Hunger for learning or tasting? An exploratory study of food tourist motivations visiting food museum restaurants

ABSTRACT

This study investigates an underexplored area of research: the motivations of food tourists to visit a food museum and its respective restaurants as an emerging food tourism attraction. Using qualitative in-depth interviews with domestic Chinese food tourists at the Hangzhou Cuisine Museum and its restaurants, the findings suggest that their motivations are revealed at the individual, social, and institutional level resulting from behaviour displayed during the actual visit. At the individual level, the most dominant motivation derives from seeking education and knowledge alongside sensorial and embodied experience and transformative escapism. The motivation at the social level highlights the significance of social togetherness and kinship, whereas motivations at the institutional level constitute food authenticity and media exposure. This study contributes to a more complete understanding of the dynamics and diversities of the food tourism and food tourist motivation literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Gastronomy
• food culture
• education
• multi-sensorial
• domestic
• authenticity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eerang Park

Eerang Park is Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellow of Tourism in Edith Cowan University. Her research interests include community engagement in tourism development, food tourism, and tourist experience. Her research involves multiple stakeholder's perspectives. Her current research projects focus on food and gastronomy tourism grounded in the emerging Asian tourism platforms and discourses.

Sangkyun Kim

Sangkyun Kim is Associate Professor of Tourism at the School of Business and Law in Edith Cowan University. His work is international and interdisciplinary at the boundaries of social psychology, cultural studies, media studies, geography and tourism. He is on the editorial boards of international leading tourism journals such as Tourism Management Perspectives and Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research. He is an editor of the books Film Tourism in Asia: Evolution, Transformation and Trajectory (2018) and Food Tourism in Asia (2019). He is a Visiting Professor at the School of History, Culture and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Min Xu

Min Xu earned her PhD from the Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Dr. Xu is Assistant Professor in Yangzhou University, China. Her research interests include media encounters, cultural events and special interest tourism such as food tourism. She specialises in qualitative and ethnographic research covering a wide range of techniques, approaches and ideas.