why is it OK to customize some dishes but not others? Customization can be thought of as a form of personalization, but one where control remains firmly in the hands of the consumer (or customer). It should feel empowering (rather than creepy). It was the opportunities for customization that were provided by the encouragement to ice one’s cake that led to the revival in sales of cake mix. In the case of dining, customization occurs when the customer has some say over how their choice of dish is prepared, seasoned and/or served, everything from how spicy their curry through to how well done their burger. When the waiter offers to grate some Parmesan over your pasta at your local Italian, or you instinctively reach for the salt or pepper next time you go to the steakhouse—these are all examples of customization. But when should we feel entitled to customize our food? Let me illustrate with an infamous tale from the annals of restaurant folklore.

“Would you be so kind as to pass the salt and pepper?”

Marco Pierre White, the first British celebrity chef to be awarded three Michelin stars, comes from my home town of Leeds, in the north of England. His cookbook White Heat was one of the first I used when learning to cook, given to me by my sister on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday. It is still on (and often off) the shelf three decades later, containing, as it does, a truly sublime recipe for lemon tart. However, this chef first came to fame—or should that be public notoriety?—for throwing diners out of his restaurant should they be impertinent enough to ask for the salt and pepper. White said that it was an insult for any diner to want to season (or customize, we might say) their food in his restaurant. Seasoning a dish is, after all, the chef’s remit, no? So, if a diner were to ask for the salt and pepper, then they could mean nothing but to insult the chef. Why so? Well, because they would be implying that the kitchens hadn’t done their job properly. That, at least, is how the chef saw it.

In hindsight, one can view this incident as an early sign of the ascendance of the star (or prima donna) chef, no longer content to be hidden away in some dark and hot back room, never to be seen and rarely, if ever, to be acknowledged by the dining public. It presages, I would say, today’s situation, whereby the celebrity chef has an open kitchen at the front of the restaurant for everyone to see. The chef, in other words, is now very much the star of the show. They call the shots, and don’t we all know it!

However, while it was Marco Pierre White’s tantrum that first brought the question of customization to the table, as it were, it does seem to me that the salt and pepper have been slowly becoming a little more elusive in restaurants up and down the land. You certainly don’t find them in the majority of high-end modernist establishments.* So, one might ask, is it not just choice that the chefs wish to restrict but also the diner’s opportunity to customize their food? (At the same time, of course, the top restaurateurs are ramping up the level of personalization in other parts of the meal experience.)

So why do we customize some dishes but not others?

Come to think of it, I would never dream of asking for salt and pepper in The Fat Duck. But why not, I ask myself. (And why don’t we have sugar and citric acid shakers to season our desserts too, I wonder.) It is partly about trusting the skills of the chef, or rather the culinary team beavering away in the kitchens. However, it partly relates to the nature of the food that is being served. Much of it is so unlike anything that I (or you, I presume) have ever had before that it can be hard to know quite what the chef had in mind, what they were trying to achieve. As such, I have no internal standard against which to judge the dishes. All I know for sure is that they are delicious. So, given that I do not really know what I am supposed to be tasting, I am really not sure what outcome I would be aiming for, were I to try seasoning it myself.

We can contrast this with the situation when you go out for a steak. Not just any steak, mind you; let’s imagine you’ve just ordered the £140 Japanese wagyu 8-oz. Rib-eye steak from star Austrian chef Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant Cut, in The Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, London. In this case, I most definitely do expect to be asked how I would like my meat to be cooked. And there would be a riot if I didn’t find the salt and pepper close at hand!* Notice that we are not so far off the price point of The Fat Duck (at least not once you’ve ordered your fries, sides and starter, etc.), and yet customization of the food is expected in one case and not even worth contemplating in the other. So price, or the skill of the kitchen, can’t be the whole story here.

So what, then, is the difference? Well, I have had many steaks before, so I have some sort of internal standard that I am aiming for. My food memories may, of course, be inaccurate (see “The Meal Remembered”) but still I have an idea (or at least think I do) about the taste. Whenever a pepper grinder is available, though, I will habitually reach for it and add a liberal dose to my food, even before I have taken the first mouthful. How are we to explain such behavior? Could it be that, by this simple act, I am somehow making the dish mine (customizing it, if you will), and that this somehow automatically makes the food taste better (in much the same way that it might when we rotate the plate just a little once the waiter has placed it down before us). Alternatively, however, I suppose it is also possible that we might all realize that our own taste preferences tend to reside at one end of the taste spectrum (for instance, I know that I like my food spicier than most other people), and hence that most food that has been prepared for the masses will taste better to us if we adapt it to our own personal profile. That said, perhaps the real distinction here relates to the degree of adulteration of the raw ingredients on their way to becoming a dish on the menu, and thereafter on my plate. So for relatively unprocessed foods, like steak, it is OK to season; it may even be expected. But as soon as that meat has been cooked in or presented with a sauce, say, then the justification for seasoning the dish ourselves is diminished somewhat, especially when we are in the hands of a top chef. And when it comes to the fabulous concoctions on the menu at The Fat Duck, they are so highly processed one may no longer have any real sense of quite what the raw ingredients were; that is, they have been transformed into something totally new. Under such conditions, then, there is simply less of an incentive for customization, as the goal of doing so is no longer so clear. Note that it is not that personalization is removed entirely in such venues, rather that it occurs in other aspects of the service or the meal.

My personal answer

So, in closing, let’s return to the question of whether chef Marco Pierre White was right when he said that the diners had no right to customize his food. Is the seasoning of a dish really something that is best left to the chef (assuming that they have got the requisite number of Michelin stars)? Ultimately, isn’t the diner always right? And never forget, as we saw in the “Taste” chapter, we all live in very different taste worlds. In fact, once you realize just how distinct and personal your taste, smell and even flavor perception really are, there can be no looking back. So, in the future, will the foods and drinks served in restaurants themselves start to match our own personal taste profiles? This was another of those far-reaching ideas that was prefigured by the Futurists. The movement’s founder, F. T. Marinetti, wrote that “[w]e will create meals rich in different qualities, in which for each person dishes will be designed which take into account sex, character, profession, and sensibility.” Recently, consumers have been offered the opportunity to personalize the taste of everything from chocolate (Maison Cailler) through to champagne (Duval-Leroy), while Illy has developed a new system to allow their customers to adjust the sensory profile of their coffee.

So, given all of the above, I am sure you’ll understand why I recommend that you leave the salt and pepper on the table the next time you throw a dinner party, no matter how good (you think) your cooking is, and no matter what you end up doing to the ingredients. As a gastrophysicist, I’d say that the fact that the diner chooses to season their dish shouldn’t be thought of as an insult to the chef, but rather as a form of customization that recognizes the very different taste worlds in which we all live.