The Ethnic

Restaurateur

i
ii
 The Ethnic
Restaurateur
BY KRISHNENDU RAY

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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 Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2016

© Krishnendu Ray, 2016

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To Maa and my Pishis

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 Contents

List of Figures viii

List of Tables ix
Acknowledgments x
Preface: As the Grains You Eat, So Will Be the Mind xi

1 Taste, Toil, and Ethnicity 1

2 Dreams of Pakistani Grill and Vada Pao in Manhattan:
Immigrant Restaurateurs in a Global City 31
3 Hierarchy of Taste and Ethnic Difference: American Gustatory
Imagination in a Globalizing World 63
4 Extending Expertise: Men in White at the Culinary Institute
of America 111
5 Ethnicity and Expertise: Immigrant Cooks with Haute
Aspirations 155
6 In Closing 185

Bibliography 195
Index 225

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 List of Figures

1.1 The foreign-born as a percentage in selected occupations,

USA and New York City, 1860 13
1.2 The foreign-born as a percentage in selected occupations,
USA and New York City, 1900 13
1.3 The foreign-born as a percentage in selected occupations,
USA and New York City, 1950 14
1.4 The foreign-born as a percentage in selected occupations,
USA and New York City, 2000 14
2.1 The mystery of kachori 47
2.2 A portion of Vada Pao’s menu 55
3.1 The rise of the restaurant and the decline of the saloon: ratio
of coverage in The New York Times (NYT ) (1851–2013) 64
3.2 The rise of the restaurant and the decline of the saloon: ratio
of coverage in the Los Angeles Times (LAT ) (1880–2013) 65
3.3 The rise of the restaurant and the decline of the saloon: ratio
of coverage in the Chicago Tribune (1850–1999) 65
3.4 The rise of the restaurant and the decline of the saloon: ratio
of coverage in the New York Tribune/Herald (1841–1962) 66
3.5 Percentage of documents with the words “café”, “saloon”,
“tavern”, and “restaurant” combined in the New York
Tribune/Herald, NYT , Chicago Tribune, and LAT
(ca. 1851–2013) 68
3.6 Twin peaks of public discussion of restaurants in the US 68
3.7 Comparative popularity of cuisines over time, NYT
1881–2013 77
3.8 Popularity of major Zagat-rated cuisines in NYC (1986–2014) 82
3.9 Rank by price, Zagat NYC (1986–2014) 86

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 List of Tables

3.1 Michelin, Zagat, Menupages coverage of NYC restaurants in

2014 80
3.2 Comparative popularity of ethno-nationally-marked Zagat-rated
restaurants in four selected US cities in 2010 81
3.3 Hierarchy of taste: check averages of NYC Zagat-rated
restaurants in 2010 84
3.4 Zagat survey: New York City restaurants at the decadal
benchmark 101
3.5 Menu theme as percentage of all restaurants in the National
Restaurant Association sample (1984–2010) 102
3.6 Zagat: “America’s Top Restaurants” 103

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 Acknowledgments

I have benefited immensely from criticism and encouragement over the

years from a number of sources: first and foremost my doctoral students
Sierra Burnett Clark and Jackie Rohel, who also conducted some of the best
interviews on which this book is based; Anne McBride, with whom I contested
many of the enclosed arguments; Hi’ilei Hobart and Christy Spackman, who
steered me in various productive theoretical directions; graduate students in
the Food Studies Doctoral Seminar at CUNY —in a course taught by Barbara
Katz-Rothman and Jon Deutsch—where I first presented the idea in any
coherent form; numerous Masters students on whom I tried out some of my
arguments; my colleagues Amy Bentley and Jennifer Berg; audiences at
annual meetings of the American Sociological Association and the Association
for the Study of Food and Society, where I presented early versions of the
chapters; and my confederates in The BAWG , Julie Elman, Toral G. Gajarawala,
Maggie Gray, Thuy Linh Tu, and Jessamyn Hatcher. Of course, I have often
ignored their very good advice and have said what I needed to say in my own
way. Feedback from two anonymous reviewers, twice, over a two-year period,
was central to re-working the manuscript for coherence and clarity. Vanina
Leschziner’s insistence that I make clearer the distinction between popularity
and prestige of various cuisines forced me to wrestle down Chapter 3 in a
more competent way. Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann’s Foodies was
essential to my articulation of the difference between their story and mine.
Paul Freedman has been a remarkable senior colleague who has encouraged
me and provided numerous opportunities to think big which have forced me
out of the narrow ethnic corner of the field. Thanks to Jo, Piya, and Dan Bender
for giving me the space and time, and providing me with the material and
emotional frame of mind in Toronto to finish the writing. Most importantly I
owe an immense debt of gratitude to the many named and unnamed
immigrant restaurateurs who took time off from their very busy schedules to
talk to us through the duration of the project.

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 Preface
As the Grains You Eat,
So Will Be the Mind

I had never cooked a meal when I came to the United States in 1988 as a
young adult. I had made omelets, taught by a Boy Scouts’ Camp Counselor
in Jamshedpur. I had brewed tea a handful of times. That’s it. That kind of
experience with cooking is not an exception. A recent OECD study, released
in March 2014, shows Indian men coming pretty close to last in global terms
of sharing domestic care-giving work (Rana 2014). In my case, cooking is what
mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and servants did. Even if I appreciated the
eternal recurrence of delectables, I did not think much about the everyday
improvisation of cooking and cleaning. Now I cook often, write about food,
and teach it. That was a transformation wrought not by a conscious, thinking,
and virtuous subject but by the force of circumstances and the absence of
servants and women. My turn to food studies was catalyzed by the realization—
forced by immigration—not only that I did not know how to cook, but that I
had never thought about it. It was that lack of consciousness about everyday
skills of sustenance, in spite of the apparently progressive Marxist politics
that I had adopted in high school and college, that cried out for attention. In
some ways, progressive, public politics covered over my domestic ineptitude.
More than twenty years of cooking, cleaning, and material and affective care-
giving was left unaccounted for either in the economic calculations or the
narrative of my self. That debt seems to have lingered somewhere, to bubble
and burst into recompense in a whole new life. Perhaps we can call it a
hauntology, after a famous philosopher (Derrida 2006).
I did not think my way out of that ineptitude. Instead, the process should
be described as first finding my way through doing what needed to be done,
and then the slow, fragmentary, recuperation of that process in thought. I
cooked because I had to cook. I thought about it because I had developed an
unavoidable habit of doing so. Furthermore, my hands had to be forced to
surrender the license of living without a care. I was obviously not the first man
to realize that fact, but migration was central to that epistemological

xi
xii PREFACE

recognition, which would shape my subsequent trajectory. Yet it was also

retrospective distance rather than proximity that produced insight. In this
preface I tell you why I turned to cooking, to the surprise of my family and
friends. What that did to my thinking? And how might that in turn contribute
to the fields of food studies, sociology, and immigration studies?
My turn to cooking came in graduate school, amidst the heavy theorizing and
philosophical engagement that is typical at that age and in such institutions. For
a long time I could not reconcile the mundane doing and the high thinking. How
could I connect a series of “mere household events, the common, the low, and
the familiar” (Das, Jackson, Kleinman, and Singh 2014), with the philosophical
strategy of distancing myself from everyday experience? What could be the
relationship between the sovereign subject of philosophy and the fragile subject
of everyday life, with his craving for the ordinary pleasures of good taste? That
is the ground between preparing and eating food, and studying it, as I have
come to see after the thoughtful work of Veena Das and her colleagues. For Das
it was unclear “what could ever be of philosophical interest in the trivial details
of the insecurities of everyday life” (2014: 279). In Michael Jackson’s apposite
but unintended response, “philosophy saves us from drowning by providing us
with the means of regaining our sense of comprehension, composure, and
command in a world of confusing and confounding experience” (Das et al. 2014:
28). There was this developing chiasmus between the necessity of doing and
thinking. Yet, I soon learned that the sharpest retort to old-fashioned theorizing
had already been pre-emptively delivered by the seventeenth-century nun and
Hispanic Baroque scholar Sor Juana Iñes de la Cruz, who in responding to the
chastisement of a powerful bishop noted, “If Aristotle had cooked, he would
have written a great deal more” (de la Cruz 2009: 75). Here she was transforming
the long-resonant anger given voice in the Indian monk Sumangalamata’s
ancient poetic outburst, “A woman well set free! How free I am, How wonderfully
free, from kitchen drudgery . . . Free too of that unscrupulous man” (Tharu and
Lalita 1991: 69). De la Cruz was articulating a subtle theory of knowledge while
making room for the care-giver’s ways of knowing the world in the kitchen, the
parlor and the nursery, and thinking and writing about it.
In What is Called Thinking (1976), Martin Heidegger attacks the assumed
theoretical distinction between the sensible and the intelligible. He is central
to the genealogy of major continental thinkers who have made a big difference
in re-conceptualizing doing and thinking in the second half of the twentieth
century i.e., P ierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen
Habermas, and Richard Rorty.1 No matter the limits of Heideggerian thinking,
some of which will be addressed below, the revolution wrought by his
conceptualization is crucial to reimagining everyday practice. First he re-
positions and re-valorizes un-theorized, everyday coping skills, over mindful
thinking (Harman 2009). Mindful thinking had received all the credit in Western
 PREFACE xiii

philosophizing since Plato. Heidegger’s contribution is the understanding that

this ontology of being-in-the-world need not be represented in the mind. It is
lived first, thought about later. “The pathbreaking achievement of Being and
Time consists in Heidegger’s decisive argumentative step towards overcoming
the philosophy of consciousness” (Habermas 1989: 438). Heidegger’s insight
can be sharpened by the old pragmatist contention—of Peirce, James, and
Dewey—that practice trumps philosophical postulation. That is something that
Pierre Bourdieu recognized with telling brilliance in Outline of a Theory of
Practice (1977), in which he noted that the symbolically structured environment
exerts pervasive pedagogic pressure driven by practical mastery that never
attains the level of discourse. The child develops whole techniques of the body
through mimicking adult gestures and postures, “a way of walking, a tilt of the
head, facial expressions, ways of sitting and of using implements, always
associated with a tone of voice, a style of speech, and . . . a certain subjective
experience” (1977: 87). While practical embodied principles are beyond the
grasp of consciousness, they can instill “a whole cosmology, an ethic, a
metaphysic, a political philosophy, through injunctions as insignificant as
‘stand up straight’ or ‘don’t hold your knife in the left hand’ ” (1977: 94). When
I recoil from a cold glass of water with ice, which is the American norm, I am
deploying the embodied understanding of Ayurveda even when I explicitly
disavow it. The body sometimes lives in a world that the mind cannot yet
think, the tongue articulate, or the fingers inscribe.
Feminist critics such as Hélène Cixous, among others, have long insisted that
“écriture feminine” can happen and has happened only in areas un-subordinated
to philosophic-theoretical domination by the “conventional man” (Cixous, Cohen
and Cohen 1976; DeVault 1991; Charles and Kerr 1988; Murcott 2000; Cairns,
Johnston, and Bauman 2010). As Deborah Lupton notes, “food and eating, are
commonly regarded as the preserve of the embodied self rather than the
disembodied, philosophizing mind. Like food and eating practices, the emotions
are traditionally linked with the feminine, with the disempowered and
marginalized” (1996: 31). Nevertheless, more than books it was the everyday
feminism of colleagues at work, at home, and in the Graduate Student
Organization—some of whom were nominally conservative—who were
pushing, nudging, and elbowing my perspective into place. Practical everyday
feminism was also important before I left India, but there I was surrounded by
middle-class feminists who, of necessity, were seeking to break away from
domestic bonds and could afford to displace care-work to servants. For Indian
feminists in my cohort, domestic care-giving was not the site of positive
engagement, so I was never forced to learn that lesson. Instead middle-class
American feminism, built in a world without servants in the second half of the
twentieth century, was essential to prying open what had already been thought
and theorized by women under the double burden of care-giving and
xiv PREFACE

conceptualization. With some research—as I show in the first chapter—it was

quickly becoming apparent to me that once we take care-giving into the public
domain, immigrant men and women have disproportionately cooked, cleaned,
and picked up after Americans, since we have records of immigrants writing
home and the first official count of occupations and birthplace in the 1850
Census (see Figures 1.1–1.4). The evidence is overwhelming in terms of the
association between subjection, care-giving, and cooking that is nevertheless
rarely reflected in conscious philosophy.
As in the case of Luce Giard (the exemplary collaborator with Michel de
Certeau), I picked up cooking in spite of my thinking. Cooking in general is not
considered conducive to thinking. Although the registers of gender are
different here and the difference is important, her experience with cooking
has echoes that illuminate mine. She writes, “As a child, I refused to surrender
to my mother’s suggestions to come and learn how to cook by her side. I
refused this women’s work because no one ever offered it to my brother”
(1998: 151–2). But one day in a small apartment she needed to cook so that
she could “escape from the noise and crowds of college cafeterias and from
the shuttling back and forth to face preordained menus” (1998: 152). From
those groping initial gestures she realized, to her surprise, that although she
thought that she had never learned or observed anything, “having obstinately
wanted to escape from the contagion of a young girl’s education and because
I had always preferred my room, my books, and my silent games to the kitchen
where my mother busied herself, yet, my childhood gaze had seen and
memorized certain gestures, and my sense memory had kept track of certain
tastes, smells, and colors” (1998: 153). She had to admit that this woman’s
knowledge had crept into her, “slipping past my mind’s surveillance” as she
discovered, bit by bit, the pleasures of cooking and eating good meals. What
is surprising is that in my case, even as a boy, I had not escaped the example
of women’s everyday work that surrounded me.
To eat good Indian food I had to cook, because when I left India I left the
company of women and servants who could cook Indian food. With cooking
I learned the use of tools that never alienated themselves into distant
technology. In cooking I began to feel through food and touch other living
things in their dying throes, by gutting fish, stuffing chicken, mashing potatoes,
kneading dough. Cooking can be humbling because it forces us to consider
the connection between death and sustenance. Through cooking I acquired
allies in graduate school who both aided me in my academic project and gave
me a value that exceeded my worth in ideas, words, and critique. I gave them
something to eat. In exchange, cooking gave a certain zest and confidence to
my critique of culture and hierarchy because I could cook (appropriating the
tools of my gendered and class other), a decidedly common activity, badly at
first, but better with each passing day.
 PREFACE xv

Soon it was assumed that I would cook. Yet, the strictures of a good liberal
arts education kept these two things separate. I had learned to cook in spite
of my gender, my class, and in spite of my mind. The future was still ahead in
which I could cook and think without apology. That came slowly because there
were no available models for it in my social world. As Ann Romines (1997: 87)
noted in her study of Methodist cookbooks in Texas, it was a great relief
when “I realized that I needn’t be torn between two communities—one for
scholarship, one for cooking.” The limits of my horizon, thrown as I was into an
already given, already constituted world, slowly opened up to my inquiry with
the aid of others. I am bringing together here the two habits of thinking and
doing. My posture towards cooking and the new gestures I have learned have
allowed me to remake the world I live in. Cooking and tasting opened new
possibilities in at least two directions.
First, they provided the foundations of an alternative relational aesthetic
experience of rasa, used in Indian performance art, that “necessitates and
is only completed by the beholder’s presence” (Fisher 1999: 38), which
circumvents the dominant Kantian aesthetic formula of distanced consideration.
Rasa ruptures the habits of Enlightenment rationality in the conception of
shared beauty and good taste (Fisher 1999: 38). To see is to separate the
object from the subject, reason from feeling, emotion, which of course is the
Kantian project of saving beauty from Humean feeling and opinion by
developing rational criteria of judgment by eliminating flavor and taste. We
need to pay attention to other theorizations of taste. We need a lot more of the
mouth, the tongue, the nose. We need the intermingling of the subject and the
object, and of the context, company, and performance. Eating is about socially
constructed taste. Taste is about the aesthetics of pleasure. It is preceded by
the ethics of feeding. Both ethics and aesthetics are relationships between
feeder, partaker, and audience. That is the frame for the pleasures of good
food, emotion, affect, company, and context. As Richard Schechner noted,

Rasa is sensuous, proximate, experiential. Rasa is aromatic. Rasa fills

space, joining the outside to the inside. Food is actively taken into the
body, becomes part of the body, works from the inside. What was outside
is transformed into what is inside. An aesthetic founded on rasa is
fundamentally different than one founded on the “theatron,” the rationally
ordered, analytically distanced panoptic . . . Theory is cognate with
“theorem,” “theater,” “theorist,” and such, all from the Greek thea, “a
sight” . . . This binding of “knowing” to “seeing” is the root metaphor/
master narrative of Western thought (2007: 13).

Yet, to consider good food as something amenable to rasa aesthetics, it is

necessary to undermine the usual transcendental claims made in the name of
xvi PREFACE

rasa, by philosophically oriented male Indian theorists, as something divine. It

is necessary to yoke rasa to the pragmatists’ claim that the aesthetically
valuable is and can be continuous with this-worldly life of everyday emotions
heightened and focused by a form (Schechner 2007; Shusterman 2003; Ghosh
2003; Higgins 2007).
Second, cooking opened up another dimension for me. It showed me how
the terms of exchange between domains of cultural activity, art, and everyday
cooking can shift dramatically with displacement and re-emplacement—that
is, migration, in my case—a fact unaccounted for in Bourdieu’s analysis of
taste and hierarchy. Transplantation can sharpen perception and cognition by
redeploying old concepts in new contexts. Cooking in a different context
allowed me to circumvent both the straitjacket of Eurocentric aesthetic theory
and the subjection to transcendental Brahmanism. Food studies, for me,
emerges in the breach, in the rift, between Western high aestheticism and
Brahmanic divination, between measured discourse and unmeasured
everyday practice, between explicit and implicit knowledge, between life and
thing, object and subject, doing and thinking.
Charles Malamoud picks a pebble on the crowded shores of Vedic texts
and rituals, an alternative way of being in the world, to throw light on a religion
and system of thinking. He picks the Sanskrit phrase lokapakti in the Satapatha
Brahmana, translating it as “cooking the world.” At the heart of every
Brahmanic rite, according to Malamoud, is cooking the world. Every rite
hinges on a sacrifice, and every sacrificial operation employs a derivative of
one of the roots signifying cook, “pac or sra (or one of their partial synonyms,
such as us, ghr, tap, or dah)” (Malamoud 1996: 36–7). That is a powerful,
almost magical claim, declaring an unwillingness to place everything under
the aegis of Western logic, intelligibility, and translatability. Furthermore, it
contends that to live properly is to cook the world just right. The objective of
cooking is to conjoin the moral and material properties of the food, the cook,
and the eater (Achaya 1994: 64). It clarifies much, about both the ancient Vedic
tradition and its contemporary Indic appropriation.
No one connects the Vedic cosmology of food to the current tradition more
cogently than R. S. Khare, who, with Mary Douglas, co-chaired the International
Commission for the Anthropology of Food from 1978 to 1985, urging various
national committees to undertake research on food consumption. Khare
extrapolates from his dense ethnographic research on the cosmologies and
everyday practices of the Kanyakubja Brahmans of the Avadh region in the
state of Uttar Pradesh in India (1976a, b; 1992; Khare and Rao 1986). His is a
theory of essential and stable differences between the West and India, which
violates current orthodoxies of hybridity and eternal change, so central to both
postmodern Western experience and theorizations about food. Furthermore,
he invests in a Hindu essence—in terms of both everyday experience and a
 PREFACE xvii

cosmology—that yokes food to the self, soul (atman), and the universe
(brahmand). Sustaining the body sustains the universe, because the pursuit of
dharma in daily life maintains the cosmic balance, and good food is essential
to good karma. Thus one of the oldest Indic texts, called the Taitirriya Upanishad
(presumed to be compiled sometime between 700 and 600 BCE ), suggests
that the essential spiritual principle of the universe can be put in the following
words:

Having performed austerity, he understood that Brahma[n] is food. For

truly, indeed, beings here are born from food, when born they live by food,
on deceasing they enter into food; mankind is food for death; he is nourished
and nourishes: I, who am food, eat the eater of food! I have overcome the
whole world (Dimock 1995: 28).

What Khare finds distinctive about the Hindu view is this seamless conjoining
of nutrient, taste, morals, aesthetics, medicine, body, other beings, plants,
animals, minerals, and the universe. The creator of the Hindu universe is after
all a yogi, a conjoiner. Khare presumes a Heideggerian riss2 between severed
dualistic categories where he contends that the Hindu conception of food
“affords the Indianist a cultural lens to see beyond such basic dichotomies of
his analysis as the ideal and the practical; self, body and the other; and abstract
and concrete” (Khare 1992: 1). He continues, “food becomes simultaneously
a moral and material essence” where the central discourse on food is
“ontological and experiential” (1992: 7). He builds on “the popular Hindu
intuition concerning the absence of opposition between spirit and matter” and
promulgates the “interdependence between body, food and mind” (1992: 33).
The “Hindu system treats language and discourse as a function of self (and its
manas), while this ‘mind’ depends on food (anna) and breath (prana)” (1992:
39). Breath, by means of food, yields intellect, which in turn works through the
five sensory organs. That is both an obvious empirical fact and a subtle spiritual
claim. Not only is the bodily substance made of food but so is the moral code,
which could be critically accentuated. “Just as butter is formed by churning
milk, so the mind is formed by churning food. It is annamaya—comprised of
grains. Jainsa khave anna, vainsa hove manna—as the grains you eat so will
be the mind” (Parry 1985: 613). Purandaradasa, a medieval Hindu saint (1480–
1564 CE ), employs a battery of semiotic switches which tellingly illuminate
the Indic relationship across the dualist divide between the self and the divine,
morality and aesthetics, cooking and eating, and essence and experience,
when he states ecstatically:

For the milk-made delicacy of Rama’s Name, the sugar is Krishna’s Name,
and the Name of the Lord Vitthala, the ghee; mix, put it into your mouth and
xviii PREFACE

see the taste! Take the wheat of Ego, put it into the milk of dispassion and
pound it into a soft flour and prepare it into fine vermicelli, boil it, and put it
into a vessel of your heart, fill it with water of feeling and cook it with your
intellect; take it on a plate and eat; and when you get a belching, think of
the Lord Purandara Vitthala, who is of the form of joy (translated in Raghavan
1966: 128–9).

It is the joyous belching as spiritual intellection that denotes a different dialect,

different from the one to which modern subjects have become habituated.
Dialect is about essential difference, not just different registers for the same
people. This mixing of metaphors of devotion and diet is not the Hinduism of
statecraft and caste-making, but the domain of everyday worship, especially
illustrative of female attention to domestic goddesses and the mundane
materiality of care-work (Newark Museum 1995). It is the twined vernacularity
of labor and care that is signified in the alliterative Bengali listing of everyday
work and worship in batna-bata (grinding spices), kutno-kaata (cutting
vegetables), ranna-banna (cooking and cleaning), jhat-daowa (dusting and
sweeping), pujor-jhogaar (collecting the flower, water, fruits for worship),
bashon-maja (doing dishes), kaapar-kaacha (laundry), etc. It is important to
underline the difference here between a critical, care-based, pragmatic,
everyday form of Hinduism that can be recuperated against the violent, caste-
based, nation-making Hinduism that is in power in India today. The latter
violates everything that is good and sustainable about small-scale worship
and care. The work of sustaining the body, especially others’ bodies, is equal
to divine worship in some branches of everyday Hinduism, and one could live
with that form of religiosity. It is the toil that makes the real difference, not the
philosophizing, not the bombastic cultural claims on behalf of national
Hinduism. There is much worth recuperating in the Hinduism of care-work
against the Hinduism of state-craft. Looking back through the thoughtless
rituals that I sat through and the mundane nourishment that made me, it
was everyday worship, and food offered and cooked by mothers, aunts,
grandmothers, and servants, that was central to my being in a world already
there, but covered over in language, text, feeling, and theory. For me, bodily
displacement, expatriation, was essential to making the obvious visible and
in opening up a space to inhabit where I could both practice cooking and
theorize it.
Ritual and everyday food is the riss—the thing that separates and pulls us
in a conflictual relationship—not only between gods, men, and priests, or
between men and women, servants and masters, but also between one
being and another. It is the hinge of an assemblage. This project not only
develops that post-Heideggerian (and as I learned, Indic) insight, but in doing
so goes past his subject-oriented philosophy. Heidegger’s thinking re-opens
 PREFACE xix

the intellect to the non-theoretical, pre-reflective knowledge of carpenters,

cooks, poets, and philosophers. He does that by re-valorizing implicit, everyday
forms of knowing that are not easily amenable to explication. Or to put it in
Michael Polanyi’s terms, “we know more than we can tell,” especially in
cooking, decorating, and even thinking (1966: 4). This everyday background of
doing is as invisible to the intentional mind “as the eye which sees is invisible
to itself” (Searle 1983: 157). Yet Heidegger limits his attention to human
beings, and his beings never eat. His brilliant retort to Descartes, “I am,
therefore I think,” does undermine the fully conscious subject, but it is still
subjectivity that interests him. Objects are secondary and derived (Garcia
2014). In contrast, the philosopher Raymond Boisvert’s (2014) retort is
penetratingly obvious: “I eat, therefore I think.” We are finally turning the
corner from the anthropocentric anti-materialism that has dominated much of
modern Western philosophy and opening up new possibilities of considering
cooking and thinking.
Thus the other analytic of my conception is an object-oriented philosophy
that has been consolidated lately, in one instance, by Jane Bennett in Vibrant
Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010). She re-animates the object world
by invoking the spirit of traditional philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza and
Gilles Deleuze, to posit a “world populated by animate things rather than
passive objects” (2010: vii). Her guiding question is: “How would political
responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of
(nonhuman) bodies? By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things—edibles,
commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and
designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories,
propensities, or tendencies of their own” (2010: viii). So we can say that the
humanist subject (after Foucault and Derrida) is not only a Eurocentric one,
hell-bent on subjecting the world to its own image, but that all subject-oriented
philosophies have sustained the obviously improbable fantasy that we are
really in charge of the world (of objects, including other bodies) and should be
in charge. Here demystification, that venerable trope of critical theory, is the
obstacle to seeing that human agency is not at the heart of the matter. The
object has returned to view in the academic humanities. Things have begun to
matter, and food is one of them. In Tristan Garcia’s words, “Our time is perhaps
the time of an epidemic of things . . . those of us who love things, but who
struggle in the face of their accumulation” (Garcia 2014: 1–2). In other words,
things matter, people matter, other lives matter, but it is also possible that one
of these things can overwhelm the others. Connections between subjects
and objects are essential, but vigilance is also necessary not to tip the balance.
Food is the hinge, where another life is the thing that sustains body and mind.
That of course turns out to be a very old Indic concept echoed most audibly
in notions of transmigration of souls between animals, plants, and humans; in
xx PREFACE

rasa aesthetics that seamlessly conjoin mood, flavor, environment, and

substance; and in ayurveda that conjures body, person, and illness as process
rather than as objects. I had to be re-introduced to this alternative ecology of
forms by way of post-Heideggerian philosophy, given the inevitable trajectory
of a post-colonial subject. I had to re-learn the obvious truths of life in a
complicated choreography of misreading, forgetting, and knowing. I re-learned
that god, food, and life are essential elements of a Hindu cosmological triangle,
and in this triangle food has the “privilege of being a nexus where all possible
concerns—cosmological, social, psychological, biological, physical—coalesce”
(Moreno 1992: 149). When the Upanishads state that life is food or when the
Vedas declare that food is life there is an unmistakable sense of an assemblage
attached to food.
Furthermore, cooking, one of the closest things to us, has been driven
farthest from analysis, as post-Heideggerian philosophers have understood
and the Brahmanas have reminded me. The rediscovery of this riss between
pre-theoretical thinking and object-oriented philosophy allows me to do three
things. At the grandest level, it allows me to evade the narcissism of the
human subject, with all his autonomy and agentic activity that has brought the
world to the brink of disaster in the narrow bottleneck of a sustainability crisis
that re-poses crucial ethical questions about our relationship to other humans,
other species, and the environment. “Food is the field in which we daily
explore our ‘harming’ of the world”—the world at large, the social world of the
hungry, and those ill with food, the animal world, and the plant world (Snyder
1995: 70). “Harming” here references himsa, the conjoined twin of ahimsa
(nonviolence), a central Indic concern.
At the intermediate level, this riss between pre-theoretical doing and the
world of things shows me a way through the lacunae and riddles that have
accumulated in and around my work on immigrants and their food-related
work and consumption. My first book, The Migrant’s Table (2004), was
focused on domestic cookery in the remaking of migrant worlds. My next
edited book (with Tulasi Srinivas), Curried Cultures (2012), interrogated claims
of transnational cosmopolitanism and provincialism by way of literal taste.
The Ethnic Restaurateur takes the analysis to the marketplace of ethnic
entrepreneurship and urban culture. My forthcoming project is on immigrant
street vendors, where I will lay out the possibilities and problems of producing
subjectivity at the intersection of culinary knowledge and the praxis of city-
based state regulation.
Most immediately, this engagement with taste and toil allows me to cook
with the invocation of theory, where theory is the Sanskrit of the liberal arts
academy, central to its rituals of indicating serious intent. Philosophical
thinking is a habit developed in a milieu, just as cooking and eating. This
particular kind of theorization—practical, provincial thinking—does not allow
 PREFACE xxi

me to postulate universal processes and posit a god’s eye view of the world.
It tethers me to the precise place from where I speak today, which is in New
York City as an immigrant, in the milieu of food studies scholars. That is, I
postulate here, my sense of the city, as revealed by my body in interacting
with other bodies and things. In Virginia Woolf’s apposite recommendation,
this book was born from the body of its author (1929: 93). This returns us to
the gains of phenomenology, in spite of the turn to object-oriented ontology,
where Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) insight, that cognition depends on a schéma
corporel which locates one’s body in the world that encourages an
understanding of other bodies, is still relevant. External stimulus can only
make sense via an embodied sense of self. Migration is not just about loss of
culture or even only about economic opportunity. Migration also has its
rewards—mundane, material, spiritual, and epistemological—as I will show in
the following chapters of the book.

Notes
1 Michel Foucault said, “For me Heidegger has always been the essential
philosopher . . . My entire philosophical development was determined by my
reading Heidegger” (Foucault 1985: 8). Jacques Derrida at one point doubted
that he could write anything that had not already been thought by Heidegger
(cited in Dreyfus 1991: 9). Pierre Bourdieu acknowledged that Heidegger was
his first love in philosophy, although he did move on to Blaise Pascal in
recuperating the genealogy of his thinking. Yet, he acknowledged that his
powerful concept of social fields was “indebted to Heidegger by way of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty” (Dreyfus 1991: 9). Merleau-Ponty, in turn, accredited
the influence of Being and Time on his Phenomenology of Perception (2012).
Jürgen Habermas, who has distanced himself from Heidegger, nevertheless
judged him to be “probably the most profound turning point in German
philosophy since Hegel” (1989: 434). Furthermore, “Heidegger’s critique of
reason has been taken up . . . strongly in France and the United States, for
example, by Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Hubert Dreyfus” (Habermas
1989: 435).
2 Heidegger offers “riss” as a manufactured compound, in his attempt to wrest
art, especially drawing, from aesthetics. Riss evokes Aufriss (contour or
elevation), Grundrisse (outline or floorplan), and an opposition that does not let
the opponents fall apart but pulls them together in a unitary whole (Umriss)
(Heidegger 1976). I am appropriating riss here only as the rift that connects, a
productive strife. The relation, the riss, is the coming together through
antagonism, opposition. I link it to “trials of strength” in Bruno Latour’s
equally post-Heideggerian project, where the matter hinges on the strife
between humans, animals, bacteria, viruses, and things, and humans are not
the only dramatis personae (1986: 276).
xxii
 1
Taste, Toil, and Ethnicity

A lthough immigrants have a long and substantial presence in the United

States food system, they appear to have left little trace on American
conceptualizations of good taste. This book inserts immigrant bodies and
conceptions into American discussions of taste and in doing so jeopardizes the
consensus about aesthetics in popular and scholarly domains. An immigrant
who enters the American national space, especially a visibly different immigrant,
has been turned into an ethnic in the last half-century. An ethnic is a proximate
but subordinate other, too close to be foreign, too different to be the self.
According to the twentieth-century sensory regime of Americanism, an ethnic
looks different, sounds different, and prefers different food. Among subcultural
and avant garde groups, the term and the people so categorized are sometimes
presumed to carry the promise of cultural authenticity. This book narrates that
story about subordination and power in the domain of palatal taste that
challenges standard theories of aesthetic taste and culture-making in an
American city. The central paradox I address is that, although the foreign-born
have numerically dominated the feeding occupations, such as greengrocer,
baker, butcher, saloon-keeper, tavern-keeper, and restaurateur, especially in
the large bi-coastal cities in the United States since the 1850s, we know
relatively little about how the transaction in taste appears from their point
of view. In contrast, there is a rich literature on the perspective of the native-
born consumer, which, in this book, is held at the margin as a mirror to the
migrant self.
This blindness about the ethnic provider can be attributed to a number of
technical and conceptual reasons. Low prestige of care-work, the unheroic
labor of micro entrepreneurship, the inability to articulate in language the
taste of the tongue, the limited language skills of scholars working with
the American material (especially in the languages of recent migrants), the
over-worked migrant without the time to write, and the illiteracy of many
immigrants, have compounded our access to that perspective. One example
that brings together a number of these reasons should suffice here: although
the Chinese have dominated the feeding and cleaning occupations from the

1
2 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

middle of the nineteenth century, we do not get a book-length treatment

of their perspective in establishing and running the quintessential American
ethnic restaurant until the twenty-first century (Lee 2009; Cho 2010). That is
an extraordinary deferral. The reason is both the theoretical problem with
cooked food in the modern Western imagination, especially within academic
scholarship, and the subordination of the cooking subject. Little else can
explain such a notable and durable silence.
Food, long considered trivial, now condemned as fashionable in popular
culture, has compounded its entry into the academy. Various reasons have
been accorded for the absence of food in classrooms, libraries, and museums.
Among them is the inordinate attention to mind and thinking in the liberal arts,
over the body and other modes of doing things. As modern subjects we are
trained to be pleased with our minds and surprisingly blind to our bodies,
other than as an object of shallow concerns of vanity. There are a few
exceptions. The primitive’s body and the diseased body have been allowed
entry into the academy for over a century, but only as ontologically inferior
things in anthropology and the health sciences. Such a containment of the
body is crucial to Enlightenment dualisms.
Yet normative disembodiment is not only limited to the sphere of the
West. Strands of Brahmanism—which is one of the points of my departure, as
I show in the preface—also make a crucial argument against the abject
materiality of the body, especially the socially inferior’s body and its lack of
liaison with the divine. Perhaps that is because food and the body have long
been considered the concerns and cares of the inferior, that is women,
servants, slaves, and subject races and castes. Superior men have theorized
away the body and its needs, especially for food and for sex (the latter
was recovered in the twentieth century West by Sigmund Freud and
psychoanalysis), out of the domain of serious deliberation in the academy.
That concordat is disintegrating all around us, in particular in the Western
academy, precisely because that is where it ruled the roost, as the importance
of the mind and reason are dialed down, and subordinate classes containing
women, inferior races, lower castes, and ethnic men have entered the academy
and begun to violate its ontological assumptions of superior bodies and high-
mindedness. They have reminded us of the necessity of bodies and the love
of thinking, a fondness for doing as well as intellection, and the allure of doing
and talking about it. New materialisms have refocused our attention on objects,
especially the material and affective connections between objects and humans,
and the resulting possibility of a paradoxical counterpoint, which is a deep-
seated environmentalism. As a result, attention to our relationship to food, as
with our relationship to other living and dead bodies, has become unavoidable.
Yet we just didn’t think our way out of it. It took practice and pragmatism to exit
the closed world of the self-assured and superior mind.
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 3

Scholarly work such as Marcy Norton’s Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures

(2008) has successfully recovered the inadvertent adaptation of Mesoamerican
aesthetics in European taste for chocolate and tobacco, transported from the
outer reaches of the empire, against the weight of the colonial ideology that
good taste only flowed from the direction of the conqueror. In Norton’s case,
the Spanish taste for chocolate, instead of bolstering established hierarchies
of race, class, and roots, spotlighted the internal contradictions of the imperial
project and “affected, rather than reflected, discourse” (2008: 691). This
book is an analogous inversion of established norms, in which an alternative
aesthetics is recovered from the interior of cities, deep at home, rather than
from abroad, brought by relatively less powerful people from elsewhere.
Surprisingly, in answering her question “When and how do societies assimilate
foreign things?” Norton completely misses the role of immigrants and the
whole body of literature on it, while acknowledging the historiography of
colonialism, consumerism, and food (2008: 661).
These are some of the contexts and conditions that have made possible
this project of paying attention to literal taste in talking about aesthetic taste
while violating principles of eighteenth-century Western philosophy. They
allow us to attend to migrant materialities, which is a result of the cultural
democratization wrought by the Civil Rights Movement. That is what connects
taste, toil, and ethnicity in this book. The inferior talk back here, and force
us to see American cities from the perspective of migrant bodies. The virtue
of that is not only a newer, fresher view but also the way it challenges us to
transform establishment-style theorizing and sociologizing, by interjecting
subordinate practices and theories of the world we live in, forcing us to
experience life outside theory qua theory.

The ethnic
Ashis Nandy, the venerable post-colonial theorist, writes bombastically:

[E]thnic cuisine becomes more and more like a museum or a stage on

which culture writes its name . . . for the sake of appeasing our moral
conscience and declaring its survival. The Los Angeles Museum of
Holocaust displays some artifacts of Jewish culture, thoughtfully collected
by the Nazis for the projected museum on an extinct race after the Final
Solution. Those were not the days of ethnic cuisine. Otherwise the Nazis
would have surely added a wing to their museum where one could include
a well-appointed restaurant serving traditional Jewish fare from all over
Europe (2003: 251).
4 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Nandy’s posture is a provocation, crafted to elicit a retort rather than a

considered discussion. Let me first concede some legitimacy to Nandy’s
ill-tempered diatribe. At one level Nandy’s irritability with the collective
category of the “ethnic” as a flattening and meaningless pen to hold all non-
White, non-Anglophone others is understandable. Nandy was partly reacting
to the disrepute that had attached to the term “ethnic” after the break-up of
Yugoslavia and mass murder in Rwanda, when it came to be associated with
“cleansing.” In other post-colonial locations, such as India, the term is polluted
with the stench of pogroms in the name of illegitimate group claims against
the nation-state (see Calhoun 2007).
In the US the term ethnicity has other lineages. It came into play almost
simultaneously in the fields of American journalism and social sciences in the
late 1950s in what appeared then to be a relatively neutral way of constructing
difference (Glazer and Moynihan 1975; Sollors 1997; Guibernau and Rex 1999).
“Ethnic food” led this trend in the emerging sub-field of food journalism (as
I will show below). Subsequently, theorists of representation—especially
Stuart Hall in his 1989 essay “New Ethnicities”—challenged us to re-read the
poetics and politics of the term (Hall 1989). By the late 1980s and the early
1990s ethnicity was seen as a benign claim of cultural coherence by any group,
previously excluded from the centers of power, now staked below the level of
the nation-state. Ethnicity became the dominant mode of framing difference
without falling into the problem of race. Among theoretical sophisticates “the
ethnic,” within scare quotes, is an unutterable referent to color and inferiority,
which is mostly covered over in pragmatic silence. In this book I interrogate
that precise intersection of dominance and agency to narrate a story of urban
culture-making. The time has come to abandon the term for current use, but
it remains quite useful in weaving the history of the relationship between
the presumed normative non-ethnic center and its radiating, multiple, ethnic
others, which belongs as much to the realm of fantasy as to fact. The term
itself is one of the signs of unequal relationship between the self-proclaimed
normative center of the Euro-American imagination, its dominating institutions,
and numerous categories of others such as the foreigner, the tourist, the
exile, the stranger, the immigrant, etc., in a rich semiotic universe of slippery,
relational selfhoods and Otherness.
What Nandy proposes dramatically in the quotation above is also suggested
by bell hooks. She posits that the totalizing perspective of “eating the other”
is a posture “from the standpoint of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,”
where “the hope is that desires for the ‘primitive’ or fantasies about the Other
can be continually exploited, and that such exploitation will occur in a manner
that reinscribes and maintains the status quo” (hooks 1992: 22; also see
Hage 1997). Although most of her essay “Eating the Other” is written in the
outraged mode of a critic who cannot find any hope in the commodification of
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 5

the culture of racial and ethnic others, especially their desires and their bodies,
hooks provides two instances of alternative ways of reading such an encounter.
She concedes that the “desire for contact with the Other, for connection
rooted in the longing for pleasure, can act as a critical intervention challenging
and subverting racist domination, inviting and enabling critical resistance,” but
it remains “an unrealized political possibility” (1992: 22). She cites Stuart and
Elizabeth Ewen’s critique of consumption in Channels of Desire as politically
limiting where “communities of resistance are replaced by communities of
consumption” (1992: 33). She recommends engaging with the particular form
of desire for the Other as the place to begin the interrogation of what exactly
is going on. She identifies John Waters’s Hairspray and Peter Greenaway’s The
Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover as exemplary instances where desire
across the color-line is deployed not merely to conquer and reassert white
domination, but to recognize the “particular pleasures and sorrows black folks
experience,” which refreshingly “does not lead to cultural appropriation but
to an appreciation that extends into the realm of the political” (1992: 37). She
concludes, “Acknowledging ways the desire for pleasure, and that includes
erotic longings, informs our politics, our understanding of difference, we may
know better how desire disrupts, subverts, and makes resistance possible.
We cannot, however, accept these new images uncritically” (1992: 39). One
can live with this assertion a little better than Nandy’s exaggerated opening
claim, yet there are a number of problems here too.
For one, hooks connects food and sex too closely. They are both forms
of literal incorporation, but they are different. It is true that eating together
often leads to sleeping together, which is why race and caste purists have
always panicked about cross-category commensality, even fleetingly at water
fountains or more elaborately at lunch counters and restaurants. Yet, the table
is different from the bed. “The table is a social machinery as complicated as it
is effective: it makes one talk, one ‘lays everything on the table’ to confess
what one wanted to keep quiet, one gets ‘grilled’ by a skillful neighbor, one
yields to a momentary excitement, to a fit of vanity, to the velvet smoothness
of a red wine, and one hears oneself tell all about what one had sworn the
day before to hide from everyone” (de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998: 197).
Michel de Certeau and Lucy Giard, who are attuned to the specificity of place
and space, slow down our move from the table to the bed. Eating together
allows one to hold the other at some distance with the table in between, so
the relationship can be subject to mutual discussion and negotiation. Eating
allows intimacy but not too much of it, which is why we can afford to feed
every guest, while it is hardly advisable to sleep with them. That ratio of
intimacy and estrangement is an important distinction to be made between
the pleasures (and hence the problems) of the table and the bed. hooks’
analysis moves too quickly and too easily from food to sex and back again,
6 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

and I think her argument holds more for eating the other, than eating with
the other.
The problem is that both Nandy’s and hooks’ critiques, although targeting
the colonizing white view, nevertheless appropriate that imperial viewpoint in
surveying colored bodies and ethnic foods. Neither of them asks any of the
ethnics (or relevant others under discussion) what they think of all this. That is
partly a function of academic discipline. It seems one can say a lot in philosophy
and in cultural studies without asking anyone else what they think about the
matter under full speculative elaboration. Thus Nandy and hooks appear as
perverse inversions of Gustav Flaubert’s classic Orientalist appropriation of
Kuchuk Hanem, the Egyptian courtesan salvaged by Edward Said, who never
spoke of herself, never “represented her emotions, presence, or history.”
Instead Flaubert “spoke for and represented her” (Said 1979: 6). Thus, in this
book I am insistent that the ethnic talk back and tell us what they think.
It would be inaccurate to lay the charge of Orientalism at the door of the
philosopher who has written the book on this matter titled Exotic Appetites
(Heldke 2003). Born of the methodological discipline of philosophy, Heldke
cannot ask the migrant purveyor of food what he makes of his experience,
without fracturing the bounds of her discipline. She begins with a trenchant
critique of her own “easy acquisitiveness” towards ethnic food, which
she eventually comes to see as culinary colonialism, which in turn is the
window through which she comes to recognize the disturbing attitudes of
“contemporary Euroamerican food adventurers” with their “obsessive interest
in and appetite for the new, the obscure and the exotic,” their grasping of
ethnic food to serve their own interests, linked together by “the adventurer’s
intense desire for authentic experiences of authentic cultures” (2003: 7). But
Heldke confines herself to a theoretical critique of the acquisitive attitude
because, in her words, “Philosophers’ methods are not those of ethnographers,
for example, who may at times find themselves scandalized by philosophers’
tendency toward abstract generalization, our tendency to see the development
of a point as necessitating more theory rather than more examination of
concrete circumstance” (2003: xxv). Uma Narayan gently chides Heldke,
which also happens to be my position:

I am not unsympathetic to [the] critique of “culinary imperialism” or to

Heldke’s critique of “food colonialism.” However, I hope to complicate
this discussion of “food colonialism” by thinking about ethnic foods from
the point of view of immigrants to Western contexts, rather than from
that of mainstream Western citizens. While eating “ethnic foods” in
restaurants might result only in shallow, commodified, and consumerist
interaction with an “Other” culinary culture, it seems preferable at least
to the complete lack of acquaintance that permits the different foods
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 7

of “Others” to appear simply as marks of their “strangeness” and

“Otherness.”
Eating in these restaurants, I also register how “ethnic restaurants” are
an important form of economic enterprise for many immigrants to the West,
and how Westerners’ taste for “ethnic cuisines” contributes to the economic
survival of immigrants, the desire for culinary novelty making a positive
difference to profit margin (1997: 180).

Narayan touches on the limits of a theoretical critique but, having barely

opened the issue, she goes no further. As a philosopher Narayan cannot
imagine asking immigrant restaurateurs what they think. Surprisingly, even
sociologists such as Johnston and Bauman (2007), in spite of their rich
discussion of distinction, cultural capital, and omnivorousness, have refrained
from that task which should come naturally to a sociologist. That is precisely
what I do, especially in Chapters 2 and 5. In doing so, I draw on the work
of Ghassan Hage (1997), refining and specifying it conceptually and
methodologically.
Hage develops a three-part argument. He is in line with Heldke’s critique in
characterizing that obsessive cultural acquisitiveness as cosmo-multiculturalism,
which is a competitive discourse that positions “ethnic feeders” with a passive
feeding function “in a field where migrant subjects have been erased and where
the central subject is a classy and more often than not an Anglo-cosmopolitan
eating subject” (1997: 118). It is a form of multiculturalism without migrants,
which is linked to tourism and the international circulation of commodities
and gastronomic conceptions rather than to the circulation of migrants (1997:
118–19). In Hage’s words, cosmo-multiculturalism, or what I will characterize
as gastronomic cosmopolitanism, fuses “notions of diversity with notions
of classiness, sophistication and international distinction” (1997: 119). Such a
cuisine is elaborated by a community of producers, consumers, and interpreters,
where a “whole set of internationally sanctioned and largely implicit rules of
production and consumption begin to operate as a form of symbolic violence,
setting the parameters of acceptable creativity” (1997: 123–4), as we will see
in Chapter 4. Gastronomic cosmopolitanism may appear to have a positive
antiracist message but it continues to be “deeply Anglo-centric in positioning
Anglo subjects in the role of appreciators enriched by what are constructed as
ethnic objects with no raison d’être other than to enrich the Anglo-subject”
(1997: 136).
Furthermore, gastronomic cosmopolitanism makes too much of a break
with its own past as a stodgy, conservative, closed-minded old self. It is
posited that anyone with enough “class” could become an appreciator of
Otherness, especially through their food. The working class is constructed in
this discourse as “non-multicultural by virtue of its presumed inability to
8 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

appreciate ‘diversity’ and ethnic cultures” (1997: 137). Hage quotes a lawyer
making the case for cosmo-multiculturalism in the following manner:

Cabramatta [an ethnic suburb of Sydney, equivalent to the Manhattanite’s

Queens] is the only place worth eating at. It is the only place where you are
not expected, where the restaurant owner does not smile to welcome you.
He doesn’t want you there. He thinks you are a nuisance. When I go to a
restaurant like this I know I am going to eat well. I know I will be eating the
real thing. I look inside the restaurant and try to locate the owner and as
soon as I see that look of disdain on his face I’m in [laughing]. I love it (Hage
1997: 139).

