Feast Your Eyes: Immersion Through Food

One relatively easy way to add an immersive element to an event is to serve food. It engages more of the audience’s senses and presents an opportunity to delve more deeply into the theme. 

So, how do you craft a culinary experience that fits a theme? There are multiple ways to approach this task. The connection between the food items and the theme can be direct or oblique. You can start with a previously decided menu and retrofit it to the theme or start from scratch and develop the menu based wholly on the theme. It all depends on what you need from the menu. Here are some examples of past menus I’ve developed for themed events:

1. Moulin Rouge!

   1. Café au lait

   2. Soufflé aux épinards

   3. Coq au vin

   4. Pommes de terre au gratin

   5. Crème brûlée

2. Goosebumps

   1. Monster blood punch (pineapple juice, cream of coconut, and key lime juice)

   2. Mummy pies (puff pastry tartlets)

   3. Earthworm delight (fusilli with crushed walnuts)

   4. Jack O. Lantern’s pumpkin seed salad (spring mix with roasted pepitas)

   5. HorrorLand fried ice cream (vanilla ice cream rolled in brown sugar cinnamon crunch)

3. Tennessee Whiskey Blues, a murder mystery

   1. Bourbon sweet tea

   2. Whiskey-glazed cocktail meatballs

   3. Bourbon BBQ pork ribs

   4. Southern mac and cheese

   5. Memphis-style cole slaw

   6. Maple-bourbon banana pudding cake

Although each menu has the same basic components—a drink, an appetizer, a main dish, one to two side dishes, and a dessert—the relationship between the theme and the menu is different for each of these three events. 

For the Moulin RougeI party, the goal was simply to craft a menu that screamed French cuisine. A fancy coffee, spinach soufflé, provincial-style chicken and potatoes, and an iconic French dessert served that purpose. 

For the Goosebumps party, the relevance of the food items to the theme might not be obvious at a glance. This made a printed menu crucial to make the meal feel like an integral part of the event. Without the name “earthworm delight,” the audience might look a bowl of pasta and crushed nuts and never make a connection to the Goosebumps books, show, and films. But when the audience took their seats at the table and read the menu, it added a layer of fun to the dinner experience. To craft this menu, I wrote down a list of Goosebumps books I wanted to reference through food. Then, I brainstormed foods that could represent those books. For Go Eat Worms!, I thought of pasta. For One Day at HorrorLand, I thought of the kind of deep-fried sweet treats associated with theme parks. The menu developed from there.

By contrast, the menu for the Tennessee Whiskey Blues murder mystery centered on a single ingredient: the titular Tennessee whiskey. I found recipes that incorporated whiskey and adapted them for the client. Only the side dishes lacked that key ingredient; for those, I went with Southern classics.

Regardless of how you choose to tie your menu to your theme, the most important factor is that the meal is a fully embedded part of the event—not an afterthought, a formality, or a standalone component. Incorporating food gives you the opportunity to engage the audience’s sense of smell and taste! Use the opportunity with care.