Booklist Review
America's restaurants have undergone virtual revolution in the past several decades. Thanks in no small part to the ubiquity of food television, patrons have grown ever more knowledgeable and demanding about what they are served. They also want excitement and drama, just like what they see on the tube, and a restaurant's vibe or lack of one profoundly influences its success. At the same time, strict rules of etiquette for dining in public have largely disappeared. Foods such as offal, rarely seen on twentieth-century American menus, now dominate. Flourishing and popular restaurants must cater to a range of tastes and daily need to challenge diners with novel approaches to serving and eating. Pearlman visits dozens of today's restaurants and reports on how they meet contemporary expectations with fresh interior design, innovative cooking, and daring business plans. Culinary students and budding restaurateurs will definitely profit from Pearlman's research.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
Choice Review
Smart Casual traces the evolution of American gourmet restaurant culture and design over the last 40 years. Fine dining once meant immaculately dressed maItre d's and stuffy waiters serving traditional haute cuisine in elegant settings. Today, popular and critical acclaim is just as likely to be heaped upon the hip modern chef who expresses a unique style in a rustic cafe, a minimalist food bar, or a mobile food truck. Pearlman (art and design historian, Cal Poly Pomona) explores this evolving landscape through such trends as informal dress, casual atmospheres, open kitchens, communal tables, local and environmentally sustainable ingredients, fusion cuisine, and the creative reimagining of comfort foods. The rise of foodies, the ascendency of celebrity chefs, and the proliferation and influence of modern cooking media (blogs, websites, books, TV shows, etc.) are also on the menu. Most of these trends and issues have been written about elsewhere, but Smart Casual is concise and well researched, and Pearlman brings some interdisciplinary perspectives to the mix. It should serve as a useful addition to food studies, cultural studies, sociology, and design history collections. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty/researchers. T. Bottorff University of Central Florida