Experimental Dining


Book Description

A provocative study of the creative dining experience as a multisensory performance. Experimental Dining examines the work of four of the world's leading creative restaurants: el Bulli in Catalonia, the Fat Duck in Berkshire, Noma in Copenhagen, and Alinea in Chicago. The author contends that the work of the experimental restaurant, while operating explicitly within an economy of experiences, is not absolutely determined by that political and economic context. Exploring gastronomy as experience, Paul Geary examines the restaurants' creative methods and the broader ideological discourses within which they operate. Bringing together ideas around food, philosophy, performance, and cultural politics, the book offers an interdisciplinary understanding of the world of experimental experiential dining.




The Perfect Meal


Book Description

The authors of The Perfect Meal examine all of the elements that contribute to the diners experience of a meal (primarily at a restaurant) and investigate how each of the diners senses contributes to their overall multisensory experience. The principal focus of the book is not on flavor perception, but on all of the non-food and beverage factors that have been shown to influence the diners overall experience. Examples are: the colour of the plate (visual) the shape of the glass (visual/tactile) the names used to describe the dishes (cognitive) the background music playing inside the restaurant (aural) Novel approaches to understanding the diners experience in the restaurant setting are explored from the perspectives of decision neuroscience, marketing, design, and psychology. 2015 Popular Science Prose Award Winner.




Dining and Wining During the Pandemic? A Quasi-Experiment on Tax Cuts and Consumer Spending in Lithuania


Book Description

Could temporary tax cuts stimulate consumer spending? Sector-specific measures to the COVID-19 pandemic provides a quasi-experimental variation in consumption patterns to infer a causal effect of tax policy changes. Using a novel dataset of daily debit and credit card transactions, this paper investigates the effectiveness of Lithuania’s decision to cut the standard value-added tax (VAT) rate from 21 percent to 9 percent on restaurants and catering services during the pandemic in a difference-in-differences regression framework. I obtain robust evidence that the VAT reduction has had no statistically significant impact on consumer spending on restaurants and catering services, while other policy interventions such as mobility restrictions and vaccination have more pronounced effects. These results have important policy implications in terms of the expected stimulative effect of sector-specific VAT reductions and the effective design of fiscal policy interventions to counter the impact of pandemics during which mobility is highly constrained.




The Perfect Meal


Book Description

The authors of The Perfect Meal examine all of the elements that contribute to the diners experience of a meal (primarily at a restaurant) and investigate how each of the diners senses contributes to their overall multisensory experience. The principal focus of the book is not on flavor perception, but on all of the non-food and beverage factors that have been shown to influence the diners overall experience. Examples are: the colour of the plate (visual) the shape of the glass (visual/tactile) the names used to describe the dishes (cognitive) the background music playing inside the restaurant (aural) Novel approaches to understanding the diners experience in the restaurant setting are explored from the perspectives of decision neuroscience, marketing, design, and psychology. 2015 Popular Science Prose Award Winner.




Zero


Book Description




The Next Frontier of Restaurant Management


Book Description

"The Next Frontier of Restaurant Management is of the highest quality and appropriate for Service Management courses at the graduate level." ― (Richard Ghiselli, Purdue University) The Next Frontier of Restaurant Management brings together the latest research in hospitality studies to offer students, hospitality executives, and restaurant managers the best practices for restaurant success. Alex M. Susskind and Mark Maynard draw on their experiences as a hospitality educator and a restaurant industry leader, respectively, to guide readers through innovative articles that address specific aspects of restaurant management: * Creating and preserving a healthy company culture * Developing and upholding standards of service * Successfully navigating guest complaints to promote loyalty * Creating a desirable (and profitable) ambiance * Harnessing technology to improve guest and employee experiences * Mentoring employees Maynard and Susskind detail the implementation of effective customer management and staff training, design elements such as seating and lighting, the innovative use of data to improve the guest experience, and both consumer-oriented and operation-based technologies. They conclude with a discussion of the human factor that is the foundation of the hospitality industry and the importance of a healthy workplace culture. As Susskind and Maynard show, successful restaurants don't happen by accident.




The Literature of Food


Book Description

Why are so many literary texts preoccupied with food? The Literature of Food explores this question by looking at the continually shifting relationship between two sorts of foods: the real and the imagined. Focusing particularly on Britain and North America from the early 19th century to the present, it covers a wide range of issues including the politics of food, food as performance, and its intersections with gender, class, fear and disgust. Combining the insights of food studies and literary analysis, Nicola Humble considers the multifarious ways in which food both works and plays within texts, and the variety of functions-ideological, mimetic, symbolic, structural, affective-which it serves. Carefully designed and structured for use on the growing number of literature of food courses, it examines the food of modernism, post-modernism, the realist novel and children's literature, and asks what happens when we treat cook books as literary texts. From food memoirs to the changing role of the servant, experimental cook books to the cannibalistic fears in infant picture books, The Literature of Food demonstrates that food is always richer and stranger than we think.




Dining Out


Book Description

A global history of restaurants beyond white tablecloths and maître d’s, Dining Out presents restaurants both as businesses and as venues for a range of human experiences. From banquets in twelfth-century China to the medicinal roots of French restaurants, the origins of restaurants are not singular—nor is the history this book tells. Katie Rawson and Elliott Shore highlight stories across time and place, including how chifa restaurants emerged from the migration of Chinese workers and their marriage to Peruvian businesswomen in nineteenth-century Peru; how Alexander Soyer transformed kitchen chemistry by popularizing the gas stove, pre-dating the pyrotechnics of molecular gastronomy by a century; and how Harvey Girls dispelled the ill repute of waiting tables, making rich lives for themselves across the American West. From restaurant architecture to technological developments, staffing and organization, tipping and waiting table, ethnic cuisines, and slow and fast foods, this delectably illustrated and profoundly informed and entertaining history takes us from the world’s first restaurants in Kaifeng, China, to the latest high-end dining experiences.







Technical Report


Book Description