Like A Kid In A Sweet Shop

The restaurant has been awarded numerous accolades including ‘Best Restaurant in the World’ over the past few years. Reservations are required by telephone or online up to 3 months in advance. With up to 10,000 calls a day, the 48 covers are in huge demand.

Heston wanted to explore how to improve the reservation system, to make it part of his whole unique experience. He wanted guests to be rubbing their hands with anticipation, his metaphor being to feel ‘like a kid in a sweet shop’.

We designed a unique multi-sensory reservation experience. After a reservation has been successfully made, a weblink is emailed to the diners with an invitation to experience an exclusive piece of content to instigate the Fat Duck journey. An experience designed to whet their appetites.

Our animated journey takes the diners through a series of evocative landscapes and visual cues that they will discover during their visit, encountering a series of reward mechanisms through imagined worlds, to arrive at the door of a sweetshop.

Once inside, the visual stimulus is removed leaving a curious world of sound guided by John Hurt’s narration as the shopkeeper.  The narration and rich binaural audio soundscape allows guests to recall their own childhood sweetshop, imagining the sights, sounds and  smells through a combination of stimuli and memory.

Guests are encouraged to wear headphones to experience the full effect of the binaural audio.

The final reward mechanism is the bag of sweets and the ‘smell of a sweet shop’ served as the final course in the restaurant.

We also designed an augmented ‘digital souvenir’ to complete the experience.

Collaborators:
Love Creative (Script)
Zelig (Audio)

Awards:
2011 Roses Design Awards: Design Grand Prix
2011 Roses Design Awards: Digital Design. Gold.