There are a number of things to note here, Hage suggests: first, this
whole thing is played out as a game of mastery. “But it is experienced not as
mastery over ethnic people as such. There is nothing more anathema to the
aesthetic sense of cosmo-multiculturalism than the idea of an explicitly
subjugated ethnic otherness” (1997: 139). Yet for gastronomic cosmopolitans,
ethnicity is “an object of experience rather than an experiential subject” (1997:
136), even when cosmopolitans insist on authenticity—in fact berate the
ethnic immigrant for diluting authenticity for the sake of their neighbor’s
retrogressive Anglo palate. Here cosmo-multiculturalism is in “direct conflict
with the multiculturalism of intercultural interaction” (1997: 144). These
cosmopolitans in competitive search of real, authentic ethnic food would
not allow the ethnic to negotiate or design their interactions with the
larger society.
In his sociological investigations, when Hage talked to the same Vietnamese
restaurateur and his son whom the lawyer discusses above, he found
that they were actively seeking a non-Vietnamese clientele and deploying
sophisticated strategies of subtle exoticism and authenticity, knowing full
well “that the absence of signs in English is a good way to attract Anglo
customers” (1997: 144). Such knowledge is difficult to incorporate into the
cosmo-multicultural fantasy of authenticity. To cosmo-multiculturalism, Hage
counterposes the multiculturalism of inhabitance, of real migrants, in complex,
sometimes conflictual, relationship, but always in negotiation with white folks
and others, and where ethnicity is not detached from ethnic producers. His
point is “to valorize a multiculturalism grounded in the reality of migrant home-
building and intercultural interaction” (1997: 146). That is precisely what I seek
in the migrant restaurateurs’ designs on the world they have come to inhabit,
and in doing so I hope to sharpen Hage’s subtle insights about interrogating
those sites where “both the eater and the feeder experience themselves as
subjects” (1997: 146). Chapters 2 and 5 bring us most clearly the view from
the other side.
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 9

That kind of work on inhabitation will also allow us the possibility of getting
away from the excessively pinched attitude of theoretical over-cautiousness
towards ethnic food that belies the history of its appropriation by the
counterculture as a way to critique and re-invigorate the mainstream that
Warren Belasco describes in Appetite for Change when he notes that “The
new Sikh restaurant in downtown Ann Arbor taught us about vegetable
tempura, curried squash soup, and tantric meditation” (2006: 218), in the
process connecting “us to people and places all over the world,” and creating
“a visceral, lived daily link between the personal and the political” where the
“countercuisine represented a serious and largely unprecedented attempt
to reverse the direction of dietary modernization and thereby align personal
consumption with perceived global needs” (2006: 217). It might be that such
a transformative moment has passed, but banging the door shut to other
peoples’ food is no way to reimagine the self or the Other and put the
relationship between the two on a new footing.
Parama Roy provides an opening for such an interaction in Alimentary
Tracts (2010). Heavily theorized and deeply entangled in the thicket of literary
criticism, it is chronologically selective, hopping, skipping, and jumping from
the 1857 Indian Mutiny (against East India Company rule), to Gandhi’s austere
vegetarianism and spectacular fasting, through the hungers of the low-caste
poor, finally to the gastronomic reclamation of curry powder by Madhur Jaffrey.
In doing so, Roy walks the fertile borderlands of the ethical and the aesthetic
consequences of eating the Other—animal and human. In allowing the Other
to enter one’s body without the desperate need of purgation, she expertly
inverts the critique of hooks (1992), Heldke (2003) and Nandy (2003). She does
so by drawing on Jacques Derrida’s (1991) suggestion of anthropophagy, not
as an abomination but as a “parabolic instantiation of unexpected somatic and
ethical engagement with the other” where the “refusal to partake of the other
is an important breakdown in or rejection of ethical reciprocity with the other”
(Roy 2010: 14).
I think, Nandy’s appropriation of the imagined mainstream view in surveying
ethnic food enables the post-colonial theorist to avoid identification with the
immigrant, as opposed to the affluent traveler or the anguished exile. The
point of view of the imagined mainstream persists even in the work of analysts
more sympathetic to sociological “facts,” such as Johnston and Baumann
(2007). In contrast to their work, this book gathers immigrant narratives to
refract high theory. And it inverts the lens of the viewing subject—against
Nandy, hooks, Heldke, and Johnston and Bauman—to generate a theoretical
chiasmus.
Sometimes the shrill clamor of post-colonial theorists erases any alternative
signifying possibilities that reside in plain view on sidewalk vendor carts, in
ethnic newspapers, menus, and the voices of subjects who are producing
10 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

various kinds of foods and meaning. Here I want to qualify Spivak’s (1988)
theorization of the silent subaltern on the very grounds of her quarrel with the
Subalternists. Even those reduced to documentary illegibility are not silent.
The advantage of ethnographic work, of course, is the recuperation of fragile
orality that text-dependent history cannot bear witness to.
The embodied potentiality of food has a theoretical consequence. Those
feeding us may have some power over us. Usual paradigmatic vulnerabilities
can be inverted. The study of food is capable of generating epistemic implosions,
where “a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to
their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on
the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity” can come
alive and burn our fingers (Foucault 1980: 82). Cooking opens up the possibilities
of what de Certeau characterizes as an economy of the gift, an aesthetics of
tricks, and an ethics of tenacity that upgrades ordinary practices to the status of
a theoretical object (de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol, 1998: xxiii).
Post-colonial theorists sometimes speak as if nothing exists between
domination and resistance. The vast intermediate landscape of making do,
of living, of making ends meet, of insinuating one’s intentions between the
expectation of others, of poaching, of mimicking, of mocking, of explaining
to white folks, of dismissing them, of interpreting the rest of the world
to them, of plain fabrication of one’s self as the ponderous native informant,
the gorgeous pleasures of subversion and subterfuge, may not be available
to righteous theorists, but is important to practical others, including migrant
restaurateurs peddling food as much as notions of it. Binary conceptions of
domination and resistance ignore the peculiar intimacy between the Anglo
and the ethnic that has always shaped American cities and public cultures of
eating, and theorizing that kind of intimacy without occluding historical and
persistent inequalities could be the source of creativity in our work (Suleri
1992). Nandy, Heldke, hooks, and Johnston and Baumann have elucidated on
what needs to be stated, which is the long relationship between the imperial
imagination and the colonized Other, yet that is not all that needs to be said.
Ethnicity is a classification system that produces practical activity, knowledge,
and domination. “Ethnic” is both an obfuscating term and a revealing one, as
I show in the following pages.
Ethnicity is the perceptual schema by which Americans produce cultural
difference. The ethnic is the carrier of difference—marked by feature, language,
and culture. It is the production of manageable difference that functions to
establish and define the boundaries of who “we” are, who “our” ancestors
were, and how “we” mark that difference. The ethnic is never seen as a
superordinate class, although s/he is sometimes white (such as in the case of
the Irish, Italian, and Jews—and I will show their relevance to my discussion
further into this text). The ethnic is the inferior outsider, inside the nation, who
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 11

can become the locus of our longings, in spite of his inferiority, if touched
by some measure of modernity, development, and Americanization. Yet, what
makes the American case particularly interesting is that it is unclear that in
the encounter between the native and the ethnic, the culture of the former
will prevail. There is a failure of nerve, a crisis of cultural confidence that returns
the ethnic to the center of American culture in spite of his inhabitation on
the margins. In this book the ethnic restaurateur carries that connotation of
subordination yet potential strength, the inferiority of the foreign-born yet
the possibility of some cultural capital, a person who, due to limits of money,
social, or cultural capital, could never play in the domain of high culture yet
cannot be excluded from American culture. Those foreign-born restaurateurs
who could participate in the social field of the dominant, such as French haute
cuisine (and relatively recent instances of Italian, Spanish, and Japanese
cuisine), are addressed only through a comparative prism of the disenfranchised,
as the focus here is on subtle ways of playing with power in spite of relative
subordination.
Yet it is impossible to comprehend the field of ethnic food without
interrogating its specific location in American gastronomy as the subordinate
and exotic other to the newly valorized chef and restaurateur. Which is why,
in Chapter 4, I investigate one of the premier sites of production of a social
body learning to play above its class-weight at the Culinary Institute of
America. It is a place where the professional is produced in a field dangerously
close to those tainted with ethnicity. I address instances of previously
subordinate cohorts—Italians, Chinese, Indians, and Filipinos, among others—
who have tried to enter the domain of the superordinate chef. Those
are instances that illuminate the exacting terms of play at the top of the
culinary field.
Since occupations and birthplace were first identified in the Census of
the United States of America, beginning in 1850, data has shown a strong
correlation between food service occupations and new immigrant groups
(used interchangeably with foreign-born here). Although occupations cannot
be directly compared across Censuses (because the classifications have
changed; for instance, cooks, servers, and chefs have been added to the mix of
occupations over the twentieth century, changing the ratios between them), we
can see that the foreign-born numerically dominate certain occupations, such
as domestic servants, hotel and restaurant employees, hotel-keepers, saloon-
keepers and bartenders, traders and dealers in groceries, bakers, and butchers.
In contrast, members of the so-called white-collar occupations, such as
the clergy, lawyers, school teachers, and government officials, have mostly
been native-born (see Figure 1.1). For example, in New York City on the eve of
the Civil War, about 60 percent of hotel and restaurant employees and 71
percent of hotel-keepers were foreign-born, mostly of Irish and German
12 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

heritage. (This is in a context where the foreign-born constituted about a third

of the labor force) (Ruggles, Alexander, Genadek, Goeken, Schroeder, and
Sobek 2004). Scotch-Irish bakers were increasingly replaced by German
immigrants, who were dominant by the time of the Civil War. By then, New York
City was home to more than two hundred thousand Germans who lived in
“little Germany” along the Bowery, and they were the most numerous among
the butchers, bakers, and grocers. Germans also constituted about 15 percent
of the domestics shaping the kitchen and palates of their Anglo employers
(Smith 2014: 44).
About half a century later, according to the 1900 Census (see Figure 1.2),
63 percent of hotel and restaurant employees were foreign-born (Irish and
German predominate) and 65 percent of hotel-keepers were foreign-born
(mostly German). Restaurant-keepers, a newly significant occupation by 1900,
were 67 percent foreign-born at a time when the foreign-born were about
50 percent of the population (Ruggles et al. 2004). At this time the vast
majority of the city’s pushcart vendors were Jewish, and they were moving up
the social ladder to employment in groceries, kosher butchers, bakeries,
coffee shops, delicatessens, and wine shops. At the same time New York’s
Chinatown had more than one hundred restaurants, and a decade later a little
over a hundred Greek-owned restaurants were counted on Seventh Avenue
(Smith 2014: 61).
Even by the 1950 Census (see Figure 1.3), after immigration had subsided
due to restrictions (since 1924), 64 percent of restaurant cooks were foreign-
born (Italians now at the top, followed by Greeks, Chinese, and Germans).
According to the historian Andrew Smith, Italian-American grocers would
introduce various kinds of seafood, ice-cream, “olive oil, Parmesan cheese,
anchovies, pastas, and coffees” to Americans (2014: 56). Italians ran more than
ten thousand grocery stores, almost a thousand butcher shops, and more than
a thousand restaurants in the city by the mid-twentieth century.
According to the 2000 Census (see Figure 1.4) that trend continued, with
75 percent of restaurant cooks (and 64 percent of restaurant workers) in New
York City foreign-born, but the dominant countries and regions of origin were
now Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean Basin, South America, China,
and the former USSR (Ruggles et al. 2004; Shierholz 2014). By 2010, more
than twenty thousand New York City bars and restaurants employed over two
hundred and four thousand workers, many foreign-born, accounting for over
$12 billion in revenue per annum (NYC Health n.d.). Most of the approximately
nine thousand street food vendors in New York City today are foreign-born,
with Bengali as the most common native tongue, followed by Cantonese
and Mandarin, Fulani, Arabic, Spanish, Urdu, Wolof, Swahili, etc. (Street Vendor
Project 2006).1 By 2010 nearly one half of all small business owners living in
New York City were immigrants, including 69 percent of restaurant owners,
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 13

FIGURE 1.1 The foreign-born as a percentage in selected occupations, USA and

New York City, 1860.

FIGURE 1.2 The foreign-born as a percentage in selected occupations, USA and

New York City, 1900.
14 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

FIGURE 1.3 The foreign-born as a percentage in selected occupations, USA and

New York City, 1950.

FIGURE 1.4 The foreign-born as a percentage in selected occupations, USA and

New York City, 2000.

90 percent of dry cleaners, 84 percent of small grocery store owners and

70 percent of beauty salon owners (Foner 2013: 21; Kallick 2013: 80). Given
this kind of data it would be perverse to be interested in immigrant lives yet
uninterested in food, as a matter either of the political economy of micro-
entrepreneurship or the cultural politics of transactions in taste. Yet that was
the norm until recently among most scholars.
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 15

Although the journalistic material is replete with stories of immigrant

restaurateurs there is surprisingly little scholarly work of greater duration that
engages theoretically with taste in the metropolis from the point of view of
the immigrant entrepreneur (notable exceptions are Möhring 2007; Möhring,
Harris, Könczöl, and Motadel 2014; Hassoun 2010; Buettner 2012). Among
scholars, historians have been better at recording the doings of immigrant
shopkeepers and grocers because, often literate, they have kept records that
historians could mine. Labor and immigration historians are particularly good
at picking up the scent of food in poor peoples’ records (Levenstein 1988,
1993; Gabaccia 1998; Ziegelman 2010; Smith 2014). Good food may matter
more to poor people than it does to the rich.
In sociology there is a robust literature on ethnic entrepreneurship. There
are a number of common parts to the theory. Low capital requirements make
it relatively easier for foreign-born entrepreneurs to enter the highly competitive
business of feeding others that most native-born people no longer find
desirable. Niche cultural knowledge about esoteric food gives them a
competitive edge over better-capitalized mainstream entrepreneurs. Kin or
fictive kin networks of loyalty that allow the lending of money on a rotating
basis without collateral enable ethnic entrepreneurs to raise the necessary
cash for a small eatery without the assets a bank loan would require. Self-
exploitation—long hours of work and unpaid labor of kin and fictive kin—
permits these enterprises to compete with better-capitalized businesses, and
turns sweat and loyalty into capital. Large corporations often cannot respond
quickly to fickle changes in fashion, but small enterprises can adapt with speed
and thrive for a while, hence there is much greater room for small enterprises
selling food and other things that are attuned to quick transformations of taste.
Finally, and most importantly for our purposes, both migration and
entrepreneurship exhibit serial patterns—that is, people who know each other,
have typically migrated from the same regions, work in and own similar
enterprises built with money and expertise borrowed from co-ethnics. They
effectively develop an informal, intra-ethnic consulting and banking system.
Paucity of assets to collateralize bank loans and unfamiliarity with the language
and norms of a consumer society deepen this dependence on co-ethnic
money, information, and cultural expertise. Co-ethnicity is a powerful labor
recruitment and management system that also allows quiescence and
exploitation. It is a precise proof of the embeddedness of the economic in the
social, as shown most compellingly and recently by Erin Curtis (2013) in the
case of Cambodian doughnut shop owners in Los Angeles (also see Heisler
2008; Zhou 2004; Foner, Rumbaut, and Gold 2000; Granovetter 1995; Portes
1995; Rogers and Vertovec 1995; Sassen 1995; Bailey and Waldinger 1991;
Westwood and Bhachu 1988; Light and Bonacich 1988; Waldinger 1986, 1990,
1992; Bailey 1985, 1987; Landa 1981; Light 1972).
16 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

This, of course, is a broad prototype of an explanation, and a structural

one, that needs to be fleshed out with the real activity of real, live, everyday
people. The structural model cannot explain, for instance, why and how the
first Bangladeshi entered the Indian restaurant business in New York City. That
demands biographies and micro-histories. In Bengali Harlem (2013) Vivek Bald
reveals those potentialities in his finely drawn portraiture of about two dozen
itinerant Bengali peddlers of chikan (a textile) circulating from Hoogly through
London, Durban, New York, to New Orleans in fin de siècle nineteenth century,
sliding into the interstices between the dying throes of the British Empire and
the birth of American emporium.2 As these men left some of their compatriots
behind in the United States to keep the tethering posts of their networks
in place, they in turn, out of pure necessity and unrestrained desire, built
some of the earliest South Asian boarding houses, coffee shops, eateries, and
restaurants in their places of habitation, occupying the “thin edge between
Indophilia and xenophobia” (Bald 2013: 46).
Much of the ethnicity and entrepreneurship literature attends to economics
and politics, as if immigrants are creatures only of political economy who
never think about taste, beauty, and how such things might intersect with their
practical-moral universe. An apt recent illustration is Roger Waldinger’s The
Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants and Their Homelands (2015),
which is an attempt to reframe Oscar Handlin’s view of the suffering, oppressed
immigrant in The Uprooted (1951). Handlin was part of the generation of
scholars who refocused the locus of American history from the frontier to
the immigrant experience, which he considered harsh and oppressive. Handlin
famously wrote in the opening lines of his book, “Once I thought to write a
history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants
were American history” (1951: 3). Waldinger’s thesis isn’t equal to Handlin’s
in terms of drama, but he makes an important point nevertheless. Instead of
suffering and loss, Waldinger turns to migrant agency. As a result, his focus is
on migrant access to resources here (high-wage labor market) and back home
(property, kith and kin); the persistence of transnational connections (instead
of uprooting); and the extension of other societies and cultures into territories
here. In the process, Waldinger sometimes goes so far in the other direction
that he ends up with jarring claims, such as: “the poor exploited the rich,
using access to the resources of a wealthier country to make life better back
home” (2015: 2). These are unsettling, although rare, rhetorical excesses, given
the tenor of the rest of the book. Most importantly, while Handlin devoted
a whole chapter to “The Daily Bread” and such mundane materialities of
immigrant life, Waldinger’s migrants do not eat, drink, sleep, dance, or sing.
The index does not list food, shelter, or culture. There are three passing
references to food in the whole book.3 The immigrants do remit money home,
talk on the phone, and face the challenges of big ideas such as nation,
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 17

border, and community, but they do not come across as living subjects. They
appear interested only in the nation-state, the labor-market, laws and policy.
At least, that is Waldinger’s interest and although he makes some very
interesting points about remittances, telephony, laws, and transnationalism
(with pointed arguments against nationalists and globalists), his migrants are
purely political-economic ideas, without bodies and hence innocent of the
challenges of nursing those bodies with materials and memories that matter
affectively. Waldinger’s migrant is a peculiar inversion of the soulful, suffering,
uprooted subject of Handlin.
The propensity to ignore immigrant bodies in the disciplinary discussion of
taste may be a product of the tendency to see discussions of taste as marginal
to the real lives of marginal peoples. In this conception, poor, hard-working
people can teach us about poverty and suffering, hierarchy and symbolic violence,
but never about taste. That might be one of the unfortunate consequences of
the overwhelming dominance of Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of analysis, as
I will show later. As a consequence, taste loses its contested and dynamic
character, and, I would argue, even its fundamentally sociological nature.
My interest in the contested nature of taste explains the focus on the
entrepreneur, celebrated here not necessarily as the archetype of the mythic
American urban hero, but as an important actor in the aesthetic transaction.
My work attends to the otherwise preoccupied ethnic restaurateur because
he is the hinge between taste and toil—two streams of theoretical accounts
that are put in productive conversation here. Because this is about transactions
of taste in the city, I mostly bracket the perspectives of labor that have been
documented recently by ROC -NY (2005), Miabi Chatterji (2013, 2010), and
Saru Jayaraman (2013). They point out how exploitative the relationship often
is between South Asian ethnic entrepreneurs and low-skilled restaurant
workers who are sometimes co-ethnics, manipulated by rhetoric of kinship
and care to fend off the regulatory reach of the state in terms of labor, safety,
immigration, and health laws. Analogously, Mae Ngai (2010) shows, in her
study of one upwardly mobile Chinese-American family in The Lucky Ones,
how the Tapes “broke into the American middle class by helping manage
the continued marginalization of other Chinese” (2010: 223). Simone Cinotto
points to the same “unnatural convergence of low salaries and low conflict,”
which was a product of paternalistic control of co-ethnic Piedmontese workers
among the pioneer Italian wine producers of California at the turn of the
twentieth century (2012: 134).
For a recent instance of hyper-exploitation one need only reference the
story of the Fuzhounese (from Fuzhou in Fujian Province) restaurant worker
Zhuo Yilin, whose wife and four children were stabbed to death by a mentally-
ill cousin, Chen Mindong, another Chinese take-out cook, who shared their
Sunset Park apartment in Queens, New York (Yee and Singer 2013: 1). Belonging
18 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

to a networked diaspora of about half a million Fuzhounese, with low paying

jobs and long hours in Chinese take-out, Chen complained to the police on
his arrest that “everyone seems to be doing better than him.” After his family
had borrowed tens of thousands of dollars to pay smuggling rings to get
him into New York City, he is in jail today; his cousin distraught over the
consequences of his goodwill; his nephew, niece, and sister-in-law dead by
his over-worked hands. Sometimes such risky wagers work out, as in the case
of “Rain” in a New Yorker story: the $70,000 he paid to the smuggler was
made up in about five years, after which he was earning $2,000 a month, in
comparison to a typical Fujianese salary of $4,700 a year (Hilgers 2014).
It was cook, sleep, wake to cook again, for twelve hours a day, Chen
complained. He was one of a vast invisible group. After their shifts ended
at midnight they watched TV and video-chatted with their families, six to a
room or in internet cafés. The hope was that if they kept working hard they
would own a restaurant or a house, maybe even get a green card. Chen
Yixiang, Chen Mindong’s father, paid about a hundred thousand dollars to his
son’s smugglers, and still owes them half of this, while his son is in jail awaiting
trial for murder. Much of this universe is one of brutally unrelenting work with
other people’s food. Thus I hope to remain unsentimental about the ethnic
entrepreneur, because he should not be reduced to a paper cut-out for the
propaganda machine of the American Dream.
Often workers in South Asian immigrant-owned enterprises are
undocumented Latino immigrants, who are not only racialized and demeaned
by everyday instances of homogenization by the use of names such as “Amigo”
and “Jose,” used to address all Latino men on the payroll without individual
distinctions (a fate not shared by co-ethnics), but exploited beyond the limits
of the law (M. Chatterji 2013: 147–48). In one instance, one Latino worker,
Santiago, retorted, “It’s the same shit everywhere. If he’s not calling us amigo,
he is calling us worse. They got nicknames for us at every restaurant—they
only learn Spanish so they can swear at us!” (M. Chatterji 2013: 148). It is
important to record that relationship and name it, but that is not my focus here.
In this work I spotlight the urban sociology of value production, arguing that it
is productive to pay attention to immigrant restaurateurs who rarely figure in
such discussions and urging scholars to do so by getting closer to the dish and
the doing.

Bourdieu and bodily practice

In American sociology—one of the disciplines where urban ethnic communities
have figured prominently—taste has been studied most extensively over the
last decade in the sub-field of “cultures of consumption,” which builds on
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 19

Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984).4 The latest iteration of such disciplinary

attention in North America is Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann’s Foodies:
Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape (2010). Their work is
representative of a major trend in academic theorizing, which is a focus
on consumption. The same has to be said of the various identity-producing
studies of immigrants and Asian-Americans (Dalessio 2012, Xu 2007). I will
argue that a number of these works, especially Foodies, while useful in
mapping modes of consumer identification and their pursuit of distinction, is
limited if we are after a fuller understanding of taste in the metropolis and the
work of provisioning, value-production, and taste-making that is put into the
exchange by immigrants.
Johnston and Baumann argue that in spite of broadening palates, the
gastronomic discussion that has caught fire in bi-coastal American cities
(specifically in representative newspapers and food magazines such as
Gourmet) is burdened with the quest for class distinctions. This, they contend,
is happening despite the decline of old-fashioned snobbery and the dethroning
of French and Continental cuisines.5 Their book confirms Bennett, Savage, Silva,
Warde, Gayo-Cal, and Wright’s (2009) detailed empirical work on the United
Kingdom in arguing that taste hierarchies exist, culture irrevocably marks class,
and omnivorousness is a rarefied (but not rare) phenomenon wherein the
rich and the better educated devour even working class subcultures, while the
working classes (especially men) do not consume highbrow genres such as
avant-garde art, classical music, art cinema, or exotic restaurant cuisine. They
corroborate Warde and Marten’s food-related findings based on a study of three
British cities (2000) that eating out “continues to operate as a field of distinction,
marking boundaries of status through the display of taste . . . The professional
and managerial classes are thronging to ethnic cuisine restaurants, while poor,
working class, older, provincial people are not. Familiarity with ethnic cuisine is
a mark of refinement” (2000: 226).6
I would argue that current concerns in cultural sociology are shaped by
strong theories of closure and containment, allowing little room for openings
and disruption. Repurposing Pascale Casanova’s questions in the domain of
literature, I would also argue that sociological theories of taste posit a direct
political connection between literal taste and social hierarchy, reducing the
gustatory merely to the political, and passing in silence the actual aesthetic
and stylistic characteristics that make food edible and the center of peoples’
investment in good taste (see Casanova 2005a, 2005b). This is opposite to the
error committed by connoisseurs and pursuers of pure taste who cannot see
any connection between the real political world riven by race, class, and
gender, and the world of good taste. It is possible to re-establish the link
between literal taste and politics while maintaining the irreducible autonomy
of good food. This work navigates between those short-circuits of pure politics
20 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

and pure literal taste. Furthermore, while Johnston and Baumann (2007, 2010)
see fit to exclude immigrant food producers from their analysis because they
cannot hear them in the gastronomic discourse they study, Warde and
Martens argue that they want to focus on consumption and its meaning for
the consumer (2000: 5). There is an implication in some of this work that
immigrant concerns relate exclusively to the labor process and the law (as we
saw previously in Waldinger 2015), which is to create a peculiarly constricted
notion of immigrant selves as only laboring, and to be blind to the role of
immigrants in the culture of consumption and the aesthetics of work, as I
will show below, through their naming of restaurants, designing menus, and
reproducing foods, flavors, and ambience in the metropolis (and I am not
alone here: see Buettner 2012; Highmore 2009; Hassoun 2010; Zukin 1995;
Yee 2012; Ngai 2010).7 Three decades ago, when consumption studies began
to proliferate, it may have been useful to study consumption exclusively
because it had been ignored for so long under the weight of various forms of
Marxist and non-Marxist productivism, but I think we have swung too far in
the other direction and the stark divide between production and consumption
is no longer productive, especially in the articulation of taste in the American
city. Warde and Martens’s (2000) and Johnston and Baumann’s (2007, 2010)
focus on consumption, and their consequent elision of producers and their
transactions with consumers and critics, is in the final analysis linked to
disciplinary narrowing and specializing. This is an important imperative that
produces work of detail and density—but it also engenders blind spots,
sometimes at the very site where interrogation would have been fruitful. This
is where depth could be better illuminated with some breadth and lateral
knowledge. This work builds on the insights of each of their approaches, but
also seeks to compensate for their errors of omission that, as I will show, have
substantial theoretical consequence.
Sharon Zukin has shown that “culture is more and more the business of
cities” and “[t]he growth of cultural consumption (of art, food, fashion, music,
tourism) and the industries that cater to it, fuels the city’s symbolic economy, its
visible ability to produce both symbols and space” (1995: 2). She underlines a
telling transformation in the symbolic economy where “Large numbers of new
immigrants and ethnic minorities have put pressure on public institutions, from
schools to political parties, to deal with their individual demands . . . These
pressures, broadly speaking, are both ethnic and aesthetic. By creating policies
and ideologies of ‘multiculturalism,’ they have forced public institutions to
change” (1995: 2). Not only have public institutions and dominant discourses
come under pressure, as Zukin notes, but the whole gastronomic field has
had to make room for strangers, as I will show below. One obvious illustration
of this is the way in which restaurants, either owned by cosmopolitan, well-
capitalized immigrants such as Eric Ripert (a celebrity chef) or by less-credentialed
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 21

protagonists such as Mohammad Rasool (the pseudonym of one of the

protagonists in this book whom you will meet soon), have over the last forty
years come to dominate the process of urban culinary value production. Almost
every restaurant consecrated by the print media—The New York Times, Zagat
Surveys, or Michelin—since the gastronomic revolution in the United States
(circa 1971) are stand-alone restaurants (or very small chains) that distinguish
themselves from big-money-yet-low-cultural-capital establishments such as
McDonald’s and KFC . Numerically small enterprises dominate in the New
York City restaurant market. The New York City Department of Health and Mental
Hygiene (NYCDOHMH ), which is the licensing agency, lists 25,383 Food
Service Establishment licenses at the end of 2014. If we exclude organizations
with national brands and more than three units we still retain 17,915 small
enterprises from that list (Chisolm and Bubb 2015: 3–4).
In much of the book I engage exclusively with the immigrant restaurateur
because s/he is the long-ignored hinge in the transaction in taste. Furthermore,
the entrepreneur is an important analytical point at which to enter the
discussion about the uses of a displaced body in the transaction in literal taste.
With a few exceptions that I will point out, most of the restaurants I analyze
in this book are products of capital investments ranging from $20,000 to
$200,000 because I am particularly interested in the popular and subordinate
dimension of the transaction in taste.8 In terms of worth and income, most
of my respondents are in the lower half of the US population. So capital
and profit work here at the Braudelian level of competitive markets, where no
one is rich, and if someone is lucky they make a living a notch above the
median household income (Braudel 1992). Yet, these are players of some
consequence—granted, not dominance—in the emerging gastronomic world
of star chefs, print-media critics, commentators, and celebrity bloggers.
This project is about a different scale of entanglement between entrepreneurial
capital and cultural symbols in the spatial transformation of a city than the one
referenced by Zukin in the story of the Sony takeover of the AT &T building,
the transformation of Rockefeller Center, and the up-scaling of Bryant Park,
all of which owe more to the collaborative monumentalism of corporations,
the patrician class, and municipal governments in mutual pursuit of majestic
museums, parks, and architectural complexes (1995: 7). Instead, my work
draws attention to instances of entrepreneurship at the molecular level—
the street—and the daily encounters in shops between immigrants and
natives that produce much of the everyday sensorial cultures of cities such
as New York, notwithstanding the modernist ambitions of its planners for
ordered rectilinearity. Immigrants have repeatedly poured into this city and
made it work in ways that defy high-modernist ambitions about how it
should work. By living, working, and playing in the city they have changed its
shape.
22 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

The exclusion of immigrant restaurateurs, combined with the restricted

focus on foodie “discourse,” may have allowed Johnston and Baumann (2010)
to bind their project narrowly and hence render it doable, but in evacuating
the very center of urban culinary production I think they have failed to capture
its most dynamic dimensions and sociology has once again missed the
opportunity to engage with popular disputations around good taste. I seek to
correct that by approaching the transactions in taste from the other end. I pay
attention to particular stories of immigrant restaurateurs and make them run
up against the silences in the established gastronomic and sociological
narratives.
In the case of Johnston and Bauman (2010) we also have the problem
of constituting “discourse” too narrowly as representations. My extended
definition of discourse without quotation marks includes representations
and practices. Both discourse and practice became important in American
sociological theorizing, as Swindler points out, to circumvent the limits of
Talcott Parson’s distinctions between ideas in actors’ heads and their everyday
doings (Swidler 2001). Practice theory moved “the level of sociological attention
‘down’ from conscious ideas and values to the physical and the habitual.
But this move is complemented by a move ‘up,’ from ideas located in
individual consciousness to the impersonal arena of ‘discourse’” (Swidler
2001: 75). Discourse socializes ideas in individual heads, thereby making them
more potent. This double movement—discourse and practice—refocuses our
theoretical attention on contingent, contested activity. Discourses produce
certain contingent subject positions (ethnics, immigrants, Anglos, natives, etc.)
and objects (ethnic food, Indian food, American cuisine, haute cuisine, etc.).
Attention to practices in specific places and their connection to discourses
allow a better grasp of the world I am trying to describe.
I also pay particular attention to the gap between representations and
practices that Michel de Certeau has forced us to consider in The Practice
of Everyday Life (1998). Representations do not exhaust the possibilities
of what we do, as implied after the textual and visual turns in the human
sciences. Representations are more stylized, limited, and fixed than what we
can do in practical life. Practices are much more open to subtle possibilities
and subterfuge than representations. I will illustrate the matter in some detail
below.
Discourses about ethnic food and immigrant stories and biographies are
related ways of organizing varieties of social experiences with more or less
authorization, yet there is no way to completely sever one from the other.
Power over storylines is always partial and contested. Exclusive attention
to representational “discourse” winds the circuitry of meaning too tightly
and drives authors inexorably towards textuality, away from the materiality of
cities where culinary cultures, foodie aspirations, and immigrant words and
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 23

livelihoods intersect on co-produced street corners that smell different from

the dry pages of magazines, books, and web sites. The story is different if we
are open to the sensual stimuli of big-city streets peopled by natives and
immigrants, built with their sweat and toil, quarrels and collaborations. These
olfactory, aural, and textural microcosms of immigrants and natives, living,
fighting, dreaming, and interacting in this city of dreadful delight, could be
brought to the center of our research on urban food cultures. Much depends
on everyday practical relations in the shops, in cabs, in the curry-houses and
subways, and scholars could pay attention to that density of social interactions
so as not to let our lived world—of person, body, place, and thing—dissolve
into “discourse.” The challenge is to bring that kind of everyday practice into
the analysis without eliding the power of discursive formations. Furthermore,
the story here, though propelled by people who come from elsewhere, is
grounded in frictional social encounters on specific street corners that should
restrain us from over-emphasizing flows and scapes that have come to dictate
our recent conceptualizations.
David Howes, a leading protagonist in the sensorial revolution, explains
that sensory studies have come after the linguistic turn of the 1960s, inspired
by Saussure and Wittgenstein, which gave us culture as language or text, and
knowledge as discourse. For a moment in the 1980s, visual culture dominated
analysis, and the 1990s witnessed the turn to body and materiality. The
sensorial revolution builds on the insights of each of these approaches, but
also seeks to correct for their excesses (Howes 2005: 322–3). In a subsequent
essay Howes notes that

The genealogy of this revolution would not be complete, however, without

noting various openings towards the senses in the work of certain leading
figures of twentieth-century thought, both social and philosophical. These
precursors of the full-bodied, multi-sensory approach to the study of the
human condition (which can be called “sensory studies” for short) include
the historians Lucien Febvre and Norbert Elias, the philosophers Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray, the anthropologist Claude Lévi Strauss,
and the sociologist Georg Simmel (2005: 332).

In this construction, the “senses become the sentinels or theoreticians of

society” and this sensualization of theory resists the traditional identification
of theorizing with “gazing upon” (in Greek, theorein) (Howes 2005: 326).
Howes not only provides us with handy mileposts for our theoretical journey
here, but also underlines the use of the multi-sensorial register of our bodies—
especially, smell, sound, touch, and taste, in addition to the usual distal record
of the eyes and the mind—to produce a sensual theory of a body at work in a
new locale, in the process transforming the basic infrastructure of a city in a
24 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

lived rather than a planned way. It is in this lived everyday transformation of

habits and thinking about them that a way can be found out of Bourdieu’s
closed circle of habitus and automatic practice that ties subjects inexorably to
social spaces of class and culture. The habitus is the body’s dispositional
structure that represents the objectification of social structure—as posture,
gesture, class, race, gender, ethnicity—at the level of the bodily hexis of the
agent. While a lot of everyday practice may be automatic, we should not
dismiss the weight of deliberate thinking, especially made available to a
displaced immigrant body due to its failure of automatic unconscious replication
of everyday gestures, postures, and affinities (see Leschziner and Green 2013).
Shirley Yee shows how conflict may not have precluded intimate interethnic
interactions in her compelling study of interracial encounters in a New York
neighborhood in An Immigrant Neighborhood (2012). Chinese restaurateurs
and laundry shops needed white business, just as Irish, Italian, and Jewish
suppliers depended on Chinese restaurateurs. Barred by state law from
serving as morticians, Chinese and African-Americans used white undertakers.
Chinese men sometimes married Irish women as the sheer weight of
demographics intersected with desire and geographic proximity. Attending to
the mundane problems of inhabitation opens the possibilities of connecting
with the history of engagement with ethnic food by the counterculture in
critiquing and re-invigorating the mainstream. Here I use the protocols of
sociology to invite the ethnic restaurateur to speak. As we shall see, when
invited, the ethnic entrepreneur has a lot to say about the city, the consumer,
taste, and making a living within the constraints of those constructions.
The ethnic entrepreneur in the heart of the Western metropolis conceives
and offers the flavor of her experience by designing a small, semi-public space
and a menu, by hiring and managing the skilled hands that can reproduce her
recipes. Such choreography is undertaken in the shadow of white Anglophone
demand, which nonetheless never overwhelms it. I want to recover that
elbow room made by small entrepreneurs of everyday taste. The evidence
of immigrant designs on the city is there, but often “inaudibly and always
smothered in a stupor of objects” (Merleau-Ponty 1969: 66). In his incomplete
work Passengenwerk, Walter Benjamin writes, “The revealing presentations
of the big city are the works of those who have traversed the city absently,
as it were, lost in thought or worry” (1982: 69). Much of the city is made and
re-made by people too busy to spend time contemplating what they do and
have done. Yet, even those reduced to documentary illegibility are not silent.
The advantage of ethnographic work and interviews is, of course, the recovery
of fragile orality that history cannot bear witness to. This is also an argument
for the kind of interdisciplinarity that food studies provides.
What I am recommending here is the recovery of literal taste to argue
about aesthetics in general. In a recent issue of the journal The Philosophers’
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 25

Magazine (2013) Raymond Boisvert notes that in the eighteenth century, “The
new philosophical imagination envisioned humans as a set of containers:
bodies for minds and minds for ideas. One unsurprising corollary: the
segregation of cooking and eating from philosophy.” (Boisvert 2013). Western
philosophers have long denied aesthetic legitimacy to taste—in particular, that
is, taste on the tongue—while theorizing about taste in general (Korsmeyer
1999; Dickie 1996). This book seeks to recover literal taste and corporeal
sensory experience as a means of richer engagement with contested urban
cultures.
In their cultural history of Italian cuisine, Alberto Capatti and Massimo
Montanari note how pizza and pasta have become the most recognizable
signs of Italy the further one goes from Italy (2003: xx). In closing, they
cite Prezzolini’s question in 1954, “What is the glory of Dante compared to
spaghetti?” Instead of insisting on the distinctions between palatal taste and
taste in literature, they underline the point of contact between mundane
practice and high art, where,

Spaghetti and pizza belong to a legacy that has spread throughout the
world, just as books have . . . Along with the exchange of food products,
dishes, and flavours, there is also an exchange of documents and recipes.
This lively traffic . . . is vital for good taste. In fact, without realizing it, when
we eat spaghetti we also ingest something of Dante (Capatti and Montanari
2003: xx).

On that ringing note Capatti and Montanari flatten the aesthetic hierarchy set
in place in Early Modern Europe. Aesthetics was born as a discursive field
against literal taste in the eighteenth century, when it was argued that literal
taste is unconscious, subjective, and too intimate to allow rational elaboration
(Korsmeyer 1999; Dickie 1996).
While reclaiming literal taste and care-work, this study engages with points
of contact and sites of contestation between the infant field of food studies
(mostly born outside the academy in the realm of journalism) and its godparents
in cultural and social sciences. Here, food studies may have the momentary
advantage of being “journalistic” (which is usually a poisoned chalice in the
academy). My current institutional location allows me to stitch immigrant
corporeality both to the materiality of food and to the sociality of the body, and
attend to its sensorial range, in the process making elbow room for food
studies in the narrow confines of already constituted disciplines, replicating
within the university my respondents’ labor in the city.
It is often the social friction of a body in motion that makes the naturalized
body visible; thus the immigrant is the focus of this work not only because
s/he has been absent from the discussion of taste but also because s/he
26 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

reveals more clearly what cannot be seen in grounded native practices. This
is the opposite of the classical anthropological operation of a transgressive
ethnographer going out of her community and into the world of others
to study the native. An immigrant is an inverted anthropologist who deals
practically with the problems of a body out of place. Much has been written
about the problems of the anthropological project; in contrast, very little has
been theorized about the epistemological consequences of the intrusion of
immigrant bodies into metropolitan spaces (in clear distinction from empirical
descriptions of what immigrants do here) and what that might do to our
concepts and methods of inquiry. Here, it is the boundary-crossing immigrant
revealing to the native the truth about his city, at a moment when exotic tastes
demanded by a roving cosmopolitan appetite must be fed in a furious gesture
of appeasement. Immigrant hands and imaginations, along with capital, both
financial and cultural, must be put to work.
My trajectory is akin (but inverse) to Loïc Wacquant’s terminus at the black
boxer’s body in an attempt to understand his milieu of young black men on the
South Side of Chicago in Body & Soul (2004). He wanted an entrée into the
black, masculine world that was closed to him as a white, transplanted, French
student of Bourdieu. At the end, it was through his somatic reputation as a
boxer that he became “brother Louis.” As an immigrant, my body’s place in
a new world was revealed in the process of following the bodies of other
immigrants, which has driven me, like Wacquant, “to thematize the necessity
of a sociology not only of the body, in the sense of object, but also from the
body, that is, deploying the body as tool of inquiry and vector of knowledge”
(2004: viii).
My attempt here mirrors one of the leading goals of theoretical social
sciences, which is to imbricate phenomena within a structure. As Levi-Strauss
put it long ago, ethnography is a means of producing knowledge in which
“[t]he observer apprehends himself as his own instrument of observation”
(1976: 35). Furthermore, the contribution of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology
was precisely that our perceptions and conceptions of the world are shaped
by our notions of our own body. Sociology over the last generation has sought
to mediate between these points by way of the work of some of the most
cited sociologists—Bourdieu’s work on habitus, and Anthony Giddens’s
on structuration. My project pays further homage to the work of Michel de
Certeau and Luce Giard, who urged us to insert the author’s body into a body
of doctrine, and to cultivate ways of knowing that allow for the intrusion of
the everyday into theory and history. Everyday food practice “is the place of
a silent piling of an entire stratification of orders and counterorders,” where
Giard seeks to compensate Bourdieu’s reticence on doing cooking, and other
feminine activities which “are a place of silence or disinterest that his analysis
does not trouble to take into account” (de Certeau et al. 1998: 183).
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 27

It is now three decades since Bryan S. Turner published The Body & Society
(1984), which was one among a number of early sociological texts to pay
sustained theoretical attention to the body.9 Turner’s synthesis sought to
account for the path-breaking theorizations of Michel Foucault and practices
of the social movements of feminism and civil rights that centered on this
tactile, tangible thing—the color, texture, gender of the body. Now, the field
is crowded, theoretically (Jaggar and Bordo 1989, Featherstone, Hepworth,
and Turner 1991, Giddens 1991, Butler 1993, Falk 1994, Grosz 1994, etc.), yet it
is apparent that the sociology of immigration on the one hand, and theories of
taste, embodiment, and practice on the other hand, are developing in separate
realms. Much of the sociology of the body continues to be devoted to theoretical
argumentation focused on gender, sexuality, and disease, belying the sense
that all social action, including immigration, is always embodied. Studies of
immigration demand a dose of corporeality, and theories of embodiment would
benefit from a diverse body of empirical research. That is what I do in this book,
while showing how the analyst’s sensorial range can be a more versatile tool of
inquiry than we have allowed so far in modern epistemes. That is true even
when at the end we have to reduce things back again to sign and sound
according to the rules of a written academic text.10

Sequence of chapters
The next chapter, “Dreams of Pakistani Grill and Vada Pao in Manhattan:
immigrant restaurateurs in a global city,” plunges us into the bowels of the
city, animating two street corners, where two separate immigrants have
tried to build restaurants. Based on extended interviews, it will show how the
specificity of capital, bodily habits, imagination, and urban location determined
the fate of those restaurateurs. Yet that is too close a perspective to get
adequately at the structure. For that, I step out into the discourse produced by
American tastemakers in the following chapter.
Chapter 3, “Hierarchy of taste and ethnic difference: American gustatory
imagination in a globalizing world,” is based on reports in newspapers such as
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune throughout
their print run, on more recent restaurant evaluations in surveys such as Zagat
and Michelin, and on reports of the National Restaurant Association. Here I
show how different kinds of restaurants have been historically evaluated over
the last one hundred and fifty years, in terms of both popularity and prestige.
American taste-makers—that is, journalists and restaurant critics—have
framed their appropriation of culinary cultures in two divergent ways: first, as
high-status foreign foods, initially limited to Continental and French cuisines,
eventually consecrating Italian and Japanese cookery at the end of the
28 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

twentieth century; second, as the low-status product of the labor and implicit
knowledge of the immigrant poor classified as ethnic fare. The appropriation of
the first sort is understood primarily in aesthetic terms of taste and masculine
notions of skill, while the latter is understood as a matter of necessity, primarily
in terms of undifferentiated toil. Here I show how Italian cuisine exited the
ethnic category and entered haute cuisine, and I do that by enumerating
various surveys and analyzing menus of some of the leading American
restaurants through different phases of their expansion and transformation in
the long twentieth century (ca. 1880–1999).
Chapter 4, “Extending expertise: men in white at the Culinary Institute
of America,” is based on an ethnographic insertion into the premier cooking
school in the United States, where I taught for ten years between 1996 and
2005. I make the argument that the reconfiguration of American haute cuisine
had to be fed by newer modes of training not only in terms of culinary skills
and techniques but also by the literal and metaphoric re-classification of white
working class bodies into multicultural middle class ones. In the process I
elucidate the tensions inherent in the bodily transformation of the American
chef, where identities such as the chef are born in strife with others such as
ethnic cook (and the housewife).
Chapter 5, “Ethnicity and expertise: immigrant cooks with haute aspirations,”
is the last empirically substantive chapter, which brings us back to the level of
the cook by highlighting the tension between the categories of chef and ethnic
through the experience of immigrant restaurateur-chefs and the ways in which
that is reflected in restaurant criticism and the rhetoric of cookbooks. The
material for this chapter is derived from extensive interviews and cookbooks
written by ethnic and non-ethnic chefs. Expertise comes imbricated in gendered
and racialized bodies.
In the concluding Chapter 6, I return to some of the themes adumbrated
here.

Notes
1 According to Sean Basinski of The Street Vendor Project, major vendor
languages of Lower Manhattan in 2006 were Bengali (21%), English (20%),
Mandarin or Cantonese (15%), Farsi (10%), Fulani (8%), Arabic (7%),
Spanish (6%), French (2%), Tibetan (2%), Urdu (2%), Wolof (2%), and
other (5%). All data from Center for Urban Pedagogy and The Street Vendor
Project (2006).
2 According to Claude Markovits (2008) these peddlers may add up to a
quarter-million merchants and financiers operating outside the subcontinent,
mostly in the Indian Ocean world, between 1830 and 1930. Caroline Adams
(1987) provides us with an analogous handful of Bengali pioneers in UK .
 TASTE, TOIL, AND ETHNICITY 29

3 Combining macro- and micro-level analysis, Nancy Foner’s edited volume

(2013) allows richer attention to material and affective worlds of music,
worship, and food in sections such as “Eating, Drinking and Acculturation”
(Orleck 2013: 108–12) and “Korean Enclaves in New York City” (Min 2013:
155–9), etc.
4 Other recent directions of research have focused on organization theory
(Rao, Monin, and Durand 2003, 2005), small-group interaction, workplace
dynamics and aesthetics of work (Fine 1992, 1995, 1996), field theory
(Ferguson 1998, 2004), and nutrition-related science-and-technological
studies (Schleifer 2010).
5 They base their theoretical contention of omnivorousness on van Eijck
(2001); Peterson (1997); Peterson and Kern (1996); Peterson and Simkus
(1992); Zavisca (2005); DiMaggio and Mukhtar (2004); Fisher and Preece
(2003); Garcia Álvarez and Lopez Sintas (2004); and Vander Stichele and
Laermans (2006).
6 They also show that “Frequent eating out on commercial premises is
associated positively with having high household income, being highly
educated, being younger and being single, and negatively with being a
housewife” (Warde and Martens 2000: 226).
7 Even a fleeting perusal of any American newspaper over the last 100 years
will show that journalistic literature has been much better at reflecting the
transactions between immigrants and natives in the making of urban
American culinary cultures.
8 In a comparable study done by Zukin and her students (1995) she underlined
a particular limitation for immigrant entrepreneurs: “Another constraint on
immigrant entrepreneurs is the cost of opening a full-service restaurant in
Manhattan. Investment in a lease, equipment, advertising, and décor can rise
as high as $250,000 to $1 million, which prevents many immigrant
entrepreneurs from moving beyond the immigrant sector into the
mainstream of the industry” (1995: 182). At the upper reaches of the
restaurant world, properties such as Junoon and Vermillion rack up to tens
of millions of dollars in investments.
9 Norbert Elias’s work, leading to (the late translation of) The Civilizing Process
(1982), pre-figured much of the sociological interest on the body, but was
mostly ignored by Anglophone sociologists. Although first published in 1939,
it was not fully engaged with until the publication of Stephen Mennell’s All
Manners of Food (1985).
10 Written words so define what we do in the university that there is a
temptation to turn every aspect of the world into a text, and write the body
out of it. Hence, it is not at all a surprise that anthropology, in which written
texts play a minor role as a source of evidence, has most fully engaged with
the body compared to almost any other cultural discipline. See Mauss (1935),
Connerton (1989), Lock (1993), Serematakis (1994), Sutton (2001), Herzfeld
(2004), and Lock and Farquhar (2007).
30
 2
Dreams of Pakistani Grill and
Vada Pao in Manhattan:
Immigrant Restaurateurs
in a Global City

Setting the table

B read & Butter sits at the dense intersection of a cross-street and an avenue
at the lower end of Manhattan. It is barely visible from across the wide
avenue, caught in a whirl of honking buses spewing fumes. On the sidewalk
a ginkgo sapling struggles to reach the sunlight under the shadow of a three-
story walk-up. A crush of pedestrians weave their way to and from the subway
station, stepping among untreated epileptics dozing off mid-pavement, and
mistreated schizophrenics reduced to panhandling. Robust Nigerian peddlers
and slender Bangladeshis sell fruits and vegetables, knock-off handbags,
pirated DVD s, cheap jewelry and knick-knacks. Much of this is a good thing for
Muhammad Rasool. It brings the customers stumbling across the threshold of
Bread & Butter. He is at home speaking forcefully into his cellphone on the
sidewalk that bleeds into his storefront restaurant.1
The long, narrow space smells of cumin and garam masala, with the sweet,
hot hint of clove and cinnamon. The steam table is on the left, behind a glass
sneeze-guard, with its row of twenty cooked items ready to be ladled onto
Styrofoam plates. The wall on the right is covered by mirrors. Squeezed between
the mirrored wall and the steam table are eight two-tops (small tables) with
sixteen chairs, and a narrow path that leads to the back of the restaurant.
Through numerous interrupted discussions, Rasool is asked how he went about
getting the place, how much money he paid, and how he would describe the
characteristics of his customers and his workers.2

31
32 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Muhammad Rasool (MR ): I sold some family property in Pakistan to pay

down the $20,000. I put in $10,000, maybe $15,000, to renovate the place.
My rent is $8,000 a month. I sell on average $6 per customer. I have about
100 customers a day. Twenty for breakfast, sixty for lunch, twenty for
dinner. I work here six days a week from morning to night.

Bread & Butter belongs to the lower end of the universe of Indian restaurants
in Manhattan. Although I do not have access to check average prices at all
restaurants, we can find a surrogate in the average price of an entrée, which
stands at $11.16 for all Indian restaurants with menus in Manhattan. There
are twelve Indian restaurants in Manhattan with entrées under $6.00, which
is Bread & Butter’s threshold. The most expensive Indian restaurants in
Manhattan, such as Tabla (now closed), Junoon, and Ada, have entrées at a
little over $20.00 (as an average of all their entrées), although some entrées in
such establishments go above $30.

