The human desire to turn life’s mundanities into something altogether more agreeable never ceases to amaze and amuse. Take our homes, for instance. Once we were content to live in caves as long as they kept us dry and were reasonably warm. Then we decided it would be more appealing to build our own caves but with the added benefit of shag-pile carpets, front doors and locks to keep the jungle at bay. This ability to cocoon ourselves from an outside world that had once housed us became something of a status symbol and so we built bigger, more elaborate caves loaded with ostentatious accoutrements such as silk wall linings and sweeping marble staircases leading to bedrooms nobody used.
To help alleviate the tedium of home life, we started travelling to faraway places in order to indulge our fantasies of what life might be like if we were truly free. Instead of clothing ourselves in animal hide, we developed a dizzying array of colourful outerwear that flattered our vanity as well as keeping us cosy.
Nowhere has this need to escape the prison of ordinariness been more marked than in our relationship with food. The desire to sex-up sustenance began when we worked out that heating dead animals over a naked flame made them tastier and that communing with friends was preferable to eating alone. Eating went from being a means of survival to one of life’s great pleasures. As a special treat, we would sometimes abandon our newly installed kitchens and pay professionals to pleasure our tastebuds instead.
For some, though, that still wasn’t enough to truly tickle their fancy. Cut to 2023 and you find me on board the Murder Express, a restaurant-come-theatre housed within a fake 1920s railway carriage beneath an actual railway line in south-east London. While my fellow diners and I tuck into slow-cooked beef shin prepared by a BBC MasterChef winner, hammy actors dressed in 1920s garb rush around explaining that a ghastly murder has taken place and that we are all expected to help solve the crime. With a Poirot-style detective offering us clues, accusations fly across the crispy-capered palate cleansers.
Welcome to the wacky world of ‘immersive dining’ where food is all part of the ‘experience’; yup, we’ve come a long way from sitting round a campfire gnawing on animal remains. Interactive dining has become quite a thing of late. In our increasingly infantilised world of diminishing attention spans, restaurants have been under pressure to woo us away from our sofa-phones with ever more outlandish ‘experiences’.
A former department store on Tottenham Court Road, for instance, has been transformed into a giant lifesize Monopoly board where fans of the world’s most maddening game can send their fellow diners to jail without passing the ketchup. Described as ‘a live 4D experience’, it essentially allows budding property tycoons to live out their capitalist fantasies before stuffing their faces with burgers and fries.
Meanwhile, over at the Faulty Towers Dining Experience at the Russell Square Radisson Blu, your three-course 1970s-style dinner (complete with tasteless tinned soup) comes with a large side order of flaming Basil and other Fawlty Towers characters. At this ‘dinner theatre’ more than 70 per cent of the show is improvised, so expect plenty of audience baiting, interactive jokes about warmongering Germans and maybe even an escaped rodent or two.
M Canary Wharf may look like a typically swish city restaurant with its plate glass windows and sexy lighting, but in a hidden backroom diners can enjoy Symphony, where each of six courses is accompanied by a soundtrack designed to ‘evoke a series of memories, associations, ideas and emotions’. It begins with a blindfolded course, but I (literally) cannot see the point of eating in the dark. Being blindfolded as you chase a slippery starter round your plate certainly doesn’t make the grub any tastier and as all foodies know the first bite is with the eye. During the main course, I suddenly remember why I dislike throaty French torch songs so much.
Meanwhile lovers of high camp should take a velvet booth at Proud Cabaret underneath Waterloo Bridge. The show features an array of sequined performers including fire breathers and burlesque dancers. It’s a delicious cheese-filled evening – and the food isn’t bad either.
Over in Brewer Street’s Park Row, I fear that the Gotham City-themed restaurant feels like an immersion out of its depth. But while proper foodies may scoff at the idea of mixing food and frippery, for the casual diner hoping to spice up a dull Thursday evening, the ‘immersive experience’ is at least anything but ordinary.
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