Chefs are offering diners a multisensory experience

Paul Pairet's memory of truffle foraging in Dordogne, France, sounds like a plangent piano solo. It smells of damp moss and tastes of bread dipped in butter laced with soy sauce, cigar smoke and earthy truffles.

Pairet's signature "Truffle Burnt Soup Bread" - a dish he's been serving since his days at Shanghai's Jade on 36 - is a distillation of his French cultural heritage, lonely walks through the woods, and all of his years as a chef. At Ultraviolet in Shanghai, he serves this taste memory with black-and-white video projections of trees, as an image of soil is projected on the table. By the time the dish arrives, some of the diners are moved to tears.

"This is the one that gets the [strongest] emotion from guests," Pairet says. "I take them deep into the forest." The statement is more than mere metaphor. Ultraviolet, which opened in 2012, bills itself as the world's first "immersive dining restaurant", the result of Pairet's desire to control every aspect of the dining experience.

Equipped with 60 LED lights and seven projectors, a surround-sound audio system, air pressure and temperature controls, and a dry-scent diffusion system, the 10-seat restaurant is the culinary world's equivalent of . The ambience shifts with each course on the tasting menu, and all of the sensory components are chosen to complement the individual dishes.

Pairet's interpretation of fish and chips, for example, is presented amid images of rain and the sounds of thunder, along with a projection of the Union Jack flag. The chef insists that the aim is "not to be artistic", but to "make the memory stronger" and "trigger emotion".

Many contemporary chefs draw upon the five senses to elicit specific reactions. At Alinea in Chicago, Grant Achatz famously uses aromas to inject his dishes with childhood memories. Heston Blumenthal, of The Fat Duck in England, is fond of pairing food with sounds. One dish, called "sound of the sea", comes with an iPod tucked into a large seashell, the prelude to a plate of fresh seafood nestled in edible sand.

Now, some chefs are pushing the boundaries even further to offer multisensory experiences that fuse food with art.

Earlier this year, the Roca brothers, whose restaurant El Celler de Can Roca in Spain ranks No1 on the World's 50 Best Restaurant List, collaborated with music director Zubin Mehta and visual artist Franc Aleu to create a lavish, 12-course culinary opera. The performance, called (The Dream), culminated in an exclusive dinner for 12. The one-off event took place in a specially designed rotunda outfitted with a sophisticated sound system and video panels swimming with lush, digital landscapes.

But to what extent can sensory manipulations really impact the experience of eating? Science seems to suggest that the effect can be profound. The olfactory bulb, which plays a large role in our sense of smell, forms part of the limbic system - a group of structures in the brain closely related to memory and emotions.

Recent studies have also shown that sounds affect the way we perceive flavours. Professor Charles Spence, who heads the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford, demonstrated the effect in experiments he conducted with Blumenthal.