Interviewer: How many workers do you have?

MR : One Mexican. One Pakistani.

Interviewer: How did you get into the restaurant business in the first
place?

MR : You see after I came to this country I did odd jobs. Worked in a gas
station for a couple of months. I had been driving a Yellow Cab for six to
seven months. That is when I ate at a restaurant on 42nd Street. It was
very crowded and the people were rude. That is where I got the idea that I
should have a restaurant. I drove taxi for nine more months, saved some
money. I drove taxi at night to pay my workers.

That Rasool’s decisions appear as isolated and individualized is an artifact of

the interview process. Over the length of our full interaction it was clear that
all his decisions are deeply embedded in social relations with co-ethnics. The
location and contact information about the current restaurant was provided by
a country cousin. The money needed was raised with another by selling some
property in Pakistan with the help of other relatives. The manager, for some
time was the son of a friend. The legal paperwork for the restaurant was
completed by a Lahori compatriot. The cook came from a competitor. The
other cook contacted him after seeing his advertisement in a local diasporic
newspaper. Almost every day, Rasool meets dozens of co-ethnics as friends,
family, and acquaintances who provide him with business ideas, information
about better supplies, recommendations for cheaper produce, a good deal for
a property, or suggestions about the hot new thing on the menu that might
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 33

sell well. At the beginning of the business relationship he had a tough

time with his partner about matters of money and management and had to
involve a number of reputable elders in the community in Queens and at
the Mosque to settle the matter extra-judicially. Some money changed hands,
and reputations were discounted and others built up. In the evenings, when
he heads back to Queens, he often stops by at a friend’s business and, over a
couple of cups of tea, looks over Pakistani and diasporic newspapers, chats,
and picks up entrepreneurial advice, news from back home, and advice about
children’s careers. By the time he gets home, dinner has been prepared by
his wife. Sometimes the college-age children are home and they eat together.
On most days it is him and his wife. They would typically watch TV, catch a
Bollywood movie, call family late into the night before retiring. Back to work in
Manhattan in the morning.
Asked to explain the shape and design of his storefront, Rasool notes,

It is narrow. This building is 150 years old. I changed everything. From

before it is 100 percent changed. The carpenter was a friend, I told him:
“Break it down, break it down, until you get to the wall.” You know how
much more space I got?! Four feet this way and two feet that way!

Here is Rasool literally making elbow room in this already built city. Yet he
made a few mistakes in re-designing his place:

Interviewer: You don’t have any pictures up?

MR : Yes, I don’t have pictures because I have no room for pictures. The
biggest mistake I made was to put the mirror on the wall. Instead of the
mirror I should have put pictures. Now where can I put pictures?

I: Why did you put the mirror?

MR : Biggest mistake I made during the construction [laughs and shakes

his head].

I: Does it cost too much to take it down?

MR : It doesn’t . . . But you see the spirit to do becomes less, and less. A
young guy by tomorrow he will change it. I used to do that before . . . but
not anymore. That is why I want to retire [laughs].

I: Do you want your children to enter this business?

MR : No. They are like you going to school. I don’t want them here washing
dishes . . . No I don’t want them here.

I: If you were to put a picture there, what would it be?

34 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

MR : There is one scenery I see in my embassy, the Pakistan Consulate, it

was a picture of Mohenjodaro, I would put that one if I could get that one,
it is 10,000 years old . . . general scenery, which attracts everybody.

I: How would you characterize your restaurant?

MR : Fast-food restaurant. Indian, Pakistani spicy food. I also carry less

spicy Spanish-American food.

I: Spanish-American?

MR : Yes, because you see we have rice and we have beans, and chicken
of course everyone eats. It is the same food without spices. Spanish food.

We find Rasool reorienting himself to his specific Latino public at that street
corner, as fewer and fewer South Asian taxi drivers stop by his place (although
almost 80 percent of New York City’s approximately 40,000 drivers, of
approximately 13,000 licensed Yellow Cabs, are of Bangladeshi, Pakistani, or
Indian origin). He miscalculated his audience because that intersection is too
crowded for cabbies to stop for lunch or dinner. Every street corner in the city
has its character. This one is too busy to allow cabbies to stop long enough
(unlike, say, the curry houses of Lexington Avenue)—precisely the thing that
gets Rasool all the foot traffic. And this corner is different too from the other
street-corner in the West Village that can support a different kind of place from
Rasool’s, as I will discuss below. One day the conversation turned to cooking.

I: Do you cook at home?

MR : No.

I: Where did you learn how to cook?

MR : It is easy. I know it.

I: Did you train for it?

MR : No.

I: You just know it?

MR : Yes . . . It does not take a genius.

I: Who cooks at home?

MR : My wife.

I: Did your wife give you the recipes?

MR : No.
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 35

I: Do you consult cookbooks?

MR : No.

I: Did you watch your wife cook?

MR : No, but she gave me confidence. She didn’t tell me how to cook, but
she gave me confidence. If you don’t know how to cook then your partners
take advantage of you. Once I called my wife on the phone and asked her
how to make aloo gobi and she told me how to do it. Then I did it. I ask her,
how do I cook this, how do I cook that? She tells me. I do it. It does not take
a genius you know.3

I: What do you mean?

MR : You see this Mexican guy who works for me? He learned just by
watching me. Now he is my best cook.

I: How come?

MR : It is business. It is only business. It is not real. People come in, they

take a look at it and think it must take all these people to make complicated
things. But it is simple. It is business. It is just business.

There are a number of things to note here. First, the failure of the interview
as a tool to elicit tacit knowledge about cooking, which forced me to redesign
the study to deploy more ethnographic techniques to get at doing. Second, the
phrase “It is business. It is just business,” is a complex, cryptic opening into
differing values in differing domains. It implies a short-term horizon. It implies
a domain of necessity which is held in opposition to cultural essence. It
allows for certain kinds of manipulations and transformations. In Paul Stoller’s
work, that segregation of domain between culture and business is precisely
what allowed the Nigerian vendor El Hadj Harouna Souley to explain away
contradictions between a moral worldview and some of the dirty everyday
activity with the words: “Money has no smell” (Stoller 2002). The analogue in
Rasool’s words, “It is business,” allows him some ethical and aesthetic leeway.
Rasool’s construction of culture against commerce has a long lineage in
South Asia. Utsa Ray has shown (2009, 2010) how middle-class Bengali men
and women (bhadrasamaj) transformed the urban Bengali discourse on taste
in cities such as Kolkata (Calcutta) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries to produce a new desiring subject who valued domestic cookery
more than street foods, and in doing so inscribed middle-class home cooking
as the only legitimate standard of authentic Bengali cooking, one that can
never be matched either by migrant male Odiya cooks, hired in increasing
numbers by the same class, or by street vendors. Middle-class Bengali men
36 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

and women endlessly complain that there is no good Bengali food outside the
home, unlike French or Italian or Punjabi food, they say. Here the complaint
is a disguised compliment, about the subtlety of the palate developed far from
the madding crowd of the poor and non-Bengali (Odiya, Bihari, Marwari,
Nepali, etc.) streets.
There are signs of a civilizing process of Bengali desires by the end of
the nineteenth century where “katu (jhal in colloquial Bengali) [hot/spicy] and
amla [sour] had stable extreme positions in the spectrum of Bengali taste
hierarchy.” (Mukhopadhyay 2004: 43). Nationalist heroes such as Bankimchandra
Chattopadhyay and Vivekananda repeatedly condemn tamarind and chili
consumption, associating them with uneducated rural women and the uncouth
bazaar. Although the marginalization of chili and tamarind in the construction
of Bengali haute cuisine awaits its historian, classic Bengali recipe books from
the end of the nineteenth century onwards contain them both in the section
on chutneys and pickles, excising their “excessive” use in good Bengali cuisine
(Mukhopadhyay 2004). Yet it is perhaps their very repression in the dominant
hierarchy of taste that produced their efflorescence as a subaltern counter-
discourse of street-foods, a minoritarian tradition that escapes the dominating
form of taste. Furthermore, street foods are paradoxically considered an
element of the male domain and yet irresistible to young women, who for
precisely that reason must avoid the lure of dustu-khide (unruly appetite)
to shore up the claims of decency. Middle-class discourse about the great
virtues of Bengali cuisine hinges on the gendered and classed character of
its construction, as a product of the affective labor of the housewife and her
servants. A recent study of Indian street culture notes that “the street has for
long been the object of anxieties about social miscegenation and mixtures
of commerce, residence and community” (Gambetta and Bandyopadhyay
2012: 2). That story is always about culture against commerce.
In Vu Pham’s detailed study of a Vietnamese-American crustacean restaurant
in San Francisco (Pham 2006), a slightly different wording, “After all, it is a
business,” is used to find room for one’s dubious activities and intentions. In
this case it is used to self-certify a mix of Vietnamese French colonial nostalgia
that panders to white neocolonial fantasies. Crafting fairy-tales of refugee
self-invention and upward mobility, and the privileging of personal familial
triumph over critiques of colonialism. Pham sees “after all, it is a business” as
the mode of dubious aesthetic massaging of a western wound. In Rasool’s
case it allows him to act insincerely. He ignores such delicate neocolonial
convolutions, but his dreams are no different from those of some Anglophone
Indian elites playing in the New York food market with lots of capital and
MBA s. One of these concepts is inday, named by Basu Ratnam, Phil Suarez,
and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. They are hoping to spread the gospel of fast,
casual Indian food (without being too Indian) in the mid-market niche. There are
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 37

other somewhat grandiose attempts to reconstruct colonial Indian pastiche as

a Kipling-esque company, serving cutlets, burra kebabs, tea sandwiches, chota
pegs, and gin and tonics, with million-dollar investors and dreams of Gymkhana
Clubs and Mogli Eats. These business plans may still see the light of day. Here,
points of public contention are digested into aesthetically reconciled marketing
memorabilia, where, as Marilyn Halter (2000) and Arlene Davila (2001) show,
marketing and ethnicity are completely at home. That is one end on a continuum
of compromised behaviors.
Rasool’s insistence that what we have here is mere commerce, not culture,
is antithetical to the marketing of his culture. This is echoed in diasporic
newspapers’ sparse coverage of commercial cookery in the features, although
the classifieds are plastered with advertisements for restaurants and cooks.
The two major expatriate Indian weekly newspapers—India Abroad and India
Tribune (which I have analyzed from 2001 to 2014)—have carried about two
dozen stories each year (in fifty-two weekly issues) on the culture of cooking,
which typically conclude with a page of recipes written by women for women.
The focus of the food articles is to collate a pan-Indian cuisine in the diaspora,
introducing the readers to dishes from “elsewhere” in India—a theme Arjun
Appadurai noted in his seminal article on cookbooks in the Indian national
space (1988), which appears to have been extended to the diaspora today.
Both newspapers have a cautious, middle-brow approach to food contained
within discourses of domesticity, and reflect the tastes of anglophone,
achieving, middle-class Indian men in the US.
That goes hand-in-hand with a celebrity-oriented culture of chefs who have
gained recognition in the mainstream media—such as The New York Times
or on Food Network—be it Floyd Cardoz when he won the Top Chef Master
competition, Padma Laxmi as the sultry and sensuous host of Top Chef, or
the opening of Hemant Mathur’s Tulsi (Pais 2011a, 2011b). This conservative,
celebrity-oriented, nation-advertising approach sits well with Rasool’s valorization
of his wife’s home cooking (and his resistance to its commodification), the
presumed realm of culture. Here we get the faint trace of the divide of modern
post-colonial nationalism into culture inside the home and commerce outside it,
in public (Chatterjee 1993; see Walsh 2004, Burton 2003).
Most importantly, Rasool’s reticence underlines the explanatory power of
Appadurai’s argument about what happens when commodities cross the
relatively constricting cultural containers that he characterizes as regimes of
value (1986: 15). In The Social Life of Things (1986), Appadurai draws on Georg
Simmel’s work on money and economic value and Werner Sombart’s theory
of luxury consumption as the motor of Early Modern European Capitalism
to “demystify the demand side of economic life” (Appadurai 1986: 58). First,
Appadurai sidelines the marginalist presumption that demand flows directly
from needs and desires rooted in human nature. In contrast, Appadurai shows
38 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

that a desiring subject who generates demand has to be culturally produced.

Most importantly for our purposes here, the value of things, especially things
that cross boundaries between communities, has to be sorted out in complex
and sometimes mutually incomprehensible ways, as subtle and as symbolic
as the doings of the cargo cults of Oceania. And, things that are not allowed
to be commodified, such as land and relics, may acquire commodity form in
new contexts. Sites that allow commodification, such as the bazaar, may do
so by demarcating it clearly from the household, but such divisions may falter
under new regimes of value. Finally, things may be allowed the commodity
form in certain phases of their biography, such as gifts before they become so
but that, once gifted, are ideally diverted from their path as a commodity.
So is a plate of chicken vindaloo produced in Rasool’s restaurant a
commodity accessed by whoever pays for it or a gift of another culture that
cannot be fully commodified? It depends on the nature of the transaction and
the intentionality of the actors involved. The more subtle and sophisticated
the customer, the more s/he resists the complete commodification of the
relationship, in spite of the cash nexus. The seller of the cultural artifact located
at the bottom of the social hierarchy, such as Rasool, wants to commodify
it quickly, if fleetingly, and is inclined to segregate it from home cooking. In
contrast, ethnic celebrity chefs (and other high culture intermediaries) are
invested in the exchange as a long-lasting cultural transaction. That is why
the quest for authenticity becomes so acute. The search for authenticity is
an anxiety produced by access. Before it was available to many, the mere
knowledge of its existence, if not the taste, was a distinguishing sign. Now
that it is available to so many, we need experts to judge whether the thing is
any good. That biography of a commodified fragment of a culture in another
context, such as a dish you can buy, is now overlaid on the Romantic regime
of value that accentuates Western tastes for things of the past and from other
places. Buffeted by such demands, Rasool appears to carry in his metaphysics
at least two registers of value. One of money, price, and “only business,” “not
real,” important and useful to the calculus of making a living, but different from
the high moral purpose and aesthetic pursuit of “culture.” Yet culture is the
very thing that some of his customers come to him in their hunger for an
authentic replica of another culture; this is the second register of value. In the
transaction between Rasool and some of his customers who seek a quick
ethnic fix there develops a gap in the commensurability of regimes of value.
Both sides are getting something valuable out of the exchange but not the
same thing.
Beyond the back-and-forth of figuring each other out that goes on between
the entrepreneur and the customer, there is also something more here in the
case of Rasool. It has something to do with the limits of language (that
I could not press on without Punjabi—the interviews were conducted in Hindi
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 39

and English), about doing, and about the social embarrassment of cooking
and middle-class Lahorean masculinity. Rasool does not embody the skills of
cooking that his wife can lay claim to. But what he does incorporate is the
taste of the real thing, and he can mobilize the memory of that taste to feed
his imagined South Asian cabbie customer and the real Hispanic one. Yet,
beyond my own linguistic limits, and Rasool’s inability to cook with skill, what
is intriguing is how people like Mohammad Rasool have not figured in the
scholarly discussion on taste.

What’s in a name?
Taste is here directly linked to building something. The process of designing a
restaurant can begin with the mere act of naming it. The first visible Indian
restaurant in New York City, named Ceylon India Inn, was established in 1913
on Eighth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, where it became a center of Indian
nationalist activity. But the owner, K. Y. Kira, sought to re-orient its focus from
inside the community to outside it—as was becoming common in view of the
demand for ethnic food among a new Anglo-American middle class (see
Chapter 3)—by moving its location and discouraging Indian seamen and
students from lingering too long.
By the 1920s, we see the discussion of South Asian food shift to the takeover
of the Royal British Navy by “little brown men”—often called lascars—who ate
rice and curry on board ship. In an article in The New York Times,
John Carter explained that “the shift of economic forces during and since the
[First World War] has left little of her British character, save the officers, who
are English” (Carter 1925: SM 9). He complains about the lascars, “Their religion
demands that they shall eat no meat unless it has been slaughtered in
accordance with the prescribed ritual. The diet of Indian Moslems consists of
mutton, curry and rice: rice, curry and mutton ad infinitum. This mutton must be
fresh-killed, by a Moslem, although it does not matter who cooks it. Accordingly,
vessels with Moslem crews must carry a flock of live sheep aboard” (Carter
1925). There were other perverse problems with these Orientals, Carter
continues, specifically their propensity to contract strange ailments from curses
and promptly die from them, to the great inconvenience of the captain. Although
they were paid lower wages, to Carter it wasn’t clear that employing Orientals
made it cheaper to run a shipping line, because a crew of “fifty British will
handle a vessel for which seventy lascars would be hardly enough. Moreover,
Orientals, for all their philosophies of Nirvana and of indifference to death,
nearly always grow panic-stricken in an emergency, with corresponding risk to
vessel and cargo” (Carter 1925: SM 9). It is these lascars who, on jumping ship,
would give us the first chain of cheap curry houses in the Western metropolis.
40 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

There was also a Caribbean connection to South Asian food by way of

the Harlem Renaissance. Richard Huey, who sang the hit “Bloomer Girl,”
opened Aunt Dinah’s Kitchen in 1935, serving southern fried chicken, Mexican
chili, sweet potato pie, and East Indian curry (van Gelder 1944). Harlem
may have also been home to east-coast America’s first Indian restaurants
directed towards its own community, which unfortunately did not leave
any trace in print (Bald 2013: 174). By the 1930s, there is also evidence of an
Indian member of the Harlem Restaurant Owners’ Association, and by the
late 1940s, advertisement for Indian restaurants such as India’s Garden Inn
proliferate in the pages of the African-American New York Amsterdam News.
The 1939 WPA Guide to New York City (Federal Writers Project 1939/1995)
listed four “East Indian Restaurants.” There is no documentary evidence
of other Indian restaurants until the late 1940s, but according to Bald’s oral
informants there may have been a handful of unnamed ones in small
basements and side-streets of Harlem. By the mid-1940s, others had also
noticed a number of Bengali hot dog vendors operating in East Harlem, down
Madison, Lexington, and Third Avenues (Bald 2013: 173–4). Arguably, the place
that served more Indian meals than any other in Manhattan by the mid-
twentieth century may have been at the four-story building at 100 West Thirty-
eighth Street, home of the segregated British Merchant Sailors’ Club for
Indian Seamen, which had a mess hall that seated eighty people and in its first
year served 198,200 meals (Bald 2013: 182).
It appears from the sudden frequency of discussion about curry in the
course of the Second World War that media coverage of the Indian National
Movement led by Mahatma Gandhi, the requirements of a low-protein wartime
diet (with its flavor challenges for the Anglo palate), and exposure to the
taste of Allied Indian troops, conspired to put curry on the American plate, at
least of gastronomes and journalists such as Jane Holt of The New York Times.
Holt often worked in conjunction with The Civilian Defense Volunteer Office
(with an interest in civilian nutrition, especially vitamin deficiency) and trade
organizations such as The Spice Traders’ Association. Where Jane Holt left off,
Jane Nickerson continued, in her “News of Food” column, announcing the
“first direct shipment of curry powder since the war” to arrive from Madras
on September 7, 1946 (Nickerson 1946). Nickerson then also informs us that
the East India Curry Shop was “a restaurant that probably serves the most
‘authentic’ curries in town” (1946). Access, by then, was already producing
anxieties about authenticity.
The four Indian restaurants listed in the Manhattan Telephone Directory
by 1949—the earliest reference to a cluster of Indian restaurants—were
named India Bengal Garden, India Prince, India Rajah, and India Restaurant.
The Bengal Garden was opened in 1948 by a previous line cook, Habib Ullah,
his Puerto Rican wife Victoria, who welcomed guests at the front of the house,
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 41

and two investors, Ibrahim Choudry and a Mr Ali, “who had saved up $20,000
selling hot dogs from a pushcart on 110th Street” (Bald 2013: 178).
At the dawn of post-colonial nationalism such insistent use of “India” in the
name must have made sense both to South Asian entrepreneurs and to their
American customers. Perhaps that is why the categorization of India Rajah
under the class “Hindu,” in a 1939 New York Times classified ad, did not have
staying power. Hindoo was a United States Census category used from 1910
to 1940 to classify Indians who were Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or Parsee (Gibson
and Jung 2005). It was also an increasingly popular term used to classify South
Asians and distinguish them from Native Americans. There was a certain
exoticism to that classification. Tobacco growers often branded their products
under names such as Hindoo, Mecca, Mogul, and Bengal (Bald 2013: 17). Tin
Pan Alley songwriters produced tunes such as “My Hindoo Man” and “Down
in Bom-Bombay,” which were sung in middle-class American homes. In 1904,
Coney Island’s Luna Park created a veritable Delhi Darbar, with imported
camels, elephants, and hundreds of Indian performers, borrowing from the
iconography of the Raj and King Edward VII of England’s accession to the
imperial throne. Affluent men in American cities “outfitted their smoking
rooms with plush Oriental rugs, hookahs, tiger skins, elephant tusks, daggers,
scimitars and images of ‘eroticized Eastern women’—goods that simultaneously
conveyed the conquest of far-off lands and conjured the fantasy world of the
eastern harem” (Bald 2013: 18).
The classification of India Rajah as Hindu declines in the print record after
1940. The owner wasn’t Hindu, the chef de cuisine was “Ali Jan of Benares”
(Ashley 1939: 100), and “India” may have been a better referent, both for
the customer and the entrepreneur. But it took a while for the public and
the experts to develop the necessary distinctions between Indian, Hindu,
Parsee, Turkish, and Arab, as evidenced by the following confusion in an early
restaurant guide for New York City, titled Dining in New York, by Rian James
(1930). The Rajah, classified by James as a “Turkish (Parsee)” restaurant in the
1930 edition, located west of Broadway on Forty-eighth Street, is described
thus: “a dingy little red sign swings high over the stoop of an erstwhile
aristocratic brownstone front. Upstairs you will find The Rajah, about as big as
a medium-sized clothes-press, and not nearly as sanitary; but you’re in Turkey
now—and if you were terribly fussy, you wouldn’t have gone to Turkey in the
first place. Besides, the food is worth the trip” (1930: 65–6). One of the clues
that this is probably Indian food is James’s description of it:

The table d’hote starts with Tamarind—a lemon-colored drink made from
vegetables—as an appetizer. A watery, albeit true-to-type, native soup
follows. Then, the real business of the Turkish dinner sets in. Choose lamb,
chicken, or beef curry—oh, such a fiery curry sauce! A heaping plate of rice
42 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

with an ample portion of cabbage is placed beside your curry. The trick
is to pour your curried meat into the little well of the rice, mix thoroughly,
and then enjoy . . . You’ll enjoy your dinner, speculating about the other
queer-looking diners, and learn, astonishingly enough, that all sheiks
don’t wear goatees, ride white horses and brandish swords (James 1930:
66–7).

In ranging widely, James conflates the Arab world with Turkey and India in a
classic case of early twentieth-century Orientalism. Some of the comestibles—
such as the drink called Tamarind—appear in contradictory guise in different
sources. Even two decades later, Robert W. Dana, author of Where to Eat in
New York (1948), writes about it as “pomegranate nectar,” which “is a sweet
beverage boiled from the tamarind roots that grow on Indian riverbanks”
(1948: 100). Despite confusing two different fruits with very different taste
profiles—tamarind and pomegranate—and displacing the fruit with the root
of the tamarind, adding the local color of “growing on Indian riverbanks” is a
desperate attempt at verisimilitude. Lawton Mackall identifies it more plausibly
as “pomegranate cocktail (spiced juice, no alcohol)” (1948: 206).
Yet that parenthetical “Parsee” in the classification of The Rajah was too
specific to be ignored. When I first ran into the reference, I wondered what a
Parsee (a Zoroastrian exile from Persia to India) was doing in Manhattan with
a Turkish restaurant that had an Indian name (The Rajah), and that advertised
itself as “Hindu” (in the advertisement section of the 1939 New York Times).
Later, I gathered from other sources that The Rajah was once owned by
Rustom Wadia, a Parsee from Bombay, who came to the US in 1923 to study
engineering at Union College in Schenectady, New York (India Abroad 1992).
He ate his first American meal in an Indian restaurant in Manhattan around
the transportation hub in midtown, eventually becoming its co-owner in 1926,
taking it over fully in 1944. Wadia’s enterprise was clustered with a number of
other successful mid-town ventures such as Longchamps on Madison Avenue,
which specialized in Anglo-curries, Sarat Lahiri’s (an itinerant musician) Bengal
Tiger Restaurant on West Fifty-eighth Street, and Trudie Telle’s (an American
missionary) East India Curry Shop on East Sixteenth Street, which had
Darmadasa (whom we shall meet again) as a cook.
So the name The Rajah, the provenance of the food, and the sign under
which it was served, all had to be slowly sorted out over decades of transactions
between immigrant proprietors, their own classificatory systems engaging
with real and imagined customers, with those of American newspaper critics,
commentators, advertisers, and guidebook writers, before the people and the
food could be put in their mutually comprehensible categories. What appear
at first glance to be mere errors of classification are also traces of a process
of transaction in type.
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 43

Interestingly, a number of restaurants that appear for the first time

in guidebooks serving foreign cuisines for Americans, such as Indian, Thai,
Korean, and Japanese, were originally clustered around Midtown. That is in
contrast to Chinese, Italian, and Kosher restaurants, serving large domestic
immigrant populations, which were clustered on the Lower East Side in the
early years of the twentieth century. Harlem may have been home to East
Coast America’s first Indian restaurants directed towards its own community,
which did not leave much of a trace in print. Midtown restaurants facing
outward were better covered in Anglo newspapers, hence more legible in the
historical record.
By the end of the 1950s, “India” can still be found in some of the restaurant
names, such as Bombay India, Ceylon India Inn, and Pakistan India. The 1956
edition of Menu: The Restaurant Guide of New York identified three Indian
restaurants serving curries, samosa, shish kebab, and rijsttafel.4 But by
1969, sub-national places and non-place names were added to the repertoire,
such as Punjab, Karachi, Rajmahal, Koh-i-Noor, and Natraj. Yet, clear national
identifiers had to be positioned in small print underneath the names, such
as “unique Pakistani, Indian cuisine” under Rajmahal or “Authentic Indian
Curries” under Punjab. The 1978 edition of Mary Waldo’s Restaurant Guide to
New York City and Vicinity lists 19 Indian and Pakistani restaurants. By 1979,
newer restaurants such as Raga, Mumtaz, Nirvana, Shaheen, and Tandoor no
longer needed “India” in their names as the entrepreneur and the audience
began to figure each other out, sometimes with the intermediation of critics.
Perhaps the category had also become overcrowded. By 1989, Dawat had
to both explain itself and pull itself into gastronomic “discourse” by claiming
that “Dawat Means Invitation to a Feast” and that they served “The ‘Haute’
Cuisine of India . . . under the culinary supervision of Madhur Jaffrey, who
has been called, ‘the finest authority on Indian cooking in America’ by Craig
Claiborne.” They managed to say all that in their tiny advertisement in the
NYNEX Yellow Pages (1988–89: 1,481). Much of this history of transactions in
type was reticulating through the simple question I had asked Muhammad
Rasool:

I: How did you come to name this place Bread & Butter?

MR : You see, I used to call it Taj Mahal but my business was not working.
Day after day I dragged my tired body home on that [commuter] train. One
day I fell asleep. The train jolted to a halt. I woke up and looked around . . .
which is when it came to me. No one, not one person in this compartment
knows what Taj Mahal is, but each one of them knows about bread and
butter, so to make my business run I had to change the name to Bread &
Butter!
44 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

The logic of naming Indian restaurants in New York appears to be distinct

from that of Chinese and French restaurants, revealing their spatial and
social location. The first recorded cluster of eleven Chinese restaurants in
New York City in 1898, listed by Louis Beck in his New York’s Chinatown,
included Hon Heong Lau, Me Heong Lau, King Heong Lau, Way Heong Lau,
Gui Ye Quan, Mon Li Won, and Kim Sun, and were all located on Mott and Pell
Street in Lower Manhattan, marking their insider audience and subaltern
status (Beck 1898: 49). Until the last quarter of the twentieth century the
Indian population in the United States was, in most locations, too small and
dispersed to support enclave eateries, such as we find among, say, the 4,000
or so Chinese in New York’s Chinatown in the 1890s. Although we do not
know for sure from the archival record, according to the oral historian Bald’s
interviews with descendants of Bengali Harlem residents, most of the Indian
restaurants in Harlem that catered to Muslim South Asian seamen, peddlers,
and West Indian migrants might have had more specific names, such as
Ameer’s, Syed Ali’s, etc.
Chinese restaurants in New York have gone through a fascinating century-
long cycle that began with early confinement within Chinatown; then suddenly,
around 1903, they break out of that area in the Lower East Side, following
the lead of a Chinatown merchant named “Charley Boston,” who also went
by the name of Lee Quong June (or Li Quen Chong) (New York Times
1900, 1903). He closed his restaurant on Doyer Street and reopened on Third
Avenue and Rivington, then pushed up further onto Seventh Avenue, near
Thirty-fourth Street. Other “Chop Suey Resorts,” in the current terminology,
followed quickly, ending up with more than a hundred eateries between
Fifty-fifth Street and Fourteenth Street, from Bowery to Eighth Avenue, with
names such as Chop Suey Bowl, Chop Suey House, Chop Suey Café, Chop
Suey Palace, Chop Suey Food Garden, and Chop Suey Parlor, by the 1920s (Liu
2009). In Los Angeles, in 1900, there were a couple of Chinese restaurants,
frequented almost exclusively by the Chinese, which jumped to fifteen by
1910, now covered in the typical write-ups in Anglophone newspapers. In
1905, San Francisco had forty-six Chinese restaurants, growing to seventy-six
by 1925 (Chao 1985: 223). This was not just a New York or a West Coast thing.
There is evidence of one Chinese restaurant in Chicago in 1900; by 1915 there
were 118, with only half a dozen or so in Chinatown (Liu 2009: 12).
The sudden fashion for chop suey in American cities is a reminder that the
surprising ubiquity of sushi at the end of the twentieth century, or the current
popularity of Ramen noodle shops, have precedents. By the Roaring Twenties,
American urban culture had gone chop suey-mad, eventually to be consecrated
in a Louis Armstrong jazz number, “Cornet Chop Suey” (1926), and a cool,
iconic Edward Hopper painting, Chop Suey (1929). Harvey Levenstein links
their proliferation to the expansion of lower- to middle-class service jobs for
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 45

men and women in the city, who were not catered to by the old working-class
saloons or the new higher-class restaurants (1993: 185). By 1925, the journalist
Bertram Reinitz was pointing out the new role of chop suey in feeding working
women, the “telephonists and typists” (Reinitz 1925: XX 2), who typically
made a lunch-hour exodus to Chinatown from Franklin, Duane, and Worth
Streets. Taking stock of the year’s major developments at the end of the term,
he writes, “Hot tamales have acquired unprecedented popularity as party
provender . . . and chop suey has been promoted to a prominent place on the
midday menu of the metropolis” (1925: XX 2). He noted that from a casual
commodity, the chop suey had become a staple, now vying with sandwiches
and salads for the attention of young, female palates. This new American
palate was so established that by 1942, the US Army mess hall handbook
listed chow mein, chop suey, spaghetti, and tamales.
In another contrast in naming traditions, establishments that gave off
signals of much higher status, were the elite American restaurants of the
first half of the twentieth century, which invariably had French names such
as Le Pavillion, La Côte Basque, La Caravelle, Lutèce, La Grenouille, and
Le Périgord, leading the New York restaurateur Drew Nieporent to characterize
it as the Le/La phase of American fine dining (in Bruni 2005: F4). Mere names
of restaurants can provide a rich record of social location and transactions in
taste.

From naming to cooking

Walking down the steps from the sidewalk, I found myself in a dark, low-
ceilinged room. My eyes landed on the gourd-shaped IKEA lamps over each
table. Then they were drawn to a large calligraphic backdrop on the far wall,
which was a cross between a fluid Arabic verse from the Quran and the
famous terracotta horse figurines from Bankura which pay homage to Vishnu,
the Hindu god. Begum Hasina welcomed me as if she already knew me.
Dacca is in the East Village in Manhattan on Sixth Street—New York City’s own
little stretch of Brick Lane—a block it shares with a dozen other Indian
restaurants run by branching Bangladeshi expatriates descended from Sylheti
lascars who, by jumping ship, have given us a network of curry houses
stretching from Amsterdam to New York. Dacca is the brainchild of three
Bangladeshis linked by marriage—Hasina, the spirit occupying the place, her
husband, and her brother-in-law Dulun.5 They opened the restaurant because,
in their words, they wanted to bring Bengali home cooking to Americans
(Burnett 2007). So they have put khichuri (a rice and lentil mess that is the very
apotheosis of domestic cookery) and maacher jhaal (fish in mustard sauce) on
their menu. This has drawn some critical attention from reviewers on the web
46 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

and food critics in the print media. On MenuPages.com, among a dozen

ecstatic evaluations, a typical one stated, “Best on the block . . . [Dulun] and
his family are warm and welcoming and ensure a great meal” (Menupages.
com 2007). Peter Meehan noted in The New York Times, “I swore off the
restaurants on the block, and anything on Sixth between Cooper Union and
the F.D.R Drive. [Dacca] . . . brought me back. [Dacca] is proof that interesting,
authentic Indian cooking is not relegated to the outer reaches of the city”
(Meehan 2004).
Dacca provides a variation on a theme. With an average entrée at $13.02,
Dacca sits among the middle third of all Indian restaurants in Manhattan. Of the
202 Manhattan restaurants that characterize themselves as Indian, there are
177 separate properties with distinct menus, while the rest are alternate
properties of chains with the same menu, such as Baluchi’s (Menupages.com
2009).6 More than 90 percent of Indian restaurants in New York City can be
characterized as the standard curry house, of which Baluchi’s is a good example.
Curry houses typically list appetizers such as samosas, soups such as
mulligatawny, tomato and lentil, and various kinds of kebabs. They include
tandoori breads, biriyanis and pulao. Main courses include chicken, lamb, and
fish in pre-made base sauces with a last-minute twist such as vindaloo (added
vinegar), tikka masala (added tomato paste and butter), dopiaza (added fried
onions), and makhni (added butter). The vegetarian options are typically chana
masala, aloo gobi, saag paneer, mutter paneer, malai kofta, and baigan bharta;
sides include mango chutney, tomato chutney, raita, and pickles; and desserts
such as rasmalai, gulab jamun, kheer, mango ice cream, and kulfi. The names
of these dishes are beginning to be standardized as a kind of global curry-
house Hindustani, but they often carry traces of Bengali locution, such as
khichuri (contra the Hindustani khichdi), bendi mosala (contra vhindi masala)
and luchi niramish (contra puri-bhaji).7 The reason that East Bengali accents
abound in nominally Hindustani-looking menus is because currently more
than one-half of Indian restaurateurs in New York City are Bangladeshis.
In the context of rampant hybridity it is not surprising, then, that Muhammad
Rasool from Lahore puts vindaloo from Goa on his menu in Manhattan. No one
orders the vindaloo at Bread & Butter. It is too expensive at $7.95. It may also
be a bit too much for the crowd it caters to, but it is right there in smudged ink
at number 23 on the menu. “A piquant . . . curry from the famed Beach City of
Goa, meat marinated in a unique spicy ‘masala’ w/cumin seeds & potatoes.”
The language is formulaic, magical, ritual-like in its ubiquity here and in all low-
cost Indian restaurants, and points to something sad and touching, obvious
and insistent, as revealed by the momentary confusion of a young man.
Sebastian D’Souza is an American-born Bangladeshi who, along with a
group of six intricately linked male family members, manages Sonar Bangla,
one of the downtown Indian restaurants, a stone’s throw from Ground Zero.
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 47

When asked whether some of the dishes there have echoes of home, he
surprisingly picks the vindaloo. He says, “Yes of course, we have it often at
home . . . my mother cooks it. Like most Bengalis we love our vindaloo.” His
father hastens to explain, “We are Catholic Bangladeshis, and vindaloo is
Portuguese. So we have it often.” In a way, that explains everything—shared
Catholic world. But in another way it does not explain a thing. There are many
other kinds of Catholics, so why must these two groups—Bangladeshi
Catholics and Goan Catholics—imagine themselves as proximate, especially
when they are thousands of miles from home? Perhaps because they are
thousands of miles from home and pushed towards each other by their
appearance to outsiders.
Sometimes there are problems of turning into explicit language what is
obvious to the practiced body. Take for instance, a savory, lentil-stuffed, fried-
dough appetizer called kachori. As Figure 2.1 shows, it is intriguing how the
kachori got on the menu and came to be named through a series of borrowings
as apparent from the spellings and the misspellings on the menus. I wonder if
the kachori, by its very nature, is untranslatable, or are such borrowings a mere
sign of laziness? What are the specific problems of translation that motivate
the restaurateur to give up? Language sometimes falls much shorter than the
broader sensorial range we experience with our bodies—does it smell right,
have the right crunch of puff pastry, does it have the brittle heat of dried red
chilies? The body ranges more widely and can be deployed more deftly, as a
tool of enquiry that exceeds mere sign and sound. That is partly the power of
food and also the limits of turning something so multi-sensorial into language.

FIGURE 2.1 The mystery of kachori.

48 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Furthermore, the varieties of spellings for kachori /katchori /kochuri /ka-chori

in today’s Indian restaurant menus echo the unsettled appropriation of
curree /curry /currey in eighteenth-century English cookbooks and pasta /paste
in twentieth-century American equivalents. Words and dishes settle into
certain known things with prescribed dimensions (the prescription and names
becoming more stringent with print) slowly among a community of producers,
consumers, and critics.
Of course, many of the steps in the process of transmission and translation
are no longer remembered or inscribed anywhere that can be traced
back. These are forgotten stories: the way that vindaloo got on the menu at
Bread & Butter (Rasool told me that he does not recall, “Perhaps taken from
another menu?”); how vindaloo relates to Sebastian D’Souza’s mom’s
cooking in Queens; how Floyd Cardoz’s “South Indian Mushroom Soup”
with tamarind at the high-status and high-priced Tabla may or may not be a
riff on vindaloo while simultaneously fleeing from it; why Madhur Jaffrey’s
menu at Dawat (which she now disavows) puts its duck “vindaloo” within
quotation marks.

From cooking to eating (and judging)

Jackie, a particularly thoughtful and erudite respondent and customer at
Saravana Bhavan, an Indian restaurant in the Murray Hill neighborhood of
Manhattan (which is sometimes referenced colloquially as “Curry Hill” because
of the two-dozen restaurants, grocery stores, etc. located in that neighborhood),
reflects on the mercurial nature of power in the encounter between the
customer, the server, and the entrepreneur. Much of the complexity surrounding
Indian food, for her, comes from the difference in language: different still from
the Romance languages which many Westerners are at least familiar with,
even if they cannot understand.

Indian languages (usually Hindi, I assume) are utterly incomprehensible on

a menu to me. When I finally make it to Saravana Bhavan, I recognize items
like curry and chutney as they are assimilated into the Western lexicon,
however kara dosa and bisibelabath are totally baffling. As kara dosa is in
the earlier section of the menu, I assume it is an appetizer.

These blind guesses are made only on the basis that, as a restaurant
operating in America, the proprietor would organize the menu according to
local custom. Without knowing how meals are eaten in India, she defers to her
own upbringing and orders medhu vada (lentil doughnuts) and some naan first,
then a curry for the main course, and gulab jamun and masala tea for dessert.
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 49

For an insider that combination of medhu vada and the naan would be
incompatible.

Unfortunately I am completely lost on whether the chaat is a chunky dip, a

side dish, supposed to be mixed into something else, or some other form
of dish I don’t know about. Food arrives and I reach for my fork but stop. Is
the proper way to eat this with one’s fingers? Do Indians eat with their
fingers or is that a remnant image from British imperialism? Would I be
foolish and insulting or respectful if I attempted it? How am I supposed to
know how to eat this food?8

Laurie, another customer, speaking about the same restaurant, notes, “The
Hotel Saravana Bhavan has a Taj Mahal-like feel with white textured walls
and bright lights that seem to promote purity and simplicity,” but without
the blatant religious motifs that are so common in other Manhattan Indian
restaurants she has visited. The restaurant’s website gives virtual tours of
different chains around the world, mostly in the United Arab Emirates and
Malaysia. In each one, including the New York property, the servers wear
white shirts, the atmosphere seems calm and refined, there are no women
on staff, and there is a lot of stainless steel. Customers in the other branches
of the chain are seated in large wooden chairs, with a warm pink and red
color scheme surrounding them, and lots of upholstery. There is always a
sweets counter, and pictures of dishes on the wall. None of these were
present on the property at Twenty-sixth Street and Lexington in Manhattan.
The Manhattan Saravana Bhavan appears to be attempting to distinguish
itself from the dark, ornate, and upholstered “typical” Indian restaurants in
the neighborhood, as it is also a little more expensive than the typical Indian
restaurant. “I paid $20.00 for two cups of tea, a masala dosa, a side of rice,
with a 20 percent tip.”
Laurie, also commented on the available silverware and the ubiquity of
stainless steel plates and glasses, but concluded that it was “a mix of sensitivity
to local service, culture and taste which was nicely fused with the maintenance
of tradition, whether that tradition stemmed from the ancient mass temple
feedings of the southern Indian town of Udupi, or the more current mélange of
European and Indian style dining.”
Alisa, another respondent, changed the terms of the discussion. She began
by drawing attention to the threads of mint that top an innocent-looking bowl
of thin lentil soup:

I scooped up one of the rectangular prisms of bone marrow. It wriggled and

limped in my spoon. It tasted of pure fat. The headiness of the broth alone
was delicious for a bite or two, but the overwhelming fattiness imparted by
50 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

the marrow forced me to stop eating. “What is going on,” I thought. “Why
don’t I like anything? This is Tabla. This is Floyd Cardoz. This is supposed to
be the future of Indian cuisine. What is wrong with me!?”

Things improved with the lentil patties. She was excited to eat something
vegetarian. She downed her first morsels without tasting the crunch of the
cashew or appreciating the complexity of the yogurt sauce (spicy and tasting
faintly of curry). Visually, it was the most stunning dish of the night—a shallow
pond of yogurt sauce cradled four lentil mounds hidden under a mask of
verdant mint chutney and burnt-sienna tamarind sauce.
The lentil patty finished entirely too soon; she eyed the platter of goat
tandoori with suspicion. It looked tame enough, like thin slices of medium-
rare filet mignon, splayed on a white plate with nothing but wedges of lime
and few herbs as garnish. It did not look anything like the fiery red chicken
tandoori, with its mass of onions and peppers, that she was used to at
inexpensive Indian restaurants.

Delicately spiced with ginger and garam masala, I speared piece after
piece, eating with the voraciousness of beggars. I was so thrilled to be
finally enjoying something. I had been feeling all-together too memsahib-
ish thus far. Then again, perhaps the recognizable plainness of the goat
tandoori had moved it out of the realm of the exotic and into the realm of
the familiar not so different from the transformation of curry into a British
dish in the 19th century.

Alexa, another commentator I interviewed, connected the discussion to a

broader transformation in both demographics of cities and division of labor at
home:

As a child I saw the transformation of Iowa City, and my palate, from being
comprised of uniquely American cuisine to a city rich with global tastes.
First, it was Mexican cuisine—with migrant workers beginning to settle.
Then, Asian, with the expansion of the University of Iowa Medical Hospital
and the influx of Asian students and families. Most recently, Indian cuisine
has come to dominate—every time I return home my mother takes me out
for Indian. Hand-in-hand with this globalization was industrialization. Foreign
ingredients were being shipped in—“fresh” in the “ethnic” aisle of our
supermarket. As the taste for global cuisines increased, the frozen dinner
aisle expanded too—boasting frozen enchiladas, dumplings, and curry . . .
Ethnic restaurants were, in those days, cheaper and more accessible to my
mother. Also, they validated going out—my mother could not make these
dishes at home. So we had to go out to eat.
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 51

These reflections point to the fact that consumer-oriented studies have

given too much power to the customer, critic, and foodie in the process of
making meaning. In fact, ironically, consumer-oriented surveys rarely get close
enough to the consumer’s point of view and anxieties. Value production in
the realm of ethnic food is not an Anglo monologue. It has never been so. It
is even less so now, after the cultural democratization that gives all subaltern
cultures (including those of the foreign-born) a robust sense of legitimacy
and in fact even some slight disdain towards normative, mainstream culture.
The foreign-born have always participated in the negotiations, not as equal
partners, but as substantial ones.
Throughout these transactions there is a desperate search for authenticity
by consumers. Authenticity is haptic, haunting, in a crowded and noisy
marketplace. It is the craving for touch—its magic and its intimacy—in an
increasingly distanced, ocular, and aural world. From art, through craft and
designer goods, to commodified food, the quest is to be touched, in this case
by an Indian, and in other cases by the artist or the designer via his signature
or fingertip on a keyboard. Academics, working in high-cultural institutions,
dismiss the uses of authenticity not only because of its potential for
ahistoricism but also because of their disdain for touch over sight and sound.
In the Western intellectual tradition, indifference towards touch is long and
durable, traceable to Plato and Aristotle’s agreement about its radical inferiority
to sight and sound (Smith 2007: 93). An institution built on writing culture
must discourage gesture, touch, and savor, perhaps even speech (Lowe 1982:
13). In contrast, everyday life is filled with touching gestures, such as a hug, a
handshake, a kiss, an embrace, many of which can be turned erotic.
An erotics of authenticity is crucial to the ethnic quest. The ethnic, although
subordinate, is blessed by touching authenticity, the putative Other of the
late twentieth-century urban American modernity. The contemporary search
for authenticity has strengthened ethnic hands further in the trial of strength
based on their capacity to bring new allies into their effort to wrestle value out
of the transaction in taste. Customers, even the most thoughtful ones, are
ciphers in a circulation of ideas and judgments about foods that today routinely
include not only ethnics but high-culture critics, which wasn’t the case until
about the 1980s in most American cities. That happened slowly and hesitatingly.

Critics constitute a cuisine

Until 1961, an authoritative native informant was always invoked in discussions
of Indian food in The New York Times. On March 12, 1939, we see one of the
earliest discussions of curry in the context of gastronomy in an article by
Charlotte Hughes (1939). It goes into a long and sophisticated discussion of
52 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

the thing. “Curry is a very ancient dish, antedating Hollandaise sauce and
apple pie by centuries.” It asserts that “Curry has come to be a lot more
popular in New York in the last few years, with curry restaurants springing up
here and there and with hotels putting curry dishes on their menus.”9 She
goes on to elaborate that “Curry powder is a blend of fifteen or twenty spices”
that needs proper blending, as explained by “Darmadasa, of the East India
Curry Shop” (Hughes 1939). In 1946, Jane Nickerson, another New York Times
reporter, depended on the proprietor of the same shop to explain curry, getting
an answer colored by the typical exaggeration and bravado that a native
informant displays towards what he construes to be a naïve American—
“fifteen to twenty spices” (Nickerson 1946). In 1948, an anonymous American
reporter depended on C. B. Deva, an “import–export trader,” a transplanted
native of Lahore, and the proprietor of India Prince, to unpack the mystery of
curry (New York Times 1948). Later, in 1955, Nickerson found Dharamjit Singh,
a “crimson-turbaned Sikh” (Nickerson 1955).
Craig Claiborne, often consecrated as the first American restaurant critic,
depended initially on the exotic housewife as his tour guide. In his February
25, 1960 piece on Indian food, Claiborne relied on Manorama Phillips, a
middling Indian bureaucrat at the United Nations. “Miss Phillips is a diminutive,
dark-haired young woman with a mercurial smile who has lived in the United
States for nearly four years,” he describes. “When she arrived from India, the
pangs of homesickness were severe and she literally dreamed of the dishes
of her native land” (Claiborne 1960: 22). Professionally, Miss Phillips worked
for the Government of India Trade Center and roomed with an American
woman. Her three-room apartment was furnished with Indian accessories.
When she entertained, which was frequently, it was either for tea, when she
served a spiced tea punch, or for a curry dinner. “Her guests are seated on
pillows covered with brilliant fabrics. In keeping with tradition, flatware is
never used at the table” (Claiborne 1960: 22). The article is accompanied by a
six-by-six-inch photograph of Miss Phillips in her apartment, clad in a sari, and
framed by exquisite Indian handcrafted textiles. Here is the brown body as
evidence of authenticity. Words needed the aid of pictures, and pictures the
help of body, clothing, sari, artifact, to produce meaning. A very Heideggerian
point, where life and the environment of things and other bodies are
inseparable.
It points to the ratio of configuration between immigrant bodies, urban
demand, and cosmopolitan gastronomic dialogue that goes into the construction
of a “discourse,” barely hammered into place by numerous performers with real
and borrowed authority. The story of the curry, the kachori, and the vindaloo
connects “discourse” to practice, and to the problem of transplanting durable
dispositions. Yet, the immigrant dreams not only of a better analogue for the
kachori and the curry; his fantasies are more substantial.
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 53

I: If you could change this place . . . to make it your dream place, what
would you do?

Muhammad Rasool (MR ): I will take this mirror out and put the picture
there such as the scenery of Mohenjodaro. I will put a small stand there
with three containers of soup. I will sell cheap soup, self-service soup, pita
bread, and put a grill there [at the window to the sidewalk]: serve shawarma,
chicken shawarma, lamb shawarma.
I will put the clay oven—the tandoor—there. I will get a young guy with
a cap [toque] on his head. We will just have meats in the tandoor and
salads. I will call it Pakistani Grill!
If I was permitted in Islam to sell liquor, maybe as an exception, I would
open a big restaurant . . . still an Indian Pakistani place but beautiful like an
American place.

