Trust Your Tongue
A playful food-science experience exploring how much our eyes influence what we think we're tasting.
How much do you trust your own taste buds?
Trust Your Tongue began with the idea that we often decide whether we're going to like something long before we've actually tasted it.
Colour, appearance, expectation and familiarity all get there first.
Developed alongside Virgin Voyages' culinary team, including Senior Director of Culinary Program Development & Experience Levi Mezick, the experience uses food science, unexpected flavour combinations and a little playful deception to explore what happens when your eyes and tongue disagree.
Rather than turning it into a traditional game show, we kept the competition deliberately light. Sailors make red-or-green choices throughout, but curiosity is really the point.
A Mouthful of Maybes starts challenging expectations. The Chameleon uses purple cauliflower purée and lemon to create a dramatic colour transformation, alongside an electric margarita with citrus. Then Savory Scoop deliberately plays with the expectation that something presented like ice cream must surely taste sweet.
Behind the curtain
One of the biggest changes came after an executive test of the experience.
We realised the food itself worked, but we needed something to bring the room together before asking everyone to start making choices.
So we created a custom arrival questionnaire and icebreaker that gives each Sailor their own tongue personality.
It's a small addition, but it changed how people entered the experience. Instead of arriving and waiting for something to happen, they're immediately curious about themselves and everyone around them.
From there, the food can do the talking.
Trust your eyes?
Trust your instincts?
Or Trust Your Tongue?
