Vouchers for Destination Meals - NYTimes.com LONDON - Restaurant meals have long been the settings for celebrations of birthdays, anniversaries or other special events, but increasingly they are moving center stage as events in their own right. The change has been embraced by the industry. Even once-discreet Michelin-starred establishments now market themselves with words like "experience" and "discovery." "Ideally you're paying for an experience that you could not get at home," said Nick Kokonas, co-owner of Alinea, Chicago's most expensive restaurant, where dinner for two costs close to $800 with wine pairings, excluding the 20 percent service charge. "Everything that wraps up into that - the service, the ambience and the setting - is all part of the experience beyond the food itself," Mr. Kokonas said. The trend has been aided by the increase in food tourism, accompanied by a boom in food tours, blog lists of top 10 experiences and endless advice on how best to enjoy a place like the locals. Restaurants have become a reason for a trip across the world - so much more than a stopover or a place to fulfill a basic physical need. "With destination restaurants, people have this wish list of places they want to go to," said Ben McCormack, editor at Square Meal, a British restaurant and bar guide. To be given that meal at a restaurant you've been dreaming of going to for two or three years would be a spectacular present. The negative connotations that come with the words "gift" and "voucher" have led the world's most expensive restaurants to find ways for their customers to give more elegantly. The French call it "bon cadeau," the Americans and the British call it a gift card, but they all promise similar things: food, usually paired with wine and, wrapped around everything, an experience to remember. The bon cadeau at Mirazur costs 135 euros, or $180, for the degustation, or taster, menu, which has become so popular that the restaurant in Menton, on the French Mediterranean coast, is developing its meal-gift business: The chef, Mauro Colagreco, is designing a special invitation box for next year's season. He wants to design something close to nature because his kitchen is close to natural projects. Everything will be set in a natural context," said Julia Ramos Colagreco, the chef's wife who shares in running the restaurant. A gift invitation from Mugaritz, a Basque restaurant in the hills outside of San Sebastián, Spain, takes natural context literally. The "Mugaritz Experience," €250 per person including wine, comes in a handcrafted wooden box with seasonal herbs and flowers from the surrounding countryside and the restaurant gardens. The Shanghai restaurant Mr and Mrs Bund, where the chef Paul Pairet serves some of the city's best French cuisine, sells dining vouchers for 500 renminbi and 1,000 renminbi, or $82 and $164. If the destination is Chicago, Mr. Kokonas and his partner Grant Achatz have reinvented the pricing and purchasing systems at their restaurants Alinea and Next, where they sell seats like tickets at a theater. "The ticketing system acknowledges that restaurants are a form of entertainment," Mr. Kokonas said. Annual ticket sales as gifts are probably between $50,000 and $100,000 per restaurant, he said. Tickets for the restaurants are exchangeable but nonrefundable. Season tickets for Next will go on sale soon, when the 2014 menus are published. Back in Europe, Niklas Löfgren, the manager at Frantzen, a two-Michelin-star eatery in Stockholm, said the restaurant sells on average one gift card a day. In Sweden, meals are a frequent gift, he said. Yet, whether you're savoring caviar-encrusted toro at Masa, the Japanese sushi bar off Columbus Circle in New York, or summery Ayu sweetfish at Kitcho Arashiyama, in Kyoto, Japan, "the most important thing of all is the company that you're with: That's what can make it or break it," said Mr. McCormack of Square Meal.