Rasool would rebuild this corner of the city—pushing the glass-front out,
putting the grill on the sidewalk, pursuing his customers with dreams of soup
and shawarma. He could turn this into a Middle Eastern place, at some
distance from South Asia, but successfully playing between the scope of his
ecumenical Islamic imagination and the confused compass of his audience’s
geography.
Rasool arrived with the burden of feeding his body, and came to
eventually use it to feed his customers and his household as well. He
came with his morals, motivations, and aesthetic standards, all practically
developed in his previous social context. He arrived with his tongue, taste,
and hands tied to the Lahorian lower-middle-class milieu when he immigrated
in 1988 at the age of thirty-seven. He learned to deploy his body, especially
his hands and his tongue (both for talk and taste), in the midst of a dispositional
crisis under the scrutiny of others. He brought memories of things he had
eaten but never cooked, morals entwined with a division of labor at home
and at work, and an insistent distinction between commerce and culture. He
has crafted his place in this world that is not of his own making, and in the
process has supplied what was demanded through his labors, turning his
culture into commerce, which he resists and yet profits from. Rasool had to
develop a sense of his new city, and yoke his senses to the making of a living
in that city.
The ongoing sociological discussion—of taste, ethnic entrepreneurship,
changing gastronomic categories, field theory, shared meaning in restaurant
work, and professional identity—can only partially account for Rasool.10 Not
in the sense that no sociology can ever fully explain an individual and his
trajectory, but in the sense that scholars have failed to look at his menu, ask
for his recipes, or seek his judgment in explaining transformations of taste
54 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

in the city.11 Rasool and many like him have peopled American cities for
centuries. They have cooked, developed recipes in an implicit dialogue
between their bodies and their customers’ conceptions, and crystallized that
dialogue in thousands and thousands of menus (menus where migrants
struggle to name, standardize, and translate their dishes). Many more have
been erased without a trace and, with a few exceptions, scholars have rarely
taken this practical knowledge as a point of departure for an analysis of the
world of taste.
When Rasool was asked, “Do you look at online reviews of your restaurant?”
he provided a desultory response. It was clear that he was unable or unwilling
to play in the gastronomic world of Manhattan, which is very different from
the position of another entrepreneur I now want to bring into the picture. She
also brings a very different approach to the embodied materiality of cooking
and entrepreneurship. She still carries much of the palatal sense of her pre-
immigration being and is adept at translating her practices to perform in the
gastronomic field of Manhattan. And she seemingly has the dual advantages
of more money than Rasool and a lot more cultural capital.

Vada Pao: Mumbai street food in New York City

Vada Pao is indistinguishable from any small West Village eatery. It sits tightly
between two other restaurants. The sidewalk is narrow too, but less crowded,
with hardly a delinquent in sight. The foot traffic is younger, calmer, whiter,
and characterized by touristy wanderings, rather than the grim purpose
and raw ambition of immigrants on the move. When we entered Vada Pao
in the early afternoon, the sidewalk was devoid of traffic and the place
appeared to be slowly stirring from a tropical siesta. The only thing missing
was a slowly whirring ceiling fan muddling the heat amidst the creeping
bougainvillea.
Chitrita Mukherjee is the entrepreneur behind Vada Pao.12 She is thirty-four
years old, a comfortably Anglophone Indian immigrant, born in Kolkata, but
dreaming up a place like Mumbai (Bombay) in New York City. When we asked
her, “What would be your ethnic self-identification?” she seamlessly suggested
the cosmopolitan phrase “South Asian,” rather than the narrower “Indian.” In
contrast, Rasool’s imagination was tied to the nation and the taxi driver’s
occupation in the big city. Mukherjee’s connection was to the world, the region
in it, and her professional training as a designer. Her handiwork has garnered
substantial critical attention in the world of gastronomic “discourse” as “a
sleek sandwich shop that specializes in upmarket spins on Bombay-style
street food, with a focus on pao—meat and vegetable sammies served like
sliders on ghee-griddled buns.”13
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 55

FIGURE 2.2 A portion of Vada Pao’s menu.

I: What is the concept here?

Chitrita Mukherjee (CM ): Vada pao has a very strong, authentic, regional
identity as Mumbai street food. Plus we wanted to streamline our
operations. We went with our interpretation of the pao as a slider.

I: What brought you to this enterprise?

CM : I came to the US to do my Master’s in architecture and urban design

at Columbia University. I was attracted by the Parson School’s program in
lighting. I got my Master’s in Lighting Design.

I: How did you get to food?

CM : I was fascinated by the food scene here [in the US ]. We loved all the
choices available to us. We thought Indian food had this market gap where
you could find very expensive, good Indian food, or two-day old curries. We
wanted fresh Indian food, which would be portable, sold at a value, to
students and young professionals. To people like us.

I: Let us talk a little more about the concept of Vada Pao. How did you get
to this version?
56 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

CM : I had my baby shower at my friend’s restaurant and I was talking to

her that I needed a change. She said she wanted to do something outside
of her current venture. We started discussing concepts and hoped to learn
from our mistakes and missteps.

I: You are Bengali, why not a Kolkata concept?

CM : I don’t think the repertoire of Kolkata street food is large enough to

provide us with a range. You have kathi roll (which we have), jhaal muri,
puchka. The Bombay repertoire both works better and is underserved. For
instance a Delhi concept would also work with parathas and kebabs. But
no one does vada pao—only two or three places do it in Queens but they
don’t do it right. Plus a slider works as a good translation of pao.

I: Is the Delhi concept crowded?

CM : Yes . . . in a sense that is generic Indian restaurant food now.

I: I was surprised by the name Vada Pao, because it is so local and specific.
Weren’t you afraid that it might not make any sense to your American
audience?

CM : Yes, I worry about it. My fallback position [laughs] is that I can always
go back to lighting design if the concept fails.

I: How many customers do you have in a typical weekday and on the

weekend? If you were to guess their demographics what would it be?

CM : We have about 100 customers on a typical weekday. And about 150

customers on an average weekend day. My weekday and late-night
customers are about 30 percent visibly Indian and 70 percent non-Indian,
probably young professionals and students. On weekends I have more
Indian families coming from New Jersey and Philadelphia for the stuffed
parathas and now vada pao. My check average is between $8 and $9.

I: What were your thoughts in designing this place?

CM : Lower-end version of high-end cuisine. A lot of our design was

influenced by trying to do it in the cheap and yet make a statement. Since
the concept is Mumbai street food we wanted to put up a large image
of the VT train station [in Mumbai]. Earlier, this wall had a plain finish, now
it is a textured finish, a slightly unfinished look, a little like a dhaba. For
the tables I wanted to get a distressed look as in a dhaba—Indian street
food eatery—where tables have a lot of graffiti. But instead of graffiti
we wanted iconic Mumbaiker images such as of the cricketer Sachin
Tendulkar.
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 57

I: Are the cooks Indian?

CM : I have two Indians (one Gujarati, one Mumbaiker), one Mexican, and
one Nepali in the kitchen. The cook is Indian, Goanese, who has cooked at
The Taj in Bombay, then he worked on a ship (that is how he came here),
and he has worked in a couple of restaurants here in the US.

I: Did the cook bring his recipes or did you teach him the recipes?

CM : Well, a little of both. He knew how to make chicken tikka, achari

chicken, and bhaji. We asked him to follow our recipes, and the spice mix is
our own.

I: Did you consider hiring a chef who did not have an Indian background?

CM : We didn’t know where to source the chef from. We were asking

our friends in the Indian restaurant business and putting ads in Indian
newspapers. That is where we were getting our chefs. That is how we got
Mohan.

I: You said you cook at home. How did you learn to cook?

CM : I come from a joint family with thirteen to fourteen people. Sunday

would be a day when everyone cooked something. It was very competitive.
I had an uncle who had studied for a hotel management degree but did not
pursue a career in it. Yet, every time we would make a dish he would ask
us to break it down, analyze it. That is something I took for granted. I
thought if this is going to be my vision then I should put together the menu
and the recipes.

I: How would you characterize your relationship to the media?

CM : For the first time we have a PR rep. We were covered very early on
by New York Magazine. It seems Florence Fabricant came and ate here and
wrote about us. I did not even know that she had eaten here until I saw the
write-up.

I: Do you read online reviews?

CM : Yes, all the time. We have a Google alert every time someone posts
something on Yelp or MenuPages; we get a notification. I read it.

I: Has customer feedback influenced your concept?

CM : No, I wouldn’t say that it has. But it has influenced our service. Most
of the feedback is that the food is good but the wait is too long or the
service is bad. I make use of customer feedback to inform the cooks and
servers.
58 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Transactions in taste
Rasool and Mukherjee have designed their restaurants in Manhattan within
the constraints of their material, symbolic, and bodily resources (of skill and
imagination). One started with a $35,000 investment, a Bachelor’s degree
(from Pakistan), and the limits of his Punjabi-Pakistani masculine habitus. He
didn’t know how to cook. Now he doesn’t want to cook. That is women’s
work, servants’ labor. His food, his location in the city, his labor force, the
limits of his skills and imagination, have set his restaurant adrift from even any
generic notion of Indian food. On the other hand, he is more flexible, less
invested culturally in his construction of the place, and thus willing to play
to the audience that he gets, almost all of which is local foot traffic. Rasool
characterizes his customer base as “5 percent Indian and 95 percent local.”
What he is selling more than anything else are gyros, french fries, chicken
curry and rice for lunch and dinner; eggs, toast, and coffee for breakfast. Less
than six months after our interview the Urdu sign is gone, replaced by two
large announcements for “$5.00 lunch or dinner.” Since he does not cook, his
menu and recipes are drifting more and more towards the habitus of his
“Mexican” cook and their joint understanding of American tastes, specified
by his audience of sidewalk vendors and commuters. With less capital and
less embodied skill, Rasool’s transactions with his customers have to concede
a lot more ground than Mukherjee’s, but he can fulfill their need for
nourishment. She, on the other hand, responds to her customers’ demands
for better service but not for different food, which she treats as a cultural
artefact. She is more successful at translating the pao as a slider, which is a
product of her greater familiarity with Anglophone-American popular culture.
Rasool does not want his three grown children or his wife to work in his
restaurants. He has enough resources to be able to keep them away, unlike,
for instance, the Latino vendors of tacos, tamales, and pupusas in Red Hook,
Brooklyn, studied by Zukin (2010).14 Additionally, Rasool has the ability to pay
$8,000 per month as rent, and his legal status, as well as his Bachelor’s
degree, which is productive of his competency in spoken English, did make
some difference during the process of applying for various permits and
paperwork. However, Zukin (2010) shows that despite the absence of these
advantages, the more materially impoverished Red Hook vendors have been
quite successful in latching onto the gastronomic “discourse” of the city. The
Red Hook vendors also don’t seem to create a dichotomy between culture
and commerce, and in fact frame their commercial venture as a cultural one,
and I think that is one of the reasons they are more successful in playing to
the gastronomic audience.
The Red Hook vendors have effectively used numerous intermediaries,
such as immigrant advocates and foodie bloggers, to successfully legitimize
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 59

their vending and accumulate substantial cultural capital as an authentic urban

space. In contrast, Rasool fails to draw himself into that “discourse.” As Stacie
Orell, a student of mine, pointed out, part of their success may be attributed
to the recent perception of Red Hook as being an up-and-coming trendy
neighborhood, whereas Rasool is in a neighborhood that doesn’t have that
sort of cultural cachet. Maybe the vendors chose their location wisely, but
then again, vendors are by definition mobile, whereas a storefront is not. Did
the vendors really draw themselves into the “discourse,” or did the “discourse”
find them by virtue of their locale? I think it is probably a little of both.
Rasool does have some degree of cultural capital, some of it embodied in
his tongue as language, and as taste, which he can remember. Furthermore,
he is forced to fit his somatic experience of Pakistani food into the category
of Indian food, which for reasons either of translation or global hierarchical
valuation appears to work better in Manhattan. For instance, as a category
in Restaurant Guides published within the telephone directories of the last
five decades, “Pakistani” fails to take hold. A high of six Pakistani restaurants
in 1969 falls to three the next decade, then two, one, and finally none at all
in 2010 (although in reality they proliferate in Jackson Heights, Queens, and
Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn). The relative paucity of national cultural capital
available to a Pakistani practically dictates that Rasool has to concede to the
demands of his audience. Yet, he resents being lumped within the category
of “Indian,” given the work of imagining contested national communities in
South Asia.
Rasool’s cultural advantages are less than those of Mukherjee, who started
with almost $100,000, a Master’s degree from a premier American university,
and the vocabulary of design that allowed her to connect the rough newness
of the vernacular to the smooth texture of the cosmopolitan omnivore. Hence,
only she can imagine the common street foods of India as containers of
capital. Approaching them through a designer’s eyes, Mukherjee grasps their
pop-cosmopolitan possibilities. But those are not her only advantages. She
can cook, partly because, as a South Asian woman of a particular cohort, she
must. She could explain to us the art of making good stuffed parathas and the
analogic taste of a kathi roll. Yet she also claims more than she can legitimately
command when she minimizes her cook’s somatic memory of making chicken
tikka, achari chicken, and bhaji.
That is not the whole story either—of gender, generation, and class. In
Mukherjee’s words, her “hotel management uncle” delivered an unusual
familiarity with cooking, which is an extraordinary accomplishment against
the Bengali grain of bhadrolok (proper, middle-class) masculinity (see Janeja
2010). This is partly where biography exceeds sociology. Cooking skills and the
ability to access what she calls a “global Indian” imagination, accentuated by
an accidental catering gig for the New York premier of Slumdog Millionaire
60 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

(after which the call of the vada pao was more insistent), connects her to
networks that are crucial to her self-conception as a successful entrepreneur.
As a designer, she coped very well with fitting her bodily habits into a new,
albeit tight, space in this large city, hinging her economics to aesthetics,
habits to consciousness, and inhabitation in a locale to global gastronomic
“discourse.”
By design I mean not only the physical infrastructure of the restaurant, but
also the concept, the name, and the menu, and the ways of reproducing it
through investment, recruitment of labor, recipes, and cooking. I use the word
design because: (1) of its ability to convey an attempt to re-make the world
within material and conceptual constraints; (2) of its functionality—you have
to deliver a certain kind of food, repeatedly, at a price, at a place; and (3) it
relates the body to space, economics to aesthetics, habits to consciousness,
and inhabitance in a locale to global gastronomic discourse. The entrepreneur
is the bridge here between capital and culture, and I have interrogated that
intersection between the aesthetic and the economic, taste and toil, and how
the practiced body holds the two together despite the academic separation of
such concerns in far-flung disciplines of economics, sociology, cultural studies,
philosophy, marketing, and design.
Yet, as a particular economic enterprise, Vada Pao failed to meet Mukherjee’s
income expectations and she had to close down her business. Rasool’s
restaurant survives today, years after our interview, while Vada Pao was
sold, replaced by another Bollywood concept. Rasool is more successful in
re-localizing his practice precisely to that street corner between Papaya Dog
and CVS, perhaps because he was never attuned to the global gastronomic
“discourse” on Indian food. What I initially presumed to be Mukherjee’s
advantage—attention to the global hierarchy of taste—may be her precise
disadvantage, making her unfit to occupy the street corner she had landed on.
Her customers may not have cared for designer Indian food, and the price they
were willing to pay for it was much lower than for French or Italian or Japanese
cuisine. That needs a broader and a longer historical frame to be explained. At
the level of specificity of the individual we do get agency in this chapter but
many of the structural features are hidden from view, for which we have to
step out of the particular restaurant and the perspective of the restaurateur,
and that takes us into the next chapter.

Notes
1 Where I have taken material only from the public domain—such as Baluchi’s
menus—identifiers have not been eliminated. Where my material is based
exclusively on interviews, names and identities have been changed.
 DREAMS OF PAKISTANI GRILL AND VADA PAO 61

2 All the interviews were conducted by Jackie Rohel, Sierra Burnett Clark, or
me, sometimes in combination, sometimes individually.
3 This is almost verbatim the same conversation that one of my doctoral
students, Grace Choi, had with a Bangladeshi restaurant owner in London.
4 Both this source and Mary Waldo’s Restaurant Guide, discussed below, were
accessed during archival research done by a student at the Museum
of the City of New York.
5 The names of the restaurant and the restaurateurs have been changed.
6 In my judgment, MenuPages provides a more comprehensive listing than
Zagat, the Yellow Pages, or Yelp. On 29 November, 2009 there were 202
self-identified Indian restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn, 85 in Queens,
and a handful in the Bronx and Staten Island, bringing the total to about 300
in NYC . On June 10, 2015 Menu Pages was listing 408 Indian restaurants in
New York City, with Manhattan 205, Brooklyn 76, Queens 127 and none in
Bronx (Menupages.com 2015).
7 The subtle linguistic displacements here would be unavailable to a body
unfamiliar with the ring of an East Bengali accent in West Bengali ears. The
researcher’s body embedded in details of tacit social practice is a useful tool
of inquiry unaccounted for in the typically single-minded pursuit of visuality.
8 All quotations from field notes.
9 Yet, neither “Hindoo” nor “Indian” restaurants are listed in any of the
following guidebooks: Appleton (1900); Rand, McNally & Co. (1901); Lewis,
Scribner & Co. (1903); Moreno (1903); Merchants’ Association of New York
(1906); Rand, McNally & Co. (1909); R. L. Polk & Co. (1920–21); Chappell
(1925). The supposed ubiquity of Indian restaurants and curry is probably a
late–1920s and 1930s phenomenon.
10 Johnston and Baumann 2007; Rao et al. 2003, 2005; Warde and Martens
2000; Warde, Martens, and Olsen 1999; Warde 1997, 2009; Ferguson 1998,
2004; Ferguson and Zukin 1995; Fine 1996; Waldinger 1986, 2001; Aldrich
and Waldinger 1990; Bailey 1987; Berger and Piore 1980.
11 Fine (1995, 1996), Ferguson (2004) and Rao et al. (2005) do pay attention to
the details of menus, media, and recipes. But their concerns do not include
immigrants and the processes of transplanting bodies. Sharon Zukin (2010),
on the other hand, does consider immigrants, but not the processes of
cooking, skill, and embodiment.
12 Once again, names have been changed, but matched to ethnicity.
13 Citation suppressed to protect identity.
14 What the vendors paid to regularize their carts wasn’t that different from
Muhammad Rasool’s upfront costs (about $35,000).
62
 3
Hierarchy of Taste and Ethnic
Difference:
American Gustatory Imagination
in a Globalizing World

A merican taste-makers—that is, journalists, restaurant critics, and

professional chefs—have framed their appropriation of twentieth-century
culinary cultures in two divergent ways: first, as high-status foreign foods,
initially limited to Continental and French cuisines, eventually consecrating
Italian and Japanese cookery at the end of the century. Second, as the low-
status product of the labor and implicit knowledge of the immigrant poor
classified as ethnic fare. The appropriation of the first sort is understood
primarily in aesthetic terms of taste and notions of skill, while the latter is
understood as a matter of necessity, primarily in terms of undifferentiated toil.
As we have seen in Chapter 1, there is a long-term pattern of ethnic
succession. Food-work done by German and Irish immigrants in the mid-
nineteenth century was carried out by Italians and eastern Europeans at the
end of the nineteenth century, who in turn were replaced by Latinos and
Asians at the end of the twentieth century. Tastes have changed too. French
cuisine gave way to New American, Japanese, and Italian cuisine in America’s
most expensive restaurants, which were accented by Asian and Latin
American ingredients at the end of the last century. There is a two-fold ethnic
succession here: one in the ethnicity of the labor force; the other in the sphere
of food served. The two are shaped by each other in counterintuitive ways. In
this chapter I read the long-term work of historians closely and interrogate
large sets of data produced by newspapers with durable print-runs, and
restaurant guides and surveys in the short run, to outline an argument about
hierarchies of taste based on race and ethnicity.1

63
64 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Public edibility
According to Rebecca Spang and Jennifer Davis, restaurants first appeared
in Paris in the 1760s as restorative places, and it was only by the late 1790s
that the word was “set loose from its moorings in the culture of medicalized
sensibility, and ‘restaurant’ became the fashionable word used for any Paris
eatery” (Spang 2000: 173; Davis 2013: 5). For a while the terminology remained
fluid between restaurants, inns with tables d’hôte, and cookshops, only to
settle again by the nineteenth century on what we would today recognize
as a restaurant—a sort of public parlor, with separate tables, individualized
table settings, printed and elaborate menus offering a wide range of dishes,
silverware, attentive service, music and lighting, lavish furnishings, and opulent
interiors, to create a private space of romance in public. “For decades into the
nineteenth century, Anglophone authors and publishers continued to italicize
the word restaurant and restaurateur, marking them and their referents not
only as foreign, but as untranslatably so, evidence that something had happened
in France that had occurred nowhere else on the planet” (Spang 2000: 175).
People have eaten out in cities for a long time and they continue to do so in
innumerable ways, but they have eaten in restaurants only since the French
Revolution, and French restaurants have provided the template for commercial
fine-dining in the West.
Restaurants emerged slowly in the USA , and only in the first decade of the
twentieth century did they outshine saloons in public discussions in American
newspapers. Figures 3.1–3.4 show the rise of the restaurant and the congruent
decline of the saloon, signaling a shift from a public culture bifurcated between

FIGURE 3.1 The rise of the restaurant and the decline of the saloon: ratio of
coverage in The New York Times (NYT ) (1851–2013).
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 65

FIGURE 3.2 The rise of the restaurant and the decline of the saloon: ratio of
coverage in the Los Angeles Times (LAT ) (1880–2013).

FIGURE 3.3 The rise of the restaurant and the decline of the saloon: ratio of
coverage in the Chicago Tribune (1850–1999).

the patrician and the working classes in the nineteenth century, marked by
the saloon and the tavern, to middle-class hegemony in the twentieth century,
shaped by the increasing number of restaurants. The American restaurant
would become a hegemonic space by way of middle-class disparagement of
the tavern, the saloon, and the aristocratic parlor, the very institutions that
restaurants were historically derived from.
66 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

FIGURE 3.4 The rise of the restaurant and the decline of the saloon: ratio of
coverage in the New York Tribune/Herald (1841–1962).

According to Sharon Salinger (2002), there were a range of class-segregated

taverns in the eighteenth century, especially between the middling sort and the
poorer ones, when these establishments were legally bound to provide food and
shelter for man and horse. Laws in most settlements in the eighteenth century
restricted tavern access to slaves, servants, sailors contracted to ships, and
women. And taverns were often distinguished by class according to the licenses
they acquired, for wine and brandy (upper class) or beer and cider (working
class), and by their location at the waterfront (laboring class) or at city centers
(gentlemen). At the cusp of the American Revolution, cities such as Philadelphia,
Boston, New York, and Charleston had one tavern per 55 to 133 residents. Per
capita concentration was the highest in New York, at one tavern per 55 people.
When in 1773 New York City had 396 licensed taverns, they were the most
important public places, as evidenced by their use as the setting for meetings
and public demonstrations around the new Sugar Act of 1764 (Smith 2014:
15). Taverns were robust sites of public discussion among free white men,
and the owners often became some of the best informed on local and national
events by aggregating talk among their various customers. Taverns were also
where militias converged and newspapers were available. The importance
of taverns declined after the Civil War, slowly rising again for a few decades,
then declining consistently in public visibility through the second half of the
twentieth century, and almost vanishing by the twenty-first century along with
the saloon.
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 67

Along with taverns, as in Europe, coffee houses were central to doing

business in the early colonial period, and sites such as the King’s Arms (probably
the first, and for a while only, coffee house in New York City), Exchange Coffee
House, the Merchant’s Coffee House on Wall Street, and the Tontine Coffee
House at the corner of Wall and Water Streets played an important role in
questions of governance and public disputation among free and established
white men. Coffee houses became less important as the patrician class
withdrew from public engagement with deepening franchise, and saloons
became more visible. Coffee houses both became more ubiquitous and
were transformed into leisurely cafés. Rather than a place of deal making, they
became less political and more consumption oriented. Cafés themselves
declined in importance from the pre-Civil War era, to hit a low in the 1880s,
rising temporarily in public discussions in the 1890s and 1900s, declining slowly
after the Second World War, to rise again in importance from the 1980s onwards
and hit a high in the 2010s, signaling the rebirth of café society, leisure, and
informalization.
The saloon was the dominant working class public space through the
nineteenth century, into the first decade of the twentieth century, when
restaurants replaced it consistently across the major urban print-media
markets. The saloon and the restaurant so dominate the nineteenth and the
twentieth centuries respectively that they hide the more subtle movements
of taverns and coffee houses.
Restaurants became visible in the first half of the nineteenth century
(in 1830) and became a durable semi-public institution by the middle of that
century. Delmonico’s, the most durable of the lot, began in 1827 as a modest
confectionary run by two eponymous Swiss brothers. They expanded their
operation to a restaurant in the Parisian model by 1830 and hired a French
chef. By the 1840s, Delmonico’s had become a destination for downtown
elites, with a printed menu in French and English, pages of entrées and wines,
and lavish appointments. Grand hotels’ dining rooms such as Astor House
began to play in the same domain of haute cuisine by the mid-century. In the
1850s, dinner at Delmonico’s would set the customer back by at least two
dollars, which was two days of a manual laborer’s wages (Lobel 2014: 121).
That was in contrast to the sixpenny working-class eatery and the twelve-cent
chop house for the commuting middle classes. At the bottom of the pile of
eateries was probably the oyster cellar, which provided some rare opportunity
for African-American entrepreneurs such as Thomas Downing, who ran
arguably the most famous such establishment from 1825 to the 1860s and
died a rich man, reportedly with a fortune of over $100,000. This was the time
when ice-cream parlors also began to expand to attract ladies excluded from
many eateries. One of them, Taylor’s Epicurean Palace, set the mid-nineteenth
century standard for a sumptuous feminine parlor, with a darkened and
68 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

subdued atmosphere, built at a cost of a million dollars with daily receipts of

$900 (Lobel 2014: 129).
For the 160-odd years (1851–2014) for which we have the print-run of major
American newspapers such as The New York Times and the Los Angeles
Times (Figure 3.5), we can see a persistent mention of public eating and
drinking places such as cafés, saloons, taverns, and restaurants in 3–8 percent
of documents (articles, advertisements, reviews). There is a slow upward
trend over the whole print-run that spikes up to 6 percent in the 1920s, and
then again since the 1980s into the 2010s, marking the two heights of
American discussions of eateries. Once restaurants become dominant sites
of public discussion in the Anglophone print media in the United States, we
also see the increasing discursive valence of articles and reviews (about food

FIGURE 3.5 Percentage of documents with the words “café”, “saloon”, “tavern”,
and “restaurant” combined in the New York Tribune/Herald, NYT , Chicago Tribune,
and LAT (ca. 1851–2013).

FIGURE 3.6 Twin peaks of public discussion of restaurants in the US.

 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 69

and drinks), especially since the mid-1990s, when they outstrip classifieds. In
the first decades of the twenty-first century the cultural and critical discussion
begins to outweigh the commercial media.

Retrospective ethnics
In his path-breaking book Revolution at the Table, labor historian turned food
scholar Harvey Levenstein reaches the conclusion that early Americans never
liberated themselves from the British culinary heritage, though they tended to
eat more corn, pork, and molasses, imbibe more whiskey and cider, and drink
less tea and ale (Levenstein 2003). This pattern of culinary Anglo-conservatism
“continued to be the case after 1783, even though the proportion of immigrants
of non-British origin rose” (Levenstein 2003: 4). It was the Germans who most
strongly influenced American cooking by the mid-nineteenth century.
Many of the immigrant families, visible in the earliest US Census records,
with their daily imperative of working, shopping, cleaning, and cooking, figure
prominently in Jane Ziegelman’s popular book 97 Orchard. An Edible History
of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (2010).2 Structured as
vignettes of succeeding families at one address (97 Orchard Street in New
York City), Ziegelman tells the compelling stories of the German Glockners
and Irish Moores of the 1860s, eastern European Jewish Gumpertzs a few
decades later, and the Rogarshevskys and the Baldizzis of the early twentieth
century. This is a story about how immigrants have transformed American
palates and food businesses.
Food is at the center of her analysis, but so is labor: how tenement
housewives were like “freight elevators, hauling groceries, coal, firewood,
and children up and down endless flights of stairs” (Ziegelman 2010: 7). Her
stories maintain a crucial balance between taste and toil (without which
discernment merely measures the consumption of other people’s hard work).
The story of food, cooking, and housework is interwoven with a history of
gendered shopping in public markets such as the Essex Street Market and the
Fulton Market.
Butcher-turned-historian Thomas De Voe’s extensive work on the city’s
already declining public markets (Browne 1869; De Voe 1862) registered a
two-fold shift by the mid-nineteenth century. In 1843, the Common Council of
the City of New York had repealed the law that required meats to be sold only
in public markets by licensed butchers. De Voe came from a long line of native
butchers who made a comfortable living because of the higher entry costs
into the trade due to the licensing and access to established social networks
necessary to gain admittance to a market stall. Deregulation destroyed that
protection and immigrant butchers—Irish and German—poured in, which
70 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

became a necessity as the city spread from its northern limits on Chamber
Street (in 1790) to Fifty-fifth Street on the eve of the Civil War, leaving behind
the dozen markets clustered on the edges of Lower Manhattan. The shift was
from city-supported, public market monopolies, to a more laissez-faire system
of private shops (a Census counted over 2,200 by the 1850s) that could keep
up with the spreading and class-segregating population by neighborhoods
(Lobel 2014; Horowitz 2005, 2008; De Voe 1862).
The population had doubled every decade in the first half of the nineteenth
century—due to Irish and German immigration—and the spaces of a walking
city of commerce and residence gave way to functional and class stratification.
Native-born Protestant butchers reacted by aligning with similarly threatened
shoemakers, tailors, and printers in forming the American Republican Party,
which won 23 percent of the vote in 1842 but failed to reverse the tide of a
shifting immigrant-based small-entrepreneurial market in the feeding, clothing,
and shoe-making trades (Lobel 2014: 58). By 1834, German immigrants had
already opened the first brewery. In particular, Bavarian brewers such as
George Gillig, Joseph Doegler, Frederick and Maximilian Schaefer, and Franz
Ruppert would become crucial in the shift in the taste of American beer, and
by 1872 there were seventy lager breweries in New York (Smith 2014: 107).
Levenstein finds evidence, by the 1880s, of a bifurcated working class. The
well-off skilled and semi-skilled comprised one side, consisting mainly of white
native-born Americans and immigrants of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and northern
European ancestry who ate more meat, eggs, potatoes, and more fruits and
vegetables, much of it canned, than their United Kingdom counterparts (2003:
100–1). On the other hand, there were “new immigrants,” mostly of central,
eastern, and southern European ancestry, all with lower skills in the labor
market, which were reinforced by ethnic disdain.
The latter were the target of new professionals—settlement house workers,
home economists, nutritionists, and public health advocates—each seeking “to
teach the immigrants how to Americanize their diets in an economical fashion”
(Levenstein 2003: 103). Levenstein notes that this evangelical enthusiasm did
not derive from smug self-satisfaction about their own food culture but from
their scientific expertise. “Nutritional science reinforced what their palates and
stomachs already told them: that any cuisine as coarse, overspiced, ‘garlicky,’
and indelicate-looking as the food of central, eastern, and southern Europe
must be unhealthy as well” (Levenstein 2003: 103–4).
Ziegelman records the conflicts and confluence of the taste of reformers
and immigrants as inscribed on the Bill of Fare for the Immigrant Dining Room
at Ellis Island. She also notes how in the mid-nineteenth century, “the Irish
were big in the fish and oyster business, Germans worked as dairymen, grocers,
and butchers,” and how immigrant food purveyors fed their own communities
and the rest of the city (Ziegelman 2010: 27). From the first decades of the
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 71

nineteenth century, immigrants were peddlers of fruits, vegetables, and fish,

bakers of bread, slaughterers of livestock, waiters, cooks, and brewers of
beer—shifting with the shifting populace from high alcohol English ales, to the
crisp, bottom-brewed, refreshing German lagers that would come to characterize
American brews. German immigrants established groceries, delicatessens,
beer halls, bakeries, and butcher shops, which served as both community
spaces and sites of transmission of the taste for comestibles among outsider
cohorts, “where the native-born could sample their first bratwurst, or pretzel or
glass of lager” (Ziegelman 2010: 55).
American scholarship on food has paid the most attention to the 20 million
or so “new immigrants” between 1880 and 1924. That is partly driven by the
density of documentary collections powered by Progressive Era enthusiasm
to reform the food habits of immigrants. In We Are What We Eat, Donna
Gabaccia develops the argument that Americans have always been creoles
with hybrid tastes. By the end of the colonial era, “region more than ethnicity
defined American identities” (Gabaccia 1998: 35).
The gradual formation of the national food market, along with railroads and
roadways, and the mass media revolution (print, radio, and TV ), in alliance with
new refrigeration technologies, produced a national diet. But the immigrant
labor that made the national market possible at the end of the nineteenth and
in the early twentieth centuries also produced enclave eating, as racism,
xenophobia, and cheap housing contained new immigrants in demarcated
urban neighborhoods. That is also where the ethnic entrepreneur operated,
supplying the produce of the old land which was often new to the rest of
Americans, such as Napa cabbage and radishes introduced by Japanese
farmers in California, and broccoli, wine grapes, figs, and olive oil by Italians.
Sometimes, small eateries and restaurants evolved from grocery stores, a
delicatessen, or a family boarding house (Gabaccia 1998: 81). Andrew Smith,
the prolific historian of New York City food, shows how a number of
immigrants—such as the German-born sugar refiner William Havemeyer, the
Austrian-born candy maker Leo Hirschfield, Carl and Peter Luger of steakhouse
fame, and Richard Hellman, the mayonnaise baron—entered and dominated
the earliest food businesses in baking, butchering, sugar refining, candy
making, groceries, canning, and pickling (Smith 2014: 17–69).
Corporate nationalization on one hand, and ghettoization of the poor urban
immigrant population on the other, produced two scripts on American cuisine.
One eroded ethnic and regional accents to claim mass-produced foods as
national icons where hot dogs, Cracker Jacks, fried chicken, and Fritos lost
their ethnic signifiers. Then there were ethnic enclaves such as Chinatown
and Little Italy catering to insiders.
Hasia R. Diner’s comparative work on immigrant cuisines, Hungering for
America, asks: how did America transform the taste of immigrants? She crafts
72 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

her project around two subsidiary queries: what is the fundamental difference
between pre-immigration and post-immigration foodways of the Italians,
the Irish, and eastern European Jews in the United States; and why did the
Italians and eastern European Jews develop an American identity around the
specificity of their foods while the Irish did not? (Diner 2001).
The most important difference between pre- and post-immigration foodways,
she notes, is abundance. Rosolino Mormino, a resident of Napoleonville,
Louisiana, wrote his brother in Italy with telling eloquence: “In America bread is
soft, but life is hard” (Diner 2001: 48). A dietary study of Italians, done by the US
Department of Agriculture and Hull House in the 1890s around Chicago, reported
that olive oil become essential to Italian identity, as did meat. “In Italy few from
the lower classes ate [meat] more often than three times a year. In America
meat appeared regularly on their menus” (Diner 2001: 56). Dishes that continued
to keep their Italian names, such as minestra (vegetable soup), got richer
and more complicated. “Pizza in Roseta Valforte [in Italy] was a flat, thin disc of
bread with salt and oil. In Roseto, Pennsylvania, tomatoes, onions, and anchovies
gradually covered the dough” (Diner 2001: 53). Migration effectively elevated
the cuisine of the poor Italian to that of their elites.
Class elevation also occurred with eastern European Jewish food after
immigration. “The formerly poor started to eat blintzes, kreplach, kasha-
varnitchkes, strudel, noodles, knishes, and, most importantly, meat every day.
Their once meager cabbage or beet borschts now glistened with fat” (Diner
2001: 180). Marcus Ravage, a Rumanian Jewish migrant in New York in 1900,
noted with astonishment, “In New York, every night was Friday night and
every day was Saturday [sabbath], as far as food went” (Ravage 1917: 75–6).
Furthermore, a national cuisine was born in the diaspora which eventually de-
emphasized regional styles. Angelo Pellegrini wrote that immigrants came to
America “ignorant of cuisines beyond their own regions. In the Little Italy of the
American metropolis the southern Italian ultimately learned about osso buco
and veal scaloppini, and his neighbor . . . from the north met up with pizza and
eggplant Parmesan” (Pellegrini 1971). Furthermore, as Niccola de Quattrociocchi,
a native of Palermo, wrote in the 1920s, “One evening [while strolling in New
York], we went to an Italian restaurant where I was introduced to two very fine,
traditional American specialties called ‘spaghetti with meatballs,’ and ‘cotoletta
parmigiana’ . . . I found both extremely satisfying and I think someone in Italy
should invent them for the Italians over there” (de Quattrociocchi 1950: 30).
Other new elements crept into their repertoire, such as the drinking of beer
with their food rather than wine (Diner 2001: 60).
Diner argues that “The Italian story may best represent the experiences of
most immigrants” (2001: 26). In The Migrant’s Table, I show that the more
recent Bengali-American story at the turn of the twentieth and the twenty-
first centuries is different precisely because the respondents in my study
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 73

were more affluent both in their native contexts and in the New World (Ray
2004). The hagiography of American abundance among Irish and eastern
European Jews, or even the muted critique of American foods and tastes
by Italian-Americans, stand in sharp contrast to the attitude of the Bengali-
American interlocutors in my study. Only two of my respondents, out of 126,
mentioned abundance, while others were highly critical of American foods.
That is mostly because of their class background, the way they have crafted
an identity that left behind the hunger of their poorer compatriots, and because
they take full advantage of the cultural terrain, absorbing the current normative
critique of American foods. Bengalis have culturally benefited from their
re-insertion in a world where the excesses and limits of the agro-industrial
system and its consequences on the body—in terms of both taste and
health—have become common sense.

Ethnic food and the long shadow

of gustatory difference
Between 1851 and 2013, the words “ethnic” and “restaurant” are found
together on more than eight thousand instances in The New York Times (NYT ).
The first article using both those terms separately, was published on October
8, 1959, titled “Use of Native Spices Adds Interest to Unusual Cuisine of
Balinese,” and was written by the NYT ’s first serious restaurant critic, Craig
Claiborne. On the other hand, the phrase “ethnic restaurant” can be identified
on 273 instances, with Claiborne leading that category again, on July 15, 1964,
with an article titled “Variety of French Food Sampled on West Coast.”3
There were 631 hits for “ethnic food,” with the lead article by James J.
Nagle, titled “Tastes Widening for Kosher Food” on November 6, 1960.4 Thus
the phrases “ethnic food” and “ethnic restaurant” became visible in the NYT
from the 1960s onwards, and each one of those articles was about the food
of a group that was not considered to be a part of the normative mainstream—
to wit, “one hundred percent Americans” (Edwards 1982)—by the author. The
use of the term “ethnic restaurant” peaked in the 1970s, slowly declining into
the 2000s, for which The New York Times index identifies only eleven records
in 2010, and none at all in 2013. It appears that the era of “ethnicity” as a catch-
all category between race and nation may be ending among high-status
journalists, which is precisely the time to take a look back at its half-century-
long career in defining the American relationship to gustatory difference.
There are no references to either of the phrases—“ethnic food” or “ethnic
restaurant”—in the American Periodicals Series, which is a comprehensive
collection of periodicals published in the United States from 1741 to 1850.
74 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

“Ethnic” appears on its own in that collection, in a March 1805 issue of the
General Assembly’s Missionary Magazine, only to distinguish non-Christians
from Christians. That is congruent with the idea of “ethnicity,” which is derived
from the Greek noun ethnos, meaning nation or people, and is used to refer
both to people in general and “other” people in particular (Sollors 1997: x–xi).
On October 8, 1959, Craig Claiborne writes, “Because New York is a city
of sophistication and with tremendously different ethnic groups, the public
here has extraordinary opportunities to dine on the ‘exotic’ fare of a hundred
regions,” marking the new dispensation towards gustatory difference. “One
of the most fascinating of the many Far Eastern restaurants here is A Bit of
Bali . . . Since the management obviously has respect for authenticity, dining
there can be a rewarding adventure,” he concludes, anxious that the thing
barely grasped would elude his reach (Claiborne 1959). That is a concern still
contemporary to our own times—the search for difference and the fear that
contact will contaminate the exotic.
Of course, there had been exotic food long before the 1960s, but Americans
did not call it ethnic. On August 6, 1871, the NYT noted, “the fact is patent
that restaurants and boarding-houses are fast multiplying, and threaten at no
distant day to usurp the place of the family dinner table as well as the family
mansion” (New York Times 1871). Anxieties about the “domestic” in its
multiple resonances—of family, home, hearth, and nation—are typical in much
of the commentary on “restaurants” at this time, which are mostly referred to
as “German, French, and Italian Dining-Saloons” into the late 1920s.
Restaurants clearly belonged to the demimonde and would only replace
saloons as new sites of middle-class sociability as the century progressed.
Yet, there is a hint of urban excitement often balanced by ethnic disgust.
One can see the excitement in an 1852 piece on Philadelphia subtitled an “Era
of Saloonism,” which ends with the following:

Scores of waiters, like dumb mutes, stand ready to receive your orders,
and to convey them to that concealed and invisible sanctuary whence
issues so many multitudinous preparations, whose fantastic names tickle
the ear, and whose superlative qualities please and exhilarate the palate . . .
You are persuaded that, lost in the mazes of the city, you have entered, by
accident, into some secret avenue, which has conducted you into an
elysian state of existence—some Mahomedian paradise, adorned with
marble and gold; perfumed with frankincense and myrrh; and lighted by the
brilliant eyes of beautiful houris (Victor 1852: 2)

Perhaps the earliest instance of even-handed and systematic coverage of

New York City eateries—cheap and exalted—was conducted by the New York
Daily Tribune in 1845, when it counted 123 “eating houses or refectories”
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 75

(excluding oyster bars), listing the name of the owner and their location. These
establishments provided employment to nearly a thousand Germans and Irish
immigrants, the author noted, where, for fifteen to sixteen hours of work a
day, waiters were paid ten to twelve dollars a month, plus room and board,
while cooks were paid between eight and ten, and dish-washers made four to
five dollars (New York Daily Tribune 1845: 5).
This mid-nineteenth-century equanimity, even some urban excitement for
the exotic, recedes by the 1880s, precisely when immigration takes off, until
we get someone like Helen Bullitt Lowry in the 1920s, who had to rehabilitate
and normalize the “old world” of Greeks, Jews, and Italians through their
foods in New York. According to Gabaccia this is when American food was
both nationalized due to technological developments in transportation and
refrigeration, and ghettoized in the ethnic enclave (1998). Until the 1920s,
ethnic food was often subject to open disgust even in reputable newspapers
which carried titles such as “Found in Garbage-Boxes Stuff that is Utilized
for Food by Some People” (NYT 1883) and shrill announcements such as
“An Octopus Eaten by Chinamen” (NYT 1880). We also see a less insidious
ethnocentrism about monotonous and insipid “Teutonic cookery,” where all
the meats taste the same and is slathered over by the same viscous sauce
(NYT 1898). Distaste and disdain clearly mark the outer boundary of a civilized
taste community. Only the democratizing process of the mid-twentieth
century Civil Rights Movement would make such attitudes appear crude and
impolite, in due course.
In contrast to ethnic places, society restaurants such as Delmonico’s are
welcomed with open arms. On April 7, 1862, the NYT warmly embraced the
new up-town location of Delmonico’s with the following words:

When the best families were clustered around the Bowling-green, and
gentlemen dandies who promenaded on the Battery were expected to
wear white kid gloves, the name DELMONICO first became known to the
lovers of good living in the City . . . The establishment (which was formerly
the mansion of Mr. MOSES II . GRINNELL ) has been fitted up with
faultless taste, and is without any exception, the handsomest place of this
kind in the City (capitalization in original; NYT 1862: 5).

Every new location of Delmonico’s was received with rapture, and contained
by some vague patrician referent such as “formerly the mansion of Mr. Moses.”
And every society ball held in one of these venerated restaurants was
announced with much fanfare in the dailies. On January 19, 1873, the NYT
published a long and relatively even-handed piece titled “German Restaurants.”
According to the un-named author, they are distinguished by their cheapness
and abundance—a consistent ethnic marker. They are said to serve “the odd
76 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

things that foreigners love,” along with the roasts, pumpkin pies, and dumplings
that Americans prefer. For the Frenchman there is “lentil soup, in which
masses of Bologna sausage are floating, while the Irishman is vigorously to
[sic] work on something like fish-balls smothered in red cabbage,” all of which
is served with an “enormous supply of coarse German bread.” One customer
orders a “weiner snitzel—a tremendous name, which, however, when brought,
is only veal cutlet with the bone removed.” Another “says he feels delicate,
and will have calf’s tongue with raisins. This delectable dish, when it makes its
appearance, is not very inviting in appearance.” For all this, the author notes,
the “price marked on the carte is fifteen cents. Further investigation into the
mysteries of German cuisine shows beef a la mode served with macaroni a
very peculiar but highly satisfactory way of eating it,” all served by waiters who
are “clearly German” (NYT 1873: 5).
That mix of inviting exoticism and disdain continued into the first decades
of the twentieth century when Helen Morgan, in an article, referencing
the emerging omnivorousness, titled “Our Wide Taste in Food,” could write:
“Strange dishes have been taken from one home to another, until, as a
consequence, an American family of 1935 might reasonably concoct a meal
like this: fruit cocktail, sauerkraut, spaghetti, mutton or lamb or meat balls, corn
on the cob, garlic salad and apple pie.” She assures us that “Undoubtedly any
one subject to [such] nightmares would not survive, yet such a hodge-podge
is not impossible” (Morgan 1935: SM 17). From our vantage point, marked by
even greater mixing, the menu hardly looks a hodge-podge. But the ethnic as
exotic, and maybe as someone with slightly disgusting eating habits, continues
as a minor theme even after cultural democratization. We can smell traces of
it as late as 1999, when Richard Weir writes “Not for the Faint of Palate. Guinea
Pig, Cow’s Spleen, All Part of City’s Diet.”

Popularity and prestige

When we classify the talk on restaurants in the American print media as related
to ethnicity over the last 150 years (which is about the outer limit of the print-run
of major American newspapers), we find that the data on restaurants is too thin
until about 1880 to make any generalizations. Figure 3.7 shows that French,
German, and Chinese restaurants dominated the conversation in the decades
after the Civil War. Discussions about French restaurants increased in the last
decades of the nineteenth century with their increasing popularity among the
elite, and interest in Chinese restaurants subsided modestly, while the category
“German restaurant” fell off precipitously through the First and the Second
World Wars. It is since the 1940s that interest in Italian restaurants has increased,
and it continues to climb. The persistence of Chinese restaurants in public
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 77

FIGURE 3.7 Comparative popularity of cuisines over time: NYT 1881–2013.

consciousness is remarkable, although their relative decline is understandable

given greater competition from numerous other exotic cuisines since the 1970s.
Italian restaurants climbed in terms of volume in American discourse only after
Italian immigration fell off. In comparison, French restaurants came from a high
point in the first decades of the twentieth century to fall in comparative popularity
in public discourse to below 10 percent in 2013, where they sit today with
Japanese and Mexican. The French trajectory is unrelated to immigration, as its
foreign status trumped its ethnic limits long ago. Nevertheless, the high-status
French category has been losing out to Japanese and New American cuisines,
which are recently resurgent haute cuisine categories.
Over the last 150 years, the discussion about German and Continental
restaurants has declined, the first precipitously and the second consistently.
The German case is an intriguing instance of invisibility due to ubiquity.
Germanic cuisine was everywhere and could not be distinguished from the
standard American diet of meat, potatoes, dairy, and lager beer—and anti-
German sentiments through the two World Wars squashed any residual
possibilities of a nominally distinct culinary identity. Categories of cuisine that
increase in visibility after the 1960s are quite remarkable, because in general
the ratio for almost all cuisine declines because of the increasing number of
named cuisines, related to omnivorous tastes.
I wanted to measure the difference between the coverage of ethnic
restaurants in the NYT and other national newspapers. An analysis of the
NYT , LAT , and Chicago Tribune throughout their print-runs show a marked
similarity of coverage, where French, Italian, and Chinese restaurants are the
most discussed, followed by Japanese, American, and Mexican. Most articles
about restaurants in major American newspapers are about Italian restaurants,
78 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

showing two peaks in the coverage: one in the 1881–1890 period, mostly
focused on cheap eateries; and then once again after 1981. The popularity of
Italian cuisine is given a fillip by accumulating prestige, as it begins to lose
its ethnic status and acquire haute markers in major markets. In a report
titled Ethnic Cuisine II (2000) the National Restaurant Association noted
that, according to their study based on a survey of 1,230 customers, while
younger customers sought out Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, and Japanese, older
customers often opted for Italian, among others, which is “so well known and
prevalent that” it is “no longer considered ethnic.” This is a development that
I will discuss in some detail later. The most visible difference between the
major media markets is that, predictably, the Los Angeles Times covers
Mexican cuisine more extensively than do the Chicago Tribune or The New
York Times (where it is covered minimally).
In addition to newspapers, I have most closely analyzed data from Zagat,
MenuPages and Michelin surveys, which shows the rising popularity of some
cuisines such as Italian, declining popularity of others such as Continental,
and the surprisingly stalemated location of Chinese cuisine, along with the
dramatic increase in the prestige of Japanese, New American, Spanish, and
Greek. Before I elucidate what various surveys show about the popularity and
prestige of various cuisines, which is the hierarchy I am interested in
delineating, let me say a few things about the strengths and limitations of the
surveys themselves.
Michelin is the most recent guide to the New York City market (entering it
in 2005) and sometimes considered the most high-brow, to a fault, especially
when snobbery has been on decline, as most sociologists of culture claim
(increasingly replaced by omnivorousness, according to Peterson and Kern
1996; Johnston and Bauman, 2010). Nevertheless, Michelin guides are highly
respected among chefs, and argued over, because of their long history
of game-changing reviews of French cuisine in France, the high temple of
Western culinarity. They also tend to be the most expansive, the evaluation
conducted by anonymous inspectors (some French and some American), and
the most idiosyncratic. Their claim is that they are “meticulously researched,
objective recommendations to approximately 950 delicious restaurants in the
Big Apple, a city where cuisine reigns supreme” (Michelin 2014). Michelin
is insistent that it is not a directory, thus only the best make the cut, and
that their evaluators are anonymous “local” inspectors (this was added
after widespread discussion surrounding early editions as too French, and
ham-handed about local modes of judgment).
Zagat, on the other hand, is a middle-brow product, born of an impulse of
the eponymous lawyer couple and their friends. It is sedate, not very populist
or avant garde, but considered comfortably middle class, in the sense of
reflecting the tastes of thousands of its reviewers, mostly professionals, who
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 79

eat at their own expense and provide details in a self-volunteered survey.

