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This paper aims to draw on the sociocultural dimensions of food luxury consumption as a new theoretical foundation to explore the consumers’ perceptions of ethical food production and consumption practices within luxury gastronomic restaurants.

The authors conducted a contextualized, qualitative exploration of French luxury dining settings among 35 consumers with different profiles, food cultural backgrounds and gastronomic knowledge. Drawing on Thompson’s analysis framework, the authors captured the narratives beyond the stories told by participants that describe their perceptions and the meanings they assign to ethical food practices in Michelin-starred restaurants.

The results illustrate how consumers with different profiles perceive ethical food practices within luxury restaurants. The authors identified three segments: novice, advanced and confirmed according to participants’ acquaintance with luxury gastronomy codes and values. These three profiles served as a framework to examine consumers’ perceptions of ethical food forms – environmental sustainability, food well-being and cultural heritage – within the luxury dining setting.

The study revealed no one dominant form of ethical food practices as emphasized in prior studies. Rather, there are multiple forms, including functional, hedonic and symbolic values, related to the degree of familiarity and knowledge of consumers in terms of their luxury gastronomic experiences. The findings show that the perception of ethical food practices within luxury restaurants can encompass additional dimensions such as food well-being and cultural preservation and transmission. This information can enrich the restaurant sustainability literature that principally focuses on health, community and the ecological aspects of food ethics in restaurants. Although this study suggests numerous new insights, there are limitations related to focusing on the French food culture. However, these limitations can help us develop other opportunities for future research.

The findings of this study provide luxury professionals and marketers with key insights into effective strategies to integrate sustainable practices while enhancing the luxury experience. The findings show that to encourage luxury businesses and restaurants to promote sustainable practices, it is necessary to enhance the functional, social, emotional and cultural dimensions of the perceived benefits of offering sustainable luxury experiences and reducing the constraints related to sustainability.

With its focus on the luxury dining settings underpinning the ethical food practices from the perspective of consumers, this research offers novel insights for researchers and luxury professionals interested in ethical and sustainable business practices.

This research suggests a new way to study sustainability and ethical food production and consumption practices in luxury dining settings – namely, as multiple, culturally embedded perceptions related to three main profiles of luxury gastronomy consumers: novice, advanced and confirmed.

This paper aims to examine diners’ luxury restaurant consumption behavior by incorporating diner expectations into a modified Mehrabian–Russell model. Consumers dine at luxury restaurants for reasons beyond fulfilling basic needs. However, little is known about the factors that contribute to diners’ emotions and loyalty toward luxury restaurants.

To examine the proposed six hypotheses, qualitative and quantitative studies were performed. Following exploratory qualitative research, 310 consumers who dined at Taiwan’s five-star hotel restaurants were recruited for the main study. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results show that restaurants’ stimuli influence diners’ positive and negative emotions (organisms), which, in turn, affect their loyalty toward luxury restaurants (responses). Furthermore, customers with different levels of expectation react differently to stimuli.

This study offers new empirical support for the proposition that diner expectation plays a role in building customer loyalty and, thereby, shades both theoretical and managerial understanding of the luxury restaurant consumption process.

This study conceptualizes diners’ loyalty toward luxury restaurants (e.g. revisiting and recommending luxury restaurants) by examining the influence of restaurants’ stimuli, diners’ emotions and customers’ expectations toward luxury restaurants. Additionally, this study offers some managerial implications for practitioners.

The luxury segment of the hospitality industry has experienced substantial growth in the past decade. Unfortunately, the notion of perceived luxury values has received scant attention, and there is a lack of valid framework to capture consumers’ value perceptions in the context of luxury hospitality services. Using luxury restaurant as an example of luxury hospitality services, this paper aims to establish the structure of luxury hospitality values and their measures and to investigate the relationship between luxury hospitality values and purchase intentions.

A survey questionnaire was developed to test the proposed luxury value framework. Confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical linear regression were used to test the hypotheses.

Four luxury restaurant value dimensions including functional value, hedonic value, symbolic/expressive value and financial value were identified. The study results further reveal that a consumer’s purchase intention is influenced primarily by hedonic value, followed by functional value and financial value. Interestingly, unlike in the context of luxury goods, the purchase of luxury restaurant services is not substantially influenced by symbolic/expressive value.

