11. The Experiential Meal

“Did you enjoy the experience?” This, the question that was asked time and again by the various service staff who ushered the guests through the different stages of Albert Adrià’s “About 50 days,” held in London’s Café Royal. But since when did this become the question? Why not ask whether the diners enjoyed the food instead? Getting to the bottom of this matter is the topic of this chapter. It is the story of the ubiquitous rise of the “experience industries,” first predicted by Alvin Toffler in his bestselling 1970 book Future Shock.

B. Joseph Pine, II, and James H. Gilmore, building on Philip Kotler’s early (1974) ideas about atmospherics deserve the credit for introducing the “experience economy” to the marketplace. Their point was simply that consumers are not really buying meals and drinks, or, for that matter, any other kind of product or service; rather, what people want is to enjoy, and increasingly to share, “experiences.” These experiences are, by definition, multisensory. The realization, then, that dining out isn’t really about fulfilling any kind of nutritional need helps make sense of why so many people now want to know the answer to Adrià’s question.

Look around the world of fine dining and you find a growing number of chefs and restaurateurs promising to deliver multisensory dining experiences. For example, chef Andoni Aduriz (now chef at Mugaritz, in San Sebastián) had this to say of his time working at elBulli under the guidance of Ferran Adrià: “For him, what mattered most was the experience, what one felt when eating at elBulli. Everything necessary would be done to create this experience.” Or take the following newspaper description of one of Marco Pierre White’s franchise restaurants: “The steakhouse, opened two years ago, is described on its website as being ‘all about the experience; the buzz, the atmosphere and enjoying the company of friends and family in a gorgeous comfortable surrounding.’”

On the rise of theatrical dining

As we will see in this chapter, restaurant cuisine is moving from its traditional function of providing nutrition—or restoration, as in the original meaning of the term “restaurant”—toward becoming a medium for artistic expression. Restaurants are becoming stages; the waiters and chefs at some of the world’s top establishments are increasingly playing the role of actors and magicians. First there was atmospherics, then came the theater, the storytelling and the magic at mealtimes: This really is the very heart and soul of “off the plate” dining. It is all the rage among the chefs that you find jostling for position in the San Pellegrino list of the world’s top fifty restaurants. Some have been tempted to suggest, though, that such lists may be exerting undue influence . . . “At Eleven Madison Park [in New York . . .] Daniel Humm and Will Guidara devised an entire program of changes motivated in part by the perception that ‘the San Pellegrino voters reward restaurants with a strong sense of place, and of theater.’ They included a three-card-monte dessert and—further belaboring the locavore trend—a cheese-and-beer course that emerged from an old-fashioned Central Park picnic basket.” Of course, not everyone is happy. As one commentator puts it: “If the wine industry has become Parkerized, then the restaurant world might be said to have been Pellegrinoed.” Meanwhile, David Chang (of Momofuku fame) describes the archetypal “50 Best” restaurant thus: “It’s a Chinese restaurant by a guy who worked for Adrià, Redzepi, and Keller. He cooks over fire. Everything is a story of his terroir. He has his own farm and hand-dives for his own sea urchins.” In fact, some have suggested that knowing just how important it is to sell “the experience” may actually be what’s driving many of the contemporary trends in the world of high-end dining and drinking.

Sublimotion, in Ibiza, currently offers the world’s most expensive restaurant meal. Should you be lucky enough to book a seat, you will need to find close to 1,500 euros a head. At that price, the twenty-course tasting menu can’t just be about the food, now, can it? The meal must be fabulous, that’s a given. But there needs to be so much more. The underlying assumption is that diners are willing to pay a hefty premium for an experience rather than for a mere meal, no matter how tasty the food.

