The restaurants book [electronic resource] : ethnographies of where we eat / edited by David Beriss and David Sutton.

ISBN:

9781350044913

Title:

Author:

Beriss, David.

Edition:

English ed.

Publication Information:

Oxford ; New York : Berg, 2007.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 240 p.) : ill.

Contents:

Starter : restaurants, ideal postmodern institutions / Tight spaces and salsa-stained aprons : bodies at work in American restaurants / Forming family identity in an American Chinese restaurant : one person's transformational process / Tasting Wisconsin : a chef's story / Side dish kitchens : Japanese American delicatessens and the culture of nostalgia / Familiarity, ambience and intentionality : an investigation into casual dining restaurants in central Illinois / Serving the past on a platter : cultural revolution restaurants in contemporary China / Ethnic succession and the new American restaurant cuisine / From Khatchapuri to gefilte fish : dining out and spectacle in Russian Jewish New York / Daughters, duty and deference in the Franco-Chinese restaurant / Authentic Creole : tourism, style and calamity in New Orleans restaurants / Food, family and tradition in northern Italy : the rise and fall of a Michelin-starred family restaurant / Tipping : an anthropological meditation / Digestif : postprandial imaginings

Subject Term:

Food habits -- United States.

Restaurants -- Social aspects -- United States.

Geographic Term:

United States -- Social life and customs.

Added Author:

Beriss, David.

Sutton, David E. (David Evan)

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

2007

Publication Information:

Oxford ; New York : Berg, 2007.

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
394.12 22	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

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.

Author Notes

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.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

"Everything happens in restaurants," writes Eve Jochnowitz, one of 13 contributors to this edited volume. 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. How this dynamism is explored varies widely in method, narrative structure, and perspective. Krishnendu Ray draws on archives, Zagat surveys, and census records to analyze ethnic succession in New York City's restaurants--an important contribution to work heretofore almost entirely descriptive and anecdotal. David Beriss's chapter on New Orleans as a city constituted by and through its food culture is a nuanced study of how tradition and innovation intersect with class, nostalgia, and the rise of celebrity chefs. In an insightful chapter that explores its subjects' contradictions, Jennifer Hubbert studies restaurants in contemporary China that commemorate the Cultural Revolution. As epilogue, or "digestif," Michael Herzfeld critiques the volume and identifies two weaknesses: none of the authors seriously considers questions of space and spatial relations, and too few investigate the co-constitution of restaurants and the world beyond--culturally, socially, politically. Regardless of inevitable shortcomings, it is a rich, welcome volume. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries. A. B. Audant CUNY Kingsborough Community College