Crowther Chapter 7 (pp. 177-190)
Eating Out
Overview
• How many of us have fond memories of eating out?
• Perhaps it was what my mother would call at a “fancy restaurant”.
• Or savoring your lunch on the Avenue des Champs Elysees.
• Perhaps it is the local burger joint, similar to the Dick’s experience many of you have had in Seattle.
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As a teenager, my friends and I meet up at the Taco Bell®.
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Of course, eating out does not always mean sitting down.
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The latest American craze is an expansion of street vendors, with a widening range of food choices and
experiences.
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The difference between what I knew as a “roach-coach” and the options now is staggering.
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In contrast, my study abroad students to Indonesia learned why to avoid food sitting in the sun for hours
without refrigeration.
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This chapter explores restaurants as a site of cuisine-shaping, and as an economic niche to serve people who
travel away from home for work, pleasure, or in search of a new life.
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They have brought the gastro-politics of kinship into a public place, and have extended it into the
negotiation of wider social and cultural identity work through the presentation and consumption of many
distinct cuisines.
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Restaurants can offer familiar foods, and are a familiar format for tasting unfamiliar foods, becoming
fixed ethnosites (ethnic restaurants as a place where intercultural encounters occur).
Eating Away from Home
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The range of places to eat out is staggering, as any visitor to a new city will attest, and often a guidebook,
the Internet, the local newspaper, or the advice of the locals will be sought for recommendations.
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A quick reflection of the range of choices available will also bring some interesting social and cultural
calculations into your mind: 1) How much time do you have?; 2) How far do you have to travel? How much
money do you have?; 3) Will others join you?; 4) What do you fancy to eat?
•
We are used to a wide range of choices, and to the idea of eating in public. This has not always been the
case, and it has an acquired set of social behaviors that we now take for granted.
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Governments and their bureaucrats have long grappled with the need to impose regulations on the
provision of food, for safety and social reasons.
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For example, early coffee houses became sites for public discussion and dissent, and they stirred the
possibility of upsetting the social order, as paid workers could mingle with the wealthier classes.
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In the early 19th century in Imperial Russia, the state attempted to prevent any intercourse between
classes by controlling eating venues according to clientele and the foods they could be served.
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The working class could eat boiled, baked, and fried foods at kharchevni.
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The wealthy could spend the day eating light refreshments at restaurants, but serving turkey at a
kharchevni would be outlawed.
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In 18th and 19th century Paris there were efforts by legislative bodies to bring some form of
classification to the range of eating/drinking establishments. There were innkeepers or traiteurs’
establishments, cafés, restaurants, taverns, cabarets, dancehalls, and myriad different types of food
retailers in smaller shops, all of which had to abide by rules of services offered.
Street Food: Eating Standing Up
•
Street food is fast, portable, and usually accessibly priced.
•
It is very probably the beginning of selling food to accommodate the needs of a diversified workforce
who have moved into urban centers and do not have access to kitchens.
•
Think of pizza — this began as a street food for the working poor, the lazzaroni, in Naples, Italy, and
now is the world’s most popular fast food.
As with any type of street food, these fill the needs of people to find quick, affordable food while
going about their business.
•
Yet, fast food (including street food) does have a reputation as the scourge of the culinary world,
destroying cuisines, people’s health, and the environment.
Street food may have humble beginnings, but it can serve as the foundation of national cuisines and many of
these street foods, such as tacos, have gone global (for instance, tacos).
•
The street food tradition began as a way to provide meals for those without the means to cook, and
which is often a precursor to the more fixed locations of slower food, and later fast food franchises.
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However, street food still has a market, even in cities with many.
A culture of street vendors has become a highlight of many residents’ dining away from home.
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The economic downturn since 2010 has been cited as invigorating the food cart business by offering
low-cost dining, and low-cost investment for the owners.
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These have proved to be hugely popular with diners, and are often owned by young chefs and recent
immigrants.
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It is also interesting to consider how class relations could be played out through street foods, as some
people have to rely on this food while others, such as the middle class, will choose to venture across
class lines to eat street food as a new foodie opportunity.
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Public Eating: Sitting Down 1
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We tend to take eating in public for granted, but this is not always an acceptable social activity.
