Immersive gastronomy with Chef Jozef Youssef

Immersive gastronomy with Chef Jozef Youssef
Seeing flavour: Sight, filet-o-jellyfish & the art of multisensory dining

When is a jellyfish not just a jellyfish? And why might black jellies trick your brain, and your palate?

In this Seeing Senses episode, Chef Jozef Youssef of Kitchen Theory joins host Sarah to explore the strange, compelling world of multisensory gastronomy. From controversial dishes designed to provoke emotional responses to the subtle influence of cutlery on taste, this conversation dives deep into the visual language of flavour. And why our perception of food is never just about taste.

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Listen if you’re curious about:

• How sight shapes your expectations of flavour
• Why black jelly spheres can baffle even expert palates
• The science and strategy behind sensory mapping in experience design
• What the Bouba/Kiki effect and synaesthesia reveal about our crossmodal brains
• How Kitchen Theory went from blog to award-winning immersive supper club

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Key themes & takeaways:

• Sight as a Primary Sense in Eating: How visual cues dominate flavour interpretation
• Disgust by Design: Controversial dishes provoke emotional and cognitive reactions
• Black Jellies & Recognition Gaps: What happens when colour expectation is disrupted
• Sensory Mapping in Experience Design: A stage-by-stage approach to immersive dining
• Crossmodal Congruency: Beyond mixing senses to coherence and emotional resonance
• Synaesthesia & Learned Associations: How we build sensory meaning
• Bouba/Kiki & Shared Language of Shape: Cross-cultural insights into sensory perception
• Cutlery as Interface: Redesigning utensils to heighten attention
• Filet-o-Jellyfish: Fast food futures
• Leave Them Wanting More: Designing moments that linger beyond the meal

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Guest:

Chef Jozef Youssef is a sensory experience designer and the founder of Kitchen Theory, a restaurant with an award-winning immersive chef’s table supper club. He is a culinary innovator and experience designer whose work bridges the worlds of food, science, design, and emotion. He is internationally recognised for pioneering multisensory and immersive dining experiences that challenge the way we perceive flavour.

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Bonus for multi-sensory thinkers:

Head to Seeing Senses on Substack for updates and extras.
You’ll find sense-hacking experiments and book recommendations from the guests. Become a paid subscriber to support the making of this podcast (with extra episodes and content).

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Host:

Sarah Hyndman is a designer/researcher, author and speaker. You can book her for a talk or workshop about Multi-Sensory Thinking here via Type Tasting. Sarah is the founder of Type Tasting, curator of The Sensologists and author of the bestselling book Why Fonts Matter (Penguin/Virgin). 

Seeing Senses. Where there’s more than meets the eye. 

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Theme music by AudioKraken. This episode is dedicated to Syd because it’s her birthday: Happy Birthday Syd!

#MultisensoryDesign #KitchenTheory #CognitiveExperience #SeeingSensesPodcast #FoodPerception

Transcript

Sarah Hyndman (00:01.742)
I'd like to open this episode by saying happy birthday to my brilliantly creative friend, Syd.

Sarah Hyndman (00:12.504)
Why was a flavour so difficult to identify?

We have these little black jellies and you get people to try them and they have to tell you what the flavor is. Obviously as a jelly you've completely masked the texture, you've taken away the color. You'd find that when we leave the jellies in their original color about 80 % of people can tell you exactly what that flavor is. When you remove the color that number goes down to about anywhere between 10 and 20%. Wow. So it just shows you how much we depend on our sense of vision.

Joining me is Chef Jozef Youssef, the founder of the award-winning Kitchen Theory Immersive Chef's Table Supper Club, which it turns out began as a blog. You'll hear how his customer-centered approach is inspired by design company IDO's Design Thinking course. This is such a great example of learning from outside our own industries.

We'll talk about disgust.

Chef Jozef Youssef
We have a dish on the menu at the moment, which is called disgust, and we have stenciled onto each plate in edible material a different, quite controversial character. And these range from politicians to tech tycoons to sports people and entertainers and beyond. And the question is, how much more or how less appetizing does that dish become to you?


It's interesting to see that there's a clear correlation between when people see characters that they do like, that there's a higher rating of the dish, and when there's characters that are more dislikeful, that you'll see that there's a drop in the overall appreciation of the dish. It's exactly the same food that's going onto these dishes, but just by changing what you see emotionally impacts how you feel about the food on your plate.

Sarah Hyndman
reinterpreting a McDonald's classic.

Chef Jozef Youssef
about Filet-O-Jellyfish. With a bit of tongue in cheek and an idea of kind of future foods and fast foods, you start with the jellyfish being highly sustainable. Then how do you design this in a way that looks like a Filet-O-Fish to some degree? It's really about re-imagining what this kind of fast food meal of the future might look like. You're not expecting us to give you a McDonald's inspired dish at a fine dining chef's table.

Sarah Hyndman
how he plans and experience.

Chef Jozef Youssef
Sensory mapping is a big tool in the sense of every step of the journey from invites to when guests arrive to the seating, the whole run of show of the experience itself. You map onto it, what are they touching, tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing throughout this whole journey? How do we create that environment that becomes more alive for people?

Sarah Hyndman (03:03.276)
If you'd like to try a sense hacking experiment inspired by this episode, head over to seeingsenses.substack.com. You'll also get updates, extras, and the option to become a paid subscriber to support the making of this podcast.

Sarah Hyndman (03:23.052)
Welcome to Seeing Senses, where we uncover the magic and science behind what makes us feel starting at first sight. This podcast is for creators, small businesses and the curious. Join me, Sarah Hindman, as I talk to the experts from different fields who have inspired my interdisciplinary approach over the last 12 years. Discover how they connect what we see to what we sense.

