Concrete Terroir: The Aesthetics of a City’s Restaurant Scene

• In Event: 365 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables. Table 01. Consumer Studies Network

Abstract

Most gastronomic accounts place the focus on individual actors like genius chefs or talented restaurateurs. But by attributing credit to single individuals, we have a fragile explanation for the very complex worlds restaurant inhabit. Successful restaurants draw together a diverse constituency including critics, patrons, and culinary professionals. In this manner restaurants are art worlds, filled with networks of cultural production, distribution, and consumption. This means that chefs, even the geniuses, depend upon the social systems in which they create their magic.

This article offers the start of a conversation about the influence of aesthetics and place and introduces more complex dynamics than those we find in prior, individualistic accounts. In particular, aesthetic preferences and preferred expressions of status-signaling tastes and patterns of consumption are absent or underexplored in prior scholarship. I present a case where aesthetics function as a local, rather than generalized, phenomenon. Geographic place contributes a unique combination of elements and aesthetics that combine and endure to create a concrete terroir. As a unique exploration of what Molotch calls place in product, I look at the ways that restaurant aesthetics shape distinctive urban environments, and how they contribute to new patterns of production and consumption. As such, this work advances the sociology of culture and the sociology consumption into lush territory, in which an enormous amount can be learned about cities, restaurants, and the role of aesthetics.

Author

• John T. Lang, Occidental College