The rise of the open kitchen, not to mention the growing popularity of the “at the chef’s table” dining concept, can be framed in terms of their ability to transform the very preparation of food into a kind of theater. In fact, the tour of the kitchen is becoming an increasingly common component of a meal at many high-end restaurants. Juliet Kinsman, writing in the Independent on Sunday had the following to say: “If you’d told proprietors then that one day diners would demand to eyeball the cooking team at work, they’d have blanched. Now butchery’s brought to the fore and labor is part of the flavor—we want display as we dine. At ABaC Restaurant & Hotel in Barcelona, part of the thrill is being directed to your table (where you’ll savor Jordi Cruz’s two-Michelin-star 14- or 21-course menus) through the 200sq metre kitchen. And at the Typing Room in east London, I’m sure the fact that I could see Lee Wescott piping chestnut cream into the bowl made his dishes all the more delicious.”

Even the removal of choice that we came across in “The Personalized Meal” can be seen through the lens of experience design. But this, let me tell you, is really only just the beginning. There is so much more that can, and increasingly is, being done. According to one textbook on restaurant design published in 2011, restaurants are more than 50% theater (see Figure 11.1). From where I am standing, that percentage would appear to be increasing year on year.

Have you come across theatrical plating?

There has been a growing tendency in recent years to turn the serving of food into a theatrical stunt too, this time by plating directly on to the table itself. At Alinea, in Chicago, for instance, a number of the desserts require a performance that can last for several minutes. For one dish, the waiters first lay a waterproof tablecloth over the table, before bringing all manner of sauces and ingredients. Next, one of the chefs emerges from the kitchen and starts to “plate the table” in front of the amazed diners by breaking up the solid elements and painting with the sauces (both drop by drop and “Jackson Pollocking” the table-top). Given all the practice that they have undoubtedly had, they manage to paint the dessert on to the table with great skill. Something similar happens at Sublimotion, in Shanghai, where the “waiting staff appear with palettes of ingredients and ‘paint’ an edible version of Gustav Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’ on the table.” Once the chefs have finished their work, the diners tuck in, eating straight from the table.

Figure 11.1. Chef Jesse Dunford Wood sabering the top off a bottle of sparkling wine. A most theatrical start to a meal at the chef’s table at Parlour, in north London.

Meanwhile, a little closer to home, one of the chefs I have worked with is Jesse Dunford Wood, who is famous for theatrically plating the dessert directly on to the chef’s table (hidden away in a walled alcove between the kitchens and the rest of the restaurant) at Parlour, in Kensal Rise, north London. The chef wields a dangerous weapon: the blow torch! Headphones are handed out to every diner, playing tracks that have been specially chosen to be familiar and hopefully to trigger an emotional response. When I was last there, the iconic theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey was up first, followed by Gene Wilder singing something from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Scented smoke was pumped out from a hole in the wall—this was, in other words, a truly multisensory experience. This example of performance around the plating of a dish is particularly interesting given that the chef himself listens to the same soundtracks as the diners while he works. Everyone at the table is connected in a private, but shared, sonic experience.

There is, of course, always a danger that things can be taken too far: for example, Dive, the Los Angeles submarine-themed restaurant from Steven Spielberg. According to those who went, the lighting was pretty extreme. There was a wall of monitors along one wall constantly flickering away, showing submarine-themed movie clips. One commentator described what would happen inside: “Periodically, all lighting is extinguished except for intense red lights that whir and flash while a loudspeaker barks ‘Dive! Dive!’” Sounds pretty intense, right? Perhaps a little too arousing? No wonder the restaurant closed down.

One way to deliver a memorable dining experience is by hosting it in a most dramatic or unusual location: venues such as the underwater restaurant in the Maldives or the Dinner in the Sky concept spring to mind (see Figure 11.2). A somewhat less extreme, though no less successful, version of the latter concept went by the name of The Electrolux Cube. For a while, this transparent structure was situated on top of the Royal Festival Hall, on London’s South Bank, and a stream of Michelin-starred British chefs popped up there in order to serve the eighteen guests. When you add in a great view, the experience is undoubtedly elevated beyond your average pop-up dining event. The cube has now appeared at a host of scenic locations around Europe: a rooftop overlooking the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, in Stockholm (atop the Swedish capital’s Royal Opera House). It has been to Brussels too. Part of the success of this venture can presumably be put down to the fact that this is a limited offering (scarcity being highly valued in the restaurant sector at the moment).