Feel, experience and remember. If you want to know how the senses shape your audience's emotions, memories and choices and how you can use this to create unforgettable experiences that people can't help talking about, then this podcast is for you. Seeing sensors, where there's more than meets the eye. Are you ready?

Sarah Hyndman (04:26.924)
In this episode there's a fine example of priming. I'd been chatting previously to perfumer Sarah McCartney about mint. it isn't all surprising that this was my answer when Joseph asked me about the flavour of green jelly.

Chef Jozef Youssef
Give people a green jelly, what do you think that tastes of? What would you say, Sarah, what do you think people would think a green jelly would be? That's why you're unique and you do what you do, because the majority of people, when we ask them, will say, no, they're apple or lime.

Sarah Hyndman
I'm going to assume mint.

Sarah Hyndman (05:00.044)
We also talk about Kiki Boba. This is a linguistics experiment with nonsense words that dates back a century. There will be an extra episode soon about this on the Seeing Senses Substack. But meanwhile, hold out both of your hands. Imagine you are holding a spiky shape in your left hand and a smooth round shape in your right hand. Which one do you think matches the sound Boba and which one matches the sound Kiki?

Most likely you said Kiki was jagged and Boba was round. I'll let Jozef explain more about this shortly.

Sarah Hyndman (05:41.612)
My guest today is Chef Jozef Youssef. He's the founder and the creative force behind Kitchen Theory, a restaurant with an award-winning immersive chef's table supper club. Based in London, he also creates events for clients around the world. He's a speaker, an author, and an authority in the field of multisensory gastronomy. I met you.

In the very, very early days of kitchen theory, back in, I think we worked out it was 2013, when I'd also just launched type tasting as this venture. You held an event with the most fascinating speakers and a networking session afterwards. This is where I was introduced to Professor Charles Spence and I discovered that I could be a part of this amazing world where art meets science meets sensors. And the people I met that evening changed everything for me. What was meant to be just a year out from being a graphic designer turned into my new career, so...

Firstly, thank you and welcome.

Chef Jozef Youssef
I never get tired of hearing that story. I hadn't even realized that until you were on my Kitchen Theory podcast. I love it because I guess a big part of what inspired me in the very early days when Kitchen Theory was just a blog before we were doing any form of physical events, it was all about spreading knowledge and information.

trying to find like-minded people who were interested and curious about the same strange things that I was when it came to how we perceive the world around us, and particularly in my case around food. So I'll never get tired of hearing that. And thank you for having me on.

Sarah Hyndman (07:08.91)
Absolutely my pleasure. For me, it was an eye-opener. I was a graphic designer sitting behind a computer. to find myself in this world and the parallels with mixing up the senses, then what you created was this event where you were mixing up lots of different people from lots of different backgrounds. Seemed like a metaphor, a literal physical social metaphor. I'd like to start with the idea of seeing senses, seeing as this is the theme that we're talking about, sight to sensory perception. Kitchen theory is a seriously impressive, immersive dining space with projections and sound.

And later on, we're going to talk a little about the Synesthesia dinner that you created. But first of all, could you give me an insight into how and why you play with our expectations starting at first sight?

Chef Jozef Youssef
say we eat first with our eyes, or that's at least attributed to Epictus, the first century Roman gourmand. I think, you know, what we see and that idea of visual dominance, how impactful, how what we see can alter our other senses and almost trick or defy the other senses, override maybe in some cases the other senses, is fascinating to me. over years, I guess, as we've developed more and more sensory dining experiences and

This idea of visual dominance we've tried playing with in different ways. So everything from if a food is a certain shape, one of the expectations around the flavor, around the texture. For example, we have a dish on the menu at the moment, which is called disgust. And we have stenciled onto each plate in edible material, a different, quite controversial character. And these range from politicians to tech tycoons to sportsmen.

people and entertainers and beyond. And the question is, how much more or how less appetizing does that dish become to you? We haven't published on this yet because this is still ongoing, but anecdotally, I can say what's really interesting is when you have people who get, let's say, Steve Jobs, he's one of the more likeable characters you'll tend to find in terms of the rating. know, people will rate on a scale when they get the dish, you know.

(09:15.842)
Do they recognize the character? How much do they like or dislike the character? And how appealing do they find the dish, the overall flavor of the dish? It's interesting to see that there's a clear correlation between when people see characters that they do like, that there's a higher rating of the dish. And when there's characters that are more dislikeful, that you'll see that there's a drop in the overall appreciation of the dish. And it's exactly the same food that's going onto these dishes, but just by changing what you see,

visual and doesn't change the taste, doesn't change anything about it, but something emotionally about seeing that character that you dislike or that you like impacts how you feel about the food on your plate. Over time we've just tried playing with this idea and seeing how far can you go. Does it need to look disgusting for it to be disgusting or can it just even look like something that represents something that you find emotionally to be triggering and disgusting?

Sarah Hyndman
That is what's so incredibly interesting that you're not making something look disgusting. That's kind of easy to do, but you're getting us to start asking questions in our minds. And I remember the first time I discovered how much our site can actually influence how we appreciate something. I was so surprised. Do you find that the guests are surprised by this as well?