Zagat-rated restaurants are neither exhaustive nor randomized. The Zagat
Guidebooks were begun in 1979, limited to New York City, and formalized in
1980, but no public version is available at the Library of Congress from before
1986 (which is the earliest one I cite in a number of Figures and Tables below).
The selection gets filtered through two layers of opinion-makers. First, tens
of thousands of self-selecting surveyors volunteer to rate a restaurant. Next,
it reflects the preferences of the editors themselves, who cull the reviews
and assign overall scores by no publicly discussed system. Yet, in spite of
these weaknesses, Zagat reviews do reveal some trends as opinion makers.
Accordingly, the 2014 Zagat NYC is the product of surveys undertaken by
“38,000 avid diners like you” (Zagat 2013), who evaluated 2,050 restaurants
(most of which are listed by Zagat staff on the survey instrument and some of
which are volunteered by reviewers). Zagat does not reveal its method of
collation and classification. It appears mostly to be staff judgment based on
survey inputs, with the previous year’s survey as the baseline, taking into
account the preceding year’s collated chatter in print and digital media.
One of the more populist digital listings, accounting for the largest number
of restaurants, is Menupages. I provide an illustrative example in Table 3.1
below. In January 2014, Menupages listed 2,020 Chinese restaurants in New
York City, compared to 62 by Zagat 2014 (print), and 61 by Michelin (print). In
all, Menupages lists 16,234 restaurants in NYC , out of an estimated total of
about 25,383 eating and drinking establishments (based on municipal tax,
health, and labor law statistics), compared to a Zagat total of 2,084, and a
Michelin total of 939.
At the end of 2013, Menupages further strengthened its populist credentials
by initiating the first comprehensive list of eateries in the more working-
class borough (compared to Manhattan) of Queens, which is a residential
neighborhood of some of the greatest ethnic diversity in the United States
and has for decades been a destination for gourmets in search of authentic
Asian and Latin American cuisines.
Now to the substantive claims based on the surveys discussed above.
Zagat data can be used fruitfully to show the popularity of certain kinds
of ethnically marked cuisines among the Anglophone, middle-brow public,
especially in contrast to the more popular Menupages (or Yelp), and the more
high-brow Michelin. Zagat surveys confirm the evidence from newspapers
that Italian restaurants have been popular and have consistently made up
more than 25 percent of rated restaurants between 1986 (earliest publicly
available data) and 2014. In contrast, French restaurants have declined in
terms of percentage of all restaurants rated, to just under 10 percent from a
high of 24 percent in 1986. Continental cuisine has declined precipitously in
popularity among the middle-brow, to just under 1 percent of listed restaurants
80 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

TABLE 3.1 Michelin, Zagat, Menupages coverage of NYC restaurants

in 2014

Ethnic/national Michelin 2014 Zagat 2014 Menupages

Categories (print) (print) (accessed Jan 2, 2014)

American 93 260 1,006

Chinese 61 56 2,020

Contemporary 104 n.a. n.a.

Continental 0 9 0

Filipino 0 0 23

French 42 174 347

Greek 19 30 143

Indian 21 40 383

Italian 146 371 1,945

Japanese 82 99 941

Korean 22 13 219

Mexican 42 44 960

Nuevo Latino 0 16 89

Soul 7 4 0

Spanish 22 26 125

Southern 7 21 159

Thai 16 36 387

Vietnamese 8 20 136

Others 720 860 n.a.

Numbers listed 939 2,084 16,234

Number of categories 61 98 48

from a high of 10 percent in 1986. Chinese restaurants have also declined

in relative popularity, but less precipitously, from a high of 8 percent of all
Zagat-rated New York City restaurants in 1986, to a low of four percent by
2010, rising to 5 percent in 2014. On the other hand, American and Japanese
restaurants have improved their position to about 20 percent in the case of
the former and 8 percent in the case of the latter.
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 81

How does the NYC case compare with the data from other American cities?
Table 3.2 shows that among the most visible, counted, and recommended
cuisines there is substantial similarity between NYC , Chicago, Los Angeles,
and San Francisco, with some interesting variations. What has been classified
as American or New American cuisine is substantially less ubiquitous in NYC
(19 percent) than in Chicago (32 percent), Los Angeles (33 percent), or San
Francisco (36 percent). New York City diners are more omnivorous at the higher
end of the market than the others. Yet, both NYC and San Francisco are
much more Francophile (at 13 percent each) than Los Angeles or Chicago

TABLE 3.2 Comparative popularity of ethno-nationally-marked

Zagat-rated restaurants in four selected US cities in 2010

NYC Chicago LA SF
Ethnicity/nationality
% % % %

American 19 32 33 36

Chinese 4 4 4 4

Continental 1 1 1 0

French 13 9 8 13

Greek 2 2 1 0

Indian 3 3 2 2

Italian 28 19 20 15

Japanese 7 8 11 6

Korean 1 1 1 1

Mediterranean 5 3 4 8

Mexican/Tex-Mex 3 6 6 4

Pizza 6 6 3 4

Soul/South 2 2 1 2

Spanish 2 2 1 2

Thai 3 2 2 2

Vietnamese 1 1 1 2

TOTAL MARKED 1 100% 100% 100% 100%

1
Due to rounding, not all columns add up to 100.
82 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

(9 percent each). Italian continues to be the most popular haute cuisine in NYC
(28 percent), while it is about half as popular in San Francisco (15 percent, partly
because the category “California Cuisine” includes a variety of Mediterranean
options), and a little more than half as popular in Chicago (19 percent) or Los
Angeles (20 percent). San Franciscans prefer a broader range of Mediterranean
cuisines than residents of other cities. Predictably, Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisines
do much better in Chicago and Los Angeles than in NYC and San Francisco. Yet,
it is difficult to ascertain from the Zagat data whether these are local preferences
or outsider-tourist choices because although Zagat claims its surveyors are local,
it is primarily used by tourists.
If we follow the trend lines (Figure 3.8), it appears that an American
restaurant cuisine has been born, at least discursively, in the last two decades
of the twentieth century, and a foreign cuisine—Japanese—is beginning to
complement another foreign cuisine—French—in the estimation of American
taste-makers. Here we reach a question of classification and its consequences.
I call Japanese and French cuisine “foreign,” rather than “ethnic,” foods for a
simple reason: demographics. In the 2012 American Community Survey (ACS ),
less than 1 percent of the NYC population claimed a French ancestry (67,761,
to be precise, out of a total of a little over 8 million residents), yet 10 percent of
Zagat-rated restaurants with clear ethno-national markers are French. Similarly,
only 25,672 people living in NYC claimed Japanese ancestry yet 5 percent
of Zagat-rated New York City restaurants are Japanese. At the other end of
the social hierarchy of taste we see, for instance, that 5 percent of rated
restaurants are Mexican/Tex-Mex restaurants (classified as such in the guides)
for a Mexican population that adds up to 308,952 (which is distinct from

FIGURE 3.8 Popularity of major Zagat-rated cuisines in NYC (1986–2014).

 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 83

2 million other Latinos in New York City, whose cuisine mostly does not
register in the Zagat guides).
Check averages in Zagat-rated New York City restaurants listed in Table 3.3
also show a clear hierarchy of taste if price is considered a surrogate for
status. Japanese restaurants have leapfrogged from number six in terms of
price in 1986 to the second rank in 2010. In 2011 (not shown in the table below
to avoid clutter), Japanese restaurants were the most expensive restaurants
in NYC . Another upwardly mobile cuisine is Greek, moving up from twelfth
in 1986 to fifth in 2010. There is also the steady promotion of American
and Spanish cuisines. Older ethnic categories such as Southern, Mexican,
Chinese, and even Thai have all suffered in their prestige ranking, due partly to
cheap ubiquity and partly to the call of the new Asian categories such as
Japanese, Indian, and Vietnamese. The Italian case is perhaps the only
exception, where we have seen both the proliferation of cheap ubiquity and
the high price/prestige category, and I will address that issue below.
Note that the top two cuisines in 2010 (see Table 3.3) are, for the lack of
a better word, foreign foods. The top six cuisines, with the exception of
Japanese, are ones which have come to be identified with white folks (also
with high per capita income).5 Among them, only Italian has significant
demographic weight in terms of the ancestry data of New Yorkers.
In Table 3.3 there is a pattern in terms of the distribution of the “Very
Expensive” to the “Inexpensive” restaurants—Columns F, G, H, and I—as it
relates to ethnicity. The higher ranking cuisines—French and Japanese—are
the only ones that reach double digits in terms of percentage distribution of
Very Expensive restaurants (Column I). American and Italian follow closely,
with almost half the restaurants in the Expensive category (Column H). The
middle group around Greek restaurants clusters mostly in the “Moderately
expensive” category (Column G). Most of the restaurants in the Chinese, Tex-
Mex, and Soul categories cluster in the “Inexpensive” category (Column F).
The one difference between Chinese, on one hand, and Tex-Mex and Soul, on
the other hand, is that there are a substantial number of “Expensive” Chinese
restaurants, while there are no Soul or Tex-Mex restaurants in that category.
Furthermore, Mexican, at number eight, does much better than Tex-Mex, at
number 15, affirming the prestige of foreign foods in the American imagination.
Proximity to poor ethnics undermines the prestige of a cuisine (as measured
by price, although cheap ethnic food often acquires value as authentic). Yet,
that is not the only way the variable between the self and the other gets
weighted. American cuisine is also doing very well among the taste-makers,
at least since the 1970s, so there has been an upward adjustment in American
cultural self-conception largely in national terms. American gastronomic
nationalism has finally been born after a long gestation period of much self-
doubt, marking the belle époque of American cultural self-confidence.
84
TABLE 3.3 Hierarchy of taste: check averages of NYC Zagat-rated restaurants in 2010

Ethnicity/ Number of Rank in Average Total Inexpensive Moderately Expensive Very Expensive
nationality people in NYC terms of price of number of Restaurant as % Expensive Restaurant as Restaurant as %
claimed claiming an decreasing meal in restaurants of all restaurants Restaurant as % % of all of all restaurants
ancestry in check 2010 dollars in printed within that of all restaurants restaurants within that
2012 ACS average Zagat 2010 group (up to within that group within that group (over $66)
$25) ($26–40) group ($41–65)

A B C D E F G H I

French 67,761 1 47.81 202 4 37 47 12

Japanese 25,672 2 46.72 101 9 44 35 12

American n.a. 3 42.83 270 13 34 44 9

Italian 606,826 4 42.27 389 7 41 49 3

Greek 74,821 5 38.71 32 9 56 31 3

Spanish 8,233 6 37.73 30 3 77 20 0

Indian 205,098 7 33.85 43 26 60 14 0

Mexican 308,952 8 32.88 39 31 49 21 0

Korean 96,335 9 31.43 17 29 53 18 0

Vietnamese 15,206 10 29.08 26 39 46 15 0

Thai 4,169 11 28.63 45 40 51 9 0

 Chinese 497,788 12 28.47 63 49 32 17 2

Southern n.a. 13 28.44 24 50 38 12 0

Soul 2,059,279 14 24.50 11 64 26 0 0

Tex-Mex 15 22.00 4 50 50 0 0

Total/ 8,336,697 28.14 2,003 n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a.

Average

1
About one-third of Continental restaurants are also listed under other cuisines, mostly French.
2
7 out of 11 Soul Food restaurants are also listed under the category Southern.
3
“Spanish” population in column 1 is distinct from Latino.
4
African-American population is cited in the ancestry column for Soul due to the association.
5
Totals and averages are for the whole city and include other ethnicities/nationalities not listed in the table.

85
86 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

My hypothesis is that American taste-makers have a threefold classification

system by which they venerate a few foreign cuisines in turn (Continental,
French, and Japanese) or “slum it” with the real ethnics (Soul Food, Tex-Mex,
Dominican, etc.). Falling somewhere between the two poles are Chinese,
Indian, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese food—all Asian, by the way, which hints
at a larger dynamic of cultural capital at work in the global political economy of
signs which is, I think, unrelated to food per se. Ethnic foods never reach the
heights of foreign foods. But some ethnic foods do better than others, which
is related to the per capita income of the group (as shown in the previous
footnote). My related hypothesis is that the popularity of a particular ethnic
cuisine among the middling sorts is unrelated to the total number of people of
a particular heritage: in fact the two may be inversely related. Italian cuisine
brings an interesting complexity to that pattern. American cuisine, on the
other hand, evokes an association between culture and nation on which the
French have long had a monopoly. That national identification goes hand in
hand with a complex love of and loathing for ethnic interlocutors. Proximity,
especially within a class hierarchy, can be a cultural liability much greater than
foreignness. The intimate Other is always disdained, while the distant Other
can be safely eulogized. These two polarities of identification—nation and
ethnicity—mark a complex adumbration between the self and the Other in the
American aesthetic imagination that I will develop in the concluding chapter.

FIGURE 3.9 Rank by price, Zagat NYC (1986–2014).

 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 87

Middle-class appropriation of ethnic

restaurants?
Andrew Haley deploys a wide range of evidence to argue that, by the 1920s,
“the tables had turned, and increasingly the middle class, not the upper class,
determined what would be served in America’s restaurants” (2011: 236). He
opens with the lyrics to a delightful popular song, “A Bowl of Chop Suey and
You-ey,” played by the orchestra at the high-class Hotel McAlpin, and a report
in The Steward, a culinary industry journal. The teashop at McAlpin, the report
noted, had “dainty little American born Chinese girls” serving a Chinese
luncheon. According to Haley, this is a sign of the emerging “cosmopolitan”
taste of the rising middle class, displacing the haute cuisine, haughty maîtres
d’hôtel, and French language menus of the plutocrats in the early twentieth
century.
The nascent middle class of clerks, managers, and professionals (such as
lawyers and doctors), the byproducts of the industrial and the managerial
revolutions between 1880 and 1920, were transforming “the tang and feel of
the American experience,” in C. Wright Mills’s formulation (1951). Comfortably
salaried and with more leisure time, this middle class changed the expectations
of the good life, which increasingly included urban, public, heterosocial
entertainment. Barriers of ethnicity and tightly gendered spaces (such as
saloons and elite restaurants for men and accompanied women, and teahouses
for women) were breached, as the salaried professional expected to spend a
night on the town with his wife, sometimes eating in reputable but inexpensive
German, Italian, Chinese, and Mexican restaurants. That did not lead to equality,
but it drew ethnic restaurateurs and white, middle-class women into the ambit
of professional, middle-class hegemony.
In the Gramscian sense, hegemony here implies more than mere domination.
It promised the alignment of the interest of the middle-class consumer with
the economic ambition of the ethnic entrepreneur, and an expanding sphere of
leisure activities for middle-class women, as both employees and housewives.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, at least eight percent of
Americans dined in restaurants regularly, and that number would keep
increasing (Haley 2001: 6). The American industrial revolution was producing a
class of managers, supervisors, and intermediaries both in the labor process
and in the consumer product chain that had to be fed and entertained.
With the separation of spheres and a cult of domesticity taking hold, a new
form of companionate marriage had already been articulated, on one hand,
and the segregation of cities along class lines and the resultant “slumming”
had shown the possibilities of internal urban cross-class tourism, on the other
hand. The re-gendering and re-classifications of spaces such as home, work,
and entertainment, and the reorganization of time into leisure, work, and
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recuperation, had also fed reform crusades including temperance, women’s

rights, nutrition, and slum clearance. Conflict and collaboration with ethnic
and Anglo restaurateurs was inevitable in the making of a hegemonic bloc.
Haley illustrates the struggle between the rich and the middling folks in the
remaking of the businessman’s lunchroom, which became more important
because of longer commutes, apartment living, and the middle-class servant
problem. Lunchrooms typically offered table and counter service. By the late
1870s the lunchrooms were considered respectable and moderately priced,
with cost ranging from $0.25 to $1.25.
In a typical New York lunchroom, businessmen were offered “beef a la
mode, lamb pot-pie, knuckle of ham with spinach, hashed turkey with poached
eggs, chicken and oyster patties, roast pork and apple sauce, roast turkey and
cranberry sauce, roast venison, wild duck, roast Spring chicken” (New York
Times 1881). Then there were table d’hôte restaurants that served multicourse
dinners, often with table wines, at a fixed price. Many served Italian, German,
and French bistro-style food. There were inexpensive beefsteak restaurants
or chophouses that served beefsteak for $0.15, potatoes and vegetables
for $0.05, pies, tea and coffee for another $0.05, to “well-dressed people,
evidently with plenty of money in their pockets” (Haley 2011: 79). Department
store restaurants and coffee and cake saloons were added to the offerings
available to the middle classes.
The highly competitive and precarious nature of the restaurant business
played to the power of the middle-class patron. This is where Haley challenges
Bourdieu’s model of class habitus as an exclusively conservative force, as he
makes room for new aesthetic attitudes and options in the war of positions
between the ascendant middle class and declining elites (2011: 90). This is
also where placid “continental cuisine” is restored its proper sociological
place, saving it from posthumous approbation as mere aesthetic error.
Haley shows how members of the emerging middle class, “eager to
find alternatives to inaccessible aristocratic establishments, colonized and
transformed foreign eateries into restaurants that catered to middle-class
tastes” (2011: 94). We come across the surprising claim (in light of all the
current boosterism) of an 1872 New York Times editorial arguing that the
United States could become a great culinary power only if Americans learned
to celebrate what could be found in various foreign and cosmopolitan
restaurants in the city.
German immigrant restaurateurs, with enough capital, were leading the
crusade to make their restaurants acceptable to middle-class families (often
with German heritage) against the stereotypes of greasy, filthy, garlicky, spicy
foods. In New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit, and Milwaukee, native-born
middle classes joined a growing German middle-class in patronizing a wide
range of northern and middle European restaurants (Haley 2011: 99).
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 89

Ethnic entrepreneurs often developed hybrid menus, in response to

demand or to generate it, as evidenced by a Chinese restaurateur’s rejoinder
to a police captain’s question in 1903, as to why he did not just stick to Chinese
dishes rather than range into ham and eggs, mutton chops, and French fried
potatoes. He said that he understood that a man might wish to treat his wife
or an out-of-town friend to a dish of chop suey after a theater, but would not
eat the stuff himself. “Consequently, he lets his wife have her chop suey,
while he orders from the American side of the bill” (New York Times 1903). At
about this time, the New York Sun (1901) observed that a large part of the
clientele of Italian restaurants was already American. Newspaper reporters
again played an important role in opening up the possibilities of a middling
restaurant which “may be French, Italian, Hungarian or even German, and the
price may be 30 cents or $1.25 a head” (New York Times 1885).
Slowly, the middle-class’s ability to display cultural capital came to depend
on the capacity to make judgments about cuisines other than French, an
omnivorousness that would come fully into play by the end of another century
of development and cultural democratization, as shown by Johnston and
Baumann in Foodies (2010). As a reporter from Milwaukee noted, writing about
German immigrant food in 1901, “the fear vanishes and something akin to joy
fills your soul, for you have experienced a distinctly new gustatory sensation”
(Milwaukee Sentinel, July 1901; cited in Haley 2012: 66).
Ethnic restaurateurs eager to capitalize on the expansion of the dining
repertoire of the middle-class followed their clientele out of ethnic enclaves.
In 1901 the New York Daily Tribune noted the spread of Chinese restaurants
out of Chinatown up along Third and Sixth Avenues. By the 1910s, city blocks
in the Twenties and Thirties in Manhattan were home to the city’s Italian
restaurants and modest French bistros. In 1910, 100 teachers, solid agents
of middle-class socialization, passing through New York on their way to a
convention in Boston, stopped and ate at a restaurant in Chinatown, and then
a Hungarian one in the evening (Bishop 1911: 387). By the 1920s, inexpensive
middle-class restaurants occupied the brownstones between Forty-third and
Forty-seventh Streets near Times Square (New York Times 1920). The ethnic
restaurateur recognized the growing power of the middle-class diner and his
wife in the transformation of taste in the metropolis.
For Haley, these are clear signs that the tables were turning on aristocratic
taste, modeled after European aristocracy’s manners and mores, which
seemed increasingly narrow and outmoded. Yet, “Dining at a Chinese
restaurant did not undermine support for the Chinese Exclusion Act; eating
spaghetti did not bring an end to nativism . . . Cosmopolitan dining had a limited
influence on attitude towards immigrants because it was so self-centered”
(Haley 2011: 116). According to Cindy Lobel, this “cosmopolitan cuisine”
served the imperial, social-Darwinist presumptions of the middle-classes,
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analogous to the role of minstrelsy and world’s fairs in their display of exotic
peoples (Lobel 2014: 9). Thus, the cast of “cosmopolitanism” that Haley and
Lobel attribute to their subjects is narrow and expedient, often construed as a
form of American nationalism against European cultural attitudes and racial
superiority, which forces me to keep it within quotation marks. I think Johnston
and Baumann’s “omnivorousness” (2010) is a more apt term here than
“cosmopolitanism.”
As much as looking up the class hierarchy with disdain, the middle-class
surely would have looked down on working-class entertainments that were
emerging at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as shown
by Kathy Peiss (1986) and Lewis Erenberg (1984). Working with dance halls,
amusement parks, and movie theaters, Peiss shows how working-class
women transformed urban American popular cultures at the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She also showed how these new forms of
leisure reconfigured the spatial and temporal organization of home, work, and
play. The ethnic restaurant is an extension of the same logic of reconfiguration
of leisure in the twentieth-century American city. And it is a specific place
of middle-class hegemony that successfully excludes the working-class
(now increasingly defined as palatally closed-minded). But the middle-class
would come to appropriate ethnic cuisine with a particular kind of disdain for
ethnics.

The invisible ethnic restaurateur

In spite of the centrality of ethnic entrepreneurs—German, Jewish, Italian, and
Chinese—in the cultural reconfiguration of dominant American tastes, we have
seen very few scholarly monographs on these entrepreneurs. Work is just
beginning to emerge on the North American Chinese restaurateur. The 2010
Census identified 3.8 million Chinese in the USA , and scholars have counted
more than 40,000 Chinese restaurants, “more than the number of McDonalds,
Burger Kings and KFC s combined,” as Jennifer 8 Lee writes (2009: 9).
Nevertheless, the academic output on McDonalds and McDonaldization has
been much heavier (Ritzer 1996; Watson 1997). That may be because counter-
cultural academics have come to see McDonald’s as a harbinger of cultural
homogenization under the sign of American imperialism (although James
Watson’s collection is an argument against it), and the shape of the neoliberal
future of de-skilled work, corporate control of commodity and labor markets,
rationalization, withdrawal of the welfare state, and the decline of taste.
Unfortunately, so much single-minded attention to powerful American
corporations makes the less powerful even less so. Hence it is salutary that we
are finally catching up with our analysis of the Chinese restaurant in North
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 91

America, the home turf of many of the threatening global fast food brands (Coe
2009; Lee 2009; Cho 2010).
The technique behind Jennifer Lee’s The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (2009)
is to interview restaurateurs and workers who were suddenly connected on
March 30, 2005, when hundreds of people across the United States won the
Powerball lottery. It appears that customers had bought lottery tickets with
the same numbers inscribed in their fortune cookies that had been distributed
in Chinese restaurants in forty-two American states. That allowed Lee, fluent
in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, to get further than the usual questions
asked by most Americans until then, such as why Americans eat Chinese
food, or why Chinese food is popular among American Jews (Tuchman and
Levine 1993). Her research in the digitized archives of historical newspapers,
and particularly illuminating interviews with immigrant Chinese restaurateurs
and workers, provide a view that could not be matched even by the more
conceptually astute and material-culture driven analysis of Lily Cho in Eating
Chinese (2010), which, as it turns out, has more theoretical axes to grind (that
I will address later).
Lee deftly sidesteps the issue of authenticating expatriate Chinese food by
calling food such as General Tso’s chicken and chop suey “Chinese, born in
America” (like herself), or “American which just looks Chinese” (like herself
again; Lee 2009: 16). In Louisiana she tastes Szechuan alligator, which was
probably unavailable anywhere in China, but was still recognizably Chinese.
Challenged by cream cheese wantons in the Midwest, Philly cheesesteak roll
in Philadelphia, and chow mein sandwiches in New England, she comes to the
brave conclusion that “Chinese food, perhaps, does not have to originate
in China” (2009: 22–3). She then pursues fascinating tales of presumably the
first Chinese food delivery system developed on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan in 1976; nails down the Japanese inventor of the fortune cookie;
and considers the explosion of Chinese restaurants in New York City from six
in 1885 to more than 100 chop suey places in 1905, all confined between
Fourteenth and Forty-fifth Streets and Third and Eighth Avenues (Lee 2009:
34, 45, 57).
Most persuasively, she follows the fate of the 286 illegal Chinese
immigrants abroad the ship Golden Venture, which ran aground in Queens,
New York on the night of June 6, 1993. Of the 286 passengers on that ship,
246 were from Fujian province, the source of most Chinese restaurant workers
in the United States over the last few decades (2009: 113). Lee concludes
by pointing out that, while American corporate food lore is filled with figures
such as Ray Kroc of McDonald’s, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and Asa
Griggs Candler of Coca-Cola, “Chinese food in America has no such dominant
figures, yet it is no less a powerful presence in Americana,” populated with
micro-personalities such as Misa Chang, who redefined take-out and delivery,
92 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Edward Louie, who mastered the fortune cookie-making machines, chefs

Wang and Peng, who fabricated General Tso’s chicken, and “the mysterious
Lem Sen of chop suey” fame (2009: 272).
Chinese restaurateurs and workers, go as far back as 1849—the opening
parenthesis of my analysis based on two sets of sources, the Census of
Occupations and the print run of major American newspapers—have been
acutely under-represented in the discussion on American taste. Heather R.
Lee’s work on “Entrepreneurs in the Age of Exclusion” shows how even within
the constraints of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, until its repeal in 1943,
Chinese restaurateurs found a way around the legal classification of coolie
labor—as restaurant and laundry entrepreneurs—to generate a remarkable
wave of entrepreneurship that may have been paradoxically incentivized by the
very act of excluding Chinese labor (Lee 2013: 53–77).
In Lily Cho’s pointed post-colonial critique of misplaced requiems, she
notes that neither have small-town Chinese restaurants died, nor have all the
diasporic populations vanished into exotic Chinatowns. Cho’s Eating Chinese
produces an alternative history of suppressed immigrant agency. These
ubiquitous small-town Chinese restaurants and their menus, with their egg
foo young, chow mein and chop suey, attest “to a self-conscious and utterly
aware production of fictive ethnicity,” where the diasporic subject exploits
“the menu’s capacity for the reproduction of a cultural space in order to
produce an ethnicity that can be made palatable” and yet frustrates the fierce
white pursuit of a “knowable authentic Chinese subject” (2010: 71). In contrast
to the piercing Anglo gaze that seeks to pin down authentic Chineseness
once and for all, she posits an alternative possibility.
Her research shows that small-town Canadian Chinese restaurants were
de facto community centers where “people went for their morning coffee,
or after the hockey game, or for a first date, or for sodas after school” and
which developed this “curious intimacy between its proprietors and its
patrons” (2010: 80). Yet, small-town Chinese restaurants are often spaces of
white nostalgia that consolidates white subjectivity through the production of
manageable otherness, which is why we see so much writing and singing
(Joni Mitchell’s “Chinese Café/Unchained Melancholy” and Sylvia Tyson’s
“The Night the Chinese Restaurant Burned Down”) about them. Cho argues,
with a tincture against sentimentality, that such celebration of the Chinese
restaurant is a form of rationalization of domination under the guise of inclusion.
Just as there would be no “Habermasian public sphere without a plantation
economy,” the significance of the Chinese restaurant in white Bildungsroman
sentimentality is a “barbed assertion of diasporic presence in the absence of
any mention of diasporic subjects” (Cho 2010: 101, 103).
Then again, not all nostalgia is the same. Cho asserts that it is equally
necessary to recuperate nostalgia from the strictures of white sentimentality,
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 93

where “the small town Chinese restaurant is . . . a testament to the power of

diaspora to be a force of emplacement” (2010: 108). She then goes on to
discuss how small-town Chinese restaurants created a space that addresses
“the strangeness of dominant culture through an invitation to sit down, to
open up the menu, to consume something familiar and different” (2010: 113).
As a result they successfully turned their familiar foreignness into an object of
desire against the dominant rules of good taste, a counter-poetics of pleasure
and sensuousness within the grammar of displacement.
Yet she insists that we be aware that “memorializing the Chinese restaurant
from only one side of the counter risks occluding the significant contributions
of the activities on the other side—in the kitchen, behind the cash register, at
the coffee machine, spaces where one is more likely to be standing than
sitting” (2010: 115). Such complex, exasperating accusations are typical of
post-colonial theorizing, and Cho does a good job of unsettling the reader
through high theorizing and beautiful writing, and sparse evidence of a few
menus, a couple of photographs, and a handful of songs. Most importantly,
her larger arguments about the ethnic invisibility of the entrepreneur are right
on the mark and the dialectic of ubiquity but invisibility that she records is
even more acute for another group of immigrants.

The unseen Latino cook

Recent migrations from Latin America have drawn attention to one of the
largest groups of immigrants with the longest history within the United
States. Often, that very contemporary inflow is what erases evidence of
their ancient presence in the American imagination. As Zilkia Janer notes,
“The cultural continuity between the two sides of the Mexico–United States
border predates the arrival of Europeans and the birth of both countries”
(2008: 1). The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) not only transformed one-
half of Mexican territory into the United States but stranded a large number of
Mexicans on the wrong side of the border. Among them were ranchers,
landowners, and rural workers, for whom southwestern ranch style cookery
was the norm, with dried beef, fruit and vegetables, curds and fresh cheeses,
pork cracklings, slow-cooked stews (adobos of vinegar, garlic, and spices), and
barbecues. Spanish and Native American fry breads, stews, and sausages
were adopted quite early into their repertoire. And by 1895 we find evidence
of food sellers “serving tamales, tortillas, chiles rellenos (stuffed chilies),
huevos revueltos (scrambled eggs), lengua lampreada (beef tongue with salsa
ranchera), pucheros (soups), and ollas (stews) in a plaza in San Antonio, Texas”
(Janer 2008: 9). This is also about when Tex-Mex food, with its chili con carne
and combination platters of tamales, enchiladas, rice, beans, and melted
94 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

cheese, became reductively associated by Anglos with working-class Mexican

restaurant fare, dominated by the flavors of ground chilis, cumin, oregano,
and black pepper.
By 1898, Encarnación Pinedo was already struggling to free Mexican food
from a virulent stereotype by calling her cookbook El cocinero español (The
Spanish Cook), one of the earliest Spanish language cookbooks published in
California (Janer 2008: 9). The popular guidebooks produced by the Federal
Writers’ Project’s (FWP ) in the 1930s and 1940s and the archives of the
America Eats project reveal substantial presence of “Spanish-Mexican food”
(Bégin 2012). Bégin writes that the taste of race informed the taste of place
as American gastronomic discourse, inscribed in printed guidebooks for the
newly emergent tourist trade, established Mexican food as a southwestern
regional American cuisine which “offered the sensory opportunity to perceive
the race of a conquered people.” She avers that “A potent gender dynamic
also animated the sensory construction of this domestic yet exotic taste.
Daring to eat the spicy dishes prepared by Mexican women was a central
experience of white male culinary tourism” (Bégin 2012).6
From the early decades of the twentieth century, when more than a million
migrants came to the US, Mexicans became increasingly central to working
the American food system, from the agricultural laborer to the dish washer
and the cook. Even at the cusp of the current recession (2008–2012) it
was estimated that 7 million Mexican workers were in the United States,
most working in construction and service occupations, particularly as farm
labor and restaurant worker (Pilcher 2012: 187). While Mexicans became
ubiquitous to the food system, their food was invisible to most Americans.
A study of Omaha, Nebraska, found that Mexican food remained confined to
the immigrant community until the 1950s, but then it leapt ahead of the
immigrant population. Nationally, the number of Mexican restaurants took off
in the 1970s, which preceded the great northern migration of Mexicans by
about two decades (Pilcher 2012: 179).
Mexican food was for a long time hidden in plain view among the migrant
and expatriate population as one of the oldest regional cuisines of the southwest,
from its distinctive avocados, sprouts, and sour cream at the western end of
Hispano-USA , to cactus fruits, green chilis, blue corn, and pozole around Sante
Fe. The reductive archetype of Mexican food is just beginning to dissipate in
the eyes of many Americans. Today, Los Angeles, Chicago, and even New York
City are beginning to see a varied Mexican regional—such as Oaxacan and
Poblano—and Latin American food at restaurants, in markets, and on pushcarts
populating the edges of soccer fields and street fairs (Janer 2008; Zukin 2010;
Pilcher 2012).
Wilber Zelinsky’s 1980 survey based on telephone directories found that
the three most popular cuisines were Chinese, Italian, and Mexican, making
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 95

up 70 percent of ethnic restaurants in the United States. In that study there

was an uneven regional distribution, with Mexican cuisine radiating out from
the Southwest (Zelinsky 1985). Jeffrey Pilcher’s study based on 2010 data
shows the continuing popularity of Mexican food in the Southwest and the
West, followed by the upper midwestern cities such as Chicago, and finally
the cities of the eastern seaboard. By his estimate there were about forty
thousand Mexican restaurants in the United States by the year 2010, which is
remarkably similar to the estimates of Chinese restaurants (out of a total of
579,102 restaurants nationally).7 We are just beginning to record the current
material transformation of American food reflected in books and articles on
Latino cuisines (Abarca 2006, Janer 2008, Pilcher 2012).
Yet, “One point of commonality between Mexican and U.S. versions of the
[more prestigious] nueva cocina has been the marginality of Mexican
Americans and indigenous Mexicans” to that haute cuisine and those
professionalizing moves (Pilcher 2012: 176). Notwithstanding the popularity of
the food, very few Mexican restaurants can command the price and prestige
(as shown in Table 3.3 previously) associated with western European cuisines
such as French, Italian, and Spanish, or Asian cuisines such as Japanese,
revealing a deep-seated and insidious relationship between taste and
domination (Janer 2006). In that complex sociology, the rise in prestige of
Italian regional cooking since the 1980s adds another layer of argumentation,
which underlines at least two interesting peculiarities of Italian food in the
eyes of American taste makers.

The valorization of Italian-American food:

White but not quite
In 1889, when Alessandro Filippini, the chef at Delmonico’s, published his
cookbook The Table, there were no distinctively Italian recipes in it. Half a
century later, James Beard’s list of favorite restaurants in 1955 included Quo
Vadis in New York and Perino’s in Los Angeles, two restaurants that were
owned by Italians but didn’t offer much of their cooking. Beard could dismiss
Italian cooking with the following words, written from France in 1955:

My opinion of Italian cookery is not too high . . . And getting my first piece
of French bread on the train yesterday made me realize again what masters
the French are at the art. It seems to me that even the food on the wagon-
lit restaurant was better than all the food of Italy (quoted in Kuh 2001: 61).

Addressing what appears today to be the inexplicable disrepute of Italian

cuisine, Patric Kuh notes:
96 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

The tenets of haute cuisine of limpidity, distillation, and smoothness stand

in direct opposition of those of Italian cucina. Where the Italians might grill
a whole fish over dry vine shoots, the French must pass a fish mousse
twice through a tamis. Where the French must chop their parsley to its
finest consistency, the Italians might add their herbs whole or cut fairly
large . . . The problem for Italians was precisely that their best food stood in
direct contrast to the aesthetic of refinement that was the ideal throughout
the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (Kuh 2001: 180).

Sometimes, aesthetic evaluations of food have nothing to do with the

nature of the food or the skill involved in producing it. The Italian misfortune—
at least in American eyes—may have been that Italian-Americans were poor
and derided, and hence their food was dismissed for those reasons, rather
than for any substantive evaluation of their cuisine. When American Italians
climbed out of the ghetto and into sports arenas, corporate offices, governor’s
mansions, city halls, and movie studios, Italian food was re-assessed in the
American imagination.
The story of Italian food in America gets more complicated if we get closer
to the material and expand our time horizon. There are cycles of rise and fall
within longer cycles. Paul Freedman shows, in his detailed study of menus
of elite restaurants in the middle of the nineteenth century, how versions
of macaroni and cheese (such as “macaroni au gratin,” and “macaroni au
Parmesan”) were the most commonly found, followed by escalloped oysters,
baked beans and pork, oyster patties a la Béchamel, and fricassee of chicken
(Freedman 2011; Clarkson 2009). Thomas Jefferson had already popularized
macaroni and cheese at the end of the eighteenth century. From that high
perch in prestige, where northern Italian regional foods were seen as analogues
to the Grand Tour, Italian food would be dislodged by the entry of new southern
Italian immigrants between 1880 and 1924 who were numerous and mostly
poor, hence derided by the taste-making elite.
That disdain spread down the class hierarchy. An Irish woman conceded
that although she had no prejudices against her Italian neighbors, the smell
of garlic made proximity difficult (Cinotto 2013: 85). Italian Harlem carried the
stench of poverty for middle-class visitors. By the end of the nineteenth
century, northern Italians had already played a part in racially denigrating the
diet of their southern compatriots. One of the earliest references to Sicilian
pizza is by Carlo Lorenzini (pen name Collodi), the Tuscan author of Pinocchio,
who wrote in 1886, “The blackened aspect of the toasted crust, the whitish
sheen of garlic and anchovy, the greenish-yellow tint of the oil and fried herbs,
and those red bits of tomato here and there give pizza the appearance of
complicated filth that matches the dirt of the vendor” (Capatti and Montanari
2003: 27). The reputation of Italian food recovered a little in 1930s NYC , with
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 97

the furious ascent of Italians into white racism as they sought to distance
themselves from blacks and Puerto Ricans in East Harlem, with their rhetorical
embrace of la famiglia to stem the tide of imagined normlessness among
underemployed colored households (Cinotto 2013: 76-86; Gugliemo and
Salemo 2003). Yet, that kind of rhetoric did not vaunt them into the elite; it just
kept them treading water above the color line.
Nothing devalues a cuisine more than proximity to subordinate others. That
explains not only the rise, fall, and rise again of Italian cuisine in America, but
also the difficulty of Chinese, Mexican, and Soul food to break away, in dominant
American eyes, from the contamination effect of low-class association. Poor,
mobile people are rarely accorded cultural capital. The circulation of taste
through the social architecture of class and race allows for the creation of a
subcultural niche, say for the best taco, genuine dim-sum, or most authentic
fried chicken, yet rarely assures a position among elite food cultures.
It is also a matter of timing. The prestige of Italian food could fully recover
only by the 1980s, after the bulge of poor immigrants had dissipated over
three generations. Per capita income among Italians in NYC in 2010 as the
last white group, below those of English, German, Russian, French, Irish, and
Polish ancestry, in that order, and above Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, etc.,
places them just at the right spot to both supply entrepreneurial sweat capital
today and shape taste via demand and commentary (New York City Department
of City Planning 2010). Italians are also a very large demographic group that
carries substantial weight in the marketplace of commodities and commentary.
Nevertheless, expensive Italian restaurants and high-end chefs had to position
themselves rhetorically against what they disdainfully identified as Italian-
American, checkered-tablecloth, red-sauce institutions (Leschziner 2012). The
rising prestige of Italian food in America might show us patterns of upward
mobility among other ethnics. Analogously, in twenty years from now Chinese
food may be able to climb in American estimation, but that depends on a lot,
including the continuing economic rise of China and the decline in the flow of
poor Chinese immigrants into the United States. Here, depressingly, culture
merely follows capital.
Setting his sights on the role of race in the evaluation of taste, Simone
Cinotto demonstrates how color was the single most important factor in the
consecration of Italian tastes in America (2012). He bleeds the story of the
self-congratulation of an upwardly mobile group. He does that by taking a
scalpel to an industry—Napa valley wine—that Italians are credited to have
almost single-handedly transformed “from a reserve of immigrant groups and
urban Europhile elites into a mass national market.” In the process he illustrates
how the work of David Roediger (2007), Matthew Frye Jacobson (1999), and
Michael Omni and Howard Winant (1994) can be deployed with empirical and
conceptual subtlety to explain both the centrality of the wages of whiteness
98 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

in the story of Italian winemaking, and the apparently contradictory power

of the margins, to explain the remarkable successes of Piedmontese wine-
makers.
Just as the Chinese laundryman or cook did not learn his trade in China to
then specialize in cooking and cleaning in California, the successes of Italian
wine-makers had very little to do with the so-called Mediterranean ecology of
California or with the immigrants’ wine-making skills. Here Cinotto deals a
devastating blow to the historiographical and popular claims of the successful
transplantation of an Old World culture and practical expertise to the New
World. That sentimental comparison he shows is the product of a fallacious
touristic gaze on a landscape that hides the labor of Asian, Latino, and poor
Italian co-ethnics in the laborious transformation of the soil, water, hills, and
valleys that made the topography fit for the vine.
Yet these Piedmontese entrepreneurs were great innovators in terms
of product development, advertising, marketing, and packaging, precisely
because they had very little baggage in terms of Old World traditions. From
the giant size of their storage tanks that allowed them to bear the fluctuations
of the market better, electrically powered grape-pressing, portable kerosene
heaters to ward off nighttime frost, the use of sulfur dioxide to counter
the effects of yeasts and stabilize the wine, to industrial refrigeration, they
understandably led the market. Here he breaks down another myth—of the
tradition-bound Italian. What is even more counter-intuitive is how Cinotto
shows that apparently negative developments such as the First World War
and Prohibition were turned to the advantage of the Italian wine-makers of
California by way of subterranean ethnic networks of support and distribution.
Cinotto’s work nicely illustrates the play of structure and contingency, race and
ethnicity, culture and subculture, in the making of a self-conscious American
food culture with complex routes of consolidation.
In his next book, The Italian American Table, Cinotto brings us back to
Manhattan where I began this chapter. Instead of the tenements of 97 Orchard
Street he takes us to the East Harlem of the 1930s, where Italians were
beginning to forge a gustatory identity in the crucible of race and ethnicity,
setting the table to becoming white so as to relish its privileges of inclusion
and exclusion. That process would be completed only after substantial upward
mobility, not only of Italians but of Jews, who, due to higher literacy rates
and better credentials, would quickly exit the food business, but become the
crucial outside boosters for urban Italian cuisine as professionals. The role
German restaurants played for Anglo Bohemians in the nineteenth century
would be played by Italian and Chinese restaurants for the Judeo-Bohemian
intellectual avant-garde.
Today, Italian food is everywhere—not only in “Italian” but also in self-
described “American” restaurants. The menu from an “American” restaurant,
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 99

where the chef describes his cooking as a blend of “a variety of international

flavors including Asian, Southwestern and Italian, with classical French
technique,” includes appetizers such as calamari tempura, a French soufflé,
and Vietnamese spring rolls, along with potato gnocchi. The entrées are
primarily French- or Italian-inspired, such as olive oil-poached salmon, a grilled
red snapper with lemon and herbs, coq au vin, steak au poivre, etc. Sometimes
they acquire a distinct Asian, Latino, or Caribbean inflection, with wasabi aioli
or fried plantain. The menu lists a separate pasta section, with Uncle Vinny’s
special rigatoni, gnocchi with tomato-vodka sauce, bowtie pasta with sausage
and broccoli rabe, and linguini with saffron-tomato sauce and seafood.
We can see a similar pattern of change in the menu of the restaurant that
has become a paradigm for the Third-Wave American restaurant—Chez
Panisse.8 Although from the very beginning Alice Waters was drawn to the
Mediterranean coast, Italian food and techniques have burrowed deeper into
the Chez Panisse canon, at least since the time of chef Paul Bertolli. On a
recent six-day weekly cycle one can clearly identify strong Mediterranean
elements: on Monday, we have ricotta and wild green ravioli, and Brasato di
Anatra with house cured pancetta; on Tuesday, butternut squash ravioli, olive
oil and broccoli rabe; on Saturday a chanterelle and butternut squash risotto.
Menus from other seasons show evidence of grilled vegetables, sweet pea
salad, artichoke ravioli, lamb-loin Pecorino-fried chop, bagna cauda, saffron
brodetto, pork loin grilled with rosemary and sage, tangerine gelato, orange
and celery salad with sheep’s milk ricotta, yellowtail jack carpaccio, etc.
By the early years of the twenty-first century, Italian cooking had also
embedded itself into the curriculum at the leading cooking school—the Culinary
Institute of America (CIA ). By 2001, the CIA had four full-service restaurants,
which were a part of the curriculum. They were: Escoffier, the French restaurant,
that opened in 1973 (now closed and redesigned as Bocuse, discussed in the
next chapter); American Bounty, serving regional cuisines of the US, which
opened in 1982; St. Andrew’s Café, which opened in 1984 in the wake of
concerns about health and early signs of obesity; and Caterina de Medici, the
Italian restaurant that opened on a small scale in 1984 and was moved to its
own independent building in 2001 to become the largest, most popular, and
the only profitable restaurant on campus.
The curriculum at CIA was expanded and “The Cuisines of Europe” was
changed to “Cuisines of Europe and the Mediterranean,” underplaying the
previously hegemonic Germanic cuisine of spätzle, sausage, pork chops, dairy,
and cabbage, and highlighting the cuisines of Italy, southern France, and North
Africa. One special unit in the “Mediterranean” curriculum exclusively focused
on pastas—including the making of fresh pastas such as tagliatelle, tortelli,
fettucine, cavatelli, orecchiette, tagliarini, garganelli, and farfalle (Rascoll 2004).9
The fate of other cuisines has been more complicated.
100 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

The 1983–84 Catalog of the CIA for the first time identified “Oriental
Cuisine” as an area of study separate from “International Cuisine.” It included
Chinese, Japanese, and Polynesian. By the 1985–86 academic year, Polynesian
had dropped out of the curriculum. The 1992–93 Catalog identified “Oriental”
cookery with Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese cooking. In the 1996–
97 Catalog the “Oriental” kitchen was renamed the “Asian” kitchen and in the
2001–02 Catalog the title was changed again to “Cuisines of Asia” to include
Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean, Thai, Malaysian, and Vietnamese cooking.
This was also when the Asian cookery curriculum was expanded to three
weeks from two weeks, partly by eliminating a separate class on forced
meats. In a presentation to the faculty in 2005 on the future of American
restaurants, CIA’s current President Tim Ryan noted the growth of American,
Italian, Latino, and Asian cuisines and virtually ignored the French, which is
remarkable given that the CIA’s curriculum is still structured around French
techniques. That is changing too under pressure from Third-Wave (after Chez
Panisse) and Fourth-Wave (after El Bulli and Momofuku) haute cuisine
restaurants, as we will see in the next chapter.
Major surveys of American restaurants also reflect changes in the same
direction. In Table 3.4 we have the percentage of ethnically and nationally
marked eateries as listed in Zagat’s decadal surveys of NYC restaurants.
Since 1982, when Zagat began to publish its New York City survey, Italian
cuisine has maintained its popularity (in spite of increasing variety due to
omnivorousness) among the fine-dining clintele. Continental cuisine, so
derided by Calvin Trillin (1994), has effectively vanished from the scene over
the last three decades.
Japanese makes a consistently strong showing of 4–7 percent of marked
restaurants, while every other notable cuisine—Mexican, Indian, Thai, and
Vietnamese—ranges between 2 and 7 percent. Interestingly, the popularity of
Chinese has been falling in estimation from a high of 6 percent. Yet Chinese
ingredients such as bok-choy and Sichuan peppers, and techniques such as
stir-frying, steaming, and wanton-wrapping, are becoming more common in
“New American” restaurants. Thai, Vietnamese, and Nuevo-Latino cuisines
are showing promising signs of growth (as restaurant reviews in major
American newspapers show) but they had not yet registered numerically. I
suspect their numbers are going to increase in the near future. The Italian
influence is even more marked when we acknowledge that the New American
cuisine—which is also increasing in popularity—is strongly shaped by it, as
shown previously.
Data from the annual survey of the National Restaurant Association
(Table 3.5)—which, unlike the previous material, includes “Fast Food”
establishments—shows that Italian eateries do even better as check averages
fall under $25. There are hardly any French restaurants under that figure. The
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 101

TABLE 3.4 Zagat survey: New York City restaurants at the decadal
benchmark

Cuisines 1990 2000 2011

% %

Italian 23 22 20
Northern Italian (73) (41) n.a.
Southern Italian (16) (10) n.a.
Unspecified/both (11) (50) n.a.
Pizza 2 3 8
Mediterranean 2 3 3
American (New) below 10 below
American (Trad.) 15 6 21
Cajun/Creole 1 1 n.a.
Soul/Southern 2 2 4
Other Regional American 2 1 n.a.
French 15 13 7
Continental 5 2 1
Asian - 1 n.a.
Chinese 6 4 4
Noodle shops - 1 n.a.
Japanese 4 5 7
Korean 0 1 1
Thai 2 2 3
Vietnamese 0 1 1
Indian 2 2 4
Mexican 4 2 7
Nuevo Latino - 0 n.a.
Tex-Mex above above 0
Spanish 1 2 2
Greek 0 1 2
Other 14 15 5
TOTAL 100 100 100

1
Source: Zagat 1989, 1999, 2010.
2
Number of restaurants counted multiple times under different cuisines.
102
TABLE 3.5 Menu theme as percentage of all restaurants in the National Restaurant Association sample
(1984–2010)

Menu Theme 1984 1991 2000 2010

Restaurants Full Ltd Service More than Bet. $25-15 Less than More than Bet. $25-$15 Less than
with food & Service % % $25 (ave. (ave. $15 (ave. $25 (ave. (ave. check) $15 (ave.
beverage % check) % check) % check) % check) % % check) %

Steak/Seafood 25 17 - 38 26 8 23 18 1

American2 25 35 - 26 47 57 38 42 57

French/Continental 10 10 - 13 3 Other Other Other Other

Italian 5 6 19 9 6 5 8 6 1

Pizza 3 n.a n.a. 2 Other 3 2 3 6

Mexican n.a. n.a. n.a. 2 2 5 1 6 5

Asian n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. 3 6 3

Others3 32 32 81 12 18 22 26 19 27

TOTAL 4 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

1
Source: National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant Industry Operations Report (Yearly). The Restaurant Association data has comparability problems over the years as the
categories have been changing. Percentages are rounded to eliminate decimals.
2
“American” includes American, chicken, barbeque, family style and variety.
3
“Others” as a category here is expansive and includes Hamburgers, Sandwiches, and for the earlier years Mexican, Asian, Other Ethnic, and a number of Unspecifieds.
4
Due to rounding, not all columns add up to 100.
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 103

“American” category increases to almost 60 percent as check averages fall to

under $15—mostly hamburger joints, steak houses, and seafood places.
Between 2000 and 2010, French/Continental restaurants fell from 13 percent
in the class of the most expensive restaurants (where the French have always
done the best), to below 2 percent, where they had to be subsumed within
the “others” category.
Nevertheless, French restaurants do much better in Zagat’s national survey
of “America’s Top Restaurants” (Table 3.6), in which between 19 and 25 percent
of the restaurants serve French foods of various kinds, from Bistro to Classical
French, with the former increasingly replacing the latter in popularity. Over

TABLE 3.6 Zagat: “America’s Top Restaurants”

Cuisines 1992 2000 2010 2014

(%) (%) (%) (%)

American 22 32 37 32

French 25 26 24 19

Continental 12 6 4 2

Italian 18 14 15 19

Asian - 3 3 -

Chinese 5 2 2 1

Japanese 4 4 7 13

Mexican 3 2 1 2

Indian 1 1 1 1

Thai 2 1 1 2

Vietnamese 1 1 1 1

Cajun/Creole 3 2 2 2

Other American 4 6 2 7
Regional

TOTAL 100 100 100 100

(N=722) (N=883) (N=1,532) (N=1,478)

1
The category of America’s Top Restaurant was begun in 1992, hence that is the first year listed.
2
Pizza included within Italian.
3
When a restaurant is listed as Chinese and Vietnamese it is counted twice.
4
Includes only those diacritically marked with ethnicity, nationality, and regionality. Does not
include steak houses and seafood restaurants.
104 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

the years since Zagat began its list of America’s Top Restaurants (1992), the
number of Italian restaurants on that list hovered around 15 percent until 2014,
when they caught up with French restaurants. The most dramatic improvement
has been in the fate of “American” cuisine, especially the New American
cuisine, with over 30 percent of diacritically marked restaurants identified
within that category. Very clearly, a self-consciously American haute cuisine
has been born in the last two decades, and interestingly at the same time
it has begun to regionalize, notably into Louisianan, Californian, Southwestern,
and Northwestern variants, especially in the leading cities of these regions,
such as New Orleans, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Seattle respectively. In
recent years, those regional variants have begun to settle under the category
New American.
Astonishingly, only 3 Chinese restaurants and 7 Mexican restaurants are
counted by Zagat among the top restaurants in the USA in 2014, compared to
59 Japanese, 84 French, 85 Italian and 139 American. There is not one Chinese
or Mexican restaurant among the top in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New
York, or even in San Antonio, and only one elite Mexican restaurant in Houston.
It could be argued that Zagat is never very cutting-edge and is, in fact, behind
the times. It is true that Zagat is the bearer of middle-brow taste among
the professional middle classes, but that is what pays the bills of upscale
restaurants in terms of volume and value. Given the economics of restauranting,
that is the taste that counts, which makes the limited number of ethnic
referents a relatively narrow distillation of a hierarchy of taste.

