Next time when you plan a candlelight dinner at a fine-dining restaurant, get this straight: The more expensive the restaurant, the more likely you are to describe the food in terms of sex.
According to Dan Jurafsky, professor of linguistics at Stanford University in California, people associate the luxury of an expensive restaurant with sexual pleasure.
After conducting language analysis of more than 900,000 online reviews of 6,500 restaurants across seven US cities, Jurafsky found that diners at luxury restaurants praise the "orgasmic pastry" and "seductively seared foie-gras".
On the other hand, those who visited not-so-costly places justified their food choices by claiming "the fries were like crack" or that they are "addicted to wings", the New Zealand Herald reported.
"If you like a very expensive restaurant, you use words like 'orgasmic', 'sensual', 'sexy' -- and my favourite phrase was 'a very naughty deep-fried pork belly'," Jurafsky told the audience at the American Association for the Advancement of Science convention in San Jose, California.
The team also found that eating tasty food in a cheap restaurant is more likely to be compared with drug addiction and physical trauma.
The trauma of a bad restaurant experience is communicated by the use of the third person plural such as "we", "us" and "our".
"They show that a bad thing happened to us as a group and we are going to get through it together," he told the gathering.
People also distance themselves from the bad food experience by putting it in the past tense.
Both men and women used the language of sex in expensive restaurants but women were more likely to describe food as an addiction, Jurafsky said.