Chef Jozef Youssef
Yeah, we've played around a lot with colour and taste. The beginning of our experience is at the moment, we have these little black jellies and you get people to try them and they have to tell you what the flavour is. We only give them the hint that it's either fresh-pressed fruit or vegetable juice. They have to then take it from there. Obviously as a jelly, you've completely masked the texture, the top notes of whatever the fruit or vegetable is. You've taken away the colour.

because we dyed them all black. And you'd find that when we leave the jellies in their original color, about 80 % of people can tell you exactly what that flavor is. When you remove the color or turn it black, that number goes down to about anywhere between 10 and 20%. Wow. So it just shows you how much we depend on our sense of vision. And as people are trying these black jellies, we at times have tables of people who have no idea. There's just...

Speaker 1 (11:29.142)
out of, let's say, 18 people, no one has the foggiest. And what's really interesting is when one person has it, more people, like it tends to ripple. When no one can tell what it is, everyone seems to go blank, which is really interesting that how that social dynamic works. Well, that's another conversation. Once you tell people, well, it's in its original color, it's red, then immediately, it's tomato or, it's cherry or, it's whatever. And all they needed was that color cue.

just to get them over that gap between this seems familiar but I can't quite place it to, I know exactly what that is. That to me is fascinating that you can make a flavour that people are very familiar with seem so...

I guess this is an example of the idea of cross-modalism literally in action. It's one sense, it doesn't really work. The minute you add the second sense, you add the colour to the flavour. Then suddenly you're getting enough cues that you can put those little jigsaw pieces together.

Well this is it, I always explain it's like going through a kind of filing cabinet in your mind trying to find, you know, find that this is strawberry but when all you have is the taste and smell and you don't have the visual or textural or any other cues to go with it, all of a sudden that becomes increasingly difficult to be able to do and though most of us would say, I know what strawberry tastes like, but do you?

Sarah Hyndman
And does it work on you?

Chef Jozef Youssef (12:47.918)
Yeah, no, it works. Absolutely works on me. No, it absolutely does. And we test this because the guys in the kitchen will often develop different flavors because we change through the seasons. I'll taste them and they'll try it on me. What do you think it is? And that's always interesting when you know that you should know this. You know it's familiar. It's on the tip of your tongue, but you just can't quite place it. And we've also kind of looked at how you can play with that in another way, which is give people a green jelly. And most people, if you ask them,

What do you think that tastes of? What would you say, Sarah, what do you think people would think a green jelly would be?

Sarah Hyndman
So I'm going to assume mint or something vegetabley, probably start with mint.

Chef Jozef Youssef
that's why you're unique and you do what you do because the majority of people when we ask them will say no, honestly, this is why you think slightly differently. But mint is a very good I hadn't actually Yeah, that's a I haven't come across that what we tend to get is either apple or lime. So they tend to be when you give people a green jelly. And now the really interesting thing is, even when you tell them that it's not apple or lime, that it's strawberry or watermelon or pineapple.

Okay.

Chef Jozef Youssef (13:55.074)
There's an element of, nah, they can't quite get their heads over it because a green jelly is meant to be lime or apple to them, or in your case, mint.

Sarah Hyndman
So I've done the thing where you die or you disguise white wine as red wine and people are just as adamant with that. It's like, no, that's not white wine. That's really not white wine because I can taste strawberries and red notes in it. Have you ever tried playing with actually literally turning lights out?

Chef Jozef Youssef
So at the request of a few corporate clients when we've done events for brands, like Love Honey where they sell sex toys and the blindfolding seemed fun to do at the dining table. But usually, if I'm honest with you, I'm not so into sensory depravision. We're into sensory enhancement and we're into cross-modalism. So that's about bringing more of your senses together in a congruent, meaningful way than it is about taking senses away. Now, having said that, yes, we die, the jelly is black.

you do these kind of things which you could consider some form of augmentation or change but if anything we tend to play around more with colours and shapes that maybe don't look like you would expect them to be on the play. know, Professor Spencer's written a whole paper around blue foods not being congruent let's say. That's an interesting one to play with. Who wants a blue steak or blue peas or what was it Alfred Hitchcock I think used to serve people a blue steak?

dimmed the lights and then when he turned them up they'd realise they're eating blue food and they were disgusted.

Sarah Hyndman (15:18.742)
I read an interview with you where you talked about restaurants these days designing themselves around being Instagrammable. Everything there to attract people to pull out their phones. Designing for Instagram risks being all salivation with no satiation. I was quite pleased with that phrase. And your events are officially stunning. But my impression is that it's absolutely not for Instagram. It's about something very different. So what is your process when you design an event and you think through all of the

different cues and where do you start?

Chef Jozef Youssef
Yeah, that's a very good question. And really depends on what the overarching theme of the event is. And most of the time when we're designing different sensory concepts, a big part of it, of the process is in doing research and just understanding the subject matter of the topic, the brand, the concept that we're trying to bring to life so that we can really articulate it well at the table. Sensory mapping is a big tool in the sense of every step of the journey from invites to when guests arrive to the seating.

the whole run of show of the experience itself, you map onto it, what are they touching, tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing throughout this whole journey? How do we punctuate certain aspects of the experience with different sounds or different aromas that allow us to transition from one headspace, one concept, one dish's narrative into another's? How do we...

create that environment that becomes more alive for people. We don't want people to be passive diners. We want active participants at our dining table. We want people to feel like they are truly immersed in an engaging way at the table as opposed to feeling like they're there to have a nice dinner with a little bit of projection mapping and, you know, some random sounds playing in the background. It really is about the devil in the detail. It really is about looking at each and every little part of

(17:19.021)
the guests experience and really this was inspired by having gone many years ago on a course that was about user-centered design developed by IDEO. As a chef you always design menus and experiences. If you think of some of the most successful chefs, a lot of what they're successful for is who they are, their background, where they work, where the type of food they like to cook. Maybe their main thing is oh I was inspired by my grandmother.

