Technology at the dining table

A NUMBER of experimental kitchens,  and even a few restaurants, have recently started to  experiment with the possibilities associated with projecting images directly onto the food sitting on the dinner table. For example, at El Celler de can Roca in Spain, a variety of projections over the food dishes give the impression of bringing the food very much to life. One projection, in particular, makes the dish look like the surface of an egg that dramatically cracks open, to reveal the food within/underneath.

Another kind of entertainment that is now being offered by restaurants and bars through technology is achieved by incorporating new socialising interactive technologies in their counters, table-tops, or even in the walls themselves (for example, i-Bar or i-Wall) that produce sounds or lights up as the diner touches them.

Transforming the experience of eating food by means of technology at the table, ‘The sound of the sea seafood’ dish (the signature dish served on the tasting menu at Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck restaurant in Bray) provides an excellent example of how digital technologies can be used to deliver a genuinely different kind of multisensory dining experience. The waiter arrives at the table holding a plate of seafood one hand, and, in the other, a seashell out of which dangles a pair of iPod earphones. The waiter instructs the diner to insert the earphones before starting to eat, whereupon they hear the sound of the sea. The experience of eating seafood can be enhanced by listening to the waves crashing gently in the beach, with the seagulls flying overhead.

In the case of ‘The sound of the sea’ dish, the technology (nothing more than an iPod) completely transforms the dining experience, both by enhancing the taste/flavour of the food itself and by getting the diner to pay more attention to the gustatory (and auditory) experience itself. Some diners have been known to find the multisensory experience so powerful that they have broken into tears when confronted by this dish. In part, the idea here is that diners should come away from ‘The sound of the sea’ dish thinking rather more carefully about the multisensory dining experience, and the role that sound plays in the experience of what it is that one is eating and drinking. As Mr Blumenthal puts it, “Sound is one of the ingredients that the chef has at his/her disposal.”

Much of the current excitement, then, around the merging of digital technology with food at the dining table lies precisely in the fact that it holds the potential to radically change our experience of dining, and to do so in a manner that many diners genuinely seem to appreciate. This will likely happen first at the tables of the Michelin-starred molecular gastronomy restaurants. However, we predict that within a couple of years, a number of the more successful of these technological innovations will likely start appearing at the home dining table.

Multisensory atmosphere

Another way in which digital technology is increasingly being put in the hands of the diner is illustrated by those restaurants where the diner can actually change the atmosphere (normally the colour of the lighting) in their dining space (for example, Pod restaurant in Philadelphia). Interestingly, Philips Research has been working on similar technologies for use in the home environment. The idea here is to enable the home-owner (and owner’s dinner guests) to control the multisensory atmosphere by choosing from a range of pre-selected combinations of ambienAir Jordan Trainer Essential