Abstract
Those of us who enjoy fine dining, in addition to organization studies, have experienced firsthand a revolution in scope over just the past couple of decades. What was, not long ago, a relatively narrow range of cuisines constituting the elite stratum has morphed into a far more diverse and globe-spanning set of high-end restaurant options. Now, even experienced diners may find themselves making a reservation at a restaurant for which they lack basic familiarity with the cuisine’s common dishes, core ingredients, or gastronomic foundations. Yet, these restaurants can be among those considered the most prestigious and highest in demand, commanding premium prices in cities around the world. How is it that we have become so less accustomed to hearing “bon appétit” when seated in the culinary core?
This revolution in fine dining was not a passive transformation, and as Christel Lane and M. Pilar Opazo show in their book, Cultural Flows in High-End Cuisine, it required vision and energy from a variety of actors to bring forth our present-day culinary landscape. Their book is situated in the world of high-end cuisine, defined by “its material, gustatory, and aesthetic characteristics,” “the technical and social competence of the head chef or patron, and by the high social status of its consumers” (p. 27), and in the relatively recent movement of various ethnic cuisines from the periphery of the field to its heart. The authors are able to weave together a rich tapestry of interviews with many of these culinary pioneers, along with secondary data, to shed light on the remarkable cultural changes that have redefined the pinnacle of gastronomy.
The primary empirical context for this book is New York City’s and London’s high-end restaurants serving ethnic cuisine—or rather, this is the sampling strategy, as the authors periodically take the reader to other geographic locations when their research compels them to do so. This anchoring in New York and London is not meant to be constraining, but it reflects the fact that these two cities demonstrate an entrenched cosmopolitanism, exercise outsized cultural influence across creative and cultural industries, have extensive histories of immigration, and serve as international hubs for tourism and business. And yet, because “neither city has been a center of indigenous culinary excellence. . . . These features together have made the two cities extremely receptive to new culinary trends” (p. 37). While the geographic setting is important for understanding the purview of this work, Lane and Opazo’s scholarly attention encompasses a variety of key field actors in high-end cuisine operating in this space—most fundamentally the ethnic-cuisine chefs and restaurant owners but also the cultural intermediaries that produce The Michelin Guide and The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, along with governments seeking to promote their country’s cuisine through gastrodiplomacy.
Fluidity in the main constructs is central to the authors’ framing of this work and to their principal theoretical contributions, and Lane and Opazo are careful to note that “the distinction between ethnic and high-end cuisine is not absolute” (p. 29). Accordingly, core cuisines are defined through their taken-for-granted presence in the center of the field (i.e., high-end restaurants), “dominated by Euro-American standards, including most notably French cuisine, but also Italian, Modern British/New American, and more recently, Japanese cuisine” (p. 1), while peripheral, ethnic cuisines are those that have traditionally been absent from the culinary center. Although the authors identify cuisines from the Global South as being ethnic (e.g., Indian, Peruvian, Thai), these are not synonymous because other cuisine types from the Global North are also absent from the culinary core (e.g., Korean, Nordic, Spanish). Readers are, therefore, asked to think about categories of ethnic cuisine in this study as originating across spectra of economic development and physical geography.
What we observe in Lane and Opazo’s writing is that culinary cultural flows are multi-directional, and movements from the periphery to the center are characterized by tension. However, the main tension in these movements is not about external conflict and interpersonal competition, of which we see very little in the book, but, rather, it involves restaurateurs’ maintenance of their ethnic cuisine’s essence being stretched taut against the commonly understood features of an elite restaurant—a process that ultimately redefines the boundaries of both ethnic and high-end cuisine. Indeed, the book presents more evidence of cooperation and coordination in delivering these changes, and the authors keenly frame how reshaping the culinary center involved the influence of various actors, without losing emphasis on the book’s chef-as-protagonist narrative.
Cultural Flows in High-End Cuisine is direct and approachable. Even readers with no firsthand experience with fine dining would appreciate the authors’ precision in explaining how shifts of ethnic cuisines from the periphery to the culinary center entailed changes in both symbolic and material practices. The authors go to great lengths to illustrate precisely what these changes were. Indeed, one can visualize the artistic décor when being led down a corridor to the dining room of a high-end Indian restaurant (p. 137) and imagine the restaurant’s innovative plating techniques that incorporate smoke into dishes (p. 129). However, what this book comprehensively offers to students of complex social processes is a refined depiction of the globalized field dynamics at play in bringing about the rise of high-end ethnic restaurants into the mainstream elite culinary orbit—a perspective that provides far more nuance than does much prior work on ethnic restaurants, and Lane and Opazo rightly push back against overly deterministic, unidirectional perspectives of cultural change that ostensibly presuppose static field centers. Their detailed investigation provides a far richer understanding of cultural change: one that allows for both agency and structure. In doing so, we see how the strategies of chefs and restaurant owners, third-party evaluators, and governments unfold in consequential ways.
My enthusiasm for this book aside, some limitations include early chapters that pull too abruptly in too many directions and over-engagement with perspectives from other scholars that yield limited traction. Consequently, prior to the book’s midpoint, the chapters have yet to meld together to present Lane and Opazo’s distinctive voice in this research area. When that finally does materialize, however, we gain an appreciation for their disciplined approach to letting data and analysis drive their inferences. Accordingly, the book is most engaging starting around Chapter 5. Perhaps this is unsurprising given that this is where the book best connects with the authors’ prior scholarship in this area and, thus, where they most effectively demonstrate the impact of their theoretical insights and the depth of their empirical investigation. The book provides novel ways for thinking about categorical multidimensionality and change extending from globalized cultural flows. The process they present is not about the reordering of ethnic-cuisine categories but, instead, about how the categories themselves become reshaped to extend vertically and intersect with the high-end category. The depth of Lane and Opazo’s access to leading ethnic restaurateurs is a testament to the authors’ long-standing effort in developing this book. It is fitting that this work begins with a thoughtful acknowledgment section; however, not until the book’s final chapter, the Methods Postscript, do readers get to fully appreciate the depth of the data collection and the authors’ analytical process. I suggest that readers consider jumping ahead to this chapter after reading the introduction, before continuing with the rest of the book, so as to better retain the material underpinning the arguments.
In addition to being appropriate for scholars working within the empirical setting of restaurants or fine dining, for whom this book should be an immediate priority, it is well suited to those more generally interested in globalization’s influence on creative industries, market transformation, and the evolution of field categories; there is much to offer, as well, to researchers focusing on ethnic and cultural dimensions of cosmopolitanism in global cities. Most broadly, this work asks organizational scholars to reconsider how change occurs, who is involved, and what its consequences are.
While I recommend Cultural Flows in High-End Cuisine principally for its scholarly contributions to organization studies, readers will also appreciate that they are unlikely to think about their own journey of culinary exploration in the same way after reading this book.