love simple Italian traditional food. Maybe it's I love to cook to the seasons or maybe it's I was brought up in Scotland and I want to represent the local cuisine of my heritage. You have all these different stories with chefs and these narratives and the characters that they are. When they're designing a menu they're designing it based around that they're not designing it based around the end user so for me that seems a bit self-congratulating that I would design the whole menu based around what I love and my

my heritage and history and what I like. I just feel that, and not to say that there aren't incredible chefs out there who are doing it very, very, very, very well. But my point is I wanted to take a slightly different perspective on it and think, well, rather than thinking about what do I like doing, what interests developing a menu and an experience around me, well, let's look at it from the user's perspective. Let's look at it from the diner's perspective. Let's look at it from our guests' perspective.

And let's build around that. And that's why we never call people customers or it's always guests. We consider them as guests. That's how we, that's how we design the experience around this guest. Everything they touch, they smell, they feel, they hear, emotionally, emotional engagement is a big part of what we do. It's not just about storytelling and lights and projections. It's about getting people to feel something. Even that dish that I mentioned earlier, disgust. We want to make you think about why do you find that challenging?

Why do you find it humorous? Why do you think it will impact, do you think it'll impact how you perceive flavor when you're rating it? Are you knowingly doing so? It's really allows people to question even the type of cutlery that we use. We like to vary it so that people aren't just using knives and forks. We don't actually own forks, but because it makes you more creative in terms of how people have to engage with the food. And that doesn't mean that we are making people do silly kind of thing. No.

(19:39.64)
but it's really about thinking when you use a different piece of cutlery, you have to relearn how to interact with your plate because it almost takes you back to something that you won't even remember as a child learning to use a new piece of cutlery. So when we give you our beautifully designed Studio William leaves and you go to tackle a dish with that, initially you're looking at this beautifully crafted leaf and shout out to...

William at Studio William for designing the best tableware ever. You know, I mention it because so many guests mention it to us. They find it fascinating. They find it so engaging. It's so different. They haven't used a different piece of cutlery since, well, they can't remember when the last time they used something new and different to engage with their food. When we design the experiences, it's really about not just trying to do things that trick people out or that's a little bit different or that's quirky. No, it all has to make sense.

and it all has to be centered around designing this great, immersive, memorable, magical experience.

Sarah Hyndman
And it sounds like that takes people off their autopilot, which is such an easy thing to do when we're eating. We just do go into, not paying attention, but at every point, if you put a little bit of friction in, suddenly I'm noticing I'm using this tool. I'm going to pay attention to what I'm tasting now, because, it's a little bit of an unfamiliar thing. That you were inspired by IDEO, design agency, suddenly makes so much sense. And even describing sensory mapping. And now I've got this idea of the way that

when we were designing big projects, we'd have almost like a murder wall going across a chronology of time. I'm presuming that's kind of what you did.

Chef Jozef Youssef (21:13.676)
Yeah, so you'll map out the experience, you'll map out every stage and within that stage, there'll be different sensory triggers and you never want to overdo it. It's not about having a different smell and different texture and a different this and a different that for every single course, because that's overwhelming. And at the end of the day, our research is about multi-sensory flavor perception. And what really interests me is giving people a great experience and a great experience is at overdoing it.

It's leaving people wanting more. It's understanding how to design and curate an experience so that they can enjoy it, immerse themselves within it. As you said, drop their inhibitions. There's a very fine line between what's a gimmick and what really makes sense. The moment you veer over to that gimmicky side, people start feeling a bit kind of, especially in the UK, maybe that's kind of, I would say there's a bit of a difference in the UK, in the Middle East as well. And in Europe, I'd say in America, when we've done events over there, people may be slightly different approach to it.

We want to make sure that people feel really comfortable and really relaxed because if they don't, they're not going to open up and enjoy this with all of their senses. So they have to trust that number one, we can deliver great food and the flavors have to be there because if you falter on that first hurdle, no one's taking any of the science or the research seriously and what drives this experience. second of all, we always want to back up everything we're doing with an element of research and reasoning behind why we're doing it.

Many things go under the radar. People don't even realize we've done them. And every now and again, someone will kind of mention, Ooh, was that on purpose? you're like, yes, finally someone gets it. But the point is, is we do these things and it's as much for us as it is for our guests in terms of trying to push the limits of what can we do, but also making sure that we have a really well balanced experience where you can come along and have a lovely dinner with your loved one or your friend or a group of friends or bit of a colleague.

wonderful experience with wonderful food, but we just want to make it that little bit more special.

Sarah Hyndman (23:19.768)
Talking about research, which you've just referred to there, you've worked in acclaimed Michelin-starred restaurants. Your first book is called Molecular Gastronomy at Home. But the amazing thing about what you do is that you literally turn research into something that we can experience or consume for ourselves. It's the crossover of science, food and performance. How did you find yourself doing this?

Chef Jozef Youssef
the story is I couldn't find the kind of place I wanted to work so I set it up.

Sarah Hyndman
That's the story with so many people doing interesting things.

