A cast-iron skillet of fajitas makes its way through the dining room on a busy Friday night.
Hiss.
Crackle.
A cloud of steam trailing behind the server.
Every head in its path turns. By the time it lands on table 14, two other tables have flagged their server. “What is that?”
Nobody at those tables tasted a thing. They didn’t need to. Their brains did it for them.
That’s the quiet truth behind multisensory dining. Taste isn’t just a job for the tongue. It’s a whole-brain production, and the show starts long before the plate lands on the table.
Multisensory dining research shows the brain starts tasting before the food arrives. Sensory words, action photos, and kitchen sounds activate the same brain regions as real flavor and smell, and they change both how good a dish tastes and how likely guests are to order it.
The rest of the business world is just catching on. Trend forecaster WGSN now calls multisensory experiences the next marketing frontier, Trend forecaster WGSN now calls multisensory experiences the next marketing frontier as brands look beyond text and screens to capture consumer attention in an AI-optimized, content-saturated world.
Restaurants have been sitting on this advantage forever. Eating is widely considered one of the most comprehensive multisensory human experiences because it engages all five senses simultaneously to construct what we perceive as flavor. Most just aren’t using it on purpose.
Can You Taste A Photo?
Try this… look at each photo and notice what happens.
None of it is in front of you. Not the lemon, not the soup, not the spoon. Your brain supplied all three anyway.
Sensologist Sarah Hyndman, who co-publishes research with Oxford’s Charles Spence, calls these “activating images.” They pull you into the experience by borrowing sensory memories you already own. You’ve bitten into a lemon wedge. You’ve leaned over a hot bowl of soup. You’ve cracked that sugar crust. Your brain fills in the rest.
When Hyndman recently showed a conference audience a photo of a lime being squeezed, faces puckered and people touched their cheeks as if tasting sourness. A few even pointed at their eyes, imagining juice squirting in.
Brain imaging backs it up. Researchers in Spain asked people to read words like cinnamon, garlic, and jasmine inside a brain scanner. The regions that process smell switched on, with no scent anywhere in the room. In a separate study, simply looking at photos of appetizing food fired up regions tied to taste and reward. And words like “telephone” lit up the brain’s hearing areas, even though nobody was asked to imagine a ring.
Read that again with your menu in mind. Your menu isn’t a list. It’s a remote control for your guest’s senses.
Do You Cut Your Lemons?
Marketing researchers Sharma and Estes tested activating images on something far less glamorous than a fancy dinner: dish soap.
Shoppers compared two labels for lemon-scented washing-up liquid. One showed whole lemons. The other showed lemons sliced open. Same soap. Same scent. Different picture.
The cut lemons made people imagine the smell more vividly, rating it 4.20 out of 5 compared with 3.64 for the whole fruit. Everyone knows a lemon doesn’t smell like much until you slice into it. The picture borrowed that memory and did the selling.
Now look at your menu photos and your Instagram grid. A perfect plate shot from above, still and untouched, is the whole lemon. The cheese pull, the steam curling off the soup, the gravy mid-pour, the knife sliding through a crackling crust: that’s the cut lemon.
The Brain Rehearses the Meal
Researchers have also found another small detail that does heavy lifting. In a series of ad studies, they flipped food images so the spoon, fork, or mug handle pointed toward either the viewer’s dominant hand or the other one.
When the utensil pointed toward the dominant hand, people imagined eating the food more easily and were more likely to want to buy it. Remove the utensil entirely, and the effect dropped about as much as pointing it the wrong way.
The brain isn’t just looking at food. It’s rehearsing picking it up. About 90% of your guests are right-handed. Give their brain something to grab.
The same applies to words. Across chewing gum, potato chips, and popcorn, ads that described several senses, like the sound, the smell, and the texture, led people to rate the food as tasting better than ads that only talked about flavor.
Can You Hear the Flavor?
Charles Spence and Massimiliano Zampini put headphones on volunteers and had them bite into potato chips. Behind the scenes, the researchers secretly turned the crunch up or down.
Same chips. But when the sound of the crunch was louder and sharper, people rated them roughly 15% crisper and fresher.
Spence and Zampini’s study earned an Ig Nobel Prize, the award for research that makes you laugh and then think.
We’ve talked about how the music in your dining room shapes spending (see Turn Up the Revenue) and how the plate itself changes flavor (see Can Color Make Your Food Taste Better?).
But some of the most powerful sounds in your restaurant don’t come from a speaker. They come from the food.
The sizzle.
The fizz of a fresh pour.
The crack of a crème brûlée top.
The crunch of bread being torn at the table.
Want the full tour? Heavier cutlery that makes the same dish feel worth more, music tempo that sets how fast tables turn, even why tomato juice tastes better at 30,000 feet: it’s all in my guide to multisensory dining.
The Promise Has to Be Real
Here’s where multisensory dining can backfire. Every sensory word on your menu is a prediction. The brain’s reward system loves outcomes that beat expectations and punishes ones that fall short.
Promise “crackling skin” and serve it soft, and you didn’t add a sense. You created a disappointment. Multisensory dining isn’t the same as sensory special effects. A random soundtrack or a scent diffuser in the entry doesn’t make a room immersive. The senses have to tell the same story. Balance matters as much as addition.
The Bottom Line
Your guests don’t taste with their tongues. They taste with everything they’ve ever eaten.
Every word, photo, and sizzle is an invitation for the brain to start eating early. Make it a good invitation, keep the promise, and the food will taste better when it finally arrives.
The first bite doesn’t happen at the table. It happens in the brain.
Dr. Melissa Hughes is a keynote speaker and author who has taken brain science out of the lab and into real life for the last 20 years. She helps hospitality teams understand why guests feel what they feel, from the first glance at the menu to the last bite of dessert, and how small, science-backed moves turn a good meal into a memory worth coming back for.
Her latest book, Backstage Pass: The Science Behind Hospitality That Rocks, is the playbook for turning great service into guests who return. Start with the free preview chapter and see what’s happening backstage in your guests’ brains.
