In the context of a rapidly evolving experience economy, the dining market has gone throughsubstantial growth over the past decades. This study provides a comprehensive overview of thecurrent state of research on innovations in dining experiences. Utilising a structured andtransparent methodology, we combine bibliometric indicators with manual coding of 140articles indexed in Scopus. Our analyses synthesise publication trends and identify the primaryoutlets for research on innovations in dining experiences, highlighting how these trends arereflected in the frameworks and methodologies employed in the existing literature. The reviewfindings illustrate the diversity that enriches scholarly understanding of innovations in diningexperiences, capturing the synergy between theoretical perspectives and methodologicalapproaches in advancing knowledge within this evolving field of research.

Chefs are recognised as leaders of creative and innovative processes in fine dining restaurants.In today’s competitive dining landscape, their role as trendsetters of culinary practices andcuisine movements has become crucial. Food establishments try to keep up with the fast paceof demands, such as using environmentally friendly practices. Although attempts are observedin fine dining to address sustainability concerns, legitimacy issues remain. Against this setting,this study asks how chefs in fine dining perceive and act on sustainability. The legitimacy-asperceptionlens is used to analyse 20 interviews with Michelin-starred chefs in the Nordics andUSA. Grounded in the empirical data, the findings of this study elaborate on chefs’ individualperceptions and actions that emerge as a model consisting of four sustainability pillars. Thefindings of this study are crucial for scholarly discussions, industry leaders, and policymakers,particularly those working with sustainability in the restaurant industry.

Today, Haute Cuisine chefs not only create dishes but also initiate and lead cuisine movements and contribute tosocial systems with their innovative actions. Using an alternative theoretical lens (legitimacy-as-perception) toelaborate on the socio-cognitive aspects of innovations in the Haute Cuisine context might be helpful as it explainsthe mechanism considering cross-level legitimacy judgments. Thus, the aim of this paper is to elaborate onhow the implementation of innovations change individual legitimacy judgments and behaviors (RQ1) andcontribute to the aggregation of macro-level legitimacy judgments (RQ2). This study builds a theoretical modelby identifying examples via 20 interviews with Michelin-starred chefs. Our theoretical model presents two maindimensions, reinterpretation and dining experience, and five underlying mechanisms, recombination, differentiationof the traditional concept, transformation of reputation, execution of soft innovation, and focusing on multidimensionality,that provide an extensive rationale for micro and macro-level associations. © 2025 The Authors

Purpose: Legitimacy is the perceived appropriateness of an organisation to a social system in terms of values, norms and definitions. This research analyses how customer reviews, news media and experts’ opinions influence the legitimacy perception of high-end restaurants. The aim is to understand how collective evaluators’ opinions impact the individual legitimacy perception, linking the micro and macro levels of legitimacy. This study measures and analyses the relationships and impacts of individual (customers) and collective (experts and news media) judgments to rationalise these differences in legitimacy perceptions.

Design/methodology/approach: This research was conducted through a combined analysis of the reviews published in news media, online customer review platforms and experts’ publications. This study elaborates a theoretical model using partial least squares structural equation modelling analysing 246 Michelin-starred restaurants in Spain.

Findings: Our findings indicate that individual legitimacy judgments are impacted by news media but not by experts. On the contrary, experts’ evaluations positively impact news media’s evaluations. The individual legitimacy perception of the Haute Cuisine restaurant is influenced by the collective judgments of news media.

Originality/value: The novelty of this research states the application of the multi-level legitimacy theory to analyse the relationship between news media, online customer reviews and expert evaluations, thus the individual and collective legitimacy perceptions of Haute Cuisine restaurants. Additionally, this study adds to legitimacy theory by revealing the relationships of legitimacy judgments on micro and macro levels and analysing which and how audiences perceive organisational legitimacy.

© 2025, Semiha Deniz Dönmez and Alicia Blanco-González.