A reprise
If we paint the picture with the broadest brush-strokes, the changing accent
of American cuisine can be explained by immigration patterns. We can identify
three waves of migrants into the United States, totaling about 77 million until
2010. Looking at the picture from a high level of abstraction, hence ignoring
the details and nuance, we can say that the dominant template for American
food was provided by the first 20 million northern European immigrants, as
can still be seen in the meat-and-potatoes complex, along with the hot dog,
hamburger, dairy, sauerkraut, steak, pies and beer variant. Within this pattern,
the distinctive food of the ethnics (defined as other peoples’ food) such as the
Germans, the Irish, and the Scandinavians was melted out of the national
discourse. German, Irish, and Scandinavian gustatory identity was submerged
in a white, Anglophone text, that was a hybrid for its time, but flattened out in
posterity’s view, so much so that we cannot much recall (from the vantage
point of 2015) their distinctive foods anymore, other than as caricatures of
excessive drinking—difference became drunkenness (in the case of the Irish).
With some regional exceptions—small, local traditions such as pasties in
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 105

the Upper Michigan peninsula, and Pennsylvania “Dutch” food—a relatively

uniform national text was created by writing out the Native American and
African-American gustatory experience.
Then came the next 20-odd million “ethnic” immigrants—Italians, Slavs,
eastern European Jews, and Greeks—who wouldn’t melt away. This was not
because they were any more insistent than the first wave, but partly because
of their sheer volume and concentration both in terms of space (northeastern
cities) and time (1880–1924); equally because of their gravitation towards
long-lasting ethnic enclaves; and to some degree because of their temporal
proximity to our own times (so we can still see them as distinct). In addition,
they retained their ethnic identities because just as their difference was about
to be erased due to upward mobility and assimilation, their sectional identity
was revivified by the ethnic resurgence that followed the Civil Rights
Movement, both as a cultural ideal and as a retort to blackness. Americans
discovered the virtues of quintessentially ethnic food—pizzas, pirogues,
gyros, and bagels. They would eventually become so popular that new forms
of corporate cuisine would be built on them. These immigrants would be
absorbed into a different kind of whiteness—tamed but flavorful. In this story,
Cajun/Creole cuisine would play a role in the symbolic reconciliation, on one
hand, between an imagined national uniformity and regional particularity
(often mediated through urban versus rural consciousness in the fraught
contestations around the category of Creole, for instance), and on the other
hand, between Black and White identity. The rest of America—including
Zagat surveys—continues to conflate the polarities of this idealized
reconciliation, of Cajun and Creole cuisines, to the great consternation of
many a Louisiana local.
Interestingly, the cuisine of two racially marked groups, Chinese and
Mexicans—two of the oldest “ethnic” groups in the USA —would both
become ubiquitous and yet remain classified as permanently foreign foods,
unlike pizzas or bagels. A survey of ethnic restaurants conducted by the
National Restaurant Association in 1999 identified twenty different cuisines
that Americans consider ethnic. Pizza places were excluded from the survey
for having lost their ethnic affiliation. It also noted that “[s]ome cuisines
are becoming so in-grained in the mainstream of US culture that they are
hardly considered ethnic any more. This applies especially to certain forms of
Italian, Mexican, and Chinese (Cantonese) cuisine” (NRA , 1999: 5). That is an
optimistic view, because Americans might have trouble there both with race
and with ideas about essentially different cooking—think pasta and lomein
and their resonances. Difference could be disenfranchised even in the post-
1960s world.
From 1924 to 1965—that is, for two generations with relatively few
immigrants coming in (about 7 million over four decades compared to four
106 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

times that figure before and after that period)—Americans would elaborate a
naturalized and standardized American cooking, with the help of a new kind of
mass media—radio and television. It is the food of this period that most
Americans today would come to identify as unambiguously American food—
Germanic food, often delivered by corporations, with a few ethnic accents.
Cuisine, on the other hand, would be Continental, which would be a vague
shorthand for the imagined food of European elites.
The next group of migrants—another 30 million or so—this time from the
very places blocked by racialized laws of the pre-Civil Rights era, such as
Asia, and driven by dispossession, such as in Latin America, would reach the
American shores, destroying the layered sedimentations of the first and the
second 20-millions. This would be the death of American food as we know it.
Since we are still in the midst of this transformation, it is not yet normalized
into a paradigm. The breaking of the established American mold would
also allow the food of the ultimate racial Other—African-Americans—to be
reinvented as Soul food. The ferment at the bottom would finally bubble up to
the top to inflect American cuisine and destroy the established template (as
I will elaborate in the next chapter). Difference would be democratized. In the
process, Americans would find themselves in the midst of a reconfiguration
of the culinary canon and Italian-Americans—ethnic but white—would play a
crucial role in their reimaginings.
Italians and eastern European Jews, along with Greeks, Poles, Hungarians,
and Southern blacks, have provided an opening for more recent ethnic groups
to make their mark in American haute cuisine. In that sphere the importance
of the Civil Rights Movement that taught Americans both toleration and
the pleasures of cultural miscegenation cannot be underestimated. That
movement is the single most important reason that Americans see so many
Asian and Latino migrants in the United States today—a movement that
made it impossible to discriminate on the basis of race in immigration
laws. Now these newer immigrant groups have become the source of
substantial innovation in American cuisine—mojitos, tacos, wraps, wantons,
wasabi, and beyond. The Civil Rights Movement provided the cultural and
legal opening, while Italians and Jews provided the networks and institutional
opening in terms of establishing restaurants and producing their clientele and
critics.
The demand for a new haute cuisine at the end of the twentieth century
was met by a supply of entrepreneurs and workers from the segmented
labor market that was patterned around ethnicity. For a long time, expensive
American restaurants were run by French or German chefs partly because
of the reputation of French and especially “Continental” cuisine. Neither of
these groups could supply enough chefs to satiate the feeding frenzy of the
last quarter of the twentieth century. As the French and German economies
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 107

recovered from World War Two, the pool of emigrants dried up. New
immigrants, old ethnics, and white American boys poured into this opening,
often trained in the mushrooming cooking schools run by German transplants
(Culinary Institute of America) and French expatriates (The French Culinary
Institute, now ICC ).
The United States had two dramatic advantages over almost any other
nation, first, in terms of supplies of downscale ethnic talent that could be
upscaled, and second, in the re-telling of their own national story as a history
of immigration, which Handlin (1951) most clearly delineated. American history
would be re-oriented from the frontier towards immigration, and in the process
American culture would be reimagined as an immigrant one, where foreign
cultures are seen to be absorbed into and radically transform American taste.
That is a rare script of self-understanding in global comparative terms. It is rare
to find the natives of another nation—including their historians—who are
willing to see their own culture as a relatively recent foreign one. Other national
narratives are much more grounded in their rooted imaginations, often ignoring
migrant cultures. Which is also why literal taste, in those national domains, is
separated from aesthetic taste, to insulate the latter from the cross-border
contamination and the groundswell from below.
One group of ethnics in the USA was particularly well-positioned to
take advantage of this opening—Italian-Americans. Italian food was slowly
rediscovered in America by way of northern Italy, which followed Milan’s and
Florence’s style-setting standard in the world of haute couture, and was aided
by the upward mobility of Italian-Americans. The resurgent reputation of Italian
food was only one half of the equation. There had to be a supply of chefs. And
not everybody was willing to be a chef, not yet.
American Jews had climbed up and out of the business of feeding others
that they had mastered at the end of the nineteenth century in the delicatessens
(where they had succeeded the Germans) and the hot dog stands. Because of
much higher rates of literacy, second- and third-generation Jews quickly moved
into City College and out of the delis. They entered the retail trades of healing
and litigation, which were now closed, college-certified professions (Steinberg
1989).
Italians moved in to replace the Jews, the Germans, and the occasional
French. As professionals, particularly in trend-setting eastern cities such as
New York, the Jewish cohort moved quickly from being suppliers of ethnic
food in delis and at hot dog stands, to consumers of the cuisine of others,
such as Italians and Chinese. Italians, on the other hand, burdened as they
were with much lower rates of literacy and with a rural background, continued
to be the producers of some of the best American food and wine. There would
be no renaissance of American haute cuisine without Italian suppliers of
California wine, local herbs, and produce, or as producers of transplanted
108 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

regional Italian cuisines in American cities. Nor would there be an American

cuisine without Jewish consumers, including food writers, commentators,
and restaurant critics (Steinberg 1989).
Chinese, Italians, and Greeks could dominate certain niches of the food-
service market because of ethnic ties in the labor market. These three ethnic
groups included large numbers of male sojourners, who created both a high
demand for eating places and a willingness to do the necessary jobs. Some,
like the Forty-Niner Chinese in California, had been driven out of other spheres
of profitable economic activity, such as gold-mining and farming, by violence
and race-based legislation, leaving them to cook and clean for male, white
miners who were willing to concede such feminized functions to the Orientals.
Therein hangs a fascinating tale of the Chinese take-out and the laundry.
For much of the twentieth century, the American restaurant world appeared
to prefer French chefs and Italian maîtres d’hôtel, often working for Italian
owners made invisible by the French names of their restaurants—a tradition
that would slip into the twenty-first century with Sirio Maccioni’s Le Cirque; a
tradition akin to Chinese owners of sushi establishments today and Bangladeshi
proprietors of Indian eateries. The clientele could not figure out the difference,
and the prestige of French, Japanese, and Indian food was higher, mostly
for non-culinary reasons. Yet it was much more expensive to hire a French,
Japanese, or Indian chef because of the demographic profile of immigrants
from these nations. In contrast, a poorer, working-class migration from Italy,
China, and Bangladesh fed the supply side of the labor market equation for
these establishments.
Yet many ethnic eateries are unsuccessful in remaining in business for
long because they are under-capitalized and cannot weather the inevitable
fluctuations of the market, and they often run out of luck on the fragile wager
on endless over-work and perpetual good health. Those who succeed, such as
Muhammad Rasool (introduced in Chapter 2), send their children to college
who, on completion, are unwilling to accumulate sweat capital because of
better credentials. If they stay in business it is because they have better
connections, English language capability, and assets to trade in, creating a
more upscale business where returns are greater. A typical route is from the
successful pizzeria or diner to a white tablecloth restaurant.
The nature of the American economy is such that it is fed by a workforce
both at the bottom as dish-washers and farm-workers and at the top as
physicians, software engineers, nurses and professors. These new American
immigrants are numerous, they come from many more places, with many
more cultural tools, and some come with much more class power along with
their professional skills. As they enter a relatively democratic cultural landscape
after the Civil Rights Movement, it is easier for them to make a mark quickly
than it was for, say, Italians, Jews, or Southern blacks in northern cities at the
 TASTE AND ETHNIC DIFFERENCE 109

beginning of the twentieth century. Many of these professionals not only have
money but are also Anglophone, a major advantage in the cultural dog-eat-dog
of ethnic succession.
I have made a handful of points in this chapter. First, I have sought to
enumerate the changes in American cuisine, specifically the rise of Italian-
American food, by counting what can be counted. Second, changing sources
of migration have both changed the supply of cooks and transformed our
palates. I have identified a pattern of ethnic succession in food work. I have
also noted that too much or too little upward mobility is bad for leaving a mark
on American fine dining.
Entrepreneurial activity in the food business is particularly amenable to
the theory that the economic system is embedded in the larger normative
networks that Karl Polanyi (1944) drew our attention to. Ethnic entrepreneurs
buy and sell stuff that makes no sense without the cultural envelope. Edible
commodities in particular have elaborate social lives. That is an insight
reaffirmed by cultural anthropologists working on material culture and the
social life of things (Miller 1987; Appadurai 1986).
Finally, to begin to understand the changing resonances of ethnicity and
race, and hence ethnic food, one has to understand these classification
systems—race and ethnicity—as discursive fields, where for instance the
Irish did not change their color but did become white in the course of the Civil
War (Ignatiev 1995) and hence never developed a gustatory identity distinct
from the normative white culture (see Diner 2001; Ray 2004: 101–14). While
Jews, once considered a different race because of their religious identity, are
in the process of becoming white (Brodkin 1998) and due to rapid upward
mobility (thus uninterested in the investment of sweat capital in running a
restaurant) are losing their capacity to retain their culinary identity as a mark
of difference, while Italians continue to bring a different kind of whiteness
to bear on their food, which has as much to do with class as race. The
demographic weight and the middleness of Italian migrants, as white but not
quite, plays well in the current contours of the fine dining market. With time,
that will pass too.
Immigrant restaurateurs have been crucial to the changing transaction in
taste in American cities, although they have often found the hierarchy of taste,
based on notions of race, nation, and ethnicity, insurmountable. Culture, it
seems, follows global and social capital, and flees from the contamination of
labor. Yet, it is also clear that American tastes have been opening up, and that
has led to important changes in haute cuisine (as we will see in the next
chapter). The question remains whether palatal taste will be a carrier of more
durable progressive changes, as the domain of music (aural aesthetics) was
to social movements of the last century.
110 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Notes
1 For robust epistemological questions about big data, small data, and
no data, and ways of using and accessing them see Moretti 2013 and
Borgman 2015.
2 According to Andrew Smith in “1900 there were 42,700 tenement buildings in
New York, housing almost 1.6 million people” (2014: 133).
3 “Ethnic restaurant” can be found 273 times in all documents in The New York
Times from 1851 to 2013, including classifieds, articles, reviews, etc. On the
other hand, if we limit the search only to articles and reviews we
get fifty-one hits.
4 “Ethnic food” appears 631 times in all documents, and on 368 instances
in articles and reviews, from 1851 to 2013.
5 Per capita income, rounded to the thousand, by ancestry in NYC in 2010 was,
from the top: English $70,000, German $60,000, Russian $55,000, French
$54,000, Irish $50,000, Polish $50,000, Italian $40,000, Filipino $35,000,
Korean $33,000, Greek $33,000, Asian Indian $28,000, Arab $28,000, West
Indian $24,000, Colombian $22,000, Chinese $22,000, Puerto Rican $18,000,
Dominican $14,000, Mexican $13,000, etc. (New York City Department of
City Planning 2010).
6 In the rest of this section, due to constraints of space, I am only going to
address Mexican immigrants and their food, with almost nothing to say about
other Spanish-speaking Caribbeans such as Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and
Dominicans, with their distinct cuisine of plantains, yucca (cassava), pork, and
rice and beans; their domination of the bodega business in New York City; and
the cuchifritos (snack stands) and La Marqueta (covered food market) of El
Barrio or Spanish Harlem. Janer (2008) notes that a number of things are
transformed with Latino food businesses in the United States. First,
specialized food stores such as Mexican bakeries tend to broaden their
offerings to include Salvadoran and Guatemalan breads and pastries to expand
their market. Second, what are often considered street foods such as Puerto
Rican fritters like bacalaítos and alcapurrias appear as appetizers at lunch
counters and restaurants. Third, elaborate and occasional dishes such as
complex moles and rich desserts, often prepared only for Christmas, Lent,
and family celebrations, are available all the time in the post-migration
context. These three directions of change are, she argues, what gives the
appearance of unhealthiness of many Latino diets, along with the excessive
use of soft drinks in place of fruit juices (Janer 2008: 102, 142).
7 Jeffrey Pilcher, personal communication, October 14, 2012.
8 The First Wave begins with Delmonico’s; the Second Wave with Le Pavillon;
the Third Wave with Chez Panisse; and the Fourth Wave, internationally, with
El Bulli, and nationally, with Momofuku.
9 Thanks to CIA archivist Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer and chefs Eve
Felder and Charles Rascoll for explaining the fine points of the changing
curriculum to me in 2004.
 4
Extending Expertise:
Men in White at the Culinary
Institute of America

E thnic food is the shattered mirror of haute cuisine. To comprehend the

disparate, fragmented domains of ethnic food, which has no center other
than its difference from the consecrated cooking of professional experts, it is
necessary to hold up that mirror of difference. The divergence between native
cooking and expert training is what provincializes one and universalizes the
other. Such difference is shaped by the very structure of the modern world
along lines of race, gender, and nation. To produce a profession it is necessary
to ensure a tightly coiled, small world that is heavily networked with strong
ties, well policed along its boundaries, and good at excluding others who
might be engaged in similar activities as seen from the outside, but will be
perceived as dramatically different from the inside. So let us take a look at the
small world of professional chefs, the mirror-image of the ethnic cook and the
home cook.
On November 18, 2013, chefs David Chang, Alex Atala, and René Redzepi
graced the cover of Time magazine under the title “The Gods of Food”.1
The lead article “The Dudes of Food,” sketched elaborate family trees of chefs
that did not contain a single woman. Of the fifty-eight named chefs on those
family trees, fifty-four are European, American, or Australian, one Japanese
(Seiji Yamamoto of Nihonryori), one Mexican (Enrique Olvera of Pujol), and one
Chilean (Rodolfo Guzman of Boragó).2 Similarly, the top ten chefs among the
50 Best Restaurants in the World selected by San Pellegrino in 2013 were all
white men (with the exception of Elena Arzak Espina, who is co-listed with
Juan Mari Arzak).3 At number twenty on the San Pellegrino list we have the
first non-white face, Yoshihiro Narisawa, who cooks French-style food in Tokyo,
and then at number twenty-two we have Seiji Yamamoto cooking real Japanese

111
112 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

food at Nihonryori RyuGin in Tokyo. Narisawa also leads the San Pellegrino list
of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants, where French techniques are celebrated with
Japanese ingredients, according to the Wall Street Journal (Chow 2014). In
the same way, the Culinary Institute of America’s ProChef Smart Brief news
feed repeatedly engages with the Asian culinary scene, especially highlighting
chefs from Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, yet rarely extending that
attention to China, Indonesia, the rest of Southeast Asia, India, or all of Africa,
partly because chefs from those regions have been unable or unwilling to pull
themselves into the global hierarchy of dominant culinary discourse. With
token exceptions, those regions do not play in the global culinary discourse
because they cook and talk differently from what counts in the social field of
culinary capital. Similarly, none of the showcased chefs on the 2014 San
Pellegrino’s 50 Best Restaurants in the World list are African, New World
Black, Indian, or from the Chinese mainland—that is, a population base of
about 3 billion people—and only two of the listed chefs are women, always
paired with a man.4 That is an astonishing distillation of the heights of a social
field. Yet, that kind of narrow multi-nationalism standing in for the whole world
isn’t substantially different from, say the world literary space as structured
from the sixteenth- to the twentieth century, centered on Paris and delineated
by Pascale Casanova (2005b; on films see Schwartz 2007). The elimination of
women from such a pantheon is not accidental. It is constitutive of
professionalizing moves in an emergent field as I will show below. What is
equally interesting is not only those who are excluded but the difference that
is systematically included.
The Time Magazine controversy comes years after Charlotte Druckman’s
pointed observation in Gastronomica titled “Why Are There No Great Women
Chefs?” which begins by quoting the art critic Linda Nochlin on “Why Have
There Been No Great Women Artists?” that things are in art as they are in a
hundred different areas, excluding and discouraging all those “who did not
have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class, and above
all male” (Druckman 2010; Nochlin 1971). The matter hinges on how “great”
is defined and by whom, and in doing so affirms what Nochlin already
suspected in posing the question. Druckman noticed that Food & Wine’s
annual roundup of ten Best New Chefs always listed one token woman.
It took fifty-five years for Michelin to offer the third star to a woman chef,
in 2007 (to Anne-Sophie Pic). It is a remarkable delineation of the chef’s
world that apparently counts in the world of chefs today (and in numerous
other professions). Julia Moskin notes that “All groups except for white men
are underrepresented at the top of the profession” (Moskin 2014: D6). By
one account, at the Metropolitan Museum, “5 percent of the artists in the
Modern Art sections are women, but 85 percent of the nudes are female”
(Eberstadt 2014: 1).
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 113

For a decade, the top of the field was occupied by Ferran Adrià and his
restaurant El Bulli. In 1996, Joël Robuchon, often counted as the top chef
among professionals, named Adrià as the best chef in the world, sending
ripples through the French establishment. El Bulli itself is an older restaurant,
established in 1961. Adrià was picked to run it in 1987, garnering three
Michelin stars by 1997. Restaurant magazine listed it as the number one
restaurant in the world in 2002. In 2003, Arthur Lubow consolidated Adrià’s
position with the cover story, “The Neuva Nouvelle Cuisine: How Spain
Became the New France,” in which he quoted Charlie Trotter saying “Spain
is where the zeitgeist has shifted” (Lubow 2003). Adrià, born in Barcelona, is
a cerebral-celebrity chef. “But, if you deconstruct him the way he deconstructs
food, you discover that he is also an artist, a scientist, an inventor, a stage
director, a designer, a philosopher, an anarchist and, to a degree that some
of his more solemn admirers maybe fail to grasp, Coco the Clown” (Guardian
2006). An illustration of his much talked-about technique is the way Adrià
breaks down a Spanish omelet into eggs, potatoes, and onions, and then
reconstructs it into a layered potato foam, onion purée, and egg-white
sabayon, topped with deep-fried potato crumbs, served inside a sherry glass,
ironically and evocatively named tortilla español. Molecular gastronomists’
ability to deceive dinners with professional excellence and artifice is a
deliciously baroque counterpoint to the demands for transparency,
authenticity, and honesty—which we can name as the Chez Panisse
Paradigm—that have become the orthodoxy in the new haute cuisine,
returning us to the trade’s Early Modern conception of artistry as artifice
(Davis 2013: 13).
This kind of reconstructive-cerebral cooking is shaping even so-called
traditionalists. That attitude, if not those techniques, are becoming de rigueur
for inclusion in the field as players. Massimo Bottura, chef-owner of the three-
Michelin-starred restaurant Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, and listed
as the number three restaurant on the World’s Best Restaurant List (such
improbable lists are signs of the times), underlines that it is his friendship with
top chefs around the world that is forcing him to open up his mind without
losing his footing.

When I’m in New York, I go to my friends’ restaurants—people like David

Chang, Daniel [Boulud], Mario [Battali], Wylie Dufresne, the Torrisi brothers
and [Alain] Ducasse if he’s in town. Things have changed over the last ten
years in gastronomy—chefs don’t close their kitchens to other chefs
anymore. It’s about sharing. We travel all over the world and share
techniques, experiences and ideas with one another . . . Contemporary
cuisine is not just about the ingredients—it’s also about the quality of the
ideas. At Osteria Francescana, I look to the past all the time, but not in a
114 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

nostalgic way—in a critical way, to bring the best from the past into the
future (Silberman 2013).

Most importantly, the contemporary chef that counts is the one in the network
of chefs who references others (as peer reviewers), and that is a miniscule
and uneven network in global terms.
In 2010, Noma, René Redzepi’s restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark,
replaced El Bulli at the top of Restaurant magazine’s San Pellegrino World’s 50
Best Restaurants, which is determined by “800 international leaders in the
restaurant industry, each selected for their expert opinion of the international
restaurant scene” (San Pellegrino 2010). As in the fashion world it is a very
competitive field, with new restaurants replacing recent brands and icons.
In some ways Noma can be considered the anti-El Bulli, with its intense
attention to micro-locality and seasonally attuned produce such as truffles
from Gotland (a region of Denmark), “woodruff, beach mustard and Caldonia
lichen” (Redzepi 2010), often served on rocks to further authenticate a Nordic
landscape—food closely tied to its time and place, instead of the transnational
technocuisine of foam, liquid nitrogen, and deconstruction. Yet, Noma and
El Bulli are a pair from the same small universe.
Judgments of good food in these instances, as in analogous aesthetic
fields such as book reviewing and art criticism, are determined in small circles
through processes of “double-reading,” first as a civilian with a gut reaction,
followed by an analysis of technique, skill, and innovation where the emotional
response is turned into an object of scrutiny with distancing criticism, recursive
evaluation, and evidence-based reviewing, borrowing protocols from a science
of subjectivity (Shapin 2012; Leschziner and Green 2013; Chong 2013). Ashley
Kosiak, a student of mine, noted, “Similar to clothing fashion, in haute cuisine
the chef replaces the designer, is praised by the expert critic (analogous to
Vogue’s Anne Wintour), and is discussed and coveted by the general audience.
Just as I will not be eating at Noma, I cannot afford the latest items from new
designers such as Zara Gorman and Nabil El-Nayal. Yet they do shape the
limits of my horizon” (Kosiak 2011).
El Bulli (now closed) and Noma represent the changing shape of the field
on which the chef now plays in global cities; as entrepreneur, technician,
ideologue, aesthete, moralist, artist, artisan, and a designer in the current
language of haute cuisine. The new American chef occupies as spectacular a
position in the field as an Adrià or Redzepi, in a quickly re-configuring domain
headed by figures such as Thomas Keller, Wylie Dufresne, and David Chang
(as I will elaborate on in the next chapter). As in any overheated and fashionable
field, the list is outdated as soon as it is made. That, in fact, is a sign of a field
in upward motion in the social world. Yet, this tide is not lifting all boats.
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 115

Alan Richman has noted in GQ that this new-style cooking is “entirely

male” (2014). “I found no exceptions,” he writes,

Not once have I seen a female chef prepare such food. Men have always
dominated restaurant kitchens, but I don’t recall ever encountering such
gender-specific cooking. The chefs work with like-minded discipline, hardly
ever haunted by doubts, seemingly in possession of absolute confidence,
to say nothing of the adoration of customers. Nobody is telling them what
they might be doing wrong. The food is intellectual, yet at the same time
often thoughtless (Richman 2014).

As Roosth shows in her ethnographic work in Herve This’s laboratory in

“Foams and Formalisms” (2013), when the terms of aesthetic judgment
shifts to molecules and chemistry from culture and practice, we have the
accentuation of scientism (which is more than science), masculinization, and
demonization of “old wives’ tales”—a not so subtle reference to outdated
practices of old women, who are incidentally the very people who do most of
the cooking in the world, everywhere. This masculine scientism of molecular
gastronomy takes to the limit and essentially differentiates the gendered
address of those involved in cooking and care-giving (for analogous analysis of
birthing and cooking, see Katz-Rothman 2016).
The new American chef is born in spaces between three positions: the
(female) domestic cook, the (colored male) ethnic cook, and the (white or
Asian male) professional chef. In the public domain the untrained cook and
the school-trained American chef are precise foils of each other. Interviews
with immigrant restaurateurs working in the domain of “ethnic cuisine”
underline that they do not inhabit the same field as American chefs in the
making, which leads me, in the next section, to re-interrogate the struggle for
professionalism at the institutional heart of American haute cooking. This
community of insiders, that some immigrant cooks with haute aspirations
struggle to be admitted into, as we will see in the next chapter, is in itself a
work in progress of extending expertise most typically for white American and
Asian-American men. Institutional standards of cooking and critical analysis,
along with criteria of social judgment, are built within its perimeter boundaries
and internal hierarchies at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA ), which
is one exemplary institution where American cooks become chefs by
acquiring new tastes, obtaining fresh words to articulate them, gaining novel
cooking skills, attaining new morals and identities. It is at the CIA that
working-class white men often acquire unaccustomed social demeanor
that marks them as radically different subjects from housewives and ethnic
cooks.
116 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Cooking skills and confidence

Chef Tim Ryan, the current President of the CIA , noted that by 1996 he was
wondering whether it was time to update the curriculum: in particular, if it
was still useful to teach the classical French mother sauces. Yet, as he surveyed
his friends and colleagues in the restaurant industry, he said, they were
unanimous. He doesn’t recall a single person who believed that the training
at the CIA ought to change. Each asserted that the skills associated with
mastering Carême’s and Escoffier’s mother sauces were essential (Ruhlman
1997: 262; personal conversations with Ryan).
Celebration of mother sauces has a long history in gastronomy. French
journalist Curnonsky (born Maurice Edmond Sailland), author, with Marcel
Rouff, of the authoritative thirteen volume La France gastronomique (1921–8),
and perhaps the most celebrated gastronomic writer of the early twentieth
century, had declared “Sauces comprise the honor and glory of French
cookery. They have contributed to its superiority, or pre-eminence, which is
disputed by none. Sauces are the orchestration and accompaniment of a fine
meal, and enable a good chef or cook to demonstrate his talent” (Lang 1988:
939). In the Guide Culinaire, August Escoffier, noting the importance of stocks
and sauces made from them, states “Indeed, stock is everything in cooking,
at least in French cooking. Without it, nothing can be done” (Escoffier 1989:
1). The famed French sauces under discussion here had superseded the
spiced sweet-and-sour medieval sauces based on verjuice and wine that often
relied on garum, spikenard, cloves, etc.
According to the fifth edition of The New Professional Chef, which was
being reworked with precise and painstaking detail by the CIA staff during my
tenure there, the “grand sauces—demi-glace, velouté, béchamel, tomato,
and hollandaise—were once referred to as the mother sauces, to indicate that
from these basic sauces many others were created” (CIA 1991: 297). It noted
parenthetically that “Although they may not be relied upon as heavily as in
years past, the grand sauces are still important in a contemporary kitchen”
(CIA 1991: 297). Then it goes on to show how demi-glace (a brown sauce,
itself made from sauce Espagnole), for instance, can be the root of numerous
other sauces such as poivrade (with a red wine reduction, peppercorns, and
butter), chasseur (mushrooms, shallot, white wine, tomato glace), Robert
(with white wine, onions, mustard, and butter), charcutière (Robert sauce plus
julienne of gherkins) and so on. Sauce Espagnole, the root of the root in this
case, is made by sweating a mirepoix of one portion of onions, and one half
portion of carrots, one half portion of celery, and tomato puree, sautéed lightly
until caramelized. Then brown roux is added, brown veal stock thoroughly
incorporated, simmered up to three hours, skimmed, strained, cooled, and
stored for later use. By the eighth edition, The Professional Chef allows that
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 117

“Not all commercial kitchens prepare stocks today, either because meaty
bones and trim are not readily available on a consistent basis or because they
do not have the space or manpower to successfully prepare and hold stocks”
(CIA 2006: 350). After recommending evaluation of commercial sauces (called
bases) centered on flavor, saltiness, balance, and depth, it provides short cuts
to deepen their flavor by sweating or roasting vegetables and simmering them
in diluted bases, “perhaps along with browned trim, to make a rich brown
sauce” (CIA 2006: 350).
By 2006, CIA’s President Ryan would change his mind (a little), in terms of
the necessary techniques of sauce-making, with new focus on Asian and
Latin American ingredients, techniques, and grammars of cooking. The 2006
edition of The Professional Chef devotes three extraordinary chapters to
various regions outside the typical focus of Francophile cuisine. Chapter 5,
titled “The Americas,” includes ingredients, recipes, and cuisines of various
regions of the USA , Mexico, and South America. Chapter 6 attends to the
special ingredients and techniques from various parts of Asia such as China,
India, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Chapter 7, “Europe,”
begins with France and Italy, but extends to other parts of the Mediterranean,
eastern and central Europe, Spain, and Portugal. By 2006, robust new recipes
are added, such as for dashi stock, as one of the foundations of cuisine, while
pestos and pastas proliferate, as do more down-home American cooking such
as ham bone and collard greens. Daring new soups are added to the repertoire
such as the Chinese suan la tang, Korean yukkaejang, Japanese miso, Thai
chicken soup with coconut milk and galangal, wonton soup, and Vietnamese
pho, as well as newer regional Italian variants such as minestrone alla emilia,
and Tuscan white bean and escarole soup. The Mise en Place section by now
includes not only the fines herbes (chervil, chives, parsley, tarragon) and
quatre épices (black peppercorns, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves), but also a
variant of garam masala (cardamom, coriander, cumin, cinnamon, cloves,
black peppercorns, nutmeg, and bay leaves), Chinese five-spice (star anise,
fennel, Szechuan peppercorns, cloves, and cinnamon), barbecue spice mix,
chilli powder, curry powder, red, green, and yellow curry pastes, and various
Asian-style marinades. Yet nouvelle French cuisine techniques remain the
anchor of the curriculum.5 And that is because those procedures belong to the
very language of American haute cuisine, in spite of some new skills, new
ingredients, and new kinds of people that have forced their way into the field.
To insiders it looks like epochal change, to outsiders a mere ripple.
Most importantly, a specific set of technical standards are developed,
formalized, and replicated at an institution such as the CIA . Let us take the
example of a consommé. I stumbled right at the gate as I started work with a
young, widely respected, and talented chef at the CIA . First, I did not know
that a consommé is really a double consommé, as it is the reduction and
118 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

clarification of a stock (which is a kind of a consommé). We began with a

gallon of brown stock (made from browned veal bones, water, standard
mirepoix—onion, carrots, and celery—tomato puree, salt, and the standard
sachet d’épices containing parsley stems, dried thyme leaves, bay leaf,
cracked peppercorns, and crushed garlic cloves) intensified and reduced to a
quart. We made a small onion brûlé (a caramelized onion half), chopped up
another round of mirepoix, and added eight ounces of ground beef-shank,
three beaten egg whites, and four ounces of tomato concassé to the stock,
sprinkling it with salt and milled cracked pepper. The fire was turned up and
the contents stirred, but just before boiling-point was reached—measured by
intermittent lazy bubbles reaching the surface—left to simmer on low heat for
a good hour (note that the stock had already taken about eight hours to make
the previous day). As if that wasn’t subtle enough the chef insisted that much
depends on whether the tomatoes were fresh or canned. If they were
hothouse tomatoes in the winter, they wouldn’t have adequate acidity, so he
used canned tomatoes, and perhaps even added a little white wine or lemon
juice to accentuate the acidity. Midway through the process of making a
consommé, a mess of muddled beef, egg whites, and mirepoix floats up to
the top of the cooking stock as a raft. That is about halfway to the concentration
of flavor. Eventually, the raft is removed and the remaining stock strained to be
served as consommé in beautiful china with a soup spoon.
The standard for a legitimate consommé is clear. “Rule of thumb: you can
read the date on a dime at the bottom of a gallon” (Ruhlman 1997: 40). This
kind of stringency, specificity, replicability, is what is central to haute cuisine
and unnecessary and unimaginable for everyday home cooking. That stringency
of standard and hence evaluation goes hand in hand with accentuating skill.
Any form of doing that exits the household to become a specialized task
conducted in a specialized institution and remunerated, as has happened
with spinning, weaving, cooking, childcare, elder care, and health care, leads
to the development of new techniques in that field precisely because of
specialization (focus, attention, resources) and competitive concentration from
other professionals, which is at the very heart of any specialist “field.” So as
cooking leaves the domestic kitchen and the cookshop, the skills required to
cook also change, along with the gender and ethnicity of the cook.
Pierre Franey, arguably the American century’s original foreign-born
celebrity French chef, asserts that on May 9, 1939, he was extremely confident,
at the opening of the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York,
when he, along with a dozen chefs, launched the Restaurant Français at the
Pavillon de France:

Marius Isnard, the chef de cuisine, was calm. The sous-chefs and the chefs
de parties at each station were in their element. As were we all. When you
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 119

learn to work in a French restaurant, you submit to a militaristic organization.

Even with a team of 150 workers, most of whom had not worked together
before, the assignments were so well defined that we knew precisely
what to do and how to behave (Franey 2010: 79).

This feeling of confidence and calm in the most overheated haute kitchen in
New York City, shared by the son of a village blacksmith, a self-declared “rube”
from St. Vinnemer in Burgundy, is extraordinary. The confidence did not come
easily or naturally. It came after decades of hard work in kitchens and the
embodiment of national propaganda about a cuisine. Much social work had to
go into it. First, the very idea of France and its productive provinces had to be
consolidated. French cuisine had to become a hegemonic practice in the
profession. Most importantly, the required skills, shared nomenclature, and
evaluative criteria of an established and consecrated practice had to be
embodied.
The confidence was a by-product of the competence to produce and
evaluate a shared repertoire of cuts, stocks, sauces, braises, roasts, and
desserts. Among these was the skill of clarification of the consommé: basic
work repeated by every commis and trained chef until it is internalized, but
which is almost never demanded in any institution other than the haute
French cuisine restaurant. Franey had done the work of clarifying the stock
every day since he joined the staff at Thenin, a Parisian restaurant, at age
fourteen in 1934. The cold beef or chicken stock would be poured into a four
feet high pot. It would be heated and stirred, adding a mixture of egg whites,
carrot trimmings, leeks, crushed eggshells, bones, herbs, and spices. He
spent hours stirring and scraping the mixture with a ladle. Three hours later,
drawing the consommé out through a spigot at the bottom of the pot, he
would leave the floating impurities on top. He would learn to produce, evaluate,
and affirm that the consommé, which “is one of the glories of French cooking,”
is pure “artistry and perfection” (Franey 2010: 40–1). “A consommé cannot
have the slightest hint of cloudiness; it must be rich in flavor, even though it is
so light in its appearance. A splendid consommé, perhaps garnished with
diced vegetables, serves as the opening act for the rest of the meal” (Franey
2010: 41).
A generation later, coming up through the ranks of a three-year
apprenticeship, Jacques Pépin’s scandalous error at Le Grand Hôtel de
l’Europe was to stir a ten-gallon pot of consommé barely simmering in the
back of the kitchen, catastrophically muddying it (Pépin 2003: 56). By his
seventeenth birthday, barely six months out of his apprenticeship, Pépin
would nevertheless acquire the “confidence” to run his own restaurant at
L’Hôtel Restaurant de la Paix at Bellegarde, twenty miles west of Geneva at
the foot of the Jura Mountains, due to his mastery of standard culinary fare,
120 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

all culled from his “Bible” of Le Répertoire de la cuisine, first published by

Gringoire and Saulnier in 1914 and containing more than seven thousand
classic recipes of the pre-nouvelle French cuisine (Pépin 2003: 69, 99).
Almost a century later, students at the Culinary Institute of America would
effectively have the same sort of training, evaluative schema, and ideological
posture towards the consommé. It would be one of the bases upon which a
profession and its shared standards would be built. Franey could have been
extremely confident only because on the first night of the World’s Fair in 1939
the menu at the Pavillon de France restaurant opened with a double consommé
de viveur, followed by Paillettes dorées, Homard Pavillon de France, etc. (all
written in restaurant French). On that list was everything he had made before,
at least a thousand times, even though he was only an eighteen-year-old
cook in a foreign land where his mother tongue was otherwise useless. By
the end of that opening season he would have served 136,261 customers
precisely. Two other stepping stones would send him careening on his way to
stardom. One would be a network of elite regulars at Le Pavillon and Le Côte
Basque—American restaurants born from the French Pavilion at the World’s
Fair—such as the President of the American chain Howard Johnson, who
would hire him as a Vice President and assign him their test kitchen, and
another his friendship with The New York Times’s first full-time and consecrated
restaurant critic Craig Claiborne, a little under twenty years after the opening
of the World’s Fair. The chef needed the right patron and media exposure to
become one.
Skills have to be learned, palates developed, criteria for evaluation established,
and bodies trained to cut, chop, and roast, in the process altering posture,
gesture, language, and demeanor. An ethnic cook by definition does not play in
the same field with the same tools or shared evaluative schema. He belongs to
smaller, fragmented, incommensurable, unregulated culinary domains that are
unaccounted for, which is precisely what makes him ethnic. He also does not
belong to the same networks of patronage and media coverage.
Chef Eve Felder, one of the leading visionaries at the CIA , now the Director
of their Singapore campus, and a remarkably talented chef from that Third-
Wave temple of new American restaurant cuisine, Chez Panisse, is clear that
teaching professional cooking is about instructing students on ingredients,
ratios, and techniques. Techniques include knife skills, butchery, stock and
sauce making, cooking proteins just right, mixing flavors, counterposing
textures. The object is to do all that according to standards agreed upon by
professional chefs playing in the field of haute international cuisine, formalized
in the early years of the twentieth century by French practitioners and
ideologues such as August Escoffier. They were updated in the second half of
the twentieth century by Paul Bocuse, the Lyonnaise chef, who is often
considered the father of the last influential wave of nouvelle French cuisine
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 121

(with a strong Japanese inflection, especially in plate presentation) that has

rippled through the world of professional cooking (see Ferguson 2004; Rao,
Monin, and Durand 2003; Ferguson and Zukin 1998; Fischler 1989, 1993).
Escoffier’s cookbooks present what has been done or what ought to be
done; a constant need to play by the book, nothing outlandish, and to
perpetually aspire to perfection (Schmidt 1974: 184). For a quarter century
now, Escoffier has been replaced by Bocuse, but the aspiration to a perfect
world is as insistent. Perfection can be the horizon only in a profession, real to
the field of ambition, delusional in terms of real life. We will return to this point
with Thomas Keller in the next chapter.
Bocuse’s oeuvre is being overtaken right now, which makes it the precise
moment to institutionally commemorate his location in the genealogy of the
profession. That transition is marked at the CIA by changing the name of the
flagship French restaurant, from Escoffier to Bocuse (on February 22, 2013).
It bookends the last transition, just as the Escoffier Room was born in 1974,
precisely when Bocuse had already replaced Escoffier as the new ideologue
of the profession. The Bocuse—the new restaurant at the CIA —was designed
by Adam Tihany, transforming an outdated, classically oriented space that
students referred to as the E-Room, into a sharply modern twenty-first-century
restaurant that looks a lot like a Per Se or a Daniel. Mark Erickson, the institute’s
provost, noted that in the new kitchen, old hierarchies and “separation of the
classic stations of the original Escoffier” would no longer be maintained, and
that at “Bocuse, sauces, sautéing and vegetable preparation will be done
at several stations, and there will be much more collaboration among the
cooks” (Collins 2012). The relationship between ingredients and menus is
reversed now, where seasonal ingredients, the newly canonized ideology
of the profession, determines the menu, rather than the dynamic of “old
times” when menus demanded canned asparagus to showcase the
hollandaise. Today, there is no out-of-season asparagus. Yet, not everything
echoes the new agrarian ideal. Newly ascendant techno-emotional cuisine
with its distinctive foams, spherifications, gels, crumbs, powders, etc. also
registers at the CIA , especially in the new Bachelors of Professional Studies
(BPS ) in Culinary Science (since 2013). As a result, The Bocuse restaurant
accommodates a new brigade station with the sous vide, a technique of
cooking at steady low temperatures in sealed vacuum bags, marking the
current concordat between technological triumphalism, scientism, new
urbanity, and re-configured rurality.
Teaching professional cooking in New York means reiterating and
reinterpreting institutional standards of various nouvelle cuisines that have
emerged in dialogue and disagreement with Escoffier’s institutional standards
over the long-twentieth century (ca. 1880–1999) in various waves of novelty.
It also means repeating the dishes and techniques over and over again to
122 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

make such standards a habit, second nature, even while developing new
translations of old principles and practices. That is an exercise that can go
awry without discipline.
An important but understudied aspect of teaching professional cooking in
the US is to address the social dimension of professional cooking embedded
in broader hierarchies of class, gender, race, and ethnicity. In a sense students
are trained by routines that turn them into chefs and particular kinds of men
and women. In the following pages I will develop the connection between
cooking and social hierarchies. As a result I will retrace the pedagogical
processes of producing such functioning bodies at the heart of American
institutional haute cuisine, with particular attention to what has to be excised,
excluded, transcended, and inculcated to make the new American chef, who
is the foil for the ethnic cook and the home cook. The discourse of haute
cuisine and the practice of restaurant cookery overwhelmingly produce male,
white, international chefs, where “international” is the opposite of the
domestic ethnic. Here power is productive: both within institutions such as
the CIA and outside of them, it produces skilled hands and certain kinds of
social subjects. Skills come implicated in normative hierarchies.
Yet that is not the whole story. The nature of professionalization depends
on time and place: the sociocultural ecology, so to speak. Masculine and racist
scripts that worked, say, for American physicians at the end of the nineteenth
century, could not work for chefs at the end of the twentieth century, because
the legal and cultural context had changed. That is an important difference. It
is a subtle act of normalizing and neutralizing race and gender, as is the
demand in every profession today. As the world around the CIA has been
changed by waves of feminism and civil rights movements, excessively
grandiloquent versions of white masculinity have become impediments to the
upward mobility of chefs. Organizational leaders at the CIA have been
struggling to change the character of the chef-in-making and his associated
habitus. The rest of this chapter is devoted to that enterprise of extending
technical and social expertise of a class of people who historically come from
the working class but ideologically and materially serve the upper classes.

Teaching at the Culinary Institute of America:

Disciplining bodies
When I began teaching at the CIA in 1995, two things intrigued me about
the place. First and foremost, it was the surprising ubiquity of the word
“professional.” The most disparaging thing one could say about a colleague
was that he was being unprofessional. If you asked anyone, as I did, what that
meant, they would list the things one should not do as a professional, such as
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 123

swearing, sexual harassment, dress code violation, violence, shouting, drugs,

too much alcohol, smoking, etc. Such excesses were read as markers of
untamed working-class masculinity in a world where the domain for such
idioms was shrinking dramatically in legitimacy. The characterization was
powerful precisely because it was nebulous, analogous to an aroma, which is
precisely why it evoked a whole structure of feeling. What was intended was
mostly left unsaid. Relatedly, I was fascinated by the religious aura surrounding
issues of comportment and manners, made visible by the dress code, where
the official code outlines the color of underwear allowed under chefs’ whites.
Conversations at the faculty table almost always veered towards complaints
about declining standards of dress and demeanor among the students. Why
this focus on middle-class, almost Victorian, models of discipline, character,
and propriety?
Yet, I was also surprised by the aggressive masculinity of the place.
Everyone had learned to acknowledge the presence of women amongst
them, but there was the residue of an assumption that only real men could be
chefs, the rest merely cooks, or worse still housewives. Why was this sense
of masculinity so pervasive in spite of the institutional attempt to neutralize it?
Such questions led to others: Why were only a small percentage of the
cooking students (in contrast to Baking and Pastry), and the faculty and
administration, female? Why did many women find it a difficult place in which
to work and learn? Was the institution changing in its gendered demeanor? To
what purpose?
As Fred Katz noted long ago, with the profession of nursing in mind,
“Few professionals talk as much about being professionals as those whose
professional stature is in doubt” (1969: 71). To better understand these
anxieties I needed to contrast the culture of the institution with a comparable
one, preferably the culture of an emergent profession. To do that, I needed to
look at other professions, specifically something born from women’s nurturant
work, but turned into a man’s career (Litt 2000). So I develop the analogy
below, conducting a thought experiment, with medicine in mind at the end of
the nineteenth century.
The first great transformation of American medicine into the modern
professional field that it is today happened between the Civil War and the First
World War—let us call it First-Wave Modern Biomedicine—and it fundamentally
changed the character, training, skills, and returns to the profession. That is the
analogic moment in the life cycle of professional cooking today: physicians
then (ca. 1865–1914) and chefs today (ca. 1970–2000). Medicine is currently
going through its next great transformation, producing Second-Wave Modern
Biomedicine, with its focus on outcomes-based research, double-blind studies
conducted by for-profit drug companies, not-for-profit universities, and teaching
hospitals, governed by state bureaucracies of health and human services, and
124 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

statutory institutions, such as National Institutes of Health in the USA .

