Immersive dining might not sound like your thing. Falling into a tank at the aquarium and eating seafood from a floating board as the ripples lap gently at your neck? No, thank you. I prefer my tuna tartare strictly out of context. Or so I thought before I heard about French chef, Paul Pairet.

Atmosphere, it seems, can enhance a meal. It was over this fact that Pairet stumbled one day. He was wandering about musing, as chefs do, on the best peach he had ever eaten. This immortal peach had fallen into his hands (stolen, like the pears of St. Augustine) as he was cycling, aged 13, along the Mediterranean coast near Perpignan.

Perhaps I shouldn’t say stolen. As the grown-up Pairet remembers, the harvesters had already come through the orchard and this peach remained, forgotten, ripening in the sun.

‘It was full of sugar, the best peach I had ever tasted, and along the way, it became my reference for all other peaches.’

But as he thought about it, he came to realise that the peach wasn’t the only factor at play. There was also the setting sun; there were also the idyllic trees in the orchard where he stood. Surely, too, his 13-year-old self was rather hungry, as a boy who’s cycled until sunset is likely to be. Around the vivid taste of the peach was wrapped, like tissue paper, a memory.

Pairet’s mind was opened to possibilities beyond pure cuisine. He promptly went off and in 2012 started another restaurant: Ultraviolet in Shanghai, where each dish would arrive, like the peach, in a perfectly evocative setting. Ultraviolet offered no options – set menu only – and served only ten guests per evening. Its location was secret; diners would assemble elsewhere for pre-dinner drinks, then, suspensefully, be shuttled to a nondescript warehouse on the city outskirts: Pairet’s techno-gastronomical kingdom.

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There, thanks to Pairet’s dramatic flair and what was at the time extremely expensive built-in audiovisual technology, the diner would be whisked to a different setting around the world for each course: a New York rooftop garden, a rainy London street, the forest floor. Reviewers confessed themselves by turns surprised, moved, entertained – and by the end of it, completely blown away. Getting diners to laugh, Pairet admitted, was not as rewarding as making them cry. One particular scene really got to people, where diners found themselves on the upper reaches of Mont Blanc, with a chilly breeze blowing through and Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ playing. ‘Remember when you were young?/You shone like the sun…’ Many guests couldn’t hold back the tears.

None of this was cheap, of course, but the sort of people who went to Pairet’s dinners didn’t care. The whole experience was so surprisingly entertaining, so crazy and fun, that price no longer mattered.

Ultraviolet is closed now, but Pairet’s genius lives on.

Today it inspires the team of French creatives behind Château Merveilles, the next generation of escapist dining. Pairet had to keep his dinners small, so he could control the variables that brought his vision to life: ten guests only, a small space fitted with the requisite sound and light. But we’ve come a long way since 2012.

Why not make the dining room bigger, Château Merveilles asked? Why not preserve Pairet’s powerfully evocative atmospheres, but add the shared emotion of a thousand-person crowd? And, in a fit of inspiration: why not make the whole thing relocatable, and take it around the world, from one major city to the next?

The team behind Château Merveilles, Baudouin Lacoste and Jean-Pierre Ferrand, are longtime event producers on the grand scale. Rumour has it that one or both were once asked to devise an outing for a group of top executives. It started in Tuscany with a presentation on the auto-making philosophy of Ferrari; on stepping outside the restaurant, guests found fifteen brand-new Ferraris angle-parked in the lot, waiting for them. Keys were handed out: time for a test drive! Off they zoomed down an Italian country road, blissful and free – until they came upon a broken-down bus, which, coincidentally, blocked the entire road. Oh no! It would be at least an hour before the bus could be moved. Happily, there was a village nearby, and to while away the time, the guests wandered down the street (why not?) and into the quiet coolness of the ancient church. Quiet, until from somewhere behind a pillar the silence was broken: a single voice lifted in song, a countertenor stepping softly out of the shadows with the opening notes of the Vivaldi Stabat Mater. The whole thing had been planned.

And while omertà shrouds the concept of immersive dining (no photos please), Baudouin lets slip a few details of his latest venture in Melbourne sponsored by the French state, ‘Probably the most exciting part of the evening will be when you find yourself in the middle of the Hall of Mirrors in the castle of Versailles. It’ll be a journey through space, but also a journey across French history, where living becomes an art, where art in all its forms is exalted.’

Non, vous ne regretterez rien.

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