Designing real restaurant experiments: Mapping manipulation space across food, service, and ambience

ABSTRACT Restaurants provide ecologically rich settings in which food is encountered, interpreted, and consumed through multisensory, social, and situational experiences. Yet, despite growing interest in restaurant-based research, the manipulation space available in real-world restaurant experiments remains insufficiently articulated. This conceptual paper proposes the FSA framework—food, service, and ambience—as a design-oriented structure for real restaurant experiments developed through collaboration with chefs, waitstaff, sommeliers, and other restaurant actors. Rather than treating restaurants merely as settings for ecologically valid observation, we argue that they should be viewed as intervention-ready environments in which multiple aspects of the dining experience can be systematically manipulated and studied. The contribution of the framework is not merely taxonomic. It clarifies what can be manipulated across food, service, and ambience, who or what typically implements those manipulations, and how interventions can be introduced while preserving ecological realism. It also highlights design possibilities both within and across domains, as well as across actors, thereby making interaction effects and implementation choices more explicit in real restaurant research. By clarifying the design space of real restaurant experiments, the paper positions restaurant-based experimentation as a design-oriented methodological approach for studying and comparing interventions in real dining contexts.