The more I learned about multisensory gastronomy, I couldn't believe that more people in the industry weren't talking about it. It all boils down to this one idea that we don't perceive flavour in the mouth, we perceive flavour in the brain. It derives from the sensory stimulus provided by the foods we eat, the things we see, hear, touch, taste and smell. It's these things that all come together in our brains that actually give us a perception of flavour.
When I started Kitchen Theory as a blog, it was mainly sharing knowledge of the industry on modernist cooking techniques and molecular gastronomy, which was popular at the time. I was working full-time as senior sous-chef at The Connaught and my wife Lulu, who is now also my business partner, was working full-time in digital marketing. In 2013, we started running it as a pop-up on the third floor at the House of Wolf in Highbury and Islington. We got a few people we knew together and it started to get a really good response. After about six months, I left The Connaught and we kept growing from there.
We work with Professor Charles Spence, who is head of crossmodal research at Oxford University. As a director of the company, he collaborates with us on lots of research. I'd always been fascinated by his work after attending a talk he was giving on multisensory flavour perception. Since becoming a chef, I always had a vision of trying to create something that was beyond just a normal restaurant, something that was far more interesting and creative. So I went to visit him at his lab in Oxford and was just fascinated by the work and research he was doing. I think it's interesting to take a look at some of the mechanics behind how we are as human beings and how we react to things, how our minds work.
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Now we have our Kitchen Theory Studio in High Barnet where we host the Gastrophysics Chefs Table dining experience. The evening explores multisensory flavour perception by breaking it down into much simpler elements looking at taste and smell, gently working people up to this idea of colours and shapes and how we have relationships between them in our mind. Through 13 courses of conceptual dishes, we want to take people on a journey. Even if people don't find the dishes to their taste, they enjoy the experience that we have set up for them. A lot of thought goes into each dish – we worked on the menu for about a year before putting it out and each course is based on the research we have done with Charles Spence and Oxford University over the past five years as well as involving storytelling, history, culture and issues such as sustainability.
One of the most popular menus we offer explores the phenomenon of synaesthesia, where two or more senses normally experienced separately are automatically combined. So the sound of musical notes could trigger the visualisation of different colours or smells. Our dish '4 Tastes, the taste of colour', features four edible bubbles in red, white, green and black, which we challenge diners to identify as sweet, sour, salty or bitter before tasting. Up to 70 per cent of diners agree on which colour correlates to which flavour, showing that there are widely held preconceptions about the relationship between the two.
Going through the experience allows people to learn and identify more about their own perceptions and values, and encourages them to be more mindful as they go through each course. It's about challenging perceptions by creating an experience. Another way we encourage this is to not have any forks at the table. You could visit a Michelin-starred restaurant and admire the plate that is in front of you for a moment, then after that your focus becomes less about the food, flavour and taste. By removing forks from the equation it encourages people to be more mindful of what they're doing. For instance, the first course we offer involves eating with your hands – there's something more delicious about it and it always gets people more engaged with the meal.
We like our diners to feel they can sit there, enjoy the food and relax so a comfortable chair is important to the experience. We want it to feel like you've gone to a friend's place so everyone feels like they are the chef's friends. We want people to have fun. The whole point of the evening is to focus all of your senses on each of the 13 courses, so we have to make sure the food is as good as it can be. We are constantly trying to make our guests more mindful of the food as well as feeling enlightened, but also to leave feeling satiated and that they've had a great meal.
We're very proud of what we do, we think it's cool and we want to continuously develop it. I think it can really play a significant role in understanding the relationship that we have with food and understand how we can work with people's senses to give them a greater appreciation for more nutritious and sustainable foods. And how we can design foods for the future that take into consideration all the sensory aspects of eating and dining.
In 2018, we're working with the Basque Culinary Centre on an initiative called Gastronomia. We'll be hosting two events in London with a group of experts, such as Charles Spence and Bill Knox, to discuss gastronomy in 2050. We'll be looking at a broad spectrum of topics such as food sustainability, food design, restaurant design and agricultural systems then narrowing it down to create a blueprint for designing better food systems for the future.
We've also been working with cosmologist Dr Roberto Trotta for a number of years on how the principles of things like the Big Bang and dark matter can be aligned with food. One idea we are working on at the moment is The Big Bang Dinner: five courses explaining some of the physical phenomena that took place at the start of the Big Bang through food.
At the end of the day, through all of our experiences, our goal is to encourage mindfulness. Whether you're a sceptic about all the science or not, no one can deny that being more mindful of what you eat will make it more pleasurable.
JOZEF YOUSSEF founded Kitchen Theory as a blog and started putting on pop-ups in 2013 alongside his wife and Kitchen Theory managing director Lulu. The Gastrophysics Chef's Table experience happens once a month at their studio in High Barnet. For more information or to book, go to kitchen-theory.com
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