Chef Jozef Youssef
Yeah. So the chronology basically was something along this. I've worked for let's say eight years in fine dining restaurants around London. I had picked up some wonderful skills. I'd been cooking since I was a kid, but after university, that's when I got into hospitality. I absolutely loved gastronomy and, but you see, I love being in the kitchen, but being in professional restaurants is very much about lunch and lunch and lunch and lunch too. And

Unless you're in the fat dark or a handful of restaurants around the world, really, are you sitting there doing interesting development work and interesting conceptual stuff? And I guess my interest in food extends beyond just food into science behind it, first of all, with molecular gastronomy in terms of the science of cooking, not just making bubbles and spheres, but actually the science, the physical and chemical science of what underlies everything that we do in the kitchen. One of the most fascinating things you can look into is the science of eggs.

(24:50.774)
and just cooking eggs. You could write volumes on something as simple as that. That kind of thing fascinates me, you see. And you don't get to research that when you work in restaurants. Going back to 2011, I had just met Professor Spence at a talk that he was doing for the London Gastronomy Seminars. I went up to him after the talk and was just like, I can't believe I'm the only chef in the room and that you're here talking about all this wonderful stuff to a bunch of academics. I'd love to come by.

your lab and understand more about what you do. Spent about a year and a half to two years researching his work, reading all his, well, all his papers, got about seven, 900 papers out at the moment. But at the time I read what papers he had on food out and became increasingly interested. That summer I had done a placement for a few weeks at the Fat Duck, which was wonderful. And that playfulness that they have there, you know, who of my generation isn't inspired by Heston.

in some way in this modern day and age of what we do in Foran Adria, obviously from El Bulli and Albert Adria. And just the way they were being very whimsical with the food, very narrative led. And Heston obviously having worked with Professor Spence, had done things like the Sounds of the Sea dish, which again, it was incredible to me to be working with Solonai Professor Spence. We already had Kitchen Theories of Blogbook, started doing events. And from there, what I realized was people loved the food, but they...

loved even more the storytelling, the showmanship, themes, the concept, the sensory activations and all of this stuff. This was back in 2013. So when I would say to people that I run Kitchen Theory, it's a multi-sensory design studio, it meant nothing to anyone at the time. It's taken years before now you say, we do multi-sensory immersive dining events. people are like, right, that sounds really cool. Yeah, I went to blah, blah.

and they'll give you an example of some event or experience they've been to. It was really a desire to bring together that passion for gastronomy in its broader context of the history, the art, the culture, the food, the science, the psychology, everything, bringing all of it together into one kind of experience. And that's how we evolved into what we do.

Sarah Hyndman (27:08.238)
I had no idea that it began as a blog. I think that's incredibly inspiring as well, that you can start exploring your ideas and there's something about writing that enables us to think through our processes. And it began as a blog and now you're here doing this. think anybody listening, take that bit of inspiration and where would you like to end up? I was lucky enough to attend your Synesthesia dinner. Every single course was delicious.

But it was also incredibly fascinating and thought provoking. And well over a decade later, it's still one of the most memorable meals I've eaten, which goes back to what you were just saying before about creating meals that people remember. I would love you to describe just a little bit about this experience for the listeners and to hear a bit about the inspiration behind it.

Chef Jozef Youssef
So the synesthesia concept, and for those who aren't so familiar with synesthesia, it's a neurological phenomenon. I call it phenomenon rather than a condition because a condition makes it sound like it's something negative. having done the synesthesia event and having done quite a bit of research into it and having met quite a few synesthetes, none of them see it as being a negative. If anything, it's quite kind of unique and different and fun and interesting. Synesthesia essentially is where your senses are bit crosswired in the brain.

People may have heard artists say things like, when I hear certain notes or tones of music, I see certain colors or vice versa in some cases. And what really got me into it was I remember attending this talk by Dr. Michael Banercy, I believe, from Goldsmiths at Meisebinn University. And he brought up this whole thing of synesthesia. And I was like, whoa, I'd never heard of this before. This idea that some people are born.

where they will see a particular word and it has a character or it has a color that's associated with it. Richard Sitovich wrote the book Wednesdays Indigo Blue. You know, this idea that some people see Wednesday as being male or female or the letter W as being male or female that has a character, has a color, has... They have these really strong sensory associations which are called graphemes. And I think most synesthetes are graphemes where it relates more to text. But anyway, I'm Divert...

(29:15.726)
diverging. It really interested me this idea that, oh, wow, okay, there's some people that, you know, their senses are slightly interconnected. And I thought, well, I don't experience that. But actually, from the research and the work that you know, I've done, and read of Professor Spencer's, in some way, I do think we have somewhat of what you may loosely define, and some academics would hate me saying this, but loosely, maybe described as being somewhat synesthetic, let's

Sarah Hyndman
So the idea of learned synesthesia.

Chef Jozef Youssef
Yeah, so we would give the guests a red, white, black, green element, four elements on a plate, and they'd have to arrange them into what they believed were salty, bitter, sour, sweet. And again, what's fascinating is not everyone agrees on the correlations, but over 70 % of people will go with, you know, white being salty, black being bitter, red being sweet, green being sour. And you think, okay, well, maybe that's because you've given them a forced choice and you've picked it.

Yeah, maybe it is. But nonetheless, did you ever think that you knew that or that that would be your choice? Like, for me, that's not synesthetic. But what it shows you as a non-synesthes, at least it allows you a window into understanding how that kind of connection may exist. And the whole dining experience was about looking at those correlations. So we had one dish that was called Give Weight to it. And it was a trio of glasses stacked on top of each other, each one

was slightly smaller than the one beneath it and was lighter, obviously, because it's smaller, it's lighter. You would start with the top one, which was a very light, I believe it was something along the lines of a grapefruit mousse. Then you'd go to the middle one, which, and this was a dessert course, then you'd go to the middle one, which was like a little rhumbaba, getting much sweeter now, bit doughier and a bit syrupy, but it also had a bit of lavender in there, was a bit nice and light. And then we went into the third layer.