Hospitality firms catering to the affluent might use the luxury value framework to better understand what drives their customers’ purchase intentions, and use such knowledge to create new services or to improve current product offerings. In addition, luxury hospitality companies can use this luxury value framework to position their brands/products.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first that empirically tests a luxury value framework in the luxury hospitality context and investigates the relationship between luxury hospitality values and purchase intentions.

This study aims, first, to understand consumers’ perception of chefs as human brands (i.e. study one). Second, tests were run to assess the validity of a new conceptual model of the relationships between the factors of chef image, luxury restaurant image, both images’ congruity and consumers’ hedonic and novelty experiences and happiness and well-being (i.e. study two).

The first qualitative study involved using Leximancer software to analyse the data drawn from 43 interviews with luxury restaurant clients. In the second quantitative study, 993 valid survey questionnaires were collected, and the proposed model was tested using structural equation modelling.

The results reveal that consumers perceive chefs as human brands and the associated narratives include both performance- and popularity-based characteristics. The findings support the conclusion that individuals give great importance to chefs’ image and the congruence between chefs and their restaurant’s image. In addition, luxury restaurant image only affects novelty experiences, and both hedonic and novelty experiences have a positive effect on customers’ happiness and well-being.

This research focused on Portuguese luxury restaurants. The consumers’ happiness and well-being needs to be replaced by other outcomes to confirm if the model produces consistent results.

The results should help luxury restaurant managers understand more fully which pull factors are valued by their clients and which aspects contribute the most to their pleasure and welfare.

This study adds to the extant literature by exploring consumers’ perceptions of chefs as human brands and the role these chefs’ image play in customers’ luxury restaurant experiences and perceived happiness and well-being.

Consumers dine at luxury restaurants for reasons beyond fulfilling basic needs; however, little is known about the factors that contribute to diners’ loyalty. The purpose of this paper is to examine diners’ luxury restaurant consumption behavior by incorporating product knowledge into a modified Mehrabian-Russell model.

Following exploratory qualitative research, 238 consumers who have dined at Hong Kong’s Michelin-starred luxury restaurants were recruited for the main study. The data were analyzed through structural equation modeling.

The results show that luxury restaurants’ stimuli (i.e. food quality, service quality, and atmospherics) influence diners’ emotions, which in turn affect their brand loyalty. Furthermore, food quality can directly influence diners’ loyalty toward the restaurant. Third, diners’ product knowledge can moderate the relationships between restaurant stimuli and diners’ emotion.

This study offers new empirical support for the proposition that product knowledge has a role in building brand loyalty and thereby shades both theoretical and managerial understanding of the luxury restaurant consumption process.

This study is one of the first to conceptualize diners’ loyalty toward luxury restaurants by examining the influences of restaurants’ stimuli and diners’ knowledge toward luxury restaurants. In addition, this study puts forth some managerial implications for practitioners.

Some luxury restaurants might be hesitant to adopt new environmentally friendly initiatives due to worries that consumers might have concerns about how these changes might affect them. The purpose of this study is to investigate consumers’ intentions to dine at luxury restaurants when new environmentally friendly practices are implemented, considering the influence of trust and perceived risks.

Building on information integration theory and protection motivation theory, this research proposes its model and hypotheses. To test the proposed hypotheses, 441 participants were recruited through a non-probability purposive sampling method.

The results show that perceived risks (i.e. perceived functional risk, perceived financial risk, perceived hedonic risk and perceived self-image risk) significantly affect consumers’ consumption intentions. Furthermore, consumers’ trust in luxury restaurants will partially moderate the effects of perceived risks on consumption intentions.

This study offers empirical support for the proposition that implementing new environmentally friendly practices can affect consumers’ dining intentions in a negative way. Suggestions on how to mitigate the effect of perceived risks are discussed.

