Kitchens. Gary Alan Fine

indicates, a consequential reality exists to which people pay heed, even when negotiating around the edges. People are able to define situations, but these definitions have consequences. For organizations, ecology, political economy, and authority hierarchy have this character. Micronegotiations that are so compelling to interactionists are organized by an obdurate, enveloping reality. To understand persons and their settings, we must oscillate between their “free” acts and the larger environments in which these actions occur. Anthony Giddens (1984, p. xxvi; see Collins 1981) notes: “The opposition between ‘micro' and ‘macro' is best reconceptualized as concerning how interaction in contexts of co-presence is structurally implicated in systems of broad time-space distanciation—in other words, how such systems span large sectors of time-space.” Several critical assumptions undergird the development of the negotiated order perspective. First, in this view all social order is negotiated order; that is, it is impossible to imagine organization without negotiation. All organizations are composed of actors, and even when we do not focus on their actions, they can subvert or support structural effects. Second, specific negotiations are contingent on the structure of the organization and the field in which the organization operates. Negotiations follow lines of power and communication, and are patterned and nonrandom. Third, negotiations have temporal limits and are renewed, revised, and reconstituted over time. The revisions may occur unpredictably, but the revisions themselves are often predictable post hoc if one examines changes in the organizational structure or ecology. Negotiations are historically contingent. Fourth, structural changes in the organization require a revision of the negotiated order. In other words, the structure of the organization and micropolitics of the negotiated order are closely and causally related (Herzfeld 1992). Strauss writes: “The negotiated order on any given day could be conceived of as the sum total of the organization's rules and policies, along with whatever agreements, understandings, pacts, contracts, and other working arrangements currently obtained. These include agreements at every level of organization, of every clique and coalition, and include covert as well as overt agreements” (1978, p. 2). Although this passage does not address the historical contingency of the negotiations, the ongoing and consequential character of these understandings is crucial. Strauss's later work (1991) on articulation and arcs of work attempts to bring temporality into the negotiation process.

      Within a “negotiation framework,” two broad issues are crucial: (1) How organizational, economic, and environmental constraints affect choices and behaviors of workers in their daily routines—how “life worlds” are colored by constraints (Fine 1991). How structure affects culinary doings—the mundane experience of the occupation. (2) How all occupations involve a concern with “quality” production, and how these aesthetic standards are negotiated in practice. As I describe in chapter 6, all art is work, and all work is art. A delicate balance exists between action and constraint—what in other sociological venues is labeled the problem of agency and structure (e.g., Dawe 1978; Archer 1988; Fine 1992a). Before discussing each theme, I situate my analysis in the history of restaurants.

      THE DEVELOPMENT OF RESTAURANTS AND CUISINE

      If restaurants didn't exist, they'd have to be invented. Because a restaurant takes a basic drive, the simple act of eating, and transforms it into a civilized ritual—a ritual involving hospitality and imagination and satisfaction and graciousness and warmth.

       —Joe Baum

      Gastronomy has a distinguished pedigree, a history as lengthy as human political and economic history, but not always as well documented. Food has long been produced by “specialists” outside the family in “civilized society” (Mennell, Murcott, and Otterloo 1992).⁴ The ancient Greeks wrote of cookery as art (Bowden 1975, p. 2), and some suggest that the Chinese were concerned with “cuisine” at nearly the same period (Anderson and Anderson 1988; Chang 1977; Tiger 1985) and, according to others, subsequently started the first “serious” restaurants during the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-907) (Ackerman 1990, p. 133). The great and gross banquets of the Roman Era and early Middle Ages are well known (Mennell 1985; Elias 1978; Wheaton 1983). By the Middle Ages cookbooks existed, street foods were sold to the public, and kings and nobles employed chefs to run their kitchens. Some medieval chefs such as Taillevent were famed throughout courtly society.⁵ If they were not as esteemed as artists, they were still ranked above craftsmen.

      Cooking was not accorded equal status in all nations at all times (“Cook's Interview: Anne Willan” 1985, p. 19; “Cook's Interview: Richard Olney” 1986, p. 22); and France and China (and, according to some, Italy) are reputed to have established a “true” aesthetic, or court, cuisine. It has been a commonplace that English cookery and French cuisine differ substantially, much to the disadvantage of the former (e.g., Charpentier and Sparkes 1934, p. 131)—a difference that has existed for centuries (Mennell 1985, pp. 102-33)—although whether it is a function of national character, class structure, geographical organization of the nation-state, agricultural production, weather, or some other cause is a matter of contention. French cuisine has not always been considered the foremost in Europe, however. In the sixteenth century, Italian cuisine held that distinction. The change in national reputation is attributed to the 1533 marriage of Catherine de' Medici to Henry II of France. As queen, she brought with her some of the finest Italian cooks, and French cuisine was established by these new immigrants (Bowden 1975, p. 6).

      Political movements and economic concerns contribute to culinary migration, just as they are associated with other migrations. An unanticipated consequence of the French Revolution was the emigration of some French court chefs to England (Bowden 1975, p. 8). A latent benefit of the end of the American war in Indochina was the influx of Vietnamese cooks to our shores, infusing urban restaurant scenes. Likewise, the new wave of immigration to American shores by Chinese nationals has produced a flowering of restaurants (Epstein 1993, p. 50). In fact, the American restaurant scene has benefited from waves of third world migration, bringing cuisines, cooks, and many minimumwage kitchen laborers. Migration moved west, as well as north and east: French tax rates, coupled with the growth of American culinary sophistication (and salaries for top chefs), have impelled French chefs to seek employment in American kitchens.

      Court cuisine was well established by the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but it was not until centuries later that the restaurant as modern, Western diners would recognize it appeared. Inns, teahouses and coffeehouses, caterers, cabarets, and taverns have long served food for a price (Brennan 1988), bringing dining into the public sphere, but it was not until 1765 that the first “restaurant” was established in Paris (Willan 1977, p. 85). With attention to the preparation and serving of meals, these restaurants were more specialized than previous establishments that served food, and they explicitly addressed the status needs of their clientele. (Clark 1975, P-37).⁶

      In the aftermath of the French Revolution, these establishments grew in number and importance as courtly cuisine declined. Prior to the French Revolution, fewer than thirty restaurants operated in Paris; some thirty years later three thousand restaurants dotted Paris (Clark 1975, p. 37). They served a grande cuisine but one available to all with financial resources. Restaurants in Paris and other cities benefited from the population influx into urban areas. While restaurants were not created in direct response to political and social changes, these changes facilitated their development. In the last two hundred years, restaurants have altered from a respite for the rich to a bastion of the middle class. Restaurants meet a combination of aesthetic, status, and entertainment needs—although the means in which these needs are met has changed with circumstances.

      The first restaurant in London was established in 1798 (Bowden 1975, P. 19) and in 1831, Delmonico's opened in New York, arguably the first full-fledged American restaurant, certainly the first sanctified with a French chef. For much of the nineteenth century the name “Delmonico's” epitomized American haute cuisine (Root and de Rochemont 1976, pp. 321-22).

      The spread of restaurants was a consequence of the agricultural revolution, the desire for mass feeding in urban areas, and the needs of the elites for quality food in status-conferring surroundings without the necessity of employing their own cooks (Symons 1983, p. 39). Thus, symbolic issues merge with the structure of the political economy in fostering this industry. The prosperity of postindustrial