Weird new dining experience involving bunnies
Can touching a fluffy bunny make your food taste better? Diners in Brighton certainly seem to think so...
Do you think of yourself as an adventurous foodie, primed to devour the weirdest and most wonderful eating experiences on offer?
Then hop along to Brighton’s Rabbit Café this week, where diners can snuggle up to an albino rabbit while munching on Easter-themed snacks.
Cake and bunny cuddles
You’re right: it’s far too late for an April Fool’s. The Rabbit Café is a genuine venture, designed to expand our sensory enjoyment of eating by stimulating the haptic sense of touch – how people and animals communicate with each other via touch.
Japanese trend
This might sound bonkers, but petting cafes are already very popular in Japan. There are a few cat and dog cafes in Tokyo, which apparently help people relax after work, and a rabbit café opened in 2009. Watch the video here.
The Rabbit Café comes to us courtesy of theatrical foodies Bompas & Parr, otherwise known as the Jellymongers, who recently stormed onto the foodie scene.
I do hope health and safety have been alerted. But more to the point, how on earth can a fluffy bunny hug improve the taste of your lunch?
Touch can enhance taste
“Simultaneously stimulating touch and taste might just confuse the brain,” admits Dr Ben Seymour, from London’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, “but in theory, it has the capacity to create new experiences with a strong affective phenomenology.”
He said it was “impossible to predict” what your eventual perception will be if you touch a rabbit while eating your food in the cafe, “but it will probably be unusual”!
I’m inclined to agree. Though I can’t have my breakfast with the dog sat on my lap, as it would disappear down her snout before I’d had even a forkful, sitting down to toast thick with butter and marmalade has another dimension with a warm puppy curled up on my feet.
Heston’s sense-ational ideas
Heston Blumenthal was one of the first to bring this broadening of sensory perception to a wider audience. He delights in evoking memory and emotion through his food, from his posh take on the much-loved Jaffa Cake to his Sound of the Sea dish from The Fat Duck menu, which came complete with an iPod hidden inside a conch shell so the lucky diners could listen to the sound of crashing waves while eating.
The desired effect was to transport guests to a memorable seaside experience. Heston’s special touches are avant-garde, but anything from the choice of music and lighting to putting fresh flowers or candles on a table serve as nudges in this direction – they are all creating a staged atmosphere for us to expand our taste horizons within.
Dom Lane is an expert in Organoleptics, the study of our sensory perceptions. “Sensory input is all we have,” he says. “The more we encounter the world in various ways – tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing – the richer that experience is.”
Here, here. At the most basic level, using pleasingly weighty cutlery to eat and drinking a gin and tonic from pretty cut glass makes both taste better.
Better crisps can change the world
But Lane goes further: “The world would be a better, safer place, freer and more democratic, if our cheese and onion crisps tasted better. I mean that most sincerely. The richer that crisp experience is, the richer our lives are and the more interaction we’ll have had with that which surrounds us. You are a better person, and behave better.”
Wow, heavy stuff. Yet I totally agree that better food experiences can improve the world, bit by bit. Poor diets that are high in sugar, for example, often lead to aggressive behaviour.
“The Rabbit Café encourages people to look beyond what’s on the end of their fork during the dining experience,” says Dr Zoe Laughlin, who is involved with the project. “Restaurateurs need to address the total sensory environment to provide the ultimate meal.”
Easter bunnies
Definitely some food for thought this week - especially if the closest you’re going to get to the Easter bunny is peeling back the foil of one of Lindt’s delicious chocolate creations.
If you can’t make it to Brighton, have a go at home with your pet, and let us know whether you think your eating experience was stimulated - for better or worse!
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