Luxury restaurants are expected to offer an outstanding culinary and gastronomic talent and expertise, to be authentic, creative and consistent and to provide quality and exciting food. In the twenty-first century, engaging in culinary art discourses involves a social dimension, and therefore social networking sites are used as resources for sharing gastronomic experiences with others and to read recommendations. User-generated restaurant reviews represent an interesting intersection of a participatory culture and foodie discourse. The main objective of this paper is to provide empirical findings by examining web-reviews in order to identify the expressive dimensions that describe the guests’ experience. A mixed-method content analysis is considered for this type of study, more precisely adopting a qualitative in-text interpretation as a supplement to the traditional quantitative word counts and factor analysis. A content analysis of reviews by guests on reviewing the top 3 Michelin awarded restaurants (2 stars) in Portugal produced a battery of concepts used to assess haute cuisine experiences from the guests’ perspective. The analysis produced a concept map encompassing the following dimensions food, restaurant, experience, menu, wine, special, view, beautiful, friendly, chef, visit, desert.

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Culinary arts,Web generated contents,Content analysis,Michelin star restaurants

• Economia e Gestão - Ciências Sociais