do other organizational actors (e.g., managers, customers, and servers) impinge on the doing of cuisine?
AESTHETIC PRODUCTION
The restaurant industry involves more than the production of objects and the providing of services. Restaurant food, like all food, has an aesthetic, sensory dimension and is evaluated as such by both producers and consumers. I argue as a general principle that all products and services have an aesthetic dimension, but this dimension is most evident and self-referential in those organizations in which an “artistic” rhetoric is present. Although the aesthetic of food production and the aesthetic theory behind that production may not be as elaborate as that of photography or interior design (and certainly not as elaborate as that of the fine arts), restaurant employees care about the sensory qualities of their products.
Its location within a large industry, coupled with an explicit sense that the products are to be judged on their sensory qualities, makes a restaurant a compelling research site to examine the strains that affect workers. Linking macroconstraints with interaction, I find that aesthetic choices provide a means by which a cultural analysis informs and is informed by an organizational and economic reality.
Central to my analysis is the artistic character and definition of work, a rare concern in much social-scientific discourse. Food preparation incorporates four human senses: sight, smell, touch, and taste. Typically sound is not dramatically evident in food, but in the case of a sizzling steak, a bowl of Rice Krispies, a crisp apple, or crunchy stalk of celery, some measure of auditory enjoyment is tied to mastication (Vickers and Christensen 1980). Food involves more sensory dimensions than any other art form, except, perhaps, the “art” of love. This aesthetic richness allows vast leeway in choices of food preparation, a diversity that may have hindered the development of a formal aesthetics of cuisine: a theory of eating.
From an organizational perspective, cooks must compromise on what they serve customers. Not all dishes are economically or morally viable in a kitchen. I hope to extend the analysis of the ideology of “art,” addressing the practical doing of aesthetics. The forms of aesthetic negotiation discussed are characteristic of all occupations. All—or at least most—occupations display a sense of the aesthetic, sensory quality of the doing of work. Yet, for all work, those outside the boundary of the occupation and conventions within it constrain legitimate practice. For the fine arts these limits are flexible, unstated but simultaneously ideologically offensive. The illusion is that there are no limits—that art defines itself. In other occupations, such as assemblyline work, the limits are recognized as a legitimate, if unpleasant, part of the job and are rarely explicitly questioned, even as workers complain and evade these restrictions. Cooks fall somewhere in the midst of this continuum of aesthetic workers, and, as a consequence, focusing on these workers encourages an elaboration of the role of freedom and constraint in the workplace.
Specifically in chapter 6, I examine the forms of this aesthetic constraint. In a restaurant, cooks must be aware of the demands placed on them by standards of customer taste, constraints of time, and the economics of the restaurant industry. These features limit what is possible to create. Each constraint is tied to structural and historical dimensions of the larger world, and the complaints of cooks are a response to the structural conditions of restaurants and public taste. Chapter 7 addresses the development of and limits on an aesthetic discourse in the kitchen. In a language that is not conducive to discussions of culinary issues, how can cooks communicate with each other about taste? How is a culinary poetics developed in practice?
I have attempted to write a volume that will be accessible to an audience of nonspecialists. Jargon and technical language has been eliminated wherever possible. Further, while each chapter addresses my theoretical argument, I have attempted in chapter 8, my conclusion, to place my ethnographic conclusions in light of the core sociological concepts of organization, interaction, time, emotion, economics, and aesthetics. Together, these concepts outline an interactionist sociology that takes organizational existence and social structure seriously. While some sociological discussion is necessary in each chapter, hopefully most of this volume will be as lucid to those outside the academy as to those inside. Hopefully this volume will contribute to understanding by cooks and eaters, as well as by researchers and teachers.
This research is based on participant observation and in-depth interviewing in four restaurants of different types, within the Twin Cities. In each restaurant I spent a month observing in the kitchen, during all hours in which the restaurant was open, a total of approximately 50-75 hours in each restaurant. In each restaurant I interviewed all its full-time cooks, a total of thirty interviews, lasting approximately 90 minutes each, with some lasting as long as 3 hours. I describe each of these sites in detail in the appendix, along with a set of methodological issues.
The four restaurants represent a range of professional cooking environments in the Twin Cities. I make no claim that these four restaurants form a representative sample of all eating establishments; clearly they do not. They represent the upper portion of Minnesota restaurants in status; they are not “family,” “fast-food,” or “ethnic” restaurants:
1. La Pomme de Terre is an haute cuisine French restaurant, by all accounts one of the best and most innovative in the upper Midwest.
2. The Owl's Nest is a continental-style restaurant, best known for the quality of its fresh fish. Its primary clientele is businessmen, and the restaurant is a multiyear Holiday Award winner.
3. Stan's Steakhouse is a family-owned steakhouse. It is particularly well known in its neighborhood, a middle-class area not known for the quality of its restaurants. It has received metropolitan awards for the quality of its beef.
4. The Twin Cities Blakemore Hotel is part of a chain of hotels that is not esteemed for the quality of its cuisine. The hotel is modern, catering especially to business travelers. The hotel has a banquet service and operates a coffee shop and dining room.
Although the restaurants vary widely in the number of customers served—from 500 on a busy weekend evening at Stan's to about 75 on the same evening at La Pomme de Terre—each hires from five to ten cooks, of whom usually three or four are working in the kitchen simultaneously.
Several issues of legitimate interest to readers are treated only lightly in this volume. While real differences distinguish these restaurants in the skill and aesthetic orientation of the cooks, my goal in this volume is to explore the similarities among them—those commonalities that might be generalized to the occupation as a whole. I downplay the elements that divide them, preferring to generalize from four cases than to use each restaurant with its manifest idiosyncrasies as a representative of its culinary class. Cooks at La Pomme de Terre certainly had a more profound aesthetic orientation than those at Stan's, but what impressed me was how cooks at each establishment attempted to make aesthetic sense of the food that they produced; and for this reason I feel justified in combining discourse from each kitchen in a single argument. Nor do I compare and contrast differences in organization, since I feel that the structural similarities of these establishments overwhelm their categorical differences.
Examining cooks in a second-tier metropolitan area provides a different kind of sample than one based upon elite chefs in a primary cultural center (e.g., New York, San Francisco, New Orleans), where a more self-conscious aesthetic dynamic occurs. These cooks are sociologically interesting because they are not elite artists. Taught in trade school, where cooking was likened to other industrial work, not other arts, leads them within their habitus to be inarticulate about taste and to produce imprecise classifications of culinary productions (Bourdieu 1984, pp. 170-73). The fact that, even so, they talk