Absorbing technological changes in computing, biostatistics, scanning,
molecular biology, pharmacology, and genetics, a newer kind of medicine is
emerging all around us that has been interrogated by anthropologists and
sociologists (Clarke, Shim, Fosket, Mamo, and Fishman 2003; Berg 1997).
This Second-Wave Modern Biomedicine has far outstripped the valence of
even the most high-tech molecular gastronomes and celebrity chefs. So, to
make it clear, I am not comparing the processes of profession-making in the
fields of current biomedicine and current professional cooking. I will pay
attention to the analogic moment of medicine more than 100 years ago at the
beginning of the long twentieth century and chefing today to illuminate the
comparative moment of early, insecure professionalization.
First-Wave Modern Biomedicine provides an instructive comparative
framework for professional cooking because that is when physicians
reinvented themselves as an occupation that superseded the vocations of
the ancien régime in theology, philosophy, medicine, and law, and they did so
by clearly separating themselves from informally trained, experience-based,
care-givers, medics, midwives, medicine men, and apothecaries. The First
Wave came at the end of the nineteenth century in the US. Subsequently, all
aspirants to the modern title of a professional have had to measure up to the
trajectory of physicians, with their claims of cognitive exclusiveness, scientific
expertise, and success at occupational closure. In the following pages I
develop the analogy of professional cooking not only with First-Wave Modern
Biomedicine, but also with analogic moments in other professions such as
law, dentistry, and school and college teaching.6
Scholars such as Andrew Abbott (1988) have shown the importance of the
ecology of professions and semi-professions within which a vocation is
embedded. He illustrates how the pushing, pulling, elbowing, between
various professions and sub-professions keeps an emerging profession in
dynamic tension with its neighbors, and can explain much about any single
profession. Strife between professions produces their social location.
Physicians, nurses, dieticians, lab technicians, phlebotomists, produce each
other by fighting for turf and marking out their domain, a fight which is never
settled for good, although it is crystallized by legal monopolies such as the
right to prescribe medicine.
On the other hand, depending on a theory of essential features, other
scholars have tried to identify professionals by isolating some of the
characteristics of exemplary occupations (Hughes 1958; Etzioni 1969; Johnson
1972). For instance, Etzioni (1969) defines a profession by the length of
training. According to her a professional is one who is specifically trained for
his occupation for a period of over five years, while a semi-professional is one
who is trained for under five years. I synthesize both these perspectives,
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 125

which transforms the relational and essential prognosis into a dynamic

morphogenetic process. The point is to pay attention to the life cycle of a
profession and the context that allows certain kinds of people into the cohort
and excludes others by legal fiat, culture, capital, or convention. Let me explain
what I mean by that.

Liberal arts: Curricular strategies of inculcating

gentlemanliness
After the advent of First-Wave Modern Biomedicine, a broad liberal arts degree
came to be seen as increasingly necessary by those who sought to elevate
the class profile of American physicians. Thus a Bachelor’s degree became a
prerequisite for medical college admission in the USA , without much
pedagogical justification.7 The attempt was to stress the mental aspect of the
profession over the physical, hence physicians typically hesitated to touch
their patients. Instead, they listened to them. Furthermore, the eminent
historian of medicine Roy Porter writes, “By 1900 it was becoming possible to
understand a patient not by his story, nor even simply through pathological
signs,” but by ceaseless physiological monitoring “by the apparatus of
numerical and chemical readings” (Porter 1997: 346). Diagnostic tests so
transformed First-Wave Modern Biomedicine that by the middle of the
twentieth century doctors had to be encouraged to touch their patients again.
In the first chapter, titled “Doctor and Patient,” in the ever popular manual
Hutchinson’s Clinical Methods, it is advised, “Never underestimate the power
of communication inherent in touching your patient. Try holding the hand of a
frightened old lady and see how it gives her more comfort than your words of
reassurance.” It continues, “Gentleness is all important; indeed abdominal
palpation, to be successful, must be like a caress . . . It is all part of gaining the
patient’s confidence” (quoted in Swash 1995: 3).8 Nonetheless, particularly
physical branches of medicine, such as surgery, dentistry, and nursing, were
the last to be professionalized (Adams 2000; Etzioni 1969). Eventually, medical
diagnostic technologies of the Second Wave of Biomedicine through the
twentieth century—of seeing inside bodies, listening to what is invisible,
chemical testing and marking, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, and
various modes of imaging from X-Rays to functional MRI s—comfortably
separated physicians from laypersons, who could never again threaten the
former’s expertise.
Cooking schools are facing similar pressures today to those that faced
First-Wave Biomedicine: to heighten the chef’s profile, where there are no
large technological gaps yet between the home kitchen and the restaurant
126 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

kitchen other than scale, more heat, and more sharpened knives. When I
joined the CIA in 1995, as one of the first appointments in an expansive liberal
arts hiring project, the CIA had a one-week Introduction to Gastronomy course
as the only liberal arts-oriented class in an eighteen-month curriculum. I
learned later that the gastronomy class was a product of a “dramatic revision”
of the curriculum in 1989, with the addition of courses less closely related to
cooking such as Supervisory Development, Management of Wines and
Spirits, and Menus and Facilities Planning.
In 1985, President Metz of the CIA and then-Vice President Tim Ryan had,
with the backing of the Board, begun making specific inquiries and conducting
surveys about developing a baccalaureate program. To test the market, the
first survey of 210 students enrolled in the AOS —Associate of Occupational
Studies—program at the CIA was completed in June 1985. A July 1989 survey
of 941 students and another in January 1991 (N=1175) confirmed the internal
demand for a baccalaureate program. Between 40 and 48 percent of the
students (in the three surveys) showed interest in pursuing a bachelor’s
degree. Soon after this, the CIA hired a consultant to interview thirty leading
industry executives, chefs, editors, and restaurateurs—“key persons such as
Ken Aretsky, Michael Bartlett, Joseph Baum, Jerome Burns, Julia Child,
William Fisher, John Farquarson, Pierre Franey, Dan Gescheidle, Richard
Melman, Robert Nyman, and Martin Yan” (CIA 1992: 7). Eighty percent of
these leaders confirmed what the surveys were showing—the demand and
the need for a baccalaureate degree. Other CIA internal studies cited the
National Restaurant Association’s (1988) Current Issues Report: Foodservice
Manager 2000, which predicted a need for almost 450,000 new managers by
the year 2000, of which 50,000 were likely to be recipients of higher education.
The CIA study also cited an article by Wayne C. Guyette (1981), titled “The
Executive Chef: Manager or Culinarian?” in The Cornell HRA Quarterly, to
point to real concerns about the training of chefs. Finally, it referred to a Bureau
of Labor Statistics report showing that 22 percent of the total jobs available
required a baccalaureate degree, while only 20 percent of the population had
such a degree. It optimistically concluded, “clearly, with the growth of the
hospitality industry, increasing customer sophistication, more competition,
and business complexities, there will be an increasing need and expectation
for industry leaders to possess a baccalaureate degree which this program
will provide” (CIA 1992: 9).
By 1993, a thirty-eight-month, 132-credit Bachelor of Professional Studies
(BPS ) course was established, and new fifteen-week, semester-long courses
in the History and Culture of Europe, History and Culture of the Americas,
History and Culture of Asia, Economics, Composition, Food Writing,
Accounting, and Psychology were added to the usual cooking, table service,
sommelier, and business classes. That added another seventeen months to
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 127

the curriculum, which saw some initial resistance from students in terms of
recruitment, notwithstanding the optimism of the internal studies conducted
earlier.
Liberal arts classes were added not only to the new BPS curriculum but
also to the traditional AOS program, which is still the anchor of the CIA . By
2002, a fifteen-week writing class and a fifteen-week interpersonal
communication class had been added to the eighteen-month AOS curriculum.
There have been a number of curricular strategies used at the CIA to socialize
working-class boys and men into middle-class aspirants (a) by developing a
palate and a vocabulary akin to the upwardly mobile professional classes, so
that (b) they can better serve their upper-class clientele and (c) acquire middle-
class wages and status. In addition to technical skills of cooking and baking,
students are trained to acquire middle-class styles of being-in-the-world in a
number of ways.
For instance, the course “Introduction to Gastronomy” introduces incoming
students to great French chefs such as Fernand Point and Paul Bocuse (with
Americans such as Alice Waters added in 1996) as a way of encouraging
students to recognize the possibilities of prestige within their occupation
and producing a preferred genealogy of the profession.9 Second, entering
students were assigned to eat “on stage,” where they were served the most
conservative of French haute cuisine, with its elaborate paraphernalia of
silverware, sauces with French names, and mannerisms most alien to
working-class American boys. Here an interesting etymological slippage
joined the French word stage for artisanal apprenticeship to the architectural
site where meals were consumed on a raised stage in the Great Hall, with its
chandeliers, stained-glass windows, and flags of wine-producing nations that
gave it the fitting air of a cathedral of culture. Students’ manners were on
display, when they ate “on stage,” to the policing gaze of their table service
instructors.
Classes in “Interpersonal Communication” (IPC ) were established to
universalize middle-class ethos, manners, and language (including body
language) as the only possible norm for a professional. That was done both
by training working-class boys and men to internalize middle-class modes
of communication (no shouting, no name-calling, no addressing people in
anger) as the only sanctioned style, and by training their eye to catch deviations
from that standard as managers in Supervisory Development. All three of
these classes—Gastronomy, Interpersonal Communication, and Supervisory
Development—also generated the greatest resistance from students and
chefs, who, lacking a class ideology, often termed these classes as irrelevant
to their technical skills. It was invariably male, working-class students who
struggled the most in these non-cooking classes, while the women did
quite well. On graduation, according to an internal survey, most students
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acknowledged the primary importance of “professionalism” in their training,

underlining the apparent ideological success of the process (CIA 2003).
Equally importantly, oral and practical exams were increasingly supplanted
by written exams in almost every course. Most dramatically, we see the
transformation in the Externship Manual, which has expanded to a detailed
100-odd page, twenty-module exercise, worth the most academic credit (six
credit-hours) in the whole program. Prior to 1989, the six-week Externship
experience was evaluated informally with no required written work. Most
culinary students find such written requirements cumbersome. Yet, some
students, especially female students, in alliance with their writing instructors
have seized the opportunity to publish Amusé: A Literary Magazine since
2003, which is in itself a sign of grander aspirations. These are some of the
ways in which, to answer the sociologist Gary Alan Fine’s question, “how the
children of blue-collar workers become socialized to a career that demands
knowledge of arenas of cultural capital (‘taste’) to which they have not been
exposed” (Fine 1996: x).
The socialization of students would be incomplete without transforming
their chef role-models into epitomes of middle-class sensibility. That has been
done by strong sanctions against shouting, cursing, drunkenness, carousing,
and harassment of women and minorities, which were painted as crude
working-class behavior since the early 1980s. With infinite sensitivity to
American impatience with the language of class, this project of inculcating
middle-class manners has been called professionalism.
In conjunction with increasing paperwork—in terms of course guides,
lesson plans, lecture notes, etc.—and book-learning, which has become a
new focus since 1989, this project has generated persistent subterranean
tensions at the CIA between chefs in their “whites” toiling away in hot
kitchens and “suits” who sit in judgment over them in air-conditioned offices
on higher floors of Roth Hall. These “suits” are often seen as paragons of
middle-class respectability. Given the institutional discourse on demeanor, the
tension is appropriately inscribed on attire. Without a legitimate ideology of
their class project, old working-class chefs find themselves at sea in this new
institutional culture and legitimately see their control slipping into the hands
of “suits,” aided by younger cohorts and by painful betrayal by Presidents
who are much more attuned to middle-class aspirations and upper-class
sensibilities, especially with the rising profile of the chef in American popular
culture. As Wilensky notes with regard to all professions, “The newcomers
see the old-timers as a block to successful professionalization; the latter see
the former as upstarts” (1964: 145).
Some of the expansion of the liberal-arts and reading-and-writing
components of the curriculum has come about due to expectations of
organizations such as the Middle-States Commission on Higher Education
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 129

(henceforth Middle-States), which is the accrediting agency for colleges

and universities in the mid-Atlantic states of the United States. The CIA
sought and successfully received Middle-States accreditation in 2002. For a
single-focus institution, such as the CIA (and Julliard for instance), Middle-
States expects about 40 percent of the curriculum to be liberal arts rather
than profession-oriented. The other source of curricular transformation is
internal CIA assumptions about an “educated professional” which, it is argued
by its leaders, is the shape of the “future chef.” This is in part about the
upwardly mobile aspirations of the profession. Middle-States accreditation
was sought both to upgrade the profile of the graduating chef and to out-
maneuver competitors in the crowded field of more than 500 culinary schools
in the USA .
The nature and relevance of the curriculum has been a source of
considerable debate within the educational bureaucracy in the US at least
since the Civil War. As primary education became free and compulsory in the
Northeast and Midwest by about the 1860s and was imposed on the American
South in the course of Reconstruction, questions were raised about the
relevance of secondary education for working-class Americans. It was argued
by some that vocational education that focused on specific technical skills
was a productive alternative to the diffused and mostly unmeasurable skills
taught in high schools and colleges. But the leaders of American secondary
education were hostile to vocational training because in their eyes it
undermined the ideals of a culturally socializing education oriented toward
liberal arts. More importantly, vocational schools did not flourish for two
reasons: first, most of the training for manual labor could be acquired on the
job or through apprenticeship; and second, manual education did not provide
social mobility into middle-class culture, which would become the dominant
paradigm of expectations about careers in the twentieth century. Thus most
working-class students either dropped out to pursue a trade or continued to
acquire a liberal college education so that they could climb the ladder of social
stratification (Collins 1979: 114–15).
The Progressive movement in education made some improvements to the
curriculum in terms of relevance, but at the end of the day it was liberal arts
plus athletics. Thus, football and fraternities became the salvation of secondary
schools and then colleges at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
which in terms of specific skills added circles of sociability and class endogamy
as the unspoken objectives of college curriculum. The real competition to
traditional colleges and universities with their liberal arts curriculum came from
professions such as medicine, law, and engineering, none of which required a
college education at the end of the nineteenth century.
Universities sought to counter that challenge by opening professional
schools and by making the BA a requirement for admission to schools of law,
130 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

medicine, and engineering. That added four more years of tuition money to
the coffers of colleges and created an artificial demand for their own BA s,
which by the second half of the twentieth century became a requirement for
respectability.10 That also resolved the crises of over-supply that have haunted
American higher education from the very beginning, because of fewer
restrictions on educational entrepreneurs who have established more colleges
in the US than anywhere else (the US has almost five times more colleges
than any other nation in the developed world) (Collins 1979: 121). That very
over-supply has also forced American colleges to be less selective by way of
not only scholastic aptitude but also denomination and gender, making
American colleges more secular and gender neutral (comparatively). Through
these transformations a broad liberal arts education has remained the
touchstone of the college experience.
In keeping with that trend, the current administration of the CIA has
attempted to heighten the academic profile of the institution by hiring PhDs
for its BPS program (about a dozen by 2010), and by making a PhD a
requirement for continued employment in the department. The President of
the CIA acquired an Executive PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in
2003. Compared to the older pattern of listing the chefs under whom they
had worked, major companies where they had labored, or famous restaurants
where they had worked, increasingly, chefs’ biographies in the school
brochure list degrees and certifications, many of which are obscure and minor,
such as Certified Hospitality Educator.11 Thus, formal credentials are
increasingly replacing personal attributes and patronage. Furthermore,
academic paraphernalia such as sabbaticals were introduced in 1997, with the
first one granted in 1998. (By comparison, Harvard granted its first sabbatical
in 1880, also in the process of professionalizing its academic faculty.) CIA’s
policy statement on sabbaticals self-consciously notes: “The sabbatical leave
is one of the more agreeable customs of an academic career, providing the
college educator an opportunity for mental refreshment unique to higher
education” (CIA 2003). Subsequently, the sabbatical policy was further
amended to allow for individuals with seven years of service to apply for a
sabbatical (as both the etymology of the term “sabbatical” required and the
practice of universities and colleges pointed to) instead of the previous policy
of ten years.
After 2001, faculty development was pursued with greater formalization
and accountability, with new forms, annual plans, and written applications,
again provoking strong recriminations from older chefs. All three steps cited
above—PhDs, sabbaticals, faculty development plans—echo exactly what
Mary E. Woolley, the first academic president of Mount Holyoke College
(1901–37), did to transform her institution from a seminary established in 1837
to teach young ladies morals and manners, to a first-rate college (Glazer and
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 131

Slater 1987: 30–4). As with President Woolley’s efforts, these changes have
raised the hackles of many an old timer at the CIA , and the administration has
been unable to extract a research agenda or a substantial record of publications
from the faculty, yet (partly due to a very heavy teaching load).

Character
An important variable in the professionalization of First-Wave Modern
Biomedicine was a particular kind of institutional culture, with its minutiae of
manners, mores, discipline, and dress code. That is, doctors had to be trained
for their upward mobility, which was to make visible their class promotion by
way of bedside manners, white coats, and the stethoscope. In a popular
advice manual for medical practitioners, The Physician Himself and What He
Should Add to His Scientific Acquirements (1890, first published 1881), D. W.
Cathell noted that conviviality between physician and patient “has a levelling
effect, and divests the physician of his proper prestige” (1890: 80). Appearing
in shirtsleeves, unwashed and unkempt, was unwise because it would “show
weakness, diminish your prestige, detract from your dignity, and lessen you in
public esteem, by forcing on everybody the conclusion that you are, after all,
an ordinary person” (1890: 83). A way of gathering deference was to mimic
the attire of more established professionals, such as when surgeons put on
the faux academic long gown (Katz 1999: 23; Power 1933: 23). The next step
in the sartorial marker came early in the twentieth century, when medicine-
men increasingly transitioned from black robes to the white lab-coats to
signify their transition from a guild to a scientific profession (Hochberg 2007).
A significant sign of self-consciousness about upward mobility of the
occupational group is the very process of identification of the group as a
profession. The word “professional” is derived from the old English phrase “to
profess a religious belief,” which the Oxford English Dictionary (OED ) dates
back to the twelfth century. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the word
“profession” came to be used to signify

the occupation one professes to be skilled in and to follow. A vocation in

which a professed knowledge of some department of learning or science
is used in its application to the affairs of others or in the practice of an art
founded upon it. Applied specifically to the three learned professions of
divinity, law and medicine (OED 1989).

The OED cites Francis Bacon in 1605 saying “Amongst so many great
foundations of colleges in Europe, I find strange that they are all dedicated to
professions, and none left free to Arts and Sciences at large” (OED 1989:
132 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Volume XII , 573). The use of the word “professional” expanded while its
scope was narrowed to closed, specialist knowledge, which became quite
popular by the second half of the nineteenth century.
In all probability the word “professional” was first used at the CIA in the
year 1955 in a brochure about “Courses in Professional Cooking.” An identical
brochure from 1951 does not contain that word. (Brochures for the intervening
period are missing). The CIA has had three incarnations. It began in 1946,
with fifty students and a faculty consisting of a chef, a baker, and a dietitian,
as the New Haven Restaurant Institute, as a vocational training ground for
Second World War veterans. It offered a sixteen-week program featuring
instruction in seventy-eight popular menus of the day. Members of the New
Haven Restaurant Association sponsored the original school, whose founders,
Frances Roth and Katharine Angell, served as its first Director and Chair of the
Board, respectively. In 1947 the New Haven Restaurant Institute moved to a
forty-room mansion adjacent to Yale University. The school’s name was
changed then to the Restaurant Institute of Connecticut, and in 1951 it became
known as the Culinary Institute of America, with each step expanding its claim
to represent a city, then a state, finally a nation.
It was in the 1960s that the school’s educational program was expanded to
two years. By the time of Roth’s retirement in 1965, the school had increased
its enrollment to 400 students and operated a $2 million facility. In 1969,
double-class sessions (7am–2pm and 3pm–10pm) were initiated to admit
more students. Even that wasn’t adequate to the ambitions of the school’s
administrators. Soon after, they launched a search for a new home, and found
a five-story, 150-room Jesuit seminary, with eighty acres of land overlooking
the Hudson River in Hyde Park, NY. They paid $1 million for it in 1970. Two
years and $4 million in renovations later, the new school opened, with its main
building renamed Roth Hall (CIA 2015). In 2010 the CIA was training 2,000
degree-acquiring students, almost 6,000 professionals, and another 1,600
food enthusiasts. The main buildings house forty-one professional kitchens
and five restaurants and cafés, worked by tuition-paying students. Now the
CIA has campuses in Napa Valley, San Antonio, and Singapore, but the Hyde
Park Campus continues to be the flagship. The official argument is that this
vast and expanding enterprise is tied together by character imparted by
professional training.
Outside the CIA , but within the larger emergent field of American
professional chefs, “The Culinarian’s Code of Conduct” was adopted by the
American Culinary Federation (ACF ) at its Chicago convention in 1957. The
Code has numerous references to the “profession,” and its general tenor
highlights what appears to be upwardly mobile aspirations of a guild, with
proclamations such as, “I pledge my professional knowledge and skill to
the advancement of our profession and to pass it on to those that are to
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 133

follow;” “I shall be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as I am

about my own;” “I shall be too big for worry, too noble for anger, too strong
for fear and too happy to permit the pressure of business to hurt anyone,
within or without the profession;” etc. (ACF 1957). The rhetoric underlines
the attempt to shift cooks’ orientation from narrow self-interest to the
profession. The text is primarily a pledge of loyalty to one’s colleagues. Some
analysts consider the development of a code of ethics as an important
stage in the natural history of a profession (Caplow 1954; Wilensky 1964;
Johnson 1972).
The code of conduct appears as one of the longest sections of the Student
Handbook at the CIA that has remained relatively unchanged over the last
decade, under the heading “professionalism, uniform and hygiene policy.”
There the importance of professionalism is underlined in the following way
(which I quote at some length as it is the center piece of professional claims
made visible). First, it announces that “As professionals at The Culinary
Institute of America, we are constantly working to enhance the status of the
hospitality industry.” Then it asserts that cooking professionally “is an ancient
and respected profession,” and that it “takes many years of hard work, training,
dedication, and tenacity to become a leader in this industry, but it takes only
a few moments to dress, act, and think like a professional.” Then it lists
expectations for “anyone who aspires to be regarded as a professional in the
hospitality industry,” where professionals:

refrain from abusive and foul language;

speak and act without prejudice to race, color, creed, religion, age, gender,
disability, ethnicity, veteran status, marital status, or sexual orientation . . .
refrain from the abuse of drugs and alcohol . . .
are polite and courteous to all visitors, peers, and colleagues;
work with a positive attitude . . . (CIA 2002: 34).

The code then continues to state that a professional is one who “acts reliably
and dependably,” and adds nine pages of material on the dress code, which
mandates that students “must be clean-shaven, with sideburns not exceeding
the middle of the ear for men. Beards are not permitted.” Mustaches “must
be neatly trimmed and may not extend below the corner of the lips.” Facial
jewelry, “including jewelry in eyebrows, eyelids, lips, tongue, upper ear, or
nose, is not permitted” (CIA 2002: 35). It goes on to insist that “Plain white
undergarments are required for both men and women. Colored or logo tee
shirts are not permitted.” “Leather clothing is not permitted” and “No hair
colors such as green, blue, pink, etc. will be permitted” (CIA 2002: 37).
These are not just obscure rules that no one implements. Enforcement is
lively. Let me quote just one e-mail from a faculty member urging others to
134 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

implement the dress code: “This morning I had to ask Ms. [X] if there was any
possible way that she could wear her shirt so that her breasts were actually
inside it. I would appreciate your support, so to speak, in keeping Ms. [X’s]
chest in check:).”12 Part of the interest in the dress code is titillation. Some of
it is to find opportunities to reprimand young people for violating sartorial
modes of propriety that older cohorts often complain about, which might be a
universal phenomenon. Yet much of it is seriously disciplining too, and it is the
serious part that is most intriguing.
It is today as justifiable in the CIA as the actions of the Chief of Surgery
who, in the 1890s, did not allow his surgeons “to be seen around the hospital
eating, drinking, or even carrying soda or coffee” (Cassell 1998: 101–2). As at
West Point, the Military Academy down the road from the CIA , the Culinary
has a demerits system, akin to what Bledstein considered characteristic of
“old-time colleges” such as Harvard until the end of the antebellum period,
when “the official atmosphere approached that of a military school” (1976:
235). In 1830, when a student entered Harvard he received a copy of Orders
and Regulations, with a complex system of merits and demerits where eight
points were lost for being late at prayers, two points for missing it altogether,
sixteen for lying on the grass or shouting from a window (Bledstein 1976:
235–6). The section on professionalism in the Student Handbook (2002) of the
CIA notes: “While you are going to class, in class, leaving class, or in student
dining rooms, the uniform and dress code must be adhered to, and will be
enforced.” It ends on the ominous note that “Of your final grade, 10% will be
for Professionalism, Uniform, and Hygiene. The professor will assess each
violation of the policy while you are in class . . . You can avoid these penalties
by demonstrating professionalism in all that you do” (CIA 2002: 41). The
2014/2015 Student Handbook & Planner has a similarly substantial section
called “Professionalism, Uniform and Hygiene Policy,” which opens with “As
professionals at The Culinary Institute of America, we are constantly working
to enhance the status of the hospitality industry. Students, faculty, staff and
alumni all share a common pride in their work, workplace, and appearance”
(CIA 2014), and goes on to note that “professionals refrain from abusive and
foul language,” and that “mustaches must be neatly trimmed,” etc. These are
issues that have dropped out of the handbooks of most colleges with a more
class-assured clientele.
It is apparent why both in medical colleges of the past and in cooking
schools today so much stress is put on dress code. “Like many people whose
position in society is somewhat precarious, physicians were much concerned
to maintain a front of propriety and respectability” (Starr 1982: 85). Tracey L.
Adams’s work on dentistry as a profession confirms such a hypothesis. She
writes, “Dentistry gained professional legislation [in Canada] in 1868. However,
like other professionals, dentists did not at first have an easy time enforcing
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 135

this legislation. The main difficulty, in dentists’ eyes, was that the public did
not recognize their claim to professional status—they had no social legitimacy”
(Adams 2000: 6). To convince the public that they were deserving of public
respect, they “drew on a number of social ideologies and institutions, but
gender, in combination with class and race, was central to their efforts”
(Adams 2000: 6–7). Part of the argument by self-conscious dentists was that
everything about a dentist, “his appearance, demeanour, conduct in practice
and interactions with others,” should convey his status as “a middle-class,
white gentleman. Dental leaders believed that if all dentists behaved like
middle-class professional gentlemen, then the public would come to respect
them” (italics in original; Adams 2000: 6–7).
In fact the whole idea of a profession has served the purposes of middle-
class men (a) to distinguish themselves from the propertied classes above
them and the working-class below them; and (b) in establishing a masculine
public sphere of salaried work separate from the unpaid domestic work of
middle-class women. Nothing makes that clearer than an apocryphal story
published in the Hartford Daily Times by the attorney Charles Moore in 1886,
titled “The Woman Lawyer.” It is a story that was said to be the tale of a young
woman, Mary Padelford, who wished to practice law. “She arrives in Moore’s
hometown, Old Litchfield, Connecticut, on a stagecoach. Upon seeing her
‘slender figure’ and the determined look on her face, attorney Walter Perry, ‘a
man vigorous in mind and body,’ declares that if Padelford ‘possesses enough
physical strength’ she might succeed.” But things predictably fall apart when
it is discovered that she is no match for the rigors of the courtroom during a
stormy trial that pits her against two tough, unscrupulous adversaries, when:

Padelford falls from her chair in a swoon. “Oh take me away, take me away,”
she whispers. A physician later diagnoses her condition as “brain fever.”
Constant study of the law had taxed her constitution “to the utmost” and
long trials have brought her “mental and physical exhaustion.” She
announces that, although loath to give up her profession, she must on the
advice of her physician cease trying cases. Padelford forsakes the
courtroom, marries Perry, and spends the rest of her life helping him in a
law partnership (Grossberg 1990: 133).

With attitudes like that it is no surprise that women constituted only 1 percent
of the bar by 1910 (compared to 6 percent of the medical profession) (Epstein
1993: 4; Walsh 1976: 107–8). Barbara Harris contends that “practicing law was
even more incompatible with nineteenth-century ideas about women than
was practicing medicine” (Harris 1978: 110). Lawyers could not claim that their
practice was an extension of women’s nurturant work, or occupy feminine
corners of the profession such as pediatrics and gynecology. Woman lawyers
136 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

were clearly intruding into the public domain and they were made to pay the
price for such intrusions (Harris 1978: 110).
Beyond gossip about the few women in the profession, the question, of
course, is: How exactly did middle-class men contain women’s participation in
the labor force? Victorian ideological separation of women’s sphere and the
public, paid, male’s sphere played some role in the gendered allocation of
labor and the moral exclusion of women. Father’s and husband’s material,
cultural, and emotional power over women in the household was used to
exclude and discourage women from paid work, from colleges, and hence
automatically from professions. Beyond the ideological rewards of modesty,
men reaped the benefits of free household labor, so that in part men could
pursue careers in the various professions. That still works today. But that was
only one of the strategies of exclusion.
Middle-class professional men, akin to their working-class brothers, created
organizations of civil society such as craft unions and professional associations
that explicitly agitated for the exclusion of women and for a “family wage.”
Most professional organizations built a culture of masculinity within the
profession. Furthermore, when middle-class men failed to exclude women,
sometimes due to the pressures of the labor market where employers sought
to sidestep labor and professional organizations (because women were
considered cheaper and more malleable), these men and their organizations
responded by segregating certain inferior grades of work within the profession
as women’s work, such as book-binding and print-finishing in the printing
trades, nursing in medicine, and school teaching as opposed to university
teaching in education. In the sphere of cooking, Antonin Carême was setting
the template at the end of the eighteenth-century by distinguishing professional
practice from cuisine bourgeoise and cuisine de femmes (Roosth 2013: 7).
These confinements and concessions are never settled forever. They are trials
of strength with temporary crystallizations. For instance, men cornered the
market for school teaching through much of the nineteenth century, but were
pushed back so far that today, school teaching is a feminized profession, and
college teaching at the assistant professor level is already primarily feminine
today, while full professorship is still more masculine. That is changing too,
first in the feminized liberal arts and the humanities, then in social work and
public policy, perhaps eventually in business, surgery, and corporate law.
Men also sought to back up their organizations in civil society with
legislation at the level of the state where women were excluded by law from
certain trades or professions, or certain kinds of jobs such as combat positions
in the military, presumably for their own good, which also closed their
professional opportunities. Most American medical colleges, for instance, did
not allow women until the last quarter of the nineteenth century; many
retained maximum quotas of about 5 percent into the first few decades of the
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 137

twentieth century; today the female population reaches about 45 percent of

medical school students, although surgical specialties still have single-digit
female representation.
Statutory barriers to women entering the bar stayed in place until the first
decades of the twentieth century. The Supreme Court had ruled in In re
Lockwood in 1894 that the state of Virginia could refuse to license Belva A.
Lockwood as an attorney because she was a woman. The argument followed
those of the Wisconsin chief justice Edward Ryan, who, when he denied
R. Lavinia Goodell the right to practice law, said that “persons” in the licensing
statute cannot be read in a gender-neutral way because if we follow that logic
we would “emasculate the constitution itself and include females in the
constitutional right of male suffrage and male qualification” (cited in Grossberg
1990: 146). But women were not just passive victims of state- and civil
society-based strategies of exclusion and segregation. Sometimes borrowing
the discourse of feminine work and sensibility, sometimes contesting such
essentialist constructions, women also developed certain projects of
professionalism, as in the case of nursing and school teaching, where women
were active albeit subordinate participants in claiming certain spheres of
skilled work for themselves.

Women need not apply

The CIA has had a handful of female students since its inception, ranging
from 1 to 3 percent of the graduating class until the end of the 1970s. There
were periods, such as 1948–52 and 1968–71, when there were no graduating
females. Systematic, longitudinal data is missing from the CIA archives, but
by 1983 about 20 percent of the graduating class was female, by 2003 it was
33 percent female, and in 2012 it was 64 percent male, 36 percent female
(Moskin 2014: D6).
The first increase from single digits to 20 percent around 1980 is real, but
the jump from 20 percent to 36 percent is a little misleading, because through
the 1990s the Baking and Pastry program, which has always been more
feminized, expanded. The gender ratios are inverted between the Culinary and
the Baking and Pastry Programs. In 2002, when I was teaching at the CIA , 74
percent of the AOS culinary students were male (N=1,209), while 71 percent
of the AOS Baking and Pastry students were female (N=435). If we exclude
the Baking and Pastry program, only about a quarter of the student body is
female.13 The small body of students in the Bachelor’s program exhibits gender
ratios similar to the culinary program.
In 1946, under the heading “Who May Enroll,” the New Haven Restaurant
Institute (precursor to the CIA ) stated that they would admit “Any young man
138 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

or woman who has completed a high school course or its equivalent.”14 By

1950, the prerequisite was slightly altered to read, “Any man or woman who
has completed a high school course or its equivalent in experience in the hotel
or restaurant industry,” in an obvious attempt to expand the pool of applicants
(italics mine). By 1954, an age criteria was added to the requirement: “Any
man or woman between the ages of 17 and 39 who has graduated from a high
school or trade school,” perhaps echoing the age-grading that was becoming
dominant in American high schools (italics mine). Most interestingly for our
purposes here, suddenly, by 1966–7, the criteria for admission were changed
to exclude women, complicating the typical Whig interpretation of history. It
read: “Any man between the ages of 17 and 35 who has graduated from high
school may enroll” (italics mine). By 1969–70 we get an explanation for this
intriguing development: “Girls are not accepted for the regular course—but
are welcome in the special summer courses. The reason is that with so few
girls applying it is uneconomical for the Institute to provide the special facilities,
washrooms, etc. required.” By the next year a special section is added to the
brochure under the title “Admission of Women”:

It is a matter of regret to all concerned at the Culinary Institute that existing

facilities do not permit admission of women. However, the admission of
women is under consideration by the Board, and the final decision will
depend on the number of women who apply. Women who are interested
in attending the Culinary Institute are asked to write for an application form
and if the number is sufficient, it is possible that the Institute Board may be
able to work out early admission plans.

By 1971–2, when the CIA was expanding its facilities, women were once
again allowed to apply along with men, while the age limitation of seventeen
to thirty-five was continued. The age criteria was removed in 1974–5 and in the
following year it is stated that “Admission is open to anyone who is a high
school graduate or can furnish a high school equivalency certificate, regardless
of age, sex, race, religion, or, national origin” (italics mine). That continues to
be the effective criteria today. It appears, at least from an interrogation of the
archival material at the CIA , that the Institute did not exclude women for
ideological reasons, unlike many other colleges at the time, but that women
did not apply to be a part of the profession for reasons outside the ambit of
the institution.15
So the secular trend appears to be a dramatic increase of the female
population from single digits until the late 1970s, to almost 20 percent by the
1980s, and then a steady upward trend towards 25 percent by the year 2001,
with about the same percent by 2010 (if we adjust for the gender distribution
of the Baking and Pastry program). The 1980s appear to be the hinge of a
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 139

substantial transformation. That is when the second-wave, post-feminist

generation reached college age. It appears that the perseverance of the
feminist struggle, from the 1950s to the 1970s, to break into the preserve of
professional employment finally bore fruit in the 1980s, by which time fewer
women were burdened with the exclusive responsibility of cooking and
cleaning at home. As women could do other things than cook, clean, and raise
children at home, they were willing to opt for baking, if not cooking, as a career.
Out of thirty female students, alumni, and faculty members that I
interviewed systematically on the issue of gender at the CIA , few were critical
of the institution, although a number provided instances of biased behavior
(also see Harris and Giuffre 2010). Three found the whole experience abusive.
Most women provided individualized examples such as the following: “I had a
chef instructor (thankfully only one!) who tried to knock me down a peg simply
because I was a female.” Another female alumnus—Elizabeth Beals—provided
a long and subtle response to my probing about doing gender at the CIA that
conveys the complexity both of her perspective and the character of the
institution she was characterizing. Her statements were exceptional in their
eloquence, but the sense she so successfully communicates was common to
many of my female interview subjects.

CIA masculine? Hmmm . . . Yes and no. Although, historically, CIA was
started by two women, it was a school for men taking advantage of the GI
bill. Obviously there weren’t as many women going to the school previously,
but I really think that’s changing. I think the CIA is making an effort to de-
masculinize itself.16

Beals talked about how the photographers for the school were encouraged to
get photos of women in the classes to show prospective students that there
were women at the CIA , even though there were five women out of twenty-
five in her cohort. She thought that her male classmates, by and large, didn’t
care if they were women or not, as long as they worked hard. Yet, in the final
year when the student group-leader was putting the teams together and
assigning stations, he wouldn’t put any women on the hot line simply because
they were women. But she also had a remarkably gratifying experience in the
same year when Chef Griffith said that she was the best student that he had
ever had, hands down. She was speechless. He followed that up with:

But because you’re THAT good, I have to warn you, that there will be
people out there, particularly some men that will try to cut you down,
simply because you are a woman. But don’t be shaken by them. Don’t pay
attention to them; and succeed any way because that’s what you are going
to do!
140 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

She said she was really touched by the chef’s concern for her.
Then she changed the track of her critique, talking about the uniform, which
surprised me: “Their uniforms are definitely still masculine.” She noted how
much she relished finding chef coats that fit a female shoulder-width and arm-
length, and have what are called “darts” in the back of the coat that provide
shaping in the overall structure that men’s coats do not offer. “Nothing major,
but it’s been nice not looking like a slob lost in my clothing!! And the pants at
CIA !! Good grief, I’ve never seen any woman actually fit the CIA pants at all!”
I was surprised by the turn in the conversation because I wasn’t thinking in
that direction at all.
A student and a chef, Marissa Sertich Velie (2015), added depth to that
consideration by underlining the greater importance of women’s clothing in
masculine professions and the related work that goes into striking just the
right balance of professionalism and attractiveness, without being too sexy, or
vulnerable, or masculine. Depending on the location and trajectory of the
individual in the field, and the shape of the field, sartorial transgressions can
indicate “lack of cultural capital and unprofessionalism, or it can demonstrate
a conscious, active, rejection of the career’s constructed norms” (Sertich Velie
2015: 3). Sertich Velie illustrated that potential by taking the case of Rochelle
Huppin, the founder and President of Chefwear Inc., addressing a 2010
graduating class at the Culinary Institute of America wearing a pink chef coat,
with pink and green camouflage chef pants. Sertich Velie re-interrogated her
own antipathy and sense of betrayal, provoked by Huppin in pink at that
graduation. Congruent with the conclusions of a handful of researchers,
Sertich Velie noted,

While challenging or embracing social norms through fashion may seem

trivial, it is a personal act and embodiment of individual and group identity
(woman, chef). Additionally, refusing to assimilate can be a powerful tool to
spark controversy among a professional group and disrupt previously
assumed power roles. Fashion offers physical evidence for how women
perform gender in the professional kitchen, changes in kitchen culture, and
subtle forms of subversion (Sertich Velie 2015: 4. See also Furst 1997;
Costello 2004; Hansen 2004; Druckman 2012).

Elizabeth Beals also drew attention to the physical setting, the height of
stoves and kitchen counters, and the length of chef’s knives that presume a
bigger male body.

The kitchens are, physically, set for a more manly height. I say this only
because I now know that kitchen setting heights don’t have to be ridiculously
high! I now work for a woman (which I had never done before) and she has
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 141

all of her commercial stove’s legs cut down so that she can reach all the
way to the back burner safely (she’s my height).

She also has all the counters set much at a lower height. It has been a dream
working at those heights, Beals says. She didn’t have to push a milk crate
around as her stool to step up and reach the counter to work at it. She also
didn’t have to worry about scorching underneath her arm when she reached
towards the back of the stove.

The length of the standard kitchen knife is still very masculine. I can tell you
that almost all of us females went out and bought a much smaller chef
knife to do most kitchen work. The standard chef knife is just a little bit
unwieldy for women in ratio to the rest of their body. Men, overall, don’t
have that issue.

Beals offers a remarkable perspective that combines particular instances of

bias within her own profession, and the very specific material world of
professional chefs—knives and counters and sinks. Even more importantly
she points to the silent embodiment of assumptions about the gender of the
typical subject from the shape of the uniform, to the size and heft of knives,
to the height of sinks and worktables. Gendered assumptions are built into
the physical environment, sometimes against our best intentions. But then,
on the other side, as the early history of CIA’s recruitment of women shows,
it is not always a matter of explicitly mala fide intentions of institutions.
In a conversation at the CIA , chef Eve Felder insisted that to learn cooking
you have to have passion and work hard. From that demand for hard work and
physical strength, Michael Ruhlman, one of the leading chroniclers of chef-
hood in the United States, concludes, “The difficulty of work, I sensed, partly
contributed to a macho ethic in the kitchen. And it tended to produce, as far
as I could see, a fair share of lunatics” (Ruhlman 1997: 174). The causation, I
think, could run the other way. Everyday cooking has mostly been women’s
work, which, when extricated from the household, institutionalized, and up-
scaled, demands a kind of performative masculinity to generate protective
boundaries of exclusion around it. Amy Trubek, a trained chef and an
anthropologist, notes:

The desire to be a professional, an artist, was part of a larger inclination to

not be other things and to avoid any suggestion that the practice of chefs
had links to activities lower in the social division of labor. The practice of
chefs was cooking, so they were particularly concerned with disengaging
themselves from the association of cooking with women’s work, work that
occurred solely in the domestic sphere (Trubek 2000: 126).
142 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Boundaries are based on salient social categories, primarily gender but also
race and ethnicity, because the other categorical locus of low-prestige cooking,
in addition to the home, is the cheap ethnic eatery.

Wages of Whiteness
For American men, professionalization has been a compelling way of
separating themselves from any burdens of race or ethnicity. The influx of
“ethnic” immigrants—Irish, Italian, and Eastern European Jews—and freed
blacks into the labor force, precisely at the moment of origin of many new
professions such as doctors and dentists between 1860 and 1920, challenged
elite professional standards that mixed prejudice with Progressive-era visions
of competence. Patrician attorney George Templeton Strong, writing in his
diary in 1874, praised Columbia Law School’s institution of admission tests
and requirement of a college diploma, which would “keep out the little scrubs
(German Jew boys mostly) whom the School now promotes from the grocery-
counters . . . to be gentlemen of the Bar” (cited in Grossberg 1990: 145). The
assumption has been that professional men had to be racially neutral, which
always meant white, with all its changing historical resonances (meaning that
Germans, Irish, and Eastern European Jews have been included or excluded
from the category of “white” depending on the context and the ongoing
contestations between classes, ethnicities, and races). But there is something
more to why cooking schools, even today, are so white.
African-Americans are only about 2 percent of the student body at the CIA
in 2010 (whites 59 percent; Asian/Pacific islander 3 percent; Hispanic 5
percent; international 7 percent; unknown 24 percent—in all probability white)
and even fewer faculty members are black, although the early history of public
cooking in the US is replete with black men, especially on the railroads, which
was the pre-eminent locus of the profession of cooking in the nineteenth
century.17 It must be noted parenthetically that there was one African-American
student—Jefferson Evans—in the first graduating class at the the New Haven
Restaurant Institute on January 28, 1947, who was eventually hired as a faculty
member, and the CIA continued to graduate a handful of African-American
students (based on the evidence from surviving photographs of graduating
classes), perhaps reflecting the racial integration of the military, prior to the
integration of civilian society.
Nevertheless, the conflation of whiteness and professionalism may be why
cooking schools are not so good at recruiting African-American students in
general. An important additional reason for the low density of African-
Americans at the CIA is the community’s active and immediate historical
memory of servitude. People with recent memories of servitude are not good
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 143

at playing at the theater of service because it is too historically close for

comfort. Until very recently, non-whites with any choice about their careers
have in general stayed away from the culinary profession, much like women.
The larger point here is that professionalism may be a way of insinuating
colorlessness, middleness, and masculinity that white men have used quite
successfully to their advantage, especially between 1860 and the First World
War, when many modern professions were born (Witz 1992; Davidoff and Hall
1987; Ryan 1981; Morgan 1996; Tosh 1999).

Cultures of schools: From boys to men

Returning to our specific comparison with First-Wave Biomedicine, there
appears to be a compelling parallel between the institutional culture of medical
schools at the turn of the nineteenth century and cooking schools today, which
can be described as solemn and judgmental, allowing little room for ambiguity,
ambivalence, or skepticism. Students in colleges of yore and cooking schools
today are urged to be industrious, independent, positive, courteous, and
ambitious, where “happiness is congenital,” in William James’s scathing
description of the medical college he attended (cited in Bledstein 1976: 148;
for a later analogy see Becker, Geer, Hughes, and Strauss 1961). Above all,
training is as much in morals and manners, where technical skills are seen as
a medium to inculcate professional values.
“Unlike many educational institutions these days,” Michael Ruhlman writes
in The Making of a Chef, the CIA deals “not only in knowledge and skill but
also in value judgments. It [teaches] a system of values that [is] almost religious
in scope and beautifully concrete, physical, immediate” (1997: 142). Hand-in-
hand with such a posture goes a certain infatuation with masculinity—a
physical toughness, with moral consequences for things such as tardiness and
other sources of misbehavior. It exudes an asceticism that builds virtue on the
basis of rejection of minor vices associated with alcohol, tobacco, and sloth.
That posture complements a long tradition of teaching by humiliation. “Brutal
jokes, aphorisms, adages, and indignities are passed from generation to
surgical generation,” writes Joan Cassell (1998), as they are by chefs in teaching
the next generation. It is quite impressive to see how solicitous students are
of their chefs. A non-chef faculty member at CIA wrote the following e-mail
with the obvious intention of upbraiding his chef colleagues (which backfired):

In my IPC [Interpersonal Communication] class, one assignment is to

answer the following question. “When emotions are involved, the emotions
become the message.” Do you agree? Give examples to back up your
answer. How does emotion block communication on the job?18
144 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

He then goes on to provide a critique of chefs teaching through fear and

intimidation, in the words of the student: “Hostile chefs create a lack of
interest in the student, a desire to stop listening, to emotionally shutdown and
close their mind to learning new things—the exact opposite of what the chef
instructor is supposedly trying to achieve.” A chef quickly responded, to much
electronic applause from others, with, “Could you keep a record of this
statement and send it back to this student after they have been in the industry
for 5 to 10 years and let us see how their thoughts on this subject have
changed.” The chef then moved to juxtapose the moral world of practicing
chefs against the wielders of words:

When reality hits, your dishwasher just called out; your saucier just gave
notice; you currently are putting in about 80 hours a week; you need a new
dishwashing machine because the old one is on its last legs; your business
has been down the last couple of weeks because of high gas prices, and
it’s absolutely crucial that the local newspaper’s review of you is a good
one; and so on and so on! Now that’s intimidation. And yes chefs do yell
sometimes!

Another chef wrote back, “I’m not buying into this and neither are our better
students. If ‘Preparation is Everything’ is our motto then it should mean
something or be changed to ‘We’ll hold your hand until you feel good about
yourself.’ ” The chef continued that he had just had dinner with six students
and the author Michael Ruhlman, and Ruhlman had asked: “I’m hearing from
some students that the school is getting soft, that instructors aren’t as hard as
they used to be, true or false?” Unanimously, the students agreed with the
statement, the chef noted. They named names of his colleagues who the
students described as “Great guys, but too easy going.” Maybe it was because
he was there and they wanted to please him, he conceded, but they described
him as a “hard-ass: not a hand holder.” Letting “the whiners make us feel
guilty for demanding high standards only sets the bar at the lowest common
denominator.” Anger, especially in the form of chef’s temper, in fact plays an
organizing role in the flow of kitchen time.

Anger permits time to be controlled: permitting workers to “go on to the

rest of the night.” By expressing anger, one closes a frustrating event and
reestablishes rhythm. Whether this catharsis is effective is less significant
than that it is believed to be. Anger is seen as a means of achieving temporal
stability and coping with the behavioral reality of the kitchen (Fine 1996: 69).

