Fine Dining as a Cultural Good. An Inquiry on Chef's Creativity, Restaurant Quality, and Gastronomic Guides

Abstract

The quality of fine-dining restaurant food is complex and presents information issues in customers’ quality evaluation, configuring this good as a luxury and cultural good. We investigate how different types of information available in the market influence non-expert customers’ quest for information about restaurant food. Specifically, we perform an empirical analysis based on a unique hand-collected dataset of the top Italian chefs and restaurants between 2011 and 2019. We complement this data with starred chefs' answers to a survey to collect chefs’ self-evaluation about their work. We measure latent constructs through a Structural Equation Model such as cooking knowledge, culinary creativity, chef’s and restaurant’s names, and experts’ and customers’ evaluations. Then, we estimate the structural relationships between these latent variables and several other observable variables, such as meal price, the maximum number of seats hosted in each restaurant, the number of tourist arrivals and inhabitants per Italian province, and the age of the restaurant’s chef. The guides and prices are critical in forming customers' evaluations. Further, experts' evaluations seem to be more linked with concepts of the chef's fame and the restaurant's brand than to the chef's creativity and human capital.

Keywords: expert, chef, restaurant, restaurant guide, SEM

JEL Classification: C10, C21, Z11