(31:12.514)
which was the brownie with the cherry and much richer dark chocolatey kind of flavors. And the idea was, is that you would hold the receptacle in hand as you were eating it. Now, as the flavors got richer, the weight in your hand got heavier. Because there is that, if you ask people the weight of a rich meal or dish, like, you know, a rich dark chocolate cake.

they will see that as being on the heavier side, even when we describe it in linguistics, in colloquially when we tend to say, oh, that was a bit heavy, that meal wasn't a bit rich, a heavy, versus if you eat a lemon meringue tart, you'd say, oh, that was lovely and light and zesty. You know, we use these words of weight, something's heavy, something's light, but what does that really mean? Why do we call dark chocolate and cherry rich and why do we consider grapefruit light?

And so that's what we were trying to get people to think about. You give some way between eight and nine courses. Each of those courses just got people to question a little bit why they were able to make these judgments or had these thoughts and how their senses must be working together in order for them to be, you know, experiencing the flavor in this way.

Sarah Hyndman
I still remember holding the bowl and the chocolate and performance and flavour. There were so many layers to this. But I came along with two friends with different expectations. We argued loads over the little jellies. but it won't surprise you to know that I got them wrong. But we were all thinking and talking for weeks afterwards about, but I thought that would be that. And we discovered how differently we experienced the world, which we hadn't thought about before. For that alone, was...

fascinating. I was going to talk about Kiki Boba. It's one of those in the know things that everybody ends up talking about, but we all turn it into our own version of it.

Chef Jozef Youssef (32:59.606)
Yeah, and I think that's because this whole kind of idea of shapes and tastes and the way we translate that is universal because it's kind of one of those things where anywhere in the world that I've gone, everyone will tell you that lime is kiki and that jam doughnuts booba. It's just intuitive to people. It's so universal. That's what everyone finds interesting. And I think it's the fact that people can very quickly translate that into other places. So, for example,

you'll have a lot of people who'll say, so and is quite a booba character or a kiki character. And immediate, even at the dining table, people immediately pick up how you can use this in more than just kind of like, okay, brie cheese is booba and a sharp cheddar is more kiki, let's say by comparison. But they also immediately realize how you can, you know, map that onto character types or the way people look. Some people look a bit more booba, some people look a bit more kiki. It's just interesting over the years how I've heard.

people immediately map this onto other instances of life and you think, yeah, that's what makes it so relatable.

Sarah Hyndman
And I found very quickly that it was a really interesting way of sifting how people respond to different typefaces. In a way, they couldn't explain it, but they will say, that one's kiki or that one's bobo with a bit of kiki. And suddenly it's a very shared visceral language that you can apply to everything else. And it takes it away from being intellectual or academic and it turns it into something that's felt. think the secret to tapping into any of this stuff is getting to what people feel and not what they think they should say.

Chef Jozef Youssef
Yeah, I completely agree. That was one of the things that really interested me with the Bubakiki concept initially was as a chef you categorize foods and flavors in all different ways, whether it's, you know, proteins and carbs and fats or whether it's, you know, fresh foods and dry foods or whether it's dairy and fresh produce and canned stuff. There's all different ways of categorizing and, you know, making foods fit into certain sets. But Bubakiki was a completely different one. I'd never done that. So

(35:02.346)
As a chef, again, this is now we're going back about 11, 12 years ago, but that was fascinating. That was really like, crazy that all of a sudden we found a new way of categorizing ingredients and flavors. And that to me, that's what I mean. There's something about this research and this science that I think people just find it easy to relate to. It's very insightful because you can apply it in so many different parts of your life. Even when we do the simple

sensory tests with the PTC strips and we can identify supertasters and non-tasters. The number of couples that we've had who have been like, that's why you always put so much chili or salt on your food and blah, blah. But they've never known. So you imagine they've been married for years and never known why they have such different tastes. Because we all assume that we're tasting the same thing. But not until that moment have they realized, actually, no, hang on, we are tasting two completely different things, even though it's the same food.

we're not actually getting the same thing out of it.

Sarah Hyndman
And it's really hard to compare or to measure these things. You have to actually have either tasting strips or if we can't describe what we experience compared to somebody else's, because I can only describe it according to my experience. I have no idea what's going on in your head. Now, I think I could boil my work down to asking very simply how we make often unconscious predictions about sensory experiences based purely on what we see.

And then I find an entertaining ways to make this process visible for audiences. And this is the collaboration that I want to do with you one day. And I'm going to keep wearing you down every time we talk. So an immersive and strange kind of Alice in Wonderland-esque of an adventure with eat me, drink me, touch me, jars, projections, using just words and typography to deconstruct the predictions that we make at first sight. I'm just leaving that in your head.

Chef Jozef Youssef (36:53.484)
Yeah, I'm sold. You had me at Alice in Wonderland and rabbit holes.

Sarah Hyndman
A dark, twisted version of it where you're going to get people to think

Chef Jozef Youssef
Now I'm really sold, yeah. I like dark and twisted.

Sarah Hyndman
Okay, we will talk more. You already have a dish which very much plays with the idea of predictions. Your filet or fillet of jellyfish. don't know which one. And this is very much a site first dish, but it's created again to provoke thought and conversation.

Yeah.