Humor, especially bawdy humor, is the other side of the same coin, which
compensates for the angry outburst, cements the imagined community of
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 145

bad taste, and makes men out of those who can stand it. Nothing unites
people more than their self-conscious bad taste, which, through being vulgar,
creates a distance between “us” and “them out there,” with their repressive
pretensions. Humor can be equalizing where anger is hierarchical—both
necessary for an imagined community. Hence, in spite of its best efforts, the
CIA has been unable to legislate away either the chef’s angry outburst or his
bawdy jokes. Instead, the Institute classifies them as unprofessional behavior,
which makes them both rarer but also so much more tempting to use, and
more powerful as subversive anti-corporate speech.
Diatribes on proper comportment and posture, vocabulary and attire, seek
to separate the “disciplined middle class from the dissipated lower classes”
(Bledstein 1976: 154). Such indicators of the fears of falling are a clear sign of
the anxieties of social climbing that is emblematic of the process of
professionalization (Ehrenreich 1989). Because the virtuous professional class
is imagined as nothing but working men with character, even apparent
iconoclasts such as Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential (2000) continue
to harp on character over class, something I have elaborated on elsewhere
(Ray 2007a). Michael Herzfeld’s work among artisans in Rethemnos on the
island of Crete in Greece proposes that such masculine idioms of work are
quite widespread and may even be the substratum on which more generalized
modern notions of selves are crafted. Herzfeld found that it was “meaningless
here to separate the aesthetic or the technical from the moral: all are fused in
a claim to value pure and simple. Pride in technical reliability is indistinguishable
from what we might regard as the separate issue of the aesthetic qualities of
the objects produced,” and the sense of self (Herzfeld 2004: 124).
The military plays a central role in the history of the cooking profession in
the United States, and some of the masculinity of cooking schools is a carry-
over from such a homosocial institution. One could argue that some of the
hyper-masculinity of the professional chef is a residue from the days when
military men were central to the institutional culture of the CIA . The CIA was
set up after the Second World War by two upper-class women, Francis Roth (a
lawyer) and Katharine Angell (wife of a Yale University President), to retrain
working-class military men for civilian careers. The preliminary brochure from
1946 (which announces that the school will be opening) says “Military training
and service will be given credit towards admission” and “Approved by the
Veterans Administration,” and subsequent brochures and catalogs repeat such
statements. The 1947 catalog identifies the institution as “a non-profit trade
school, to train personnel for the industry and to give the returning veteran an
opportunity to receive practical instruction in the preparation of foods and the
management of restaurants.” The catalogs from ca. 1949–51 say, “organized
at the suggestion of the New Haven Restaurant Association in May 1946 to
help returning veterans build permanent careers in the food trade.”19
146 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

In 1951, the House of Representatives held hearings “investigating GI

schools” that were established to take advantage of the GI Bill but were
cheating the government out of money without really training people. Frances
Roth was invited to testify on behalf of the New Haven Restaurant Institute.
In her testimony she says that veterans were given preference by the school,
as were wives and widows of veterans. For the first five years almost 100
percent of the recruits at the CIA were ex-military men. For a long time after
that they remained the backbone of the Institute. Carroll F. Dooley, the first
Director of the Division of Food Preparation at the New Haven Restaurant
Institute, was a former United States Naval Reserve officer in charge of
commissioned officers’ messes at Pearl Harbor. Even today, almost all of the
older male chefs at the CIA have some connection to the military—still one of
the central institutions of upward mobility for working-class boys in the United
States.
The CIA , from its very beginnings, has carried the hopes and troubles of
young military men cooking. Richard Allen Burns, a folklorist and an ex-cook in
the United States Marine Corps, points to the ambivalence of being a cook in
the military. He writes, “Avoiding combat entirely, I took up a spatula and
spoon. My only consolation to retaining my dignity was that all Marines
during boot camp were and still are trained as riflemen, and I still periodically
was required to qualify at the rifle range” (Burns 2002: 2–3). Admittedly,
he developed ambivalent feelings about being a warrior with an “effeminate
job . . . of a cook” (2002: 4). As a result, most Marines dread mess duty, and
it is often considered a form of punishment. Without getting too speculative
about it, here one can see how the aggressive male swagger of the profession
can be read as compensation for that very ambiguity—a few good men doing
women’s work.
Ruhlman’s The Making of Chef is an adumbration of the same theme—
masculine “character” in the face of adversity. His narrative snaps into place
with a blizzard that hit the mid-Hudson Valley when he was enrolled as a
student at the CIA . I was there too. Everything was shut down. Next day, as
it continued to snow, Ruhlman called the main switchboard at the CIA with
some hope. “Yes, we’re open,” the voice told him with some bemusement.
When he called his Skills Development teacher, Chef Pardus, to apologize for
not showing up, he got an earful. He was told, “Part of what we’re training
students to be here is chefs—and when chefs have to be somewhere, they
get there” (Ruhlman 1997: 68–9). He didn’t stop there. Chef Pardus berated
Ruhlman. “You’re cut from a different cloth,” he told Ruhlman. “College
boy. White collar. Smooth. Writer.” He was a cook through and through.
“ ‘We’re different,’ he said. ‘We get there. It’s part of what makes us a chef . . .
We like it that way. That’s why this place never shuts down. And we’re teaching
the student this’ ” (1997: 68–9). That ethos is common to the history of
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 147

surgeons. It is echoed in what Cassell sees as a stoic posture prevalent among

surgeons:

Surgical training is so rigorous, so time-devouring, so stressful, that whether

or not the chief rules by fear, candidates invariably absorb some aspects of
the iron-surgeon mystique. By the time they have finished their training,
surgeons have incorporated a stoic ethos that defies physical weakness
and sets them off from the quotidian world. This ethos has been learned by
the body. It is not subject to discussion, analysis, negotiation. It is not
something that the surgeon has, like knowledge that can be brandished; it
is something that the surgeon is (italics in original; Cassell 1998: 103).

Embodied, unarticulated, austerity of action and function idealizes a particular

kind of subject—masculine and proficient—produced in the crucible of a
valorized labor process, consecrated as a ritual. The precise sequencing of
process, project, and self was also discovered by Gary Alan Fine among the
restaurant workers he observed for Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work
(1994). It is paradoxical that the pursuit of sensory pleasure in haute cuisine
can only be produced by the austere suffering and unrelenting labor of the
working body that are often imagined as masculine traits. The culture includes
an orientation towards active intervention, a propensity toward definitive
decision making, an unwillingness to admit doubts, and an inclination to
perpetuate the mystique of the confident, lone, heroic male. They inculcate
thinking styles that are more categorical than probabilistic and tend toward
certainty (Katz 1999: 203). As I read the published journals of physicians at the
turn of the nineteenth century I was increasingly persuaded about how much
of that posture works to describe the culture of chefs that I had experienced
at close quarters at the CIA . “Sometimes in error, never in doubt,” is the
motto a chief of surgery ascribed to surgeons, cited in Cassell’s work The
Woman in the Surgeon’s Body (1998: 18). She continues, “male-identified
occupations such as surgeon, test pilot, soldier, firefighter, and race car driver
focus on one pole of a set of cultural oppositions: practitioners describe
themselves and their comrades as active, strong, decisive, brave, aggressive”
(Cassell 1998: 18). She contends,

In each of these vocations, we find ritualized ordeals for initiates, active

male bonding, and profound distrust and exclusion of females as
participants. And in each, we find the threat of death. What is it about the
“ancient, primordial, irresistible” challenge that women would pollute,
destroy, negate? What is it about the association Tom Wolfe notes between
“the right stuff” and death—about heroism, in short—that makes it
something men do to and for, not with, women? (Cassell 1998: 18).
148 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Such an action-oriented attitude sits very well with chefs. Such a focus on
“grit” and “character” is also typical of an emergent profession—as was the
case with physicians about a hundred years ago, and surgeons over the last
half-century. Things like resilience, punctuality, and the dress code become
external manifestations of the soul that is the character of a real professional.
Character inevitably leads to charisma.
Dr Robinson exclaimed, “I don’t like offices. I can’t sit in an office to see
patients. I am a surgeon!” (Katz 1999: 35). Similarly, a cook condemning his
chef boss confided to Gary Alan Fine, “One day I think he even put it that he
likes brains over brawn, which means he would rather sit and do his paperwork
than sit and get his fingers dirty” (Fine 1996: 92). The last straw for the cook
was that “[He’d] rather sit in his office.” The active posture, so central to the
image of the surgeon and the chef, is also the reason they show such disdain
towards their offices and desks. Chefs so recoil from their desks at the CIA
that often three or more chefs are assigned to the same desk and office
space, which they rarely use. Most use their desks in the kitchen, which
appears to be an intermediate zone between the doer and the thinker (the
latter is often read as the procrastinator).
Subterranean tension between those who sit at their desks and chefs
erupted predictably on a hot summer day when a supervisor complained
about the fire hazard associated with chefs propping their kitchen doors open.
One chef noted in response, “When confined in a space where the temperature
commonly exceeds 90 degrees on a comfortable day (as it is in K1 at the
moment) for 6-and-a-1/2 hours a day (or 13 hours as those of us on doubles
frequently do) these goals become very difficult to achieve.” With statements
riddled with barbs against the “suits,” the chef continued:

A person sitting in an air conditioned office is much higher up on Maslow’s

hierarchy than someone in a 100 degree kitchen breathing grease fumes
and sweating into their eyes. As such, the person in the office has the
luxury of noticing a squeaky hinge or worrying about “convenience” while
the person in the kitchen has all they can do to keep from cursing at
anything within ear-shot.
C’mon down to any production kitchen any day this summer. Spend a
shift with one of us. We’ll put you in whites, give you a knife and a sauté
pan, stand you in front of a grill or range top for 6 hours. Walk a mile in our
slip resistant shoes before you make the assumption that we are merely
reacting to minor annoyances and inconvenience.

The link of chefs at the CIA to modern professions and professionalism is

refracted through particularly American prisms of class, craft, and masculinity.
Dorine Kondo’s work among Japanese confectioners, Susan Terrio’s
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 149

ethnography among French chocolatiers, and Michael Herzfeld’s work among

Greek artisans show different but congruent routes of making oneself (Kondo
1990; Terrio 2000; Herzfeld 2004). In these varied national contexts the
relationship between the artisanal body and the body politic is differently
constituted because craftsmanship is valued differently than in the American
context.

In closing
The making of a perfect consommé is evidence of expertise in a particular
kind of Bocusian (after Paul Bocuse, the most influential founder of the current
iteration of nouvelle French restaurant cuisine) cooking, a mode of doing
that is shared by the evaluators. Such skills have to be demarcated, cut
off, from the common world of everyday experience, contained in small
“worlds” with internal evaluative judgments, about product, character, and
comportment (Becker 1984; Fine 1996; Davis 2013). In this case, cooking
haute cuisine in an expensive American restaurant at the turn of the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries is what is being accessed and assessed. Lasater-
Wille (2015) shows how that model is spreading to places such as cooking
schools in Lima, Peru.
The CIA and its alumni claim that first and foremost the institution produces
professionals. The professional chef is the mirror-image of the foreign-born,
untrained, ethnic cook. The former occupies the heights of the culinary field in
the USA today, just as the latter inhabits the bottom rungs of the hierarchy. To
the degree that the foreign-born depends on experience, in terms of both
taste and skill, the native-born chef is trained in schools and restaurants not
only to acquire new skills and habits, but also to transform his habits so that
he can be promoted in the class hierarchy. That is partly about remaking his
relationship to gender, ethnicity, and everyday work. His palate and hands
have to be remade, as his body, posture, and gesture have to be made to fit
middle-class aspiration and upper-class consumption. I have shown in this
chapter how the modern, American, professional chef has to be wrought from
the deformed clay of a differently-classed body, which, through years of
grueling training in expert esoteric knowledge and common everyday postures,
is remade in the mirror-image of the ethnic cook so that he can occupy one
end of an unbridgeable culinary field. If cooking schools want to make an
upwardly mobile career out of cooking, they must, by structural necessity,
distance their domain of activity from unpaid or poorly paid everyday cookery
and increase the cost of entry into the field. Haute cuisine will always be
gendered, classed, and racialized, but not in the same way, as we see in the
changing profile of the chef at the CIA with all the new pressures of cooking
150 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

by the book and proper behavior. Professions have histories. They also have
life cycles. Chefs have just begun their journey towards professionalization in
the USA . There are no completely open and democratic professions. All
professions are ranked, gendered, and racialized in one way or the other, as
superior or inferior. Every profession has to elbow others next to it, and pour
disdain into the work of others whose work is akin to theirs, especially if that
subordinate other is not a closed labor market. Here, chefs’ attitudes towards
housewives are the same as university scholars’ posture towards autodidacts.
That is the only way to build a profession. Professions produce new, more
sharply defined forms of expert knowledge, and their own future. Every
profession does that.
Ethnic cooks do not have the right skills to play in the field of haute cuisine.
Formal training in schools becomes crucial to the making of a profession,
which marries individual aspirations to class scripts, and eventually has to be
consecrated by the state by way of naming, counting,20 approving student
loans, encouraging tourism, propagandizing culture, and approving rules of
licensure. Actors here range from individuals, small groups, networks, to
states embedded in the interstate system. Cooking schools are one of the
productive intersections in the making of a chef.
Personally, I was transformed by my decade-long sojourn at the CIA and
not only learned to appreciate a good consommé, and the uses of a sharp and
heavy chef’s knife, or the power of a raging flame with very high BTU s, but
was also trained to read and comprehend the wine-list and menu at elite
restaurants. I realized I was not a chef. I did not have the right skills. That put
me in my place. Yet, what had previously made me nervous—approaching
expensive restaurants, with their rituals and language of description and the
scripted but fluent dialogue with sommeliers and servers—came naturally to
me by the end of the sojourn. I began to feel comfortable in expensive
restaurants and relish the rituals of ordering and enjoying the food, the
ambience, and the company of chefs and connoisseurs. As a non-chef, I was
trained in making a few things, tasting many others, and acquiring the social
graces of an elite restaurant. I became a camp-follower of chefs and critics.
That was my bodily, moral, and aesthetic transformation.
The CIA is an exemplary institutional incubator, imparting bodies of
knowledge that simultaneously effectuate material, moral, and aesthetic
reconfiguration of palates and class profiles. Hence the insistence on
professionalism and uniformity. It is an institution that teaches its residents
the art of making a great consommé, and to develop rules of evaluating it,
while producing the professional who does not swear, smoke, use racist
epithets, or ethnic slurs, so that he can ideally become the measured, soft-
spoken, manager of people, emotions and bodies, as much as well-cooked
proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Bourdieu famously noted that class habitus
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 151

is acquired at home and school. The CIA is an extraordinary school because it

hopes not only to teach explicitly what was often taught implicitly at home and
under apprenticeship as a craftsman, but also to explicate what is implicated
in class cultures of consumption of wine, cheese, French sauces, and haute
cuisine. The CIA , then, is home, school, and apprenticeship for the social
production of culinary professionals. The social field of professional cooking,
and institutions such as the CIA and haute restaurants, produce chefs as
social subjects that exceed the bounds of individual intentions. There were no
American chefs for most of America’s history, and immigrant cooks were
everywhere covered under the category of servants. That has changed
drastically in the last few decades.
Understandably, the Time cover of November 2013 provoked a firestorm of
criticism from female chefs, with Amanda Cohen of Dirt Candy raising the
claims of Barbara Lynch, Dione Lucas, Madeleine Kamman, Josefina Velazquez
de Leon, and Julia Child, among others (Cohen 2013a).21 Time editor Howard
Chua-Eoan unhelpfully clarified in an interview that he had considered adding
Alice Waters but did not, because he wanted to go only with “reputation and
influence” in the field rather than tokenism (see Branch 2012; Dixler 2013). The
Los Angeles Times pointed out that

this male-centric view of cooking is not something that originated with

[Time] magazine’s article. After all, of San Pellegrino’s list of the 50 Best
Restaurants in the World, only two are run by women—both of whom are
one half of a male–female team. And the last seven James Beard Foundation
chefs of the year have been men (Parsons 2013; See also Kohn 2013).

Marnie Hanel noted in The New York Times that only 12 percent of the winners
of the James Beard award for Outstanding Chef and 16 percent of Food &
Wine’s Best New Chefs have been women (Hanel 2014: 44).
In quick retaliatory response to the Time magazine cover, perhaps too
quick, Grub Street produced a list of “Goddesses of Food,” which listed Alice
Waters, Elena Arzak, April Bloomfield, Anne Sophie-Pic, Dominique Crenn,
Christina Tossi, etc. (Tishgart 2013). In the online comments, a reader sharply
countered, “It’s hypocritical to claim this list as a triumph for recognizing a
diverse group of talented chefs where there are no people of color included,
and no one outside of Europe and North America” (Tishgart 2013). Even
ideological opponents of the masculinization of professional chefs are trapped
within the social confines of the field, which cannot account for ethnic cooks.
Notwithstanding good intentions of individuals and institutions, the field of
haute cuisine still demands a chasm between the professional chef, the ethnic
cook, and the housewife. That holds true even when the edges of the field are
fraying and the center is shifting, as we will see in the next chapter.
152 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Notes
1 That cover was distributed in Europe, Africa, and Asia, while the US cover
profiled the recently re-elected New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
2 Almost fifty years earlier, on November 25, 1966, Julia Child was on the
cover of Time magazine under the title “Everyone’s in the Kitchen.” The issue
included photographs of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and August Busch
III of Anheuser-Busch fame, cooking in their respective kitchens.
3 http://www.theworlds50best.com/list/1-50-winners/#t11-20 [accessed on
December 4, 2013].
4 As Casanova notes with literature in mind, “those most distant from its great
centres or most deprived of its resources, who can see more clearly than
others the forms of violence and domination that operate within it” (2005a:
72).
5 An illustrative example is the CIA’s recent (Feb 16, 2015) ProChef Smart
Brief observation: “Singapore has transformed into a foodie destination,
thanks in part to the CIA’s first international branch, which teaches
students European cooking techniques that can be applied to the nation’s
unique cuisine. ‘Part of our being here is to professionalize and teach
the whys of cooking, so it’s not haphazard,’ said CIA Managing Director
Eve Felder. ‘The whys are all the same. The difference is in the flavor
profiles.’ ” (Zimmer 2015). Not only is the presumption astounding that
Singapore could only become a foodie destination because of CIA’s
intermediation, but it is equally interesting to see how the deeper
division between universal (haute French) techniques and vernacular
flavors holds in this construction.
6 In responding to an early draft of this chapter, a colleague, a chef, and the
current Vice-President of the James Beard Foundation, Mitchell Davis,
noted “Part of your battle with this piece will be that the field of medicine
is so revered here in America and doctors are such gods that lay readers
will find it insulting (conversely, chefs will probably think someone finally
understands how important their work is!).” In response I must reiterate
that the intent of this chapter is not to assert that chefs’ work is equal in
importance to the physician’s profession; instead it is to point to the
similarities in culture that the process of first-wave professionalization
engenders. No matter how great a chef, it is unlikely that his or her
achievement will be favorably compared to innovations in surgical technique,
epidemiology, biochemistry, or genetics, especially within the medical field,
and even among the general public. That hierarchy of expertise and social
acknowledgment remains intact even if celebrity chefs and surgeons
make enormous amounts of money, which is our society’s only way of
acknowledging objective value. What we easily forget is that (a) early modern
medicine was very close to cooking, and both were recorded in recipe
books, which is etymologically related to the instruction to take,
to prescribe = Px; and (b) culinary knowledge as well as medical knowledge
has always been produced collaboratively but professionalization in both,
divergent fields now, entailed an illegitimate privatization of intellectual
property (see Leong 2013, Claflin 2014).
 EXTENDING EXPERTISE 153

7 For instance, most doctors in India attend medical school after high school
without pedagogical burdens. In fact many of those trained in the Indian
system do quite well when they migrate to the United States.
8 Thanks to my physician friend, Dr. Atul Limaye, for drawing my attention to
this passage.
9 In 2000 the basic text was changed to the Best Food Writing, which is a
collection of journalistic writing by Americans on American food.
10 For leading cooking schools, such as the CIA , the two-year AOS program
cost about $35,000 in tuition and $45,000 including room and board, while
the four-year BPS program cost about $60,000 in tuition and $80,000 in total,
ca. 2001.
11 Thanks to Craig Goldstein for drawing my attention to this.
12 Names have been withheld for privacy.
13 The male baker, especially in pastry arts, is so exceptional that casting
agencies specifically look for male bakers, as the following e-mail suggests:
“Okay men, this is the opportunity that you have been waiting for. I just
received a call from Barbara Bersell Casting Agency in Los Angeles. They
are looking for male chocolatiers and bakers between the ages of 18 and
45. They will need 2 sets of photos with a head shot and a full shot for
each set. They can be photos that you already have of yourself. If chosen, you
will attend a one day photo shot in Manhattan for Levis jean and be
paid $10,000. (They wanted actual professionals wearing the jeans in their
ads.) Deadline is July 6th.” Internal CIA e-mail.
14 This and subsequent quotations: CIA Archive, Boxes 1–2.
15 Interestingly, “Between 1900 and 1920 approximately 10 percent of all
Ph.D.s awarded in the United States were granted to women. In the next
two decades that figure rose to 15 percent before beginning a thirty-year
decline” (italics mine; Glazer and Slater 1987: 25).
16 Interview notes.
17 Unfortunately there is no systematic historical data on race at the CIA , but
interviews with numerous “old-timers” confirm a continuous low count of
non-whites.
18 This and subsequent quotations from e-mail exchanges at the CIA are taken
from field notes.
19 CIA Archives, Boxes 1–2.
20 Chefs were counted as skilled professionals by the 1980 Census for the first
time in the United States as a result of lobbying by the American Culinary
Federation and numerous leading cooking schools; cooks, on the other hand,
were counted since the 1910 Census but until 1940 subsumed under servants.
21 Cohen points out that Diane Forley should have been included under Alain
Passard, which would have then included Amanda Freitag and Suzanne Goin.
A reader listed the following in the same spirit: Barbara Tropp, Cecilia Chang,
Alice Waters, Marion Cunningham, Madeleine Kamman, Marcella Hazan,
Lidia Bastianich, Judy Rogers, Dominque Crenn, Traci des Jardins, Nancy
Oakes, Susan Spicer, Michelle Bernstein, Elizabeth Faulkner, Niki Nakayama,
Suzanne Goin, Susan Feniger, Nancy Silverton, etc.
154
 5
Ethnicity and Expertise:
Immigrant Cooks with Haute
Aspirations

A n immigrant chef noted: “I could not get a job at a decent restaurant in

New York City. I was told, ‘You are Indian. I cannot hire you for anything
else.’ ” I pressed the chef: “What was your response to that?” He retorted,

There is a chip in my shoulder, where I have to prove myself as a chef.

That is why I opened this place, to show them that I can cook. But I refuse
to do what is done by other Indian restaurateurs. I don’t want that red paint
on my tandoori chicken. I don’t want my restaurant to be a dark, incense-
laden, god-riven place with waiters who cannot speak English.

The immigrant chef here is touching the social limits of the field of haute
cuisine in New York City in the twenty-first century.
It is more than a decade since Chef Cardoz first became a celebrity, running
a restaurant that in 2010 grossed $8 million, yet it rankles him, this dismissal of
his acquired expertise in favor of the ascribed one. The presumption that his
ethnicity was a sign of lack of expertise in haute restaurant cookery in New York
City is something that “ethnic” chefs with haute aspirations struggle with (see
Ferguson 2004; Trubek 2004; Janer 2006). So they become particularly self-
conscious in avoiding their ethnic ghetto. Roy Choi long refused to cook Asian
food, until he realized that was his forte, and fusion Asian acquired a new
prestige (due to the rise of East Asia). He could embrace Asian cookery only
after he had acquired self-confidence in the field, and after successfully sending
out signals that he could cook, because he had cooked with Eric Ripert at Le
Bernardin. Similarly, Cecilia Chiang set out to design the first haute cuisine
Chinese restaurant in San Francisco with a million dollars and four “No”s. “No

155
156 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

gold. No red. No dragons. No lanterns. I didn’t want my Chinese restaurant to

be like any other” (Chiang with Weiss 2007: 21). Boundaries between the two
worlds had to be marked. There is a clear tension here between the embodied
experience of the ethnic and the professional proficiency of the expert chef
with his designer restaurant, which encapsulates the incongruence between
two kinds of identities.
Identities have to be wrested in dialogue with others, in conflict between
contending domains of the self, and are shaped by the properties of the field
one is assigned to (ethnic) or hopes to play in (haute cuisine). Common sense
conceptions of consumer culture as the domain of free, identity-affirming
activity, in alliance with academic focus on consumption, have tended to elide
work-based identities in the United States. With the decline of class-based
politics and class analysis, it may appear, inaccurately, that work has been
drained of all identity. As a result we have an immense amount of work on the
food-related identities of consumers (Bourdieu 1984; Warde and Martens
2000; Bennett et al. 2009; Johnston and Bauman 2010, to name only a handful)
but very little on the identity of those who do all the material work of making
such symbolic claims available to consumers. In the consumer-oriented
scholarship, all the work of producing food-related identity is done by the
consumers and the commentators, and none whatsoever by the producer of
food.1 I argue that such a picture is empirically incomplete and theoretically
inadequate. This chapter challenges that consensus and shows how, in one
instance, identity work is done through public, food-related labor. Based on
extensive interviews with foreign-born American chefs, analysis of cookbooks
they have written, and restaurant reviews on the web and in print, I show how
work-related food identities are crucial to an understanding of the social
division of labor inherent in the production of professions. The field of New
American haute cuisine still subjugates “many while celebrating a chosen
few,” as was the case in eighteenth-century France, studied from the cook’s
point of view by Jennifer Davis (2013: 11).
A number of high-profile Indian chefs in New York City, such as Floyd
Cardoz, Hemant Mathur, Maneet Chauhan, Jehangir Mehta, and Vikas Khanna,
to name a few, often in spite of their current popularity, find themselves
struggling to bridge two irreconcilable identities. Irreconcilable in so far as
they acquire their legitimacy from modes of being-in-the-world that occupy
two contradictory poles in the field of gastronomy: the chef and the ethnic
cook. Julia Moskin writes “In the food world, chefs are the 1 percent, and the
rest of us are the 99 percent. At this time every year [Christmas season], we
dream of catching crumbs from their tables: shiny new cookbooks, stuffed
with recipes so brilliantly simplified as to lift us to their level” (2011: D1).
Although only a handful of individuals, these chefs and restaurateurs illuminate
 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 157

the shape of the field by lighting up its limits. In this chapter I mine those
interviews to make a larger point about the world of ethnic chefs that is the
counterpoint to the preceding chapter on the CIA .
The shape of the field of gastronomy has been most sharply delineated by
Zilkia Janer, who writes, “In spite of the celebration of multi-culturalism, most
professional cooking schools in the world still teach using a French technical
framework.” She continues, “there is no neatly packaged way to become an
expert on Indian cuisines,” thus, by extension, “[c]uisines that have not
codified their culinary knowledge in a way that makes it easy for outsiders to
learn and [be] efficient for a restaurant kitchen are at a disadvantage” (Janer
2006: 7). She contends:

We can understand what French cuisine is all about after reading a few
books, but understanding the cuisine of Rajasthan or Nagaland, among
many others, implies travel, meeting people, and challenging the very
categories on which Eurocentric culinary knowledge is based. The
proliferation of so-called ethnic cookbooks does not necessarily solve this
problem since the genre itself imposes the categories and structures of
European cooking, failing to grasp the epistemologies that shape different
culinary systems (2006: 6).

That is crucial, that difference in the culinary systems and the difference it
makes to Western understandings of taste and skill. Her argument is promising
even if we pick out some of the rhetorical barbs (for instance, it is probable
that it takes a little more than reading cookbooks to be able to adequately
cook French haute cuisine), and after we have acknowledged, as I have done
in Chapter 3, that Japanese and other European cuisines, such as Italian,
Spanish, Greek, and, currently, Nordic cooking have joined the pantheon of
venerated culinary cultures in the global hierarchy of restaurant cuisines (Ray
2007b, 2010). Just as the French body, with its acquired artisanal and aesthetic
skills and embodied everyday accent—the accent is the perfect marker of a
habituated body that is never fully self-conscious—was the dominant player in
the institutionalization of the chef in major global cities of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, a few extra-European bodies (especially Japanese) have
joined the fray in the early decades of the twenty-first century (see Chapter 4
and Trubek 2004; Spang 2000; Ferguson 2004; Davis 2013). In the following
sections I show how Indian, Thai, Filipino, and other ethnic chefs navigate
a tenuous trajectory in those networked hierarchies, with the resultant
production of a distinctive rhetoric of middleness between profession and
ethnicity.
158 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Native and foreign: Body and skill

There is a rich sociology of the acquisition of expertise, especially its rhetorics
and status claims. Drawing on that literature, I have shown in the previous
chapter how chefs develop the tasting skills, the cooking skills, and the
postures and gestures of professionalism, at similar stages of their life cycle
to physicians more than a hundred years ago, and how they are trained to do
so at a leading institution that produces chefs such as the Culinary Institute of
America.
In contrast to the rhetorics, status, and pure politics of relational professional
turf battles, Harry Collins and Robert Evans propose a realist approach that
begins with the assumption that “expertise is the real and substantive
possession of groups of experts and that individuals acquire real and
substantive expertise through their membership of those groups” (Collins
and Evans 2007: 3). Where I want to inflect their frame is in the understanding
that those groups can be ascribed and aspired ones, such as ethnicity and
profession. For Collins and Evans, acquiring expertise is a process of
socialization into the practices of an expert group, and expertise can be lost if
time is spent away from the group. “Acquiring expertise is, however, more
than attribution by a social group . . . In the case of relational theories, on the
other hand, all the work is done by the attributors. Under our treatment, then,
individuals may or may not possess expertise independently of whether
others think they possess expertise” (Collins and Evans 2007: 3). In my view
the relational/rhetorical and the substantivist theory of expertise are not
mutually exclusive. Expertise is real, produced by different degrees of
instruction and immersion, and returns to the expert (professional) depend on
the value put on certification, boundary-work, and the social organization of
advantages, between various grades of neighboring experts and their political
relationship to other experts and non-experts. The rhetoric can be learned,
embodied, and internalized as a natural fit between body, posture, skill, and
profession. Here schooling and the social world that professions produce play
a crucial role in producing expertise and exclusions from it.
Collins and Evans go on to give an example that works very well for cooking,
because cooking, like speaking, can be an everyday skill:

To give a simple example, in France everyone can speak French, “even the
little children,” and it is not thought of as an expertise. On the other hand,
in Britain a person who is fluent in French is thought of as an expert and
can, for example, command a salary as a translator or teacher. It’s the
opposite way round in France, where it is speaking English that counts as
the useful expertise (Collins and Evans 2007: 3).
 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 159

Within this substantivist frame, the ethnic cook is analogous to the native
speaker and the chef is the acknowledged foreign-language expert with skills
that do not come naturally through regular everyday socialization. So it is a
question both of a skill set and the context of its valuation.
That is why, as I have shown in Chapter 2, it is understandable that until
1960 an authoritative native informant is always invoked in discussions of
Indian food by The New York Times. Craig Claiborne’s first major piece on
Indian cooking on February 25, 1960 relied on Manorama Phillips (Claiborne
1960). As I noted earlier, the article was accompanied by a photograph of
Miss Phillips in her apartment, clad in a sari, and framed by exquisite Indian
handcrafted textiles, as crucial visual props of authenticity. As the genre of
restaurant criticism was established, the critic acquired expertise in tasting
and writing about Indian food, and developed a regular public that was willing
to take him seriously. It took some time to naturally include Indian cuisine in
the repertoire of the American critic. Only after enough Indian restaurateurs
emerged who were willing (with capital investments) to play in the gastronomic
field of haute cuisine in Manhattan, and new consumers became available,
could a novel posture be developed towards Indian food. By March 29, 2011,
Sam Sifton, the New York Times restaurant reviewer, could write:

Hemant Mathur is the force behind Tulsi. He was an owner and a chef at
Devi, where he often could be seen fussing nervously at the edges of the
dining room before retreating to the kitchen to cook with rare brilliance. At
Tulsi he does the same dance and, if the setting is less attractive, louder
and less special, it places his cooking in sharper relief.
No one in New York makes lamb chops like he does—heavy, ugly things
caked in yogurt but tasting of gamy perfection. His magical Manchurian
cauliflower has made the transition as well (spoiler: its secret ingredient is
ketchup, well caramelized).
He serves a wickedly fine duck moilee—a delicate curry softened by
coconut milk—and a deeply flavorful curried monkfish with pomegranate
sauce. And there are very good tandoori prawns. Tulsi’s vegetable dishes
do not disappoint either, most notably the house dal (Sifton 2011).

Minimally, you have to know what a “dal” is to play in this field in Manhattan
today. You have to learn to play along with the manufactured taste for
Manchurian cauliflower, sweet, sticky, and oily, neither Manchurian nor
particularly Indian by any stretch of imagination, other than as an ersatz
product of Indian restaurants. To recoil from it is to miss the joke. To miss the
joke is to reveal your hand—a novice. And as Sifton suggests, Hemant Mathur
does fuss, nervously. That is the authenticating touch. You know the chef; the
details in terms of the lineage and trajectory of the chef, the strengths and
160 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

weaknesses of his cooking, the revealed secret, are normal for write-ups on
all kinds of celebrity chefs today. It is a small and well-informed world of the
chef, the critic, the connoisseur, and the informed consumer.
In association with the expert with the byline, electronic mediation has
allowed the possibilities of numerous forums for other potential experts to
expound on their expertise. When there is disagreement about judgments
of taste about food in an Indian restaurant in New York City, contemporary
commentators take recourse to the opinions of expatriated natives. In
evaluating Tulsi, the same upscale, midtown, Indian restaurant that Sifton
reviews above, reviewers on yelp.com (one of the more ubiquitous sites
among restaurant reviewers) deployed the typical rhetoric of the native
speaker:

I’m Indian and I’ve eaten at some of the best Indian restaurants in India and
elsewhere. Tulsi is right up there with them. I ate at Bukhara, the iconic
Indian restaurant at the Sheraton in Delhi last month and I have to say
Hemant Mathur’s lamb chops (burra kebab) is just as good if not better!
(Yelp.com n.d.)

In contrast, another self-proclaimed native noted:

Being an Indian, [I] can vouch for the fact that there are much better Indian
restaurants in the area—the food is much below average (never order their
Spicy Chicken Curry—that’s not spicy at all). This is probably a brave attempt
to cater to the Indian as well as the American palate, but fails miserably.
Very expensive and tasteless at that. Poor service too—go at your own risk.
(Yelp.com n.d.)

In India Abroad (the most widely circulated diasporic Indian newspaper in the
United States), the journalist and restaurant reviewer Arthur J. Pais notes
that Chef Mathur opened Tulsi after he left Devi, “the only Indian restaurant in
New York to get a Michelin star” (Pais 2011b: M5). We quickly find Pais (the
journalist) and Mathur (the chef) in alliance, distinguishing themselves from
two directions, the excessively upscale, fancy, Western restaurant without
much flavor, and the overly down-market curry house. Mathur is quoted as
saying, “I believe a dish should not only look appetizing but should taste good
as well,” which appears to be a dig at high-concept haute cuisine, to which the
authentic ethnic is always the imagined ameliorative other. Then on the other
hand, the curry house is contained by Pais’s assertion that “He is not a fan of
heavy cream that is often the basis of many dishes in standard Indian
restaurants” (2011b: M8). By now Pais is so in agreement with Mathur that
the quotation is dispensed with. The article goes on to mark the trajectory of
 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 161

Chef Mathur through five-star, super-luxury Indian hotels such as the

Rambaugh Palace Taj Hotel in Jaipur, the private kitchen of curry-eating British
tycoon Sir James Goldsmith, and finally the New York trajectory of Diwan Grill,
Tamarind, Amma and Devi (of which Sifton had mentioned only the final step).
Pais commends:

More than 16 years ago, when most Indian chefs—with the exception of
Floyd Cardoz at Tabla—were afraid to go beyond chicken and lamb, Mathur
was offering succulent boar chops at Diwan. At Devi, he courageously
offered calf brain, venison chops and rabbit dishes. While only a handful of
Indian chefs offered quail, Mathur would go farther and serve duck with a
coconut and curry leaf sauce (2011b: M8).

Here, “going further” into the cosmopolitan omnivores’ territory is de rigueur

for any rising New York City chef. Furthermore, by the rules of the gastronomic
field the authentic chef has to be original, in contrast to the authenticity of the
ethnic cook who is urged to reproduce the unaltered original. These are two
very different modes of fabricating culinary value. It is worth digging a little
deeper into the contrasting language of these domains, and to do that I enter
the inscribed world of cookbooks because their durability allows me the
opportunity to hold the discourse still for sustained analysis.

Cookbooks and the chefs they produce

Michael Batterberry, the founding editor of the highly reputable Manhattan
food magazines Food Arts and Food and Wine, compliments Suvir Saran’s
cookbook Indian Home Cooking as a “redolent book on the simple home
cooking of his native India” that brings “Indian cooking into twenty-first
century American kitchens” (Saran and Lyness 2004: viii–ix; preface by
Batterberry). Simple, native, and twenty-first century American kitchens are
doing a lot of work here in terms of translating and transcribing between
different groups of practitioners. Saran makes the classic move of chefs who
want to distinguish themselves from the down-market curry houses. Echoing
Cardoz’s “incense-laden, god-riven places” (that I cited at the opening of this
chapter), Saran notes:

The food that most Indian restaurants in America serve is northern Indian
cuisine, the meat cuisine of the Moghuls—Muslim Turks who invaded India
in the sixteenth century and built the great Moghul empire. But I, a Hindu
and a vegetarian, also teach a lot of meatless Indian cuisine, dishes that I
have adapted from the largely vegetarian communities of northern and
162 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

southern India. Some of these dishes are spiced quite differently from
Moghul food and are unfamiliar to many Americans (Saran and Lyness
2004: 1).

He then collates a remarkable collection of southern Indian rasams,

manufactured institutional dishes such as cauliflower Manchurian, whole-
spiced baby potatoes, “my grand-uncle’s khitcheree,” etc., framing them
within the requisite gestures of authenticity, nativity, familiarity, such as the
acknowledgment to his two grandmothers and the praise for the domestic
servant “Panditji’s” cooking in Delhi. That genuflection towards authentic
expatriate domesticity is essential for the ethnic cook, and quite different from
the rhetoric of the chef, especially a chef’s chef, such as many have come to
identify Thomas Keller, as we will see below (Keller 1999, 2009). Suvir Saran’s
Indian Home Cooking is bristling with crimsons, emerald greens, and
turquoise, like a bride decked out to seduce by her demure domesticity: the
exact opposite of the demeanor and design of Keller cookbooks (or for that
matter the El Bulli and NOMA cookbooks).
The dust jacket of The French Laundry Cookbook (1999) is minimalist and
modern, with whites, beiges, browns, clear lines, and stringent folds. Clearly
this is no ethnic thing. No loud color, no ancestral sentimentalism, no deep
collective authenticity, only individual originality. Austere, yes, understated
surely, yet with a certain confident, even arrogant, presumption of perfection.
The name of the restaurant and the cookbook is clever, quirky, misleading,
especially compared to the obvious referent Indian Home Cooking. French,
yes, but a laundry? Well, the building was once a French steam laundry built in
Yountville, Napa Valley, California, circa 1900. It was a saloon, a brothel, and a
residence too. But the avant-garde self-consciousness and homage to France
would work well with the name The French Laundry. It would become one of
a brand with the artisan’s signature in the form of Per Se and Ad Hoc, two
other referents in the Keller empire of the quirky Francophilic genre leading
into New American haute cuisine. Sam Sifton, the same New York Times
restaurant critic who reviewed Tulsi above, opens his assessment of Per Se on
October 12, 2011, with: “So this is the best restaurant in New York City: Per
Se, in the Time Warner Center, just up the escalator from the mall, a jewel
amid the zirconia” (Sifton 2011: D1). He concludes, “It represents the ideal of
an American high-culture luxury restaurant,” where a dinner for two with wine
could set you back a thousand dollars. Sifton bestows the ultimate reward of
four stars on Per Se.
The introduction of The French Laundry Cookbook frames the issue as the
pursuit of “pleasure and perfection.” Addressed to the home cook, the co-
author Michael Ruhlman notes, “This is not fast food, nor is it four-star cooking
simplified for home kitchens. It is four-star cooking, period” (Keller 1999: 9).
 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 163

Quickly it plunges into a barigoule (a stew of artichoke hearts braised with

carrots and onions, fresh herbs, oil, and wine) and salmon tartare with sweet
red onion crème fraîche served in a tuile. The pictures are rarely of composed
dishes, mostly of stemware, kitchen utensils, two bright yellow squash
blossoms, tousled sprigs of mustard, the chef, his hands, and the purveyor.
Artisan and artifact. Produce, purveyor, tool, craftsman—a whole realm of
possibilities, open in various directions, limited only by quality and skill. “I take
pleasure in precision,” writes Keller (2009: 4). Perfect food by the best chef:
that’s his reputation in the culinary field. There is some sentiment about “dad”
and the categorical imperative to “Take care of your parents” (2009: 3). Here
the chef’s directive is expected to be followed to the letter. “An hour before
you want to eat, preheat the oven to 325°F. If you’re grilling over coals, start
the fire then too; if you’re grilling over propane, know that you’ll begin the
chicken about a half hour after you start cooking, and preheat the grill . . . so it
is hot when you’re ready to put your chicken on. Put the bacon in a heavy
Dutch oven” (Keller 2009: 2). Followed by beautiful abstract equations: spring
onions + parmesan cheese + persimmon + pine nuts + prosciutto = fall salad.
This is the distillate of the rhetoric, the posture, the confidence, and the skill,
embodied in a star New American restaurant chef. Keller’s is the quintessential
signature of the professional, where colleagues and family are acknowledged
but never the customer. That would be too crass. That is the difference
between a professional and a quack—a quack panders to his customers. There
is no hedging, either, in terms of the reach towards universal and abstract
proficiency, timeless and placeless, different from the rhetorical style, say, of
Michael Psilakis, a rising American chef playing in the medium of Greek food,
with its distinct location in the hierarchy between New American and Indian
restaurant cuisine.
In the case of How to Roast a Lamb (Psilakis 2009) the inviting title is
familiar, and the subtitle “New Greek Classic” tries to make room between
the old ethnic Greek diner and the New American fancy food. The
acknowledgment is overwrought, the cover classic Mediterranean, which is
olive oil in a traditionally stoppered bottle, a lemon cut in half, garlic bulb,
bunch of thyme, and olives on a plate with a stereotypically Greek key-
patterned border. This is going to be about “recipes and reminiscences” and,
in Barbara Kafka’s foreword, is identified as a book about “contemporary
Greek cooking” which “deserves to join the pantheon of other great foods of
the world” (Psilakis 2009: ix). Clearly this is a cuisine that needs updating and
promoting, a little like the native cuisine of India brought into the twenty-first
century American home that we encountered earlier, yet in this case we do
not have to travel that far.
The first visual offering, after the cover, is an old fashioned spoon with a
dab of Greek yogurt on a traditional oval plate. Nothing designer here. No
164 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Bauhaus. Deep essence and authenticity, underlined by old, torn, black and
white photographs of family and friends in difficulty, but with the possibility of
joy. The story is about families in hardship, their intensity polished by adversity,
until they get to America and the next generation, the author’s, comes along.
It is a story about Cretan men, the patriarch, and the father figure, strong,
stoic, and self-sacrificing, “men among men” (Psilakis 2009: 2). Here is the
future chef as the immigrant kid “dressed for school as if he were going to
church. They were eating hot dogs and hamburgers for lunch. I was eating
souvlaki and spanakopita” (2009: 3). The classic bundle of youthful anxieties
and grown-up “pride of culture, cuisine, and heritage” leads eventually to an
unhappy life as an accountant. He accidentally falls into Café Angelica, which
almost closes, but is then saved by a review in The New York Times. The rest
is history. More sepia-toned pictures, memories, and gorgeous recipes for
salads with wild bitter greens, grilled onions, dried tomatoes and Kefalotiri;
artichoke and potato salad; roasted whole fish; cod skordalia with pickled
beets; hanger steak with braised dandelion, lemon and oil; and shellfish
youvetsi.

When I decided to close my restaurant on Long Island and take my chances

opening a restaurant in New York City, I had one very specific goal in mind:
to shatter the confines, boundaries, and expectations that had been
imposed on Greek cuisine. I aimed to elevate the way in which Greek
cuisine—the cuisine of my heritage—is perceived by critics and diners alike
(Psilakis 2009: 224).

The storyline that Chef Psilakis is after ends with a soaring claim: “Greece is
the birthplace of democracy and Western civilization as we know it today. It is
also the birthplace of cuisine” (2009: 225). Of course we ought to be familiar
with the first contention, but the second one? A typical product of ethnocentric
exuberance? Recompense for the long history of the one-dimensional
Francophilia of American taste-makers? He is going to show how Greek
cuisine is the best in the world. That is one-half Psilakis’s swagger, the other
half insider ambition for outsider approval. That is the dream of every upwardly
mobile ethnic, expatriate chef forced to play on a field where he does not fully
belong.
From the evidence among various evaluators of cuisine, such as Zagat,
Chef Psilakis is not alone among Greeks in his hopes. Greek cuisine has
been climbing rapidly in the estimation of critics, as shown in Chapter 3. As
a result, the average price of a meal at a Greek haute cuisine restaurant in
New York City has been climbing, ranked twelfth in 1985, to the seventh rank
in the same list in 2014, with an average price of a meal at $45.50, after
French, Japanese, Continental, New American, Italian, etc. (see Figure 3.9 on
 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 165

page 86 of Chapter 3). Indian haute cuisine in the USA is also coming into
view among critics and connoisseurs, but occupies the tenth spot in that
ranking in 2014, at the average price of $37, surrounded by Mexican, Southern,
Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai. Indian haute cuisine is some distance from
Japanese, French, and New American at the top of the heap, and closer to
Greek at the seventh position in the Zagat hierarchy, but not there yet.
In this estimation, like Michael Psilakis’s Greek cuisine, Indian cuisine
needs updating. Then there is something more: Suvir Saran had to be found
by the cognoscenti, unlike Psilakis, who can announce himself, here marking
the slightly more exotic and down-market characteristic of the Indian find,
hidden in the subcultural heap. “We,” Batterberry notes, “first caught wind of
Suvir in the mid-1990s when an Indian travel consultant . . . told us of a young
caterer catching fire along New York’s food-centric party circuits” (Batterberry
in Saran and Lyness 2004: viii). That is a distinguishing feature of an “ethnic”
chef—he has to be found. Amy Lasater-Wille (2015) notes a similar process at
play in the discovery and celebration of Peruvian cuisine by metropolitan taste-
makers from Spain and the United States. In contrast, Psilakis’s ability to
announce his own arrival is another sign of the up-scaling of Greek cuisine,
out of the ethnic category, that isn’t afforded to Indian yet. Psilakis is the
Anglophone son of an immigrant, while Saran is the immigrant who looks and
sounds different (and is not up to speed with American youth cultural artifacts
such as music, clothing, and hairstyle). But to play in the upscale field, both
Psilakis and Saran have to distinguish their food from the run-of-mill cheap
joint, be it the Greek diner or the Indian curry house. Thus Saran launches into
that distinction from the first line, while also appropriating a second posture:
the guru instructing an Anglo initiate: “I was once asked by a student why my
food tasted so different from other Indian food he’d eaten in America” (2004:
1). Saran explains that he also finds generic Mughlai cuisine of Indian curry
houses “heavy and one-dimensional” and that instead he will create a pan-
Indian collation with attention to the rasams from the south of India, and home
cooking. Nevertheless, he goes on to instruct us how to make a spicy and oily
“Kwality’s chickpeas made famous by the restaurant of that name” (Saran
2004: 36). The point here is not that Saran has mala fide intentions but that the
discursive field shapes him as a native interlocutor. Domestic authenticity,
although important, can only take us so far. It needs the heat and grease of
publicity to become a value worth transacting across zesty ethnic boundaries.
Floyd Cardoz, the celebrity Indian chef at the recently closed Tabla at
Madison Square in Manhattan,2 noted too: “The Indian food I’d eaten in the
United States was another matter entirely—too oily, too hot, and full of
mushy, mysterious ingredients that were not remotely seasonal. No wonder
Americans, who had dived joyfully into the vibrant flavors of Mexico and
Southeast Asia, resisted it” (Cardoz 2006: xv). While starting at the same
166 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

point, in contrast to Saran, Cardoz fully embraces the technique and network
of the professional cook in One Spice, Two Spice (2006), partly because he is
professionally trained while Saran isn’t. Named after Floyd Patterson, the
famous African-American boxer, through enticingly delicate cosmopolitan
tracings of an imagined world of longing and ambition, Chef Cardoz did end up
in the world his name was intended for. It would take the intermediation of
another famous personality, the restaurateur Danny Meyer, whose Italian chef
Michael Romano, having fallen in love with an Indian woman, had traveled to
India in 1994 picking up all the excitement brewing in the sub-continent. At
Union Square Café, Romano introduced what Danny Meyer calls “sort of
Indian food under the radar,” which turned out to be some of the most popular
dishes (Cardoz 2006: xi). As a result, Meyer suggested to Chef Romano that
“we consider creating a new restaurant to be rooted in authentic Indian
tradition and spices and use Western culinary techniques and local, seasonal
ingredients as well” (2006: xi).
Here is the other formula by which excluded cuisines are drawn into haute
cuisine, which is as spice, added to Western culinary technique, because in
this tradition of cooking (and discourse) non-Western techniques are either
invisible as techniques or considered inappropriate for the genre rules of that
kind of food. Analogously, Lasater-Wille notes that:

the fact that most “fusion” cuisine (including Peru’s haute cuisine) requires
that indigenous ingredients be subjected to French preparation techniques
in order to be internationally recognized is itself a troubling analogue to the
still-common notion that indigenous Peruvians need to adopt European
mannerisms and dress in order to qualify as “civilized” (2015: 31).

Meyer would take the metaphor of flavoring American food with Indian spices
further in naming his restaurant Tabla (an Indian drum and a homonym for the
Latin table) after listening to Indian drumming at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art as an accompaniment to the clarinetist Richard Soltzman’s jazz riffs, where
he noted the “fascinating synchronicity of the Western and Indian music
forms” (Cardoz 2006: xii). Yet, in keeping with the importance of the ethnic
genre, you need native translators (Floyd as “U.S. ambassador to the state of
New Indian cooking”), who can make each “recipe sing” and narrate “deeply
felt stories” (2006: xii). These, by the way, are the rules of the discourse that
cannot be ignored by anyone playing with Indian food in upscale Indian
restaurants and in the media today, including my own work. Discourses
produce subjects in particular ways, subjecting them to bigger storylines that
no one in particular really controls. Subjectivity is produced in subjection, as
both Foucault (1978: 38) and Bourdieu (1977) have shown in their own
inimitable ways.
 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 167

Then there are the usual distinctions made in this discursive domain of
haute cuisine: for instance, the insistence that this is not your usual curry
house. “Certainly, in a city where so many people associated Indian cuisine
with predictable menus of raita and dal, vindaloos, keemas, curries, and
chutneys, we thought there was a great opportunity to showcase the glories
and range of Indian flavors in a fresh way” (Cardoz 2006: xi). Meyer, along
with the Swiss-born American restaurateur Gray Kunz, were at the leading
edge of the transformation of Indian cuisine into a legitimate haute category
that is today occupied by others in Manhattan such as Devi, