Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (23 page)

5. To the glass of white grape juice add 1 drop of red, 1 drop of yellow, and 1 drop of blue (goal: brown).

6. To the glass of cranberry juice add 1 drop of red and 1 drop of blue (goal: deep purple).

7. To the glass of pear juice add 1 drop of yellow (goal: orange).

8. Tell the tasters you’d like them to tell you what type of fruit juice they taste. Tell them to be as specific as possible. For example, instead of just orange juice, you want to know what type of orange it is. Navel? Tangerine? Have them cleanse their palates with saltines between tastes.

9. After the tasters have written down their guesses, let them know what is what.

OBSERVE AND DISCUSS

• Did anyone get all of them right?

• How did color color the participants’ answers?

YOU WILL NEED

1 willing cook or meal procureer

Whatever meal you choose to cook or serve

1 willing participant

1 blindfold

EXPERIENCE, TOGETHER

1. Cook a meal for someone (or a group of people) you love. Try to contain the smells away from the area where you’ll be eating so as not to tip off what you’re cooking.

2. Sit down in the dining room with your willing guinea pig(s) and explain what you’ll be doing. It’s really important that you have their trust and that you do not betray it. Tell them
that everything you’re going to feed them is safe, familiar, and hopefully delicious. Then, make it so!
    This is not the time to introduce to your loved ones a new food, or try to get them to eat something they hate. That’s not the object of this exercise. The object of “eating blind” is to see if you can recognize familiar foods without your eyes.

3. While you’re sitting down with your diner(s), have them get familiar with the table, place setting, and position of the glasses. Don’t blindfold them until they’re 100 percent comfortable with their surroundings. Have them stay in that seat for the duration of the experiment.

4. Serve your diner(s) as you would do at a restaurant, one course at a time. Sit with them and watch them eat. Be there to answer any questions. After they’ve tried to guess what they’re eating, you can tell them what it is.

5. Have them eat it again—still blind but knowing what they’re eating—before you remove the blindfold.

6. Then remove it and let them enjoy the rest of the course with their sight. Blindfold them again before the next course arrives.

7. Enjoy. Have fun with it.

D
on’t Sell the Steak—Sell the Sizzle

Über salesman and author Elmer Wheeler, 1937

H
ow do you choose a restaurant? Maybe you visit a site like Zagat or OpenTable. Or perhaps you type into your search page a city name plus a trusty phrase such as “best restaurant in” or “top 10 restaurants.” Regardless of where you end up on the web, you’re likely to have a fairly limited sensory experience, which makes your choice difficult because dining in a restaurant is one of the most complete multisensory experiences available to us on a daily basis. Until technology advances, you won’t be able to smell or taste the food from the restaurant in question. You may be able to tour the restaurant using
your eyes if the owner has the foresight to post photos or, even more rarely, a video. Some restaurateurs will even include a signature song or soundtrack that puts you in the mood. But that’s likely to be the extent of the sensory input you get to help you make your choice.

Delfina restaurant has approached the online medium differently. With the neighborhood’s signature sounds, the Delfina website transports you to the scrappy, bustling corner of Eighteenth Street and Guerrero in San Francisco’s edgy Mission District. You feel the energy. You sense the pulse of the place. You hear the sound of chairs scraping across the hardwood floor, forks clanging on plates, place settings being cleared, glasses clinking, phones ringing, and the constant din of a happy crowd of pasta-twirling, wine-drinking customers. The noise level is just right: energetic but not too deafening, infectious in a way that makes you want to go there just to be part of the action.

But Delfina didn’t always sound this way. When it first opened in 1998, San Francisco restaurant critic Paul Reidinger described it as “spare walls, stone floors, and shiny, cold zinc-topped tables amounting to an ideal environment for the propagation of decibels . . . a crescendo that’s not unlike the approach of a train. All that’s missing is a horn and a flashing light.” Owner Craig Stoll remembers another critic calling Delfina a “shrieking hellhole.”

It is a testament to the quality of Stoll’s food that the place survived at all, because eating there was a painful experience. The restaurant had the same throbbing, audible excitement as it has today, but at its original size—about one-third as big as it is today—the noise was stuffed in, uncomfortable. Today, Stoll gestures proudly at Delfina’s ceiling, bar, and walls.

“You’re looking at ten thousand dollars’ worth of acoustic panels,” he says. “This place is loud,” he continues, “but the sound is good. It’s a good-quality sound.”

Even with the moderated sound, Stoll had to engineer his menu to compete with the space’s energy. “There’s sensory overload in this place. And we like it that way. There’s a lot going on. There’s a buzz around you, and this plate of food has to compete for your attention. Our food’s pretty subtle, but it’s just past subtle.”

Stoll is onto something, according to a study conducted by the food company Unilever and the University of Manchester. They wanted to find out whether background sounds affect the perception of flavor. They found that people rated foods less salty and less sweet as noise levels increased. When noise levels decreased, the perception of those tastes increased. The results indicate that noise
has a somewhat masking effect on taste. This is one of the reasons why airplane food doesn’t taste very good. The deafening roar of the engines can make the food taste less sweet and less salty (and possibly less other stuff, too, that these researchers didn’t test for).

There are other reasons, of course, why food at 30,000 feet isn’t very good. There’s much less humidity, which dehydrates you. This translates to less saliva available to dissolve Basic Tastes and less mucus in your nose to absorb aromas. Most of the hot food was prepared and cooked hours before you will eat it. But certainly the droning of two jet engines plays a part in overpowering subtle tastes. Similarly, when Stoll pushes his food “just past subtle,” he’s turning up the volume of his food to compete against the masking sounds of his restaurant.

A company called Acoustiblok sells something they call QuietFiber for combating this type of flavor-masking cacophony. They recommend cutting QuietFiber into strips and squares and securing it all around a loud restaurant: under tables, under the bar, under chairs, and so on. The next time you feel the underside of a table at a restaurant, what you’ll end up finding is, hopefully, the result of someone thoughtful like Craig Stoll. Finding noise-absorbing panels in a restaurant is a good sign. It means the proprietor is thinking about more than just the two or three senses you primarily use when eating. He knows that a mellower decibel level allows you to experience flavor more fully. He also probably knows how to use each human sense, balancing them as carefully as he does the five Basic Tastes that you’ll savor in his food.

If your sense of taste is offended, you can spit out an unappealing food. You can pinch your nose when an awful odor overwhelms you. To shut out offensive images, you can simply close your eyes. But since you have no earlids, your sense of
hearing is often assaulted without your permission. Julian Treasure, founder of The Sound Agency, has worked with food retailers such as Tesco and Marks & Spencer to help them reengineer their spaces to reduce negative sounds and enhance pleasant ones. “There’s no point in playing a pleasing soundscape or some appropriate and effective music on top of a cacophony of other noise. That’s what I call ‘putting icing on mud,’” says Treasure.

Treasure tells a story about friends of his who walked into a very quiet hotel bar in London. As soon as the party of four sat down, the bartender turned on the music—a pumping dance track—at a level so loud they ended up shouting at each other. When they asked the bartender to turn the music down, they also asked why he had turned it on in the first place. They were the only ones present and they hadn’t asked for it. It turned out that management had instructed all employees to turn the music on as soon as customers walked into the bar “to create atmosphere.”

“That is the most misused word in the restaurant business,” says Treasure. “It’s often used synonymously with noise. Loud music is not equal to atmosphere.” What Treasure means is that music—in the absence of activity, energy, and, most important, customers—does not instantly bring a bar or restaurant to life. If only it were that simple!