Why Would I Eat Moss? Reading Customer’s Moral Positioning Through Online Reviews of Restaurant Noma

In our longitudinal study of design-mediated morality at the Michelin-awarded restaurant noma (Copenhagen, Denmark), we draw on excessive amounts of unprompted guest reviews from Tripadvisor and online blogs. Despite the scope and detailed, photo-documented accounts of the menu, the collected material falls short of describing consumers’ feelings and complex reflections during the appreciation of the meal. We build on and extend the Composite Multi-dimensional Model of Audience Reception (Michelle 2009; Granelli & Zenor 2016) to unpack and analyze consumers’ sense-making processes of aesthetic experiences and subsequent moral positioning towards quirky dishes based on moss, blubber and reindeer penis. The model allows us to identify a diversity of engagement forms among audiences, ranging from transparent, referential, mediated and discursive modes, which predicts the range of evaluative judgements of the reviewer.