The results of this research contribute to the hospitality literature in three ways. First, this study is one of the few to report that luxury restaurants should take consumers’ perceptions of risk into account before initiating new environmentally friendly procedures. Second, it confirms that perceived risks will lower consumers’ luxury restaurant consumption intentions. Third, consumers’ trust in luxury restaurants can partially moderate the influences of perceived risks on consumption intentions.

The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of service excellence and guest delight on guest affective commitment to luxury restaurants, more specifically, the mediating effect of guest delight in the relationship between service excellence and guest affective commitment.

Data were collected from 270 guests with a response rate of 67.5%. SmartPLS software was used for data analysis.

The findings indicate that service excellence and guest delight had increased guest affective commitment to the luxury restaurant. It has been determined that guest delight acts as a mediator between service excellence and guest affective commitment.

Providing a high level of service excellence and delighting, thereby encouraging luxury guests to have a high level of commitment to the restaurant. Therefore, luxury guests' expectations must be exceeded to obtain their commitment to the restaurant.

This research study provides a substantial contribution to the hospitality literature by providing a significant concept of guest delight that can offer the opportunity to establish a new understanding of guest affective commitment in the luxury restaurant context.

This study aims to explore the reasons for the rise of independent, stand-alone restaurants and ascertains the benefits of outsourcing food and beverage (F&B) in luxury hotels in India from the perspectives of the strategic partners involved in such an alliance. The study also proposes different formats for F&B outsourcing in luxury hotels.

An exploratory study was carried out by collecting primary data from 16 Hotel General Managers and F&B operations experts through qualitative, semi-structured, personal and in-depth interviews. NVivo12 software was used to carry out a qualitative thematic analysis of the data. The primary data collected were triangulated with secondary data gathered through literature review of academic papers, industry reports and studies on the trends of restaurants in luxury hotels being outsourced.

The study focusses on the antecedents of the rise of stand-alone restaurants in the Indian hospitality industry. To combat the competitive disruption arising because of this trend, the study posits the business model innovation of outsourcing F&B operations in luxury hotels.

The benefits of a strategic alliance from the perspective of both parties – the luxury hotel and Michelin-star chef or branded/marquee restaurant – are elucidated. Further, three broad formats, which can be adopted for speciality restaurant outsourcing are also proposed. Practitioners, researchers and educationists in the hospitality industry would find the implications of this study useful in the context of the present customer-centric business environment where hotels are constantly striving to meet the exponentially rising bar of guest expectations in an increasingly globalised milieu.

The study proposes a preliminary road map for internationalisation of F&B operations through the business model innovation of outsourcing operations of in-house specialty restaurants by luxury hotels in the Indian context.

The growth of luxury tourism has been brought to a grinding halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic affecting most parts of the world since early 2020. Although the time for recovery of hospitality and tourism industries is still unclear, experience from the SARS outbreak in 2003 showed that the bounce back from consumers could be fast. The group of most affluent consumers, mostly known as HNWIs (high net worth individuals), will resume their original consumption behaviour much sooner than the rest of the market; these affluent consumers are the main target market of luxury hospitality and tourism industries.

This chapter presents different types of luxury tourism, luxury lifestyle, luxury tourists' decision-making and luxury hospitality products. The luxury food and beverage business in Singapore is presented to illustrate the commercial environment during the pandemic.

The relationship between food and tourism has always been an increasingly important segment in the real worlds of hospitality, destination marketing and tourism development. However, only recently we have seen the acceptance of the growth in interest in gastronomic tourism as an academic field of study. Nowadays, there is a worldwide rise of concern for gastronomy and, specifically, for top gastronomy. The influence of gastronomy on tourism has provided new and exciting opportunities for major stakeholders in the tourism and travel industry.

This chapter focuses on the relation between Michelin-starred restaurants and luxury tourism in an attempt to understand the impact and influence of luxury restaurants in tourism. An evolutionary analysis of the literature and a Michelin-starred case study will be conducted with the aim of: (1) understanding Michelin star system and luxury gastronomy; (2) analyzing the potential link between top gastronomy and luxury gastronomy; and (3) listening to chefs' voices and perspectives on changes in consumer behaviour, perspectives and trends. Findings generated by this approach may help create innovative ways to address luxury tourism and hospitality.