This fine-dining restaurant is bringing artificial intelligence to the dinner table

Dubai (CNN) — In a dark, round dining room, the late French chef Paul Bocuse explains the next dish.

It has all the hallmarks of the classic fine-dining cuisine Bocuse was famed for: quail and foie gras, wrapped in mushroom paté and pastry, and lavished with truffle sauce.

But at Krasota, a fine-dining restaurant in Dubai, nothing is what it seems.

Bocuse is not physically there; he’s been dead for six years. Instead, it’s his likeness projected onto the room’s curved walls, before dissolving into the dark.

This dish, from the recipe to the wall projection to the deep fake video of Bocuse, was designed by artificial intelligence (AI). It’s one of eight courses in “Imaginary Futures,” a multisensory dining experience at Krasota.

The experience takes diners through different scenarios of what the future could look like, from an underwater city to a space colony to a post-nuclear apocalypse, with each dish themed for its setting.

For its AI scenario, Krasota’s co-founders — digital artist Anton Nenashev, chef Vladimir Mukhin, and entrepreneur Boris Zarkov — ceded control to technology. Nenashev, who designs the projections with 3D computer graphics software, let the AI come up with 150 different concepts, before merging together the best; and Mukhin prompted generative platform Midjourney to reimagine Bocuse’s most iconic recipes, including his signature truffle V.G.E soup.

“We drew inspiration from the intriguing prospect of AI (re)creating individuals based on comprehensive data about their lives and experiences,” explains Zarkov. He describes it as a digital-age séance that evokes the memories and style of the late chef through technology — and it’s just the beginning for the future of dining, he says.

“Living hand-in-hand with artificial intelligence has shifted from fantasy to reality,” Zarkov adds.

‘First of its kind’

Zarkov, the restauranteur behind the acclaimed White Rabbit in Moscow (where Mukhin is also head chef and co-founder), came up with the idea for Krasota while visiting teamLabs digital art museum in Tokyo in 2017, which featured an interactive “tea house” experience.

“The projection on the table was very simple — for example, you take the matcha tea and it’s like the tree starts to grow from your cup,” Zarkov explains. “I decided to do something more with the technology: more (food-focused), more complicated.”

Assembling an international team of engineers, they began working on multi-surface projections and an AI-enabled interactive tabletop that uses sensors to distinguish between different objects, such as plates and glasses, versus guests’ hands or phones, which allows targeted projection — for example, fireflies that “gather” on glasses and plates, or an arcade game activated by the diner’s hand.

“This was the most difficult, complicated technology we made,” says Zarkov. He claims the technology was “the first of its kind” when Krasota initially launched in Moscow in 2021, and recalls staff spending a full month training the AI by repeatedly putting plates down on the table and moving objects to test it.

“At first, it was not very fast — when you moved your phone, it would take three seconds to react,” says Zarkov. But AI uses machine learning to improve when it receives new information. “Now you can play with any images on the table. It’s like it’s alive,” he adds.

Krasota Dubai opened in 2023 with one show, “Imaginary Art,” which takes diners through eight courses inspired by famous works by international artists. Six months later, the team launched “Imaginary Future,” a speculative voyage through the world in the coming decades.

Getting the pacing of the show right was tricky, says Zarkov. “It’s important to make the focus on the screen, or on the food,” he says, adding, “When you have a lot of focus on the screen, your food becomes popcorn.”

The experience carefully directs diners’ attention: the most exciting and dynamic visuals are in the breaks between courses, and when food arrives, the graphics become repetitive and passive. The interactive elements only come to the fore when the plates are cleared, and in case there’s any confusion, the human staff (dressed in eccentric thematic costumes) help focus on the correct medium.

Whether it’s the food or the screens, Zarkov hopes guests take away that “art is important. We want them to feel it.”

‘Sonic seasoning’

Technology at the dinner table isn’t an entirely new concept. In 2007, The Fat Duck by Heston Blumenthal in the UK introduced “the sound of the sea” — a now-famous dish of shellfish sashimi, plated on an edible sandy shoreline, accompanied by a mini-iPod stuck in a conch shell and earphones playing the sound of waves crashing gently on the beach and the cry of seagulls.

It was one of the first technology-enabled multisensory dishes in the world, says Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford. He’s spent the last two decades exploring how audio-visual stimuli change how food tastes — or at least, our perception of it.

For example, classical melodies will make you think the food is more expensive, and music that matches the cuisine — for example, Italian songs with a pasta or pizza dish — will increase the perception of authenticity. In one experiment, Spence found participants rated the same wine “about 15% sweeter and fruitier with red lighting, compared to when it’s the green light, which brings out the freshness and the acidity instead.”

Even the pitch of music can impact the taste, Spence adds: low-pitched sounds will make something taste more bitter, while tinkling, high-pitched notes will bring out the sweetness.

“More and more chefs are deliberately introducing this kind of ‘sonic seasoning’ to modify the taste of their food,” says Spence, adding that there’s a growing interest from consumers eagers to explore the “surprising connections” between their different senses.

Technology is becoming more common in these multisensory experiences. Restaurants like Zenon, also in Dubai, use “AI-generated art installations” to change the mood of the dining room, and private dining room Jing in Hong Kong explores the ancient Song Dynasty through an immersive dinner experience with projections and a lighting scheme.

Multisensory goes sci-fi

Most multisensory dining experiences, often hosted at high-end venues and conceptualized by world-class chefs, are expensive and inaccessible. (Krasota’s show starts from 1,200 dirhams, around $326.)

But Spence likens it to “the Formula One of food,” where the best dishes and experiences will “percolate down to the mainstream.”

And that’s already happening: Fanta’s “TikTok experience” asked consumers to explore how the flavor of its special edition drink changed with different stimuli, and Spence is working with Italian food manufacturer Barilla on soundscapes for different pasta types.

In the future, Spence sees more companies integrating sensory experiences — perhaps QR codes on products that link to a playlist to enhance the taste.

Zarkov’s vision of the future is a little more sci-fi: he speculates that ultimately, brain chips will trick your mind into presenting your senses with whatever your heart desires. “In your mind, it looks like the best California sushi rolls you’ve ever seen,” says Zarkov. But really, the dish is “biomass,” with the precise nutrients, vitamins, and minerals your body needs.

But if people are plugged into their own hyper-optimized world, if the dishes on the table don’t look the same to your partner as they do to you, if the decor is different, does dining lose its communal and social aspect?

“Any technology that interferes with the social aspects of dining will not succeed,” such as headsets or goggles, says Spence. “People mostly want to talk with each other; dining is fundamentally a social activity.”

Zarkov agrees that the “main goal is still socializing” and Krasota avoids technology like VR that could be disruptive to the experience. One element the team is currently testing is projecting a “live skin” onto people’s hands, giving them a different aesthetic, like a scaly fish — but designing it to move with the person is still “very complicated,” says Zarkov. 

Krasota is continuing to develop new ideas and experiment with its projection tech. Its next show, expected to launch in early 2025, is inspired by “Alice in Wonderland,” and will “use a lot of AI in the production, because they made a huge step forward in the technology last year,” says Zarkov, adding: “We can now ‘resurrect’ images of people, use AI in creative processes, and either embrace or fear this collaborative dynamic.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.