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Sauce and sorcery: Can AI take high-end dining to the next level?
Video projections on your plate, holograms dancing at the table, customised tunes with every course. Tech’s coming to dinner. Will you reorder or reboot?
Krasota, in Dubai, has been open for just over a year and accommodates only 20 guests for dinner. But already, it’s the talk of the culinary world. What kind of cuisine does it serve? That’s the wrong question, and an outdated one.
Fans refer to their meal as a gastro-theatrical experience. Diners choose from two shows: One dedicated to famous art and artists; another that focuses on mankind’s possible futures. Everyone’s seated at one round table, with images and video projected on to the tabletop, walls and floor. These aren’t just customised to every visitor; they respond to their movements too. Virtual lemons roll and bump against real wineglasses; koi swim alongside plates, dodging people’s attempts to catch them. The music, visuals, even the servers’ uniforms change through the evening. Oh, there’s food too, an eight-course tasting menu, served over two hours.
Viraj Kamaal, a 35-year-old yoga instructor from Mangaluru, travelled to Dubai in April, expressly to eat at Krasota. He booked his table weeks in advance and paid AED 1800 ( ₹41,000) for the experience. It was worth it, he says. “You sense your food in more ways than one.” His favourite course was the artichoke curry with coconut rice, inspired by Russian philosopher-painter Nicholas Roerich’s paintings of the Himalayas. “When you mix the curry with the rice, the paintings unfurl in front of you in shades of orange and red, as Jai Radha Madhav plays,” he says. Also served was a dish of black cod with plum and fig, paired with Russian painter Ivan Aivazovsky’s iconic The Ninth Wave. “It was an intriguing combination,” says Kamaal. “The plum and fig remind you of the colours of the waves. The cod is so crispy and tangy that it offsets that fruity sweetness and texture. You do feel like the food has various dimensions.”
Yet, Kamaal isn’t keen on going back for seconds. “The novelty wears off after the first time. I can’t imagine any of this becoming a part of my routine.” As AI enters the fine-dining market, many like him are wondering if high-end, tech-driven meal experiences can really deepen our relationship with food.
Bites and bots
Making drama out of dinner isn’t new, says Pritha Sen, food historian, consultant and chef. “These are fads that come and go”. In 2014, she hosted a pop-up featuring delicacies from along the Padma river in Bangladesh, at Ta’aam restaurant in Kolkata. “I told the story of the dishes and had a singer from the region perform during the narration,” she says. She didn’t try it again. “People weren’t interested in the music as much as they wanted to eat the food.”
For Yantra, an Indian restaurant in Singapore, Sen designed a menu built around India’s wok-based kitchens, in 2022. The idea was to have Yantra staff narrate the history of each dish to the guests. “It was the novelty, until it was not,” she recalls. “We had to cut down the storytelling because it took away from people’s experience of just having a meal.”
And yet, restaurants try. On Onam last year, hip Mumbai restaurant The Bombay Canteen hosted Raja Ravi Varma’s Feast of Wonders, a traditional sadya that used storytelling and AI to celebrate the master artist. Historian Manu Pillai shared stories of Kerala and its food as patrons tried such dishes as cabbage poriyal toast with Stracciatella, and shallot foccacia. Artist Ari Jayaprakash used AI to create Ravi Varma-style works. “We managed to connect every flavour and dish on the plate with Kerala’s history,” Pillai says. “People go in knowing it’ll be unique.” The restaurant hasn’t repeated the experience since.
Show and tell
To turn a trend into a long-running business takes more than good tech and a great story. Le Petit Chef runs dining experiences in more than 70 cities globally, and has two locations in India, at the Hyatt Centric in Chandigarh and the Grand Hyatt in Goa. As with Krasota, the dinner is the show. Tables seat six. Overhead projectors beam a 3D animation of a tiny chef character, inspired by the explorer Marco Polo, on to the tabletop to guide diners through the meal. Birds, boats and mythical beasts are part of the story – a dragon breathes fire to signal Chinese food in the course to come. Each character knows exactly where to go and when to stop; the table and place settings are digitally mapped to keep the illusion intact. And the company has programmed four other themes, apart from Marco Polo, which keeps shows booked, meal after meal, across the world.
In Dubai, another restaurant, Zenon, gets AI-generated 3D holographic wall projections to change according to the dishes being served. “These visuals are inspired by Greek mythology and Mediterranean landscapes, which complement the dishes served,” says Oktay Unlu, the general manager. “When serving our signature Mediterranean seafood platter, waves gently flow across the walls. The cool blue and green tones mimic the freshness of the dish. When we serve a traditional Greek sweet at dessert, the art transitions into warm gold and sunset hues, reflecting the end of the meal and evoking a sense of comfort and satisfaction.” Zenon opened in 2023 and Kamaal had heard of it when he booked his trip to Dubai. He didn’t eat there. “Even though its offerings were exciting, I just wanted to have a non-fussy, quiet meal after Krasota,” he says.
Taste and tech
It’s more than an expensive gimmick. Experimental psychologist Charles Spence, who heads the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University, believes that sound, when used effectively, can enhance the flavours in our food. “There are various reasons why certain sounds match certain tastes,” he says. People tend to choose rough or low-pitched sounds when they taste something bitter, like black coffee or dark chocolate; while sweet food evokes high-pitched tinkling notes of the piano. “Spicy food is considered high in timbre and pitch, and has a fast tempo,” he says. “There’s a reason that restaurants around the world play loud and fast music—it’s for faster table turnover and higher sales.”
In March 2023, Spence and Italian food company Barilla collaborated with musician Cristobal Tapia de Veer (who composed The White Lotus theme) on a soundtrack designed to elevate the pasta-eating experience with the brand’s range of six Al Bronzo pastas. Each pasta was paired with a different sauce and had a separate soundtrack on the brand’s site and Spotify. “Each sauce had a different sonic note, be it salty or spicy or creamy. With that, I was able to search through our previous research and find sonic matches for each pasta, to accentuate their taste,” Spence explains.
He calls it “sonic seasoning”, which does have a nice ring to it. But despite what restaurants say, not every diner wants to engage every one of their senses at a meal. It’s probably why these AI experiences haven’t gone mainstream yet.
From HT Brunch, November 02, 2024
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