Tag-team the eating; let the talking happen between courses.
technique — attributed to Michael Cirino
Cirino's hundred-course meal could not have one person eat all hundred courses. He built a one-hundred-fifty-foot table with ten seats and a thousand plates. Each ticketed diner brought three or four friends and rotated through the seats in relay-race style. The format produced an unexpected benefit. Diners not currently at the table spent time talking to each other about the courses they had just eaten. Recounting codified the memory and made the experience stronger. The technique generalizes. Any high-density experience benefits from designed gaps in which participants can articulate what they just experienced to one another. Without the gaps, the experience compresses into a blur.
For experiential designers and immersive dining producers thinking about pacing. The technique is most useful when the experience density would otherwise exceed any individual's ability to absorb.
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