“The everything else”

How would you like to go to a restaurant where the atmosphere changed from one course to the next? The top chefs with money to burn can do this using technology, others (on much smaller budgets) manage to achieve much the same effect by having their diners move from room to room as they switch between courses. According to a profile of Grant Achatz (when contemplating overhauling the experience at his restaurant Alinea), “perhaps diners will do a portion of the tasting menu in one space, before moving to another environment that is completely different in its configuration, design elements, lighting, even aroma.” Make no mistake about it: today, we are increasingly seeing a shift (often facilitated by technology) toward a much more dynamic and adventurous approach to the dining experience, one that involves storytelling, added theater—oh, and possibly a dash of magic too. So, welcome to the all-new world of experiential dining. And here we are not just talking about playing with the color of the lighting, or synchronizing the music or soundscapes to match each and every one of the dishes. We have already come across a number of examples of ambient aroma being used to complement specific dishes (see “Smell”). Some chefs, like Paco Roncero over in Ibiza’s Hard Rock Hotel, have gone further: they are even playing with the atmosphere (i.e., the temperature and humidity) of the dining rooms they control.

Figure 11.2. Top: The underwater Ithaa restaurant opened in April 2005, seating up to fourteen diners and located five meters below sea level at the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island. Bottom: “Dinner in the sky”: these diners are having a unique experience suspended tens of meters above the ground. This is more about the experience than the food, one presumes.

The aim of the next generation of experience providers is to enhance, that is, to complement, what is hopefully already a fabulous product offering (not to distract you from a poor one), by optimizing “the everything else.” It is the chefs who are really at the top of their game (those with two or three Michelin stars, and who appear in the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list year in, year out) who are innovating here; a number of them have realized that no matter how good the food they put on the plate, unless they are in control of “the everything else,” they really can’t hope to optimize the experience for their diners. Of course, as was noted earlier, one could turn things around and suggest that these chefs are focusing on “off the plate” dining precisely because they know that this is what the San Pellegrino judges are looking for. As one commentator put it: “Chefs play to the list, mindful of its aesthetic preferences and its methodological weaknesses.” The chefs are absolutely clear on this point: French chef Paul Pairet, of Ultraviolet in Shanghai, insists that the goal of changing the multisensory atmosphere on a course-by-course basis is to “intensify the focus on the food, not distract from it.” Elsewhere, he has been quoted as saying: “You can’t escape from what I’m trying to convey. Everything will lead you to [develop] a strong focus on the dish.” The technology-enabled atmospheric projections on the walls and tables of some of these futuristic dining rooms undoubtedly allow for more theater and storytelling, elements that are key when it comes to trying to hold the diners’ attention/interest over what may well be a 15–20+-course tasting menu.

If you want to know what to expect, here’s a description by one journalist who was lucky enough to dine at Pairet’s Ultraviolet: “Dinner starts dramatically with an apple wasabi sorbet, frozen and cut into wafers. A Gothic abbey appears on the walls, the air is filled with holy incense and AC/DC’s ‘Hells Bells’ assaults the ears.” Meanwhile, an evening at Sublimotion has been described as: “an emotional ‘theater of the senses’ . . . a night of gastronomy, mixology and technology.” Ultraviolet bills itself as the first of its kind to bring together the latest in technology to create a fully immersive multisensory dining experience. It opened in May 2012 to a maelstrom of interest from the world’s media.*

Other no-holds-barred gastronomic events include the one-off Gelinaz dinners. The food at these events is whipped-up by some of the world’s top chefs and the courses are interspersed with music, dance, magic and video. Just as well, I suppose, given that these events may last for anything up to eight hours. The El Celler de Can Roca restaurant in Spain has regularly been voted top of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in recent years. Back in May 2013, the chefs (the Roca brothers) worked with music director Zubin Mehta and visual artist Franc Aleu to create a fabulous twelve-course culinary opera called “El Somni.” This one-off dinner was held for twelve carefully selected guests (talk about exclusive) in a specially designed rotunda in Barcelona. A once-in-a-lifetime experience—quite literally! An amazing sound system was installed especially for the event and visually stunning projections surrounded the diners—no expense spared. Indeed, I dread to think how much it must have cost to put this dining event on; there is no way that it could break even, even if the diners were paying through the nose (which they weren’t). My guess, though, is that it was probably worth it for the many brands sponsoring this venture, given the huge amount of international publicity it attracted.