Chef Jozef Youssef (37:22.318)
So the finale of jellyfish dish was born out of... First of all, it starts with the fascination that Professor Svens and I had around future foods that probably came around 2014-15 and we started discussing what will people be eating in 20, 30, 40 years time. Did some research. Jellyfish turned out to be by far one of the most sustainable forms of seafood we could consume. In fact,

so sustainable, they say it would have a net positive impact if we were to consume them. We have had jellyfish on the menu since 2016, and we've had various iterations over the years. And actually it's been really, really well received, like really well received beyond what we expected to the point where it's been on the menu in various iterations for well, close to 10 years now. I started thinking about, you know, this is great. The people that are coming to our

dining experience have a refined-ish palette, let's say, in terms of, if you found kitchen theory, there's a good chance you're into fine dining or you're into, you know, experimental stuff and you've been around the kind of restaurant route. I started thinking, well, what if we wanted to do something with jellyfish that gave it more of a mass appeal? How would you do that? As a team, we started thinking about how difficult it is to try and find a universal flavor palette or a universal

flavor profile that you're going to tap into millions of palates around the world. Then the actually the obvious thing was, yeah, but hang on McDonald's do it fairly well. Well, you think about it, that's an amazing thing. Given how personalized flavor is and given how different what is considered delicious food in China versus in Germany, it's incredible that one company like McDonald's has become so prolifically successful.

all over the world in pretty much every market, pretty much, there's a few examples, but they're real outliers, but in pretty much every market it goes into it does well. That got me thinking, well that's, you know, if you just went to a chef and said, I want you to design a menu that millions of people around the world are going to love, they would not design a McDonald's menu. But actually it's that that works. And you could say, well, it's the pure simplicity of it. Maybe it is. I don't know. There's something about it that seems to have that secret sauce, right? That, and I'm not just talking about their

(39:48.29)
their, you know, individual kind of thing. I'm talking about the general flavor profile, because I would say, look, McDonald's, whatever you eat from there, pretty much all tastes of McDonald's, right? Burger King, all tastes of kind of Burger King. They have a certain profiles. Then we thought, okay, they have their filet-o-fish. That may be interesting if we were to develop our filet-o-jellyfish. That might be a way of, with a bit of humor, introducing it to people as a bit of tongue in cheek and a bit of an idea of kind of, future foods and fast foods. like.

dishes that have layers. So you start with the jellyfish being highly sustainable. Then you have, can you tap into a more universal flavor palette? Then you have, how do you design this in a way that looks like a filet-o-fish to some degree, but it's really enjoyable and really tasty and is in line with the rest of our menu. It doesn't just feel like a piece of fried food that's been shoved in the middle. How do you design the rest of the dish around that? So we have millet fries rather than potatoes, millet being highly sustainable and really nutritious.

We have our cola kombucha, so rather than having a Coca Cola, it's a kombucha. And it was partially as well this idea of I'm interested in functional food. know, was Tim Spector that says it's something like 32 different ingredients in a week. We have a lacto-fermented cucumber relish that has a whole bunch of ingredients. We have the jellyfish patty itself. It's really about the imagining what this kind of fast food meal of the future might look like, because we all know...

Now more than ever, we want to eat that bit healthier. We're more aware of our sustainability impact. And then the dish took on another life in terms of looking at what future sustainable fast food could look like in some way. And again, we're always designing for the eye. People get it put down in front of them. How cute, how fun, how nice. Branded kitchen theory boxes, little baby cola bottles. It's cute. It's fun. It tells a story.

It's probably one of the most photo dishes of all of our dishes because people can relate it to something that they're so used to seeing in a fast food place and that they're not expecting in an experience like this as well. That's playing with expectation. You're not expecting us to give you a McDonald's inspired dish at a fine dining chef's table. So again, it's just, there's multiple layers to what that dish brings to the table.

Sarah Hyndamn (42:09.194)
And I really want to try it at some point. It feels like although you're talking about it being future food, it shouldn't actually be that far in the future. Maybe you should have a truck or a hatch where we could actually come and pop by and buy this.

Chef Jozef Youssef
Anecdotally, because we've never captured any data on this, but I can say that the reception to jellyfish is really positive. Like you just think it's really a matter of how these things are introduced to people. Guess who talked to me about the dish at some point will mention something along the lines of I would never have normally ordered something like jellyfish, you see, if it was on a menu. What I like about the experience here is it got me to try things, ingredients that I never would have otherwise.

chosen off of a menu, but because it was part of this experience, it just felt right. It felt interesting. It felt like I wanted to try it. I was interested in it. We've had vegetarians ask to try the jellyfish burger because they're vegetarian, more on a sustainability than a moral kind of thing that they've moved over to plant-based. So they're kind of curious to try this. And we had the same thing when we had, and we haven't done much of this, but on one menu, the Mexico menu, had, we had insects.

in a few of the dishes. And again, people were fascinated by it because we didn't just put insects on a dish. We use them as part of the process. We made you a good place of food that happened to have insect in it. But it wasn't like, here's your insect burrito. That wasn't the idea.

Sarah Hyndman
So wasn't like sticking people in, I'm a celeb, get me out of here.

Chef Jozef Youssef (43:36.47)
No, exactly. that's, and that's what I meant about that whole thing of, you know, gimmick versus doing something that is actually really meaningful and makes you think and makes you question your preconceived ideas around things. that's what I like. I like those moments where guests get a dish and they're like, that's clever. And the filet-o-jellyfish, because of even the name, when we introduce the dish, I'll say to guests, so, you know, you were trying to create a

a flavor profile that would be appreciated by millions all over the world. We turned to none other than the most successful restaurants in the world for inspiration. I, of course, am talking about, and they were all St. McDonald's. And then we introduce our filet of jellyfish and there's that, ah, that's clever. I like that. And that's what we want. We want to give people those moments.

