Fine dining multisensory restaurants and intermediality: an exploratory case study on Ultraviolet and The Alchemist

Abstract

In today’s extended and dynamic gastronomic field, fine dining ventures such as the multisensory fine dining restaurants combine haute cuisine, arts, sciences and new digital technologies to deliver memorable and immersive journeys, in highly controlled and sophisticated layouts.Traditional disciplinary perspectives seem inefficient to grasp the heterogeneous and intricate dimensions of these multisensory objects and calls for renovated methodological approaches. This research proposes the original combination of a Media and Arts studies approach - intermediality - to analyze such objects. This “undisciplined” perspective enables to comprehensively consider the artistic, digital, technical, and culinary mediations that compose the multisensory experiences.The aim of this paper is to show how the tools and approaches of intermediality offer a way of analyzing and making sense of the encounters, layering or frictions between the different mediatic components - arts, techniques, technologies - that make up the gastronomic experience.The exploratory case study probes into two establishments: Ultraviolet by Paul Pairet (Shanghai, China) and The Alchemist by Rasmus Munk (Copenhagen, Denmark). Far from being a mere juxtaposition of mediatic forms, the two restaurants combine and integrate many heterogeneous mediatic components to produce embracing and meaningful experiences. The article concludes by proposing some initial interpretations of media integrations in the restaurants under study. It suggests that the augmented restaurant Ultraviolet composes an aesthetic and semi-immersive experiential journey driven by principles of harmony and echo, whereas the repurposed restaurant The Alchemist proposes a disruptive dispositive, inserting discontinuity and divergence at the core of a hedonic proposition.