Performance at the table

Do you think that you’d enjoy your dessert more if it came out from the kitchens at the same time as a cellist sat down next to you and played a specially composed piece of music, or even just a sustained musical chord? It would, at the very least, be a rather unique experience, would it not? Composing music especially for mealtimes certainly isn’t new; go back far enough (to the mid sixteenth century) and one finds Tafelmusik (literally “table-music”) being composed for feasts and other special dining occasions. Now, composers, artists and sonic designers are once again taking up the challenge of designing music specifically for the meal. While once the music was, in some sense, composed for the occasion, now it is designed to match the food itself.

Some of you may be wondering just what influence the atmospheric soundscapes and music being played in a growing number of restaurants have on your experience. You might wonder about its effect on the taste of the food, not to mention on how much you enjoy the total experience. Note that we are not just talking about fancy restaurant meals but also the local gastropub. In an earlier chapter, we saw how the sound of the sea could be used to enhance the taste of oysters. Subsequent research by the Condiment Junkie multisensory experiential design team has shown that playing the sounds of the English summertime enhances the perceived fruitiness and freshness of strawberries. Put this evidence together with the literature on sonic seasoning and it is clear that both sensory-discriminative (i.e., what it is) and hedonic ratings (how much you like it) of the food are likely to be affected by what diners hear. All the more reason, then, to try and get it right.

One interesting challenge that crops up once you start to think about designing music, or soundscapes, to complement a particular dish (or even an entire meal) is that the structure and duration of each track probably has to be quite different from that of traditional music. In fact, music that has been especially composed for the meal (or dish) probably has more in common with the kind of sonic backdrop that people design for video games, say, than a top-forty hit. Ideally, it should be a little bit repetitive, consistent over time, but with the potential to evolve seamlessly as the diner moves from one course (or level) to the next. This is exactly what the sound designer Ben Houge aims for in his innovative sonic installations. Back in 2012, for instance, Houge worked with chef Jason Bond on a series of dinners in Bond’s restaurant Bondir in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Each table was outfitted with one loudspeaker for each diner, which resulted in a total of thirty channels of coordinated, real-time, algorithmic, spatially deployed sound that was designed to work even if different tables of diners arrived at different times.

Storytelling at the table

According to an article that appeared in The New York Times back in 2012: “Restaurants in the very top echelon these days—Noma in Copenhagen, Alinea in Chicago, Mugaritz and Arzak in Spain—sell cooking as a sort of abstract art or experimental storytelling.” An excellent example is the Alice in Wonderland theme that runs through a number of the courses at The Fat Duck—the “Mad Hatter’s Tea Party” dish comes straight out of the pages of Lewis Carroll. When the restaurant reopened late in 2015 (after refurbishment), Blumenthal turned to Lee Hall, the writer of the film Billy Elliot, to help weave the menu into a story, which means that “the menu will now be a story. It will have an introduction and a number of chapters and the chapter headings that will give you an idea of what is coming.” The top chef hasn’t stopped there, though. He has also been talking to the press about trying to redefine the very nature of the restaurant. The emphasis on narrative has been ramped up substantially: “The fact is The Fat Duck is about storytelling. I wanted to think about the whole approach of what we do in those terms.” All of this explains chef Jozef Youssef’s decision to mount the details of the dishes that he served in his new “Gastrophysics” dining concept in the books placed innocuously on the table. Meanwhile, at Alinea, chef Grant Achatz has been wondering what would change if dinner at his restaurant were to be like the set of a play.

