Tasteful aroma: should restaurants ban diners from wearing strong perfumes?
Dress codes are not unusual in highend eateries, but London’s Sushi Kanesaka restaurant has taken things one step further, asking guests to refrain from wearing perfume so as not to interfere with the sensory experience of other diners.
Heavy fragrances, the restaurant suggests, could mask the “refreshing” ambient scent of vinegar, and of the fish itself. So should the approach of the £420-per-person restaurant be adopted more widely? Is perfume on a dinner date, while making you smell better, likely to make your food and drink taste worse?
“Smell is about the most important part of tasting,” said Prof Barry Smith, the director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. “All you get from the tongue are salt, sweet, sour, savoury. All the other flavours are from the nose.”
However, Smith pointed out that smell has two components: odours that are breathed in from the environment and those coming from the mouth out through the nose during exhalation. “Can environmental odours interfere with odours in your mouth? It’s not obvious that it does,” said Smith. “When you’re tasting or swallowing you’re breathing out, and we can’t breathe out and in at the same time.”
Nevertheless, research and everyday experience support the view that ambient smells are important for the broader dining experience.
“Those ambient scents definitely can affect the taste of the food and mood,” said Prof Charles Spence, a psychologist at the University of Oxford. “It’s a bit ambiguous, when you smell something, what your brain is going to attach it to. Is it the waiter, is it the restaurant, is it the food?”
The wrong smell in the wrong context can produce an unpleasant sensory dissonance. Smith described a recent negative experience of a lunchtime meal in a London square that has introduced the use of seaweed compost in its flowerbeds. “The smell of rotting seaweed was so off-putting,” he said. “It was very unpleasant to be reminded of something rotting while eating a sandwich.”
More recently, chefs have been trying to proactively introduce ambient odours and Spence has considered this quest in a scientific review, noting that ambient scents could “help set the context for a particular dish, and/ or to assist with the storytelling that surrounds a specific element within an experiential meal”. Ambient scents have also been introduced in restaurants with the aim of inducing “a specific mood and/or to trigger nostalgia in the minds of diners”, the paper states.
If you’re going to ignore the ban, Spence suggested, it might be best to go for something that would blend into the culinary setting. “Why not go for a gourmet perfume – black pepper or strawberry? That might be less of a clash than a very synthetic or soapy, non-gourmand scent.”
Personal fragrances, research has shown, also increase the threshold at which people are able to detect other odours – a reassuring finding, perhaps, given that this is partly the point. Prof Carl Philpott, the head of rhinology and ENT research at Norwich Medical School, investigated the issue after noticing that participants’ perfumes and aftershaves were affecting the results of their experiments on olfaction.
In one experiment, volunteers were asked to wear face masks doused in Lynx or Impulse body sprays for a few minutes before doing a smell test. Afterwards, they were less able to detect other fragrances. “It made enough of a difference for us to recommend that people should not wear perfume or aftershave for smell tests,” he said.
This suggests that subtle environmental odours might be more easily disrupted by perfumes. “The smell of really fresh sushi fish is very delicate and gorgeous, but subtle, so could easily be overpowered,” said Smith. Stronger perfumes might be OK, he said, in a restaurant serving bold flavours, such as Indian or Thai cuisine, he added.
The no-perfume approach does not come without costs. Wearing perfume can make a person both appear more attractive to others and feel more confident internally. “You’re likely to make your diners anxious if they’re not allowed to wear any scent,” said Smith. “A modest amount of perfume seems reasonable.”