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 work in the kitchen, and in what ways 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