Magic is increasingly making an appearance at the dining table. At Eleven Madison Park in New York, for instance, they have been looking at introducing a card trick as part of the dessert service. Blumenthal conferred with magicians while experimenting with a flaming sorbet that would ignite at the click of the waiter’s fingers. According to one journalist: “Blumenthal created it with a magician so, at the click of a waiter’s fingers, the barley sorbet in a bowl of hidden compartments bursts alight, turning warm outside yet remaining ice-cold inside. As a fire crackles around the sorbet, a rolling vapour of whisky and leather transports you to some Scottish hunting lodge at Christmas.” Unbelievably, the bowls are rumored to cost £1,000 apiece.

Theater at the table

Why does it always have to be dinner and a show? Why not simply combine the two and dine while watching the show, or where dinner is, in some sense, the show? The dining events offered by Madeleine’s Madteater in Copenhagen are often described as free-form experimental food theater. As one journalist described it: “It’s art you experience with all five senses, the most satisfying performance in town. Madteater is precisely as its name translates: food theater. [. . .] We were transforming the act of eating into exactly that: an act. I felt equal parts diner, performer and audience member in a restaurant that channeled all at once the opera, an art gallery and a shrink’s office. It was strange. It was delicious.”

Figure 11.3. The Tickets Bar in Barcelona, a recent collaboration between the brothers Ferran and Albert Adrià.

What exactly would you think you were looking at were you to walk past the shopfront shown in Figure 11.3? It looks like some kind of theater, right? But this is actually a tapas bar! According to one description: “The atmosphere draws equal inspiration from the theater and the circus, with a nod to Willy Wonka and his overstimulating chocolate factory. It’s a place where chefs toil away at various workstations, waiters prance around like theater ushers and morsels of food arrive with the flair and mystery of a vaudeville act.” So, as dining becomes more theatrical, more entertaining, it becomes natural to make the restaurant look like a theater too.

Not only that but one might also consider the idea of selling tickets for the show. In fact, this is exactly what American chef Grant Achatz decided to do with his Chicago restaurant Next. Anyone wanting to eat there can simply buy a ticket in advance from the website. And just like the theater (and with airlines), cheaper seats are offered for off-peak shows/meals. So a seat at Monday lunchtime will cost you less than a prime-time seat on a Saturday evening. It’s an intriguing concept. No surprise, then, that a number of other restaurants and pop-up dining events have subsequently adopted a similar model; on the Ultraviolet website, for instance, you are encouraged to “book your seats now.”

In the years to come, we are going to see a continued blurring of the boundary between theatrical and culinary experience. Take the highly innovative Punchdrunk Theater company. Still incredibly vivid in my memory, as I am sure in many others’, is “Sleep no more,” the multi-story retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in an abandoned warehouse block in New York City. This was an immersive theater experience like no other. So, as actors, singers and magicians increasingly make their way into the dining rooms, the question arises: what would you get if you mashed up something like Punchdrunk Theater with multisensory dining/drinking? Well, funny you should mention that, because the people behind Punchdrunk opened a restaurant. According to founder Felix Barrett, they originally developed a distinct narrative for the restaurant involving a cast of twelve actors. However, when the concept was trialed, the feeling was that “‘people weren’t ready to watch theater’ while they ate. Expense, he suggested, was also a factor. So now there are fewer, less formal theatrical accompaniments to the catering.”

Perhaps it is because I happen to be married to a Colombian that I think so, but there really is nothing quite like Andrés Carne de Res. This restaurant on the outskirts of Bogotá has actors, musicians, magicians and a host of other performers wandering haphazardly between the tables in an atmospheric higgledy-piggledy assortment of wooden shacks. Sorry, that is the best I can do to describe it.* You really need to experience it for yourself. Best go in the evening though, when, after the food has been served, the tables turn into an impromptu dance floor. Taking people through different spaces, rather than using technology to create different atmospheres within the same space, can be a low-tech and, more importantly, lower-cost solution to delivering experiential dining. After all, not everyone has the budget or technical support offered to star chefs like Paul Pairet, Paco Roncero or the three brothers Roca! Reducing the expense associated with delivering the multisensory experience offers the opportunity to provide something that becomes a little more scalable.

