The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where we Eat

Description

Is the restaurant an ideal total social phenomenon for the contemporary world? Restaurants are framed by the logic of the market, but promise experiences not of the market. Restaurants are key sites for practices of social distinction, where chefs struggle for recognition as stars and patrons insist on seeing and being seen. Restaurants define urban landscapes, reflecting and shaping the character of neighborhoods, or standing for the ethos of an entire city or nation. Whether they spread authoritarian French organizational models or the bland standardization of American fast food, restaurants have been accused of contributing to the homogenization of cultures. Yet restaurants have also played a central role in the reassertion of the local, as powerful cultural brokers and symbols for protests against a globalized food system. The Restaurants Book brings together anthropological insights into these thoroughly postmodern places.

David Beriss is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans and author of Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France. David Sutton is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University. He is the author of Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life and Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Both are published by Berg.

The volume succeeds in making readers understand that restaurants do more than simply feed people - they transmit culture, encourage socialization, and express the values of a particular place. Reading this book makes it obvious that we do not choose to eat at a restaurant just because we like the food. * Virginia Moench, Gastronomica * The book has left me hungry for more such 'snapshots' of food and culture. * Society for the Anthropolgy of Food and Nutrition (Online Review) * From this collection emerges an understanding of restaurants as spaces of negotiation where gender, race, ethnicity, and memory are produced and reproduced as dynamic interactions ... a rich, welcome volume. High recommended. * CHOICE *