Restaurants

The study of restaurants—businesses where food and drink are made and served to customers—is robust and interdisciplinary, reflecting the wide-ranging social, economic, and cultural implications restaurants have in society at large. While modern restaurants are fundamentally market driven establishments, they are also distinctive and sometimes contested sites of community, culture, and identity. One thriving area of restaurant scholarship focuses on the production of consumable culture within these spaces. Recent studies explore the food and drinks that chefs and other workers create, how these products are served to diners, and how restaurants advertise themselves to the public (for instance, as “authentic” or “fusion”). Another robust area of research on restaurants emphasizes what takes place within them. As key hubs of social activity and interaction, restaurants are where businesspeople make deals, families celebrate special occasions, and workers earn their wages. Yet restaurants also play host to darker and more problematic social realities. As service workplaces, a growing body of scholarship details the racialized and classed forms of exclusion that play out in dining rooms and professional kitchens, the behind-the-scenes labor abuses and hard-scrabble careers that occur within the industry, and the chronically low wages paid to workers up and down the industry. In short, studying restaurants today means contending with many of society’s most pressing issues related to socio-structural inequalities, ethnic and cultural boundaries and hierarchies, and labor precarities. This overview on restaurant scholarship will highlight key themes and debates within this interdisciplinary field. It is not intended to be comprehensive—it draws mostly on Western sources, for instance—and should be used as a starting place for further research. The themes covered below fall in three general categories: (1) the history and organization of restaurants; (2) issues of food culture and “taste” within restaurants; and (3) restaurant industry labor dynamics and workplace issues. Readers will get a sense of not only how scholars have examined restaurants as particular kinds of social institutions, but also the complexities surrounding what these establishments mean within a broader sociocultural context.