One example of the low-tech approach comes from Gingerline’s “Chambers of Flavour” experience in London. Small groups of diners enjoy a four- or five-course meal, each course being served in a different room with a contrasting theatrical experience. According to Suz Mountford, founder of this immersive dining enterprise: “Guests book having no idea of what to expect and can journey through anything from enchanted forests to a spaceship to a sunset beach, meeting all sorts of crazy characters along the way . . . We’ve always wanted to firmly cast the dining experience as a creative space to stimulate not just the taste buds but all of the senses.” Actors, dancers, and performers are again all part of the experience.

Among all this talk of spectacle at the table, I would be remiss not to mention the truly spectacular meal held in February 1783 in Paris. Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, son of a wealthy tax farmer and nephew of one of Louis XVI’s ministers, hosted a dinner in which hundreds of spectators watched the proceedings from a gallery—converting hospitality into some kind of theatrical show. Invitations to the meal took the form of ornate burial announcements. Just take the following description:

Like a banquet of freemasons, to which contemporaries compared it, Grimod’s supper made heavy use of arcane ritual and semi-democratic pretensions [. . .] Grimod’s guests had to pass through an entrance hall and a series of chambers before reaching a darkened waiting room, and, finally, the inner sanctum of the dining room. In one room, heralds dressed in Roman robes examined the guests’ invitations; in the next, an armed and helmeted “strange and terrifying monk” subjected them to further scrutiny; before a note-taking fellow in lawyer’s garb greeted and interrogated the twenty-two guests [. . .] in the final stage of initiation, two hired hands dressed as choir boys perfumed the guests with incense.

This spectacular dinner was so far ahead of its time that it deserves to be remembered to this day. One could even frame it as a piece of performance art with food at the center—this, from almost 250 years ago!

Performance art with food

Looking back over the last half-century or so, one finds many examples of performance artists incorporating food, the preparation of a dish and/or its consumption into their work. The idea goes right back to the usual suspects, the Futurists, who “aimed to marry art and gastronomy, to transform dining into a type of performance art.” But there are many more recent exponents in this space; just take, for instance, Alison Knowles, an American experimental artist who served up a salad for 300 people to eat while listening to Mozart at the Tate Modern in London (see Figure 11.4 for one such “happening”). This participatory event, Make a Salad, grew out of the artists’ collective Fluxus movement back in the 1960s. This piece plays on the notion of consistency—a theme that we will come back to in the final chapter. As the artist herself puts it: “The salad will be made again for several hundred spectators [. . .] Beginning the event, a Mozart duo for violin and cello is followed by production of the salad by the artist and eating of the salad by the audience. The salad is always different as Mozart remains the same.”

Figure 11.4. Make a Salad (1962– ) by Alison Knowles, a participatory performance art piece with food (normally for several hundred people).

Nothing, though, could ever match the harrowing ordeal faced by the sixteen guests who attended Barbara Smith’s six-course Ritual Meal (1969). This performative event started with the invitees waiting outside someone’s home for an hour. They were told repeatedly by a voice over a Tannoy to: “Please wait, please wait.” On being let in, the guests were immersed in a space that was filled with the loud, pulsing sound of a beating heart. Videos of open-heart surgery were projected on the walls and ceiling. If that sounds bad enough, wait till you hear what happened next:

Eight waiters (four men wearing surgical scrubs and masks and four women wearing masks, black tights, and leotards) led them to a table. Prior to entering the house, the guests had to put on surgical scrubs [. . .] The guests were then served a meal like they had never seen before. In keeping with the surgical “theme,” the eating utensils were surgical instruments. Meat had to be cut with scalpels. Wine, served in test tubes, resembled blood or urine. In this charged atmosphere, ordinary food took on extraordinary connotations, an effect that Smith enhanced by the preparation and presentation of the food. Pureed fruit was served in plasma bottles. Raw food, such as eggs and chicken livers, that had to be cooked at the table were included in the dinner along with plates of cottage cheese embedded with a small pepper resembling an organ. Although the food was actually quite good, the dining experience was intensely uncomfortable for the guests, who couldn’t put down their wine/test tubes and were sometimes forced to eat with their hands.

