Tag Archives: Restaurant

Cases

Could we use a single commercial space for multiple purposes?

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Each commercial space has its own purpose. At a restaurant, we eat food. At a bar, we drink beer. At a cafe, we take a coffee. We rarely drink beer at cafes and we do not ask for coffee at bars. As Google Map shows, cafes are not listed when we search for bars. Similarly, bars do not appear when cafes are searched for.

However, some commercial spaces in Buenos Aires, Argentina serve more than one purpose. For instance, Hobbs Palermo looks like a restaurant. However I ordered a bottle of alcoholic beverage late night and, at a day time, I noticed a person who drank only a bottle of Coca Cola. It is a restaurant, bar, and cafe.

Bar El Federal (or the Federal Bar) is even called as cafe bar. Located in the old downtown of Buenos Aires, it is an authentic pub with wooden interiors and antique bottles. However, some people eat sandwich, others drink beers and even the others read books under the dim light.

We can eat pizza at Starbucks. We can drink coffee at Michelin restaurants. If we overcome the thought that one space should be used only for a single purpose, we will be able to use space creatively.

Cases

Food tastes different at rooftop bar

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Vertigo offers a Bangkok’s ultimate rooftop dining experience. Sixty one floors above the city, people dine on premium steaks while feasting eyes on the skyline. When I visited this rooftop terrace, it was neither windy nor noisy, a perfect place to enjoy dish under the completely dark black sky.

 

 

However, food they served had very little flavor to me. It surprised me because Thai is one of my favorite cuisines. At first, I suspected that I over-enjoyed the street food that had been heavily seasoned with basil, garlic, ginger, and red chili. Alternatively, the level of spiciness and flavor might have been calibrated for cautious people.

 

 

However, I also thought food might taste different at high altitude as in-flight meals are dull and unpleasant. Katia Moskvitch wrote an article about why food tastes different on planes.

… as the plane gets higher, the air pressure drops while humidity levels in the cabin plummet. At about 30,000 feet, humidity is less than 12% – drier than most deserts. The combination of dryness and low pressure reduces the sensitivity of your taste buds to sweet and salty foods by around 30%…

 

 

 

Cases

Old is good intuition

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Although we are always attracted by something new, we sometimes try something old to enjoy its authenticity.

For instance, when a restaurant places an nostalgic vintage signboard outside or when it serves dishes in an ugly pot, we infer that the restaurant must have been loved by many people previously. This “old is good” intuition is so strong that it can even distort the quality of the dish.

I recently visited an approximately 15-year old restaurant and ordered a fish soup for two. It was served in a pot that was all wrinkled up. Although this fish soup was not delicious, I enjoyed it simply because the pot of the soup looked old.   

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Reference

Fuchs, Christoph, Martin Schreier, and Stijn M.J. van Osselaer (2015), “The Handmade Effect: What’s Love Got to Do with It?,” Journal of Marketing, 79 (2), 98–110.

Despite the popularity and high quality of machine-made products, handmade products have not disappeared, even in product categories in which machinal production is common. The authors present the first systematic set of studies exploring whether and how stated production mode (handmade vs. machine-made) affects product attractiveness. Four studies provide evidence for the existence of a positive handmade effect on product attractiveness. This effect is, to an important extent, driven by perceptions that handmade products symbolically “contain love.” The authors validate this love account by controlling for alternative value drivers of handmade production (effort, product quality, uniqueness, authenticity, and pride). The handmade effect is moderated by two factors that affect the value of love. Specifically, consumers indicate stronger purchase intentions for handmade than machine-made products when buying gifts for their loved ones but not for more distant gift recipients, and they pay more for handmade gifts when purchased to convey love than simply to acquire the best-performing product.