Scents and sensibilities Is restaurant right to ban perfume?

Dress codes are not unusual in high-end Cestaurants, but Sushi Kanesaka in London has taken things one step further, asking guests to avoid wearing perfume so as not to interfere with the sensory experience of other diners

- Hannah Devlin

Heavy perfumes, the restaurant suggests, could mask the "refreshing" ambient scent of vinegar, and of the fish itself.

So should the approach of the £420-per-person restaurant be adopted more widely? Is perfume on a dinner date likely to make your food and drink taste worse? "Smell is about the most important part of tasting," said Prof Barry Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London's School of Advanced Study. "All you get from the tongue is salt, sweet, sour, savoury. All the other flavours are from the nose."

However, Smith points out that smell has two components: odours breathed in from the environment and those coming from the mouth and out through the nose during exhalation. "Can environmental odours interfere with odours in your mouth? It's not obvious that it does," said Smith. "When you're tasting or swallowing you're breathing out and we can't breathe out and in at the same time."