You can get an idea of what it must have been like from a close-up of the hands of one of the guests at the performance (see Figure 11.5).

Is food art? Traditionally the answer has been very definitely no, the key distinction being that the viewer/diner was not “disinterested,” in Wittgenstein’s terminology. And yet it is clear that many chefs are increasingly taking their inspiration from the world of art, some even referring to themselves as “artists.” Certainly, as we move away from the quaint notion that dining out has only to do with nutrition and sustenance, we may even see the emergence of artistic dishes that do not necessarily taste that good. Something like this has already started to happen! Just take one of the latest menus at the Mugaritz restaurant, in San Sebastián. There’s a dish (only one, mind) that the chef knows may be difficult for the diner to enjoy (a local delicacy of dried fish) and yet which plays an important part in the story of the meal that is served in this rural spot. The dish stays on the menu despite the negative comments of some diners online. As chef Andoni explains, in his book: “There was a key moment in the evolution of Mugaritz when we realized that we were serving certain things that, objectively, weren’t ‘good,’ but which had great emotional power. The dish ‘Roasted and Raw Vegetables, Wild and Cultivated Shoots and Leaves,’ for example, is eaten in a sort of altered state of consciousness [. . .] Plant bitterness is difficult to overcome, and this dish, out of context, could even be branded unpleasant. It is undoubtedly a proposition that creates mild discomfort.”

Figure 11.5. Barbara Smith’s Ritual Meal (1969). Still feeling hungry?

Getting to the bottom of whether food can ever be considered as an art form, and whether chefs (at least the best of them) should really be thought of as artists is a debate that is likely to rumble on and on. It is certainly not something that I have any realistic hope of resolving here, and certainly not in a paragraph or two. My guess, for what it is worth, is that it will become increasingly natural to consider the top chefs as artists. And at some point in the not too distant future, we will all come to wonder why we ever didn’t!

On the future of experiential dining

Any of you who find it difficult to imagine the experience of dining out being any different in the future from the way it has been in the past, just remember, the restaurant as we know it is actually a fairly modern invention, coming into existence in the latter half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century in Paris. Perhaps it’s time for the format to be updated. A less radical way to think about this, though, is perhaps to consider the relative distribution (and pricing) of different kinds of restaurant changing. Researchers who have analyzed the situation distinguish between the fête spéciale, “where dining has been elevated to an event of extraordinary stature,” the amusement restaurant and the convenience restaurant. The rise of multisensory experiential dining is likely to enlarge the first two categories at the cost of the latter.

Rest assured—or be very afraid, depending on your perspective. Before too long, many of our more mundane everyday dining and drinking experiences, be they in chain restaurants, hotels, food and wine shops, at home, or perhaps even in the air, will be accompanied by some sort of multisensory experiential cues. The hope (at least for me) is that these atmospheric stimuli will have been scientifically designed by one of the growing number of gastrophysicists out there to modulate, and preferably to enhance, some aspect (or aspects) of your tasting experience. Given what we know about the limits of the diner’s brain, gastrophysicists interested in multisensory experience design are well placed to help to deliver experiences that are both stimulating and memorable without being overpowering.

There is also growing interest in moving from “eatertainment” to “edutainment,” exemplified by Heston’s Dinner in London. At this restaurant, the stories behind each of the dishes, relating to British food history, are retold. A similar dose of storytelling was also a part of the chef Jozef Youssef’s “Mexico” concept from Kitchen Theory. Take, for example, “The Venison Dance” dish, which was preceded by a short video of the dance performed by the State Ballet of Mexico. The “Memories of Oaxaca” dish served as part of the same concept also had a video to help set the scene for diners.

In closing, it is important to stress the key challenge faced by theme restaurants. Given that diners know what to expect the second time around, those who wish to stage “experiences” have to work constantly to refresh them. As the successful New York restaurateur Danny Meyer notes: “Showmanship can be a tricky pursuit [ . . . because] the more theatrical it gets, there does come a point when you just can’t see that play another time.” On the flipside (see “The Meal Remembered”), though—there is also the comfort that comes with knowing exactly what we are going to eat.