Sarah Hyndman
I grew up in Bedford and we had so many arguments about whether it was filet or fillet. It brings that humor. And what I really enjoy about what you've just explained is that it actually takes us full circle back to that very first event that I came to. And I think it was Daniel Espina was talking about renaming fish so that we would start eating a wider range because we don't, there are some fish we don't eat just because we don't like the name.

Chef Jozef Youssef
zirgonian tooth fish is what he was talking about. It really ugly that subsequently became chilli and sea bass and sold like hotcakes.

Sarah Hyndman
Yes, that whole full circle of what we anticipate, how we talk about things and how we can change attitudes, we can change behaviours.

Chef Jozef Youssef (45:07.736)
Absolutely.

Sarah Hyndman (45:14.294)
I gave you a choice, either shudder or disappointment.

Chef Jozef Youssef
The question is around what makes me shudder, what do I see that makes me kind of like go, my wife chopping onions.

the jeopardy of her fingers or, cause she chopped them not like a chef.

Yep. And every time I see, yeah, every time I see and there's no claw and I taught her even just talking about it now gives me goose bumps. It's just, yeah, that and the other thing that I don't mind doing, but I hate seeing someone else do is with an avocado pit, smacking the knife into it, twisting it to take the core out because I've seen that go wrong. And the person who where I saw that go wrong with

Sarah Hyndman
No, oooh, that's actually making me shudder.

Chef Jozef Youssef (45:57.428)
they went to the hospital, they were told actually that's a really common A &E issue. trust myself to do it when I see someone else doing it or just shut up.

Sarah Hyndman
been doing it for many, many years. was like designers with scalpels. We learnt to use scalpels the hard way. We've all changed our fingerprints along the way. Okay, I'm now going to end on a much happier note. I asked you to think about an item that when you first see it brings happy sense memories or sense associations.

Chef Jozef Youssef
of this in the wrong way. I've been thinking about something that didn't look good, then I tried it and was good.

yeah, that will do it. That's fine as well.

My son, when he was young, one of the team baked with him. They baked beetroot brownies. Beetroot brownies look like an absolute disaster. I remember as a father, he was really young at the time, was about six or something. They tasted really good. I remember that contrast between how it looked and me thinking, my Lord. And then trying it you're going to try it you're going to act like it tastes really good because they're your child and they're young, but it actually turned out to be delicious.

Sarah Hyndman (46:57.562)
I love how chefy both of your answers are and how I reckon that should end up on your menu somehow or other. Something that looks bad and not tasting absolutely wonderful. I would like to end up by asking what one thing about sight and senses from all of things that we've just talked about, what one thing do you think you would like listeners to take away from our conversation?

Chef Jozef Youssef
may be surprised to know just how important the visual of the food really is and how that can completely change people's expectations, judgements and perceptions of what you're doing. A good example of that where we were featured on Channel 4 behind the scenes of how food works, Food Unwrapped. What they had asked us to do was take the cheapest lasagna that you could find, which I believe cost 99p, either 99p or a pound 99, where you're just like, I can't believe there's a ready meal at that.

Anyway, they served it to half the participants just out of the microwave packaging. And then we served it to another cohort of participants, but in the kitchen theory setting with the lighting with the nice wine glasses on the table and the whole thing. And the highest price it fetched from one person when they were asked to say how much they pay for it was something like 14, 14 and 15 pounds. And you just think.

My goodness, it is incredible to see how wrapped up in everything else and what you see in the cutlery, the crockery, the glassware, how all of that adds so much more value. The average for the microwave plastic sleeve or container type thing was something like £2.50 and the average for the one that we did in Outspace was something like £8, £9 and that's...

crazy that you would have such a disparity when it's exactly the same food from exactly the same supplier, made exactly the same way. We did nothing to it other than just plated it on a nice plate. No garnishes added to it, nothing like that. But it was just the setting in the surrounding that managed to do that. So when it comes to visuals, it's not just about the food on the plate. It's that, but it's everything that your guests see. It's everything that they interact with. And again, we eat first with our eyes.

Chef Jozef Youssef (49:10.914)
what we see sets so many expectations. And I would even say that, you know, in interviews and in meetings and stuff like that, how you present and how you hold yourself, how you're dressed and all that, whether they like it or not, are making so many kind of judgements about things. And it's the same with our team and the way they're presented, the way we speak. And all of that is building up to a great experience. It all is a sum of parts that comes together, hopefully, to deliver what we like to call a beautiful experience.

Sarah Hyndman
That was a brilliant, brilliant thinking point to end on. Thank you so much for taking us behind the scenes and wetting our curiosity. Hopefully I will actually get to come and visit in person very soon. yes, brilliant. Thank you very much.

Chef Jozef Youssef
Yes, you've got to come and have dinner at the table.

You're most welcome.

Sarah Hyndman (50:01.068)
Would you like updates, extras, sense hacking experiments and book recommendations from the guests? Head over to seeingsenses.substack.com You can also become a paid subscriber to support the making of this podcast and belong to the Inner Circle. I'll take you beneath the surface to explore what's happening inside our brain and body, along with updates on the latest in cross-disciplinary science.

I'm Sarah Hyndman. I'm a designer, researcher, author and speaker. You can book me to bring my Seeing Senses activity lab or as a speaker to your conference or event.

Thank you for listening to the Seeing Senses podcast.

Chef Jozef Youssef (50:56.268)
“What really interests me is about giving people a great experience and a great experience isn't overdoing it. It's leaving people wanting more.”