Dining in Virtual Reality

A Culinary Frontier

Imagine this, you’ve decided to treat yourself to one of those fancy, multi-course tasting menus at that expensive restaurant you’ve had your eye on but couldn’t justify the price tag until now.

Right as you sit down your senses are being stimulated without you even realizing it. The lighting is just right, the color scheme has been carefully selected for the season, and you can hear the quiet hum of a well-oiled kitchen in the background.

All of these external stimuli come together to turn you on long before your server brings out the first course. Turn you on? Exactly, yes you are being prepared for a highly stimulating experience.

You and your dining partner order the 20-course tasting menu, each course is paired with a small beverage and some kind of experimental dessert to finish off the experience.

You have been to high-end places before, tasted some of the finest foods, and had fantastic experiences, but this place is different it’s a completely immersive experience, a culinary spectacle, combining avant-garde gastronomy with cutting-edge technology.

This is a 4D restaurant, a dining experience that goes far beyond just serving exceptional food.

You are taken on a multi-sensory journey where you not only taste exquisite dishes but also engage with various visual, auditory, and even olfactory elements.

This is much like a 4D theater although unlike seeing a 4D movie this experience probably won’t involve a giant gorilla jumping off your plate, but then again it might.

Sublimotion, an innovative high-end dining experience located in Ibiza, Spain is one such place. Sublimotion is probably the premier high-end 4D dining experience in the world and the cost reflects that at around $2,380 per head.

Created by chef Paco Roncero, Sublimotion first opened its doors in 2014 and has been amazing diners ever since. Calling the customers of this place diners just doesn’t seem right, it’s more like being an experiencer of an alien world than “dining” in a restaurant.

The dining space consists of one table that seats 12. It’s designed to be immersive, featuring advanced projection mapping, interactive displays, and augmented reality that transforms throughout the meal, creating different atmospheres and settings to accompany each dish.

The menu at Sublimotion is typically a multi-course affair, with each dish carefully crafted to not only be visually stunning but also to evoke specific emotions and memories.

The cuisine at Sublimotion is often described as molecular gastronomy, with chefs utilizing modern techniques and unconventional ingredients to create innovative flavor combinations and presentations or in other words, a completely futuristic way to eat.

Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash

Another immersive dining experience is Le Petit Chef. This dining experience is a little different from what one would experience in the high-end environment of Sublimotion.

In a Le Petit Chef restaurant, diners are treated to an interactive dining experience where a miniature chef is projected onto their plate or table. The chef then "prepares" a virtual meal right in front of them, complete with cooking actions and animations. The projection is synchronized with real dishes served by the restaurant staff, creating a fantastical and immersive dining experience.

This concept has gained popularity worldwide, with Le Petit Chef restaurants opening in various cities around the globe. It offers diners not just a meal, but an engaging and memorable culinary event.

I would like to think that 4D dining is the future of dining entertainment but if that were the case it wouldn’t exist right now, so my question is what’s next for the immersive dining experience?