and fast-food establishments, most large metropolitan areas sport several hundred restaurants. According to 1987 census data, 330,000 eating places employed nearly six million workers with a payroll of $36 billion and sales of nearly $150 billion (Statistical Abstracts 1990, p. 769). This industrial segment represents the largest employer of young people between 16 and 19 years of age. The National Restaurant Association estimates that sales of food equaled nearly 5 percent of the United States Gross National Product in 1982. In 1977, restaurants accounted for 8.8 percent of the money spent in all retail establishments (Zelinsky 1985, p. 53). On a typical day more than 77 million customer transactions occur in the food industry, and 78 percent of all families report eating in commercial food-service establishments on a regular basis. This gigantic industry comprises numerous small firms, each tightly interconnected with a network of large corporations (food producers and suppliers).
From one perspective, all these eating establishments compete with each other, but from another this is deceptive. Within a market a restaurant draws customers from different regions, choosing its market niche or segment. A restaurant differs from others in the distances that its customers will travel to eat there. A local restaurant (e.g., a family restaurant that is part of a chain, a locally owned café, or a diner) has a customer base that resides or shops near the restaurant—a small catchment area. When my family and I desire a simple Mexican meal or to eat in a cafeteria, we choose a restaurant within a mile or two of our home or near to where we happen to be at the time. We are unlikely to drive across town, because we perceive that these restaurants are equivalent—we are unwilling to incur significant costs (in money, fuel, or time) for no measurable difference in quality. In contrast, when we choose a restaurant for dim sum or for haute cuisine, we may travel great distances. These restaurants are not fungible with others, because of the unique qualities associated with them. The more interchangeable a restaurant, the smaller the area from which customers will be drawn.8 Fungibility is an asset for a chain (if the chain itself can differentiate itself from other chains) in that advertising can be cost effective in promoting all franchisees or for a restaurant with few competitors, such as small-town restaurants. Yet, it becomes a disadvantage when attempting to convince customers to select one restaurant over another if greater costs are associated with that selection. A French restaurant seen as “nearly identical” to all other French restaurants will likely not succeed financially. The organizational ecology of restaurants is complex and dynamic, but, perhaps more than most industries, demonstrates the fruitfulness of an ecological orientation to organizational life (see Hannon and Freeman 1989), because the effect of external considerations is readily apparent.
Because of the relative ease of market entry (low start-up costs and relatively few institutional barriers), restaurants provide a compelling model of free-market capitalism. The fantasy of “Hey, guys, let's open a restaurant” is almost feasible (e.g., Miller 1978). While successful restaurants are likely to have a sufficient capital reserve to cover the expected losses during the first year, compared to other industrial sectors the restaurant industry is not capital intensive. In addition, changes in bankruptcy laws make exit costs relatively modest. Restaurants have a short life expectancy, with some claiming that 20 percent close within a year and that half close within five years.
Beyond its profit potential, operating a restaurant has cultural value (Miller 1978). Being a restaurant owner is appealing to those with cultural capital or an entrepreneurial spirit. Operating a restaurant provides a basis for the symbolic status the owner can gain in the community, as well as the privileges of owning one's own business. Unlike the owner of most industrial enterprises or small businesses, a restaurant owner can both make an aesthetic and personal statement while differentiating the business from others.9 For many entering this industry, particularly those whose establishments aim at the trend-conscious, upper-middle-class consumer, the status and glamour of control, coupled with the satisfaction of seeing one's aesthetic vision put into practice, is as important as the income. The following decision to enter the restaurant business is a dramatic example:
Dr. [Hilary] James [a psychotherapist] had always been very interested in good food and, while still a medical student, had been famous among his friends for his excellent cooking. After he had qualified and begun to practice, he found that he was not satisfied with the London restaurant scene; he did not like the food, the service, waiters in dirty tail-coats nor the necessity for customers to dress up if they wanted to go to a restaurant. He had become very fond of the little informal restaurants in the South of France which offered very good food in an atmosphere devoid of any pretension and so, egged on by the enthusiastic encouragement of his friends, he decided to open a restaurant of his own.
(Bowden 1975, p. 85, see p. 123)10
One's cultural position, a need for aesthetic expression, and the existence of a community of supportive friends—each contributes to such a decision. While some restaurant owners have economic motives as their priority, from my discussion with upscale restaurant owners and reading the popular press, I find aesthetic concerns rarely absent. The economic organization of the restaurant industry permits businesses to be run for their cultural rewards.
This economic reality provides a backdrop for understanding the mundane doing of cooking—how the kitchen is experienced, and how that experience is revealed in action. What does it mean to cooks and chefs to be working? How do cooks cope with the challenges derived from the structure of the occupation? How do cooks structure their worktime, addressing the explicit and implicit demands of management and customers while mitigating the unpleasant components of culinary labor? This issue—the interplay of agency and structure—is addressed in the first five chapters. My treatment begins with a microsociological examination of work within the kitchen, expanding the focus into the larger socioeconomic concerns. In light of the structure in which they are embedded, in examining occupations I work from the “bottom up”—describing behavioral choices, grounded in local demands, before discussing the place of the occupation in the organization and the economy. The rhythms of work create and are created by the structure of the workplace. The experienced reality of a job consists of its patterned quality: knowing what is expected in minutes, hours, days, and weeks of work.
In chapter 1, I examine the negotiation of the behaviors of cooks, given the demands placed on them, including the negotiation of the division of labor within the kitchen. How is work in the kitchen produced among co-workers? In what way do the requirements of culinary work produce shortcuts, culinary tricks, approximations, and dirty work. In this chapter I examine the advantages and disadvantages to this work, along with the routes that lead workers into the occupation. In chapter 2, I discuss the use of time within the kitchen and the pressures that emerge from the temporal structure of the workday. How do cooks experience the Bergsonian concept of duree while at the stove? More than many occupations, cooking is temporally bounded, both in the microrhythms of preparing particular dishes and the longer rhythms of the workday. The third chapter focuses on the structural reality of kitchens. Here I focus on those elements that are not themselves part of cooking but contribute to the kitchen environment. What is the role of kitchen equipment in the production of food? How does the kitchen space constrain or contribute to culinary outcomes? Underlining these questions is the reality that restaurants are work communities.Chapter 4 explains the meaning of this community to the workers within it. How does the restaurant community and the expressive behaviors of those who are a part of it tether workers to what many outside this community perceive as low-paying, dirty, unappreciated labor? How do expressive culture and the development of an organizational culture affect the work of cooks? How do the expressive components of an occupation connect to instrumental demands? In chapter 5, I attempt to situate the restaurant and the work of cooks into the economic structure. How do the institutional constraints of the restaurant and the industrial components of the occupation affect the cooking that can and will be produced? How does the political economy in which restaurants are located influence the
