Unlike perfumers, chefs spend most of their time thinking about flavour – not smell – combinations. Smell happens in the kitchen, and flavour happens at the table. But flavour is actually inseparable from scent as we found when we talked to chefs from Olivier Creed’s favourite Parisian restaurants about their relationship with scent and ingredients. Much like The House of Creed, they value the synergy between the different senses and share the same passion for sourcing the finest ingredients that will leave a lasting impression.

To test this, pinch your nostrils together the next time you nibble on something and you’ll find that no matter how sweet the strawberry, or how strong the roasted garlic, the taste sensation is greatly diminished once smell has been removed from the equation.

Thomas Finger, a professor at the University of Colorado-Denver Medical School, says that there is no question that the sensation of flavour is actually a combination of taste and smell. As you chew food, you force air through your nasal passages, he says, and the smell of the food gets carried along for the ride. This greatly enhances the sense of taste, which would otherwise be limited to five different flavours on the tongue – salty, sweet, bitter, sour and umami. Chewing our food is only one of the ways in which we experience the sensation of smell; the other is known as orthonasal olfaction and occurs when we actively sniff something. Our sense of smell, therefore, plays heavily into the complexity of our experience with food, far more than one would typically imagine.

Presentation plays a huge part in our enjoyment of food, and fine dining in particular. One study showed that when people were presented with a plate of food arranged to look like a painting by Kandinsky, the diners preferred the look of the Kandinsky dish before tucking in. They also said they would be willing to pay more for it, and then rated it as tastier than the other two dishes – even though the elements were the same.

Acclaimed British chef and ‘molecular gastronomy’ pioneer Heston Blumenthal, in fact, argues that the experience of taste is influenced by every single sense, including sound. His culinary creations include The Sound of the Sea, which pairs a delicious and complex oyster dish with a recording of ambient noises taken from the seashore to heighten the favour of the dish. He also once carried out a test on a roomful of participants who were given two identical servings of his famous bacon-and-egg ice cream, each dish accompanied by sounds of either sizzling bacon or clucking chickens. The former was conclusively judged by participants to have stronger bacon flavours.

For many, perfume, food and art all have a place on the same creative canvas – Olivier Creed himself uses world-renowned culinary ingredients including vanilla, cloves and lemon in his scents. While his first love was painting, which he still enjoys to this day. Olivier Creed takes huge pride in sourcing the best ingredients from around the globe to use in each House fragrance, encasing each fragrance in the finest glass bottles – the result being not just an olfactive experience, but a complete artisan sense delight. All of this, is, perhaps, a roundabout way of saying that if you want to enjoy a meal that ticks all of the boxes when it comes to taste, smell, art, ambiance – the whole package – then you should ask a perfumer. So we did. Here are Olivier’s three favourite restaurants in Paris – we recommend you keep them in your back pocket for your next visit of this beloved European city (and be sure to book ahead).

This article is an extract from the Second Edition Creed Book. If you would like to get your hands on future copies, please sign up to our newsletter via the link in the footer below.