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How to build a multi-sensory experience in your restaurant

It takes a lot of work for restaurant and retail brands to deliver a remarkable experience. It can be done, however, by making sure the environment touches each of the five senses.

September 10, 2015 by Steve Starr — Chief, starrdesign

It takes a lot of work for restaurant and retail brands to deliver a remarkable experience. It can be done, however, by making sure the environment touches each of the five senses.

A sensory experience affects a human’s senses: sound, sight, touch, smell and taste. Restaurateurs often naturally focus on sight and taste, primarily caring about how the space looks and the flavor of their food. But what they don’t realize is that the look and feel of the environment encompasses a lot more than simply how it appears.

In order to create a distinct and intentional sensory experience for your guests, pay special attention to the feel of the space and appeal to their senses of sound, smell and touch.Since restaurant operators are often serving customers with diverse motivational drivers and backgrounds, it’s important to hit on enough factors to create a remarkable experience.

Sound: Different restaurants function best under different noise conditions. You need to decide up front what you’re looking to establish in the space. Are you creating a festive, social vibe, or are you going for a quiet and romantic setting? It all comes down to brand messaging. Once you’ve decided on your goal, you can use an intentional combination of specific music along with specific material selection focused on acoustic control.

Smell: People often first taste food through their nose, relying on their sense of smell to determine whether something will have good flavoring. For example, if you enter a local establishment that features home-cooked meals, you want to be greeted by the aroma of fresh baked biscuits rather than the scent of grease from fried chicken. This makes scent one of the initial impressions a guest will have about your restaurant.

Scents can be established in a variety of ways. Using the pressurization associated with your HVAC system and the hood exhaust system, you can control the smell within your restaurant. Keep in mind that understanding the pressures is key: the kitchen should always be negatively pressured, allowing air to enter rather than escape. In the same way, the dining area should always be positively pressured, allowing air to leave the space.

With the pressure differences being correctly controlled, the kitchen will pull air from the dining room. This prevents an overwhelming sea of scents from all the meals being consumed in one space. Additionally, if the dining room is positively pressured, when someone opens a door to the outside, the conditioned air will move out, preventing outdoor air from hitting your customers, and thus creating a more comfortable dining experience. These are important factors that can be impacted by intentionally planning out the desired pressures from the beginning.

Touch: There are two ways your customers can experience the sense of touch: literally and figuratively. A person can physically touch different finishes in your restaurant based on surfaces that feel natural, solid, textured, soft, hard, plush, layered or comfortable. And, the way these textures look can even affect your guests’ “sense” of touch. These literal implications set the tone for the way your restaurant may feel to the customer.

A person’s figurative sense of touch may also be impacted by their perception of personal space. For example, if you’re sitting alone at a small table near a wall, you would probably feel cozy and secure. However, if that same table was positioned in the middle of the room surrounded by the hustle of others, they would now likely feel exposed and possibly invaded.

Restaurant operators typically approach this sense of touch in two different ways. While some go out of their way to define a customer’s personal space, others breakdown the definition of space to make their establishment feel more communal. The same way two-top tables along a perimeter wall allow people to feel safe, a bar area or picnic table would encourage community among guests. Additionally, different table styles can impact the way a person feels in the space. While a booth or large table feels anchored and secure, a smaller stand-alone table may leave the customer feeling small. How you approach this sense of touch will be determined by the type of environment you are trying to create.

Sensory experiences exist almost everywhere in your restaurant, whether they’re deliberately planned or not. Executing an experience that touches on each sense can be a challenge, but should always be intentional. We’ve found that it’s best to break them down into their own experience rather than tackle them all at once. This way, you have a better idea of where you want to go and what you want to accomplish with each.

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