Some claim the restaurant world is becoming increasingly individualized. In some sense, that’s true.

The gap between the simple charred prawns at a restaurant sitting at the foot of the mountains in the Basque country and the perpetually avant-garde cuisine at spots in Barcelona serve as plenty of an example alone. Just a few hours apart, one hones in on its guests’ experiences through perfecting tradition, while the other challenges every tradition it can.

Regardless of the differences between the two restaurants in service style, culinary development, and so on, both continue to function on one principle: that certainty is key–certainty over what the guest experiences, to be more specific.

Every dish component is paired with another, each executed as close to perfect as possible, all to deliver the most delicious food imaginable to diners. The same goes for everything on the other side of the kitchen wall or counter. In a stride for unreasonable hospitality, it’s become commonplace for front-of-house teams to deliver surprises to their guests based on mid-meal conversations or guest research done ahead of time, sometimes handing out foie gras donuts as a nightcap for traveling Dunkin lovers, other times pulling out a full bonfire mid-dinner to evoke nostalgia of camping trips.

The goal is for guests to live and leave their meal emotionally or with the feeling that that night may have been a pinnacle of their life, whether due to positive mental triggers or the overwhelming sensation of perfection. And certainty seems necessary for that to happen.

But what if, instead, uncertainty guided a guest’s experience?

Imagine your standard double-slit experiment, where electrons are shot through two slits in a wall onto a back wall. When someone or a detector is there to watch the process live, the electrons hit exactly where we instinctively picture they would, along the back wall, directly aligned with the two slits they passed through. Leave the room, though, and everything is different. Instead of there being two lines of electrons along the back wall, there’s now one single, thicker beam lined vertically between the two slits, with another few lines of varying length to both the right and left of that centerpiece, decreasing in width as their distance from the central beam increases.

Without surveillance, the electrons act like waves, sending one wave through the wall, causing two separate waves to carry through the front wall to the back. In doing so, the electrons then hit the back wall where the two new waves intersect most, allowing the wall to act as a probability distribution for how likely any given electron is to land on a given point on the wall. Put differently, although the movement of one photon may be random, the overall distribution outcome of the experiment is known.

Now, imagine extending the experiment to dining, replacing the rays of electrons with two complementary ingredients, and the slitted wall with a diner’s senses. Next, take away the surveillance, or in this case, the dish spiels and explanations for guests; the tales of a waiter’s memories or the chef’s intentions related to the plate. What is left is no longer a determined, exacting meal with every dish expected and identical for everyone at the table. Instead, there’s a different experience for everyone, some consistently literal, others far off and influenced by deep memories.

Suddenly, we’ve introduced uncertainty to the dinner table.

To some guests, a crepe served with a squeeze of lemon will taste exactly like that: some slightly sweet batter with acidity. For others, the dish may spur memories of a beer tasting in Bruges, and for others, the sensation of feeling and smelling fresh sand on the beach.

With this, dinner is now a series of impressions; the unconscious over the conscious; the profound appreciation of individuality over the predisposed.

Impressionary dining of this sort has the potential to reverse the global restaurant scene, pulling back from the goal of fulfilling expectations and making a guest’s standardized dreams come true, and instead focusing on the creation and fruition of new, constantly unique dreams on behalf of guests themselves. Something so simple as not over-describing every dish leaves an otherwise nonexistent gap now open for interpretation, adding freedom to any menu without resorting to an à la carte format over many restaurants’ preference of offering solely a tasting menu. To some extent, it provides a balance point between customers and restaurants, where a proprietor’s ambition can pair, rather than clash, with the desires of any guest.

In practice, though, there are still a few things to consider about this somewhat untested form of dining.

Firstly, an impressionary dinner is inherently imperfect. Stripping away the typical certainty that a kitchen or service team has over what guests will experience leaves the potential to disappoint, perhaps resulting in a controversial reputation for the crew’s operation. However, the uncertainty also allows for a deeper level of surprise with the flair needed to birth the most positively memorable experiences.

Think of El Bulli and Alchemist, for instance, two leading experimental restaurants that both work(ed) to challenge diners and be bold in their aims in executions. At times, they stray from the common goal of deliciousness to instead make a point; a shift that can evoke richer emotions stretching beyond the edible side of what is on a plate, thus resulting in a potentially more profuse takeaway than the usual menu card for any group of diners, whether such takeaway is the sudden urge to donate blood or fight child labor or more, as sparked by some of the more assertive courses at Alchemist.

Secondly, though, impressionary dining does not equate to complete randomness. While the emotions and thoughts a dish will trigger are up in the air, any team can still skew the experience their guests will have. Like the electrons in a double-slit experiment, most impressions will still line up near the middle of the wall, likely experiencing the literal sense of a dish: its bare elements. To the sides, though, are layers of memories and less tangible thoughts that a guest’s mind may tie to the course, with increasingly eccentric connections fading in frequency when moving away from the central beam on the wall.

Altogether, impressionary dining leaves only a degree to which uncertainty risks completely ruining a guest’s experience, but that degree can be minimized to any level a team desires. Some courses could lean toward the standardized experience side, for instance, while others can feast on the heights that pure impressions offer.

So yes, impressionary dining may not be for many, but such experimental dining is not as far out as you may initially think. With some time and testing, this could quickly become a new inherent piece of our dining culture.

Current restaurants are becoming increasingly individualized on a linear path, each maintaining certainty and control over the experiences they offer. To break into the next dimension, though, now is the time to shift into a completely new way of looking at dining; to look back at the double-slit experiment and other quantum physics foundations to chase new inspiration and consider alternative perspectives on consistency.

Chase the frontier; push the boundaries.

Drop the certainty; embrace the impressions.