A good-looking waiter or waitress can play a big role in how your food tastes, one B.C. study suggests.
Three business professors from the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University set out to determine how physical attraction affects taste perception using online surveys and lab experiments, and published their findings in the Journal of Retailing in September.
A relatively good meal served by someone attractive will leave the guest happy, they found, while a less-than-satisfying meal results in the opposite reaction.
In other words: 鈥淲hen the server is attractive, good food tastes better, but bad food tastes worse.鈥�
That鈥檚 because of the 鈥渘egative disconfirmation effect,鈥� when a person who already has high expectations is let down. In the restaurant scenario, they had expected the food to be especially good because of the server鈥檚 appearance, and were that much more disappointed when it wasn鈥檛.
Men were more likely to be influenced by an attractive server, the study also found, while women were more likely to be affected by the restaurant鈥檚 location and noise.
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| Study looks at how attractiveness of a server impacts a guests's likeness of meal (Study graphic.) |
鈥漌e believe restaurateurs should remain focused on what kind of experience they are actually offering,鈥� SFU assistant marketing professor Lilly Lin wrote in a column this week for research network The Conversation.
鈥淚f the goal is to have diners focus on the food 鈥� including quality, sourcing, sustainability and taste 鈥� then distracting environmental cues that fail to align with the menu should, at the very least, be reconsidered.鈥�
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