Recently in Places Category

Based upon the restaurant metaphor with a front stage (dining room) and a back stage (kitchen), the authors advice information architects and other user experience professionals to apply their thinking to the area of content management in the back stage as well.

Tim Brown, of IDEO fame, posts a thought on an unique diner experience. "We were finally taken into the chef’s office where a table had been laid for us to eat dinner. Instead of a stuffy stateroom we were deep in the private domain of the chef surrounded by his cookbooks, favorite wines, favorite music and the clutter of a large-scale culinary operation. What followed was a perfectly delivered meal where we chatted with the chef about the locally sourced food and how he cooked it as well as having great conversations amongst ourselves. Every piece of the experience felt like the chef and his staff designed it personally for us." - Sounds unforgettable.

"(...) the brand quality layer 'Brand Experience' illustrates our perception of user experience and brand management of the main stations. We studied the usability, user value, and interface (simplicity, character, and feedback), and rated each site on a scale of eating at various types of Japanese restaurants. (...) We chose restaurants as the metaphor for brand experience because, from an interactive branding point of view, a visit to a website is like a visit to a restaurant in terms of service, feedback, content, pleasure, character, and memorability. And also because Tokyo has the highest density of good restaurants in the world." - courtesy of ruurdpriester

Victor Lombardi (of NBS fame) introduces the concept of the Food Guide to guide people during their dinner through the dishes, tastes and textures. Quite a concept. "(...) the food is the focus and the restaurant provides a food-centric experience."

According to this article, an upscale New York restaurant is the first to feature 'ubiquitous computing', with an innovative table-top interactive menu for wine selection. (courtesy of Business Week)

Chefs are a lot like hardware hackers. Both geek out, absorbing the specs of (vegetables|technology) for the purpose of creating something that nobody else has: (innovative food|new machines). So what happens when the kitchen becomes a hack lab? Something delicious. Something geeky. - And what if being a designer for user experience is like being a chef? FH: Towards an anarchist food aesthetic.

"Observation of eating and drinking behaviour and of the emotional reactions triggered by such behaviour provides unique possibilities to help the food and drink industry design products and experiences that fit special situations and evoke hedonistic experiences.", says the European Centre for the Experience Economy on the project 'Restaurant of the Future'.

Cook and interaction designer Ryan Freitas wrote an article on what he learned in a restaurant kitchen as a metaphor for Adaptive Path's design studio. (Ambidextrous Magazine special issue on Food from Stanford Institute of Design)

Just found the Y! epicenter on Food. Very general, but still useful...