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For public dining in restaurants to be successful there has to be the perception that eating-out is not just
about having access to food, but is about making important social and cultural statements.
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Public eating has often become the domain of the higher-status social groups.
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It can also be restricted by gender where there is pronounced gender separation, such as in some
more fundamental Islamic societies.
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Public eating has flourished as a means to communicate individual and group identity, further benefiting
from the public gastronomic discourse which validates the activity.
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Restaurants have become a ubiquitous part of global culture, however, this is a learned style of eating in
public.
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The story of restaurants began in France in the 1700s.
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At this time the only people who dined out were those without kitchens, the less well off, and travelers,
who out of the necessity had to find food.
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The needs of the kitchen-less were catered to by inns and taverns, and in France these were staffed
by cook-caterers, known as traiteurs.
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Eating at these establishments was done at a common table, at a set time, with little or no choice and
food served from communal dishes.
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For travelers, outsiders to the locality, this presented fears of risky food and social awkwardness,
while local residents regularly gathered together and formed community friendships.
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In this context, the exclusivity of family meals became marked against the inclusivity of a table
open to those who could pay, setting the scene for private meals to be taken in the company of
strangers; a characteristic of restaurants today.
Public Eating: Sitting Down 2
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Not mentioned in the book: Many European and American households did send out food to be cooked by
strangers.
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For instance, bread was prepared and sent to the baker.
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This became less common in the early 1900s, as fear of disease shifted baking to the home.
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Baking at home, with one’s own oven became a status symbol.
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By the 1930s, buying commercial bread was also; “next best thing to sliced bread”.
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Whoever began the restaurant in the 1760s may never be known, but the time was ripe for just such an
establishment—more people were travelling, work demanded access to food away from home, dietary
health was of public interest, the wealthy had a taste for fine foods, and chefs cooked for those willing to
pay and sold their cookbooks to the literate.
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The earliest restaurants served light foods, such as restorative broths, from which the word “restaurant”
is derived, and through the years began to serve much more substantial fare, from local soft cheeses and
berries in 1770s, to salt cod, mutton, roast chicken, fricassees, artichokes, and sauced partridges into the
1790s.
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After the terror of the French Revolution, the restaurant became a place of pleasure and enjoyment,
allowed by the authorities as a diversion from interfering in the government’s business.
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Dining was no longer a risky business.
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Instead restaurants had become “a space of urban sociability,” with establishments inclusively
catering to all social classes, but following a new model of service and choice which is still
characteristic of restaurants.
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By the 1820s the restaurant, as Westerners imagine them to be, was well established, and catered not just
to travelers but also to a new clientele who were happy to dine away from home, to be seen, and to be
comfortable dining among strangers, but at their own table.
Characteristics of Restaurants
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Crowther lists eight characteristics of restaurants, many of which are now so familiar to us that we tend to
overlook their significance for shaping people’s public eating culture.
1. A meal can be had at any hour, at the convenience of the diner, rather than at regular mealtimes.
2. The price of the meal is known ahead of time, preventing haggling and overspending.
3. The diners can choose, according to their tastes and appetite, anything on the menu.
4. Separate tables are available for individuals or groups of private diners.
5. Separate dishes are served for the individual.
6. Restaurants often shape the dining experience.
7. Staff and customers: this is the business of food.
8. Menus define the style of restaurant.
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Brillat-Savarin’s (2009, 15) much-quoted adage, “tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,”
becomes apparent as the exercise of taste through selecting from a menu.
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Indeed, by the 1800s the identification of European nations with particular foods was well underway, as
the British were identified with roast beef and the French with salmon.
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Parisian restaurants, while defining their own cuisine, also catered to the needs of travelers and
would provide dishes that suited the meat needs of the British.
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At this time, as Brillat-Savarin’s comment recognizes, diners were selecting according to their
nationality or ethnicity—eating their own cuisine—and by their social standing, identified by their
discerning taste.
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Today we have the opportunity to eat the cuisines of many other ethnic groups, presenting new
opportunities to display gastronomic taste—as in social refinement, lessening food’s role as an ethnic
marker for some consumers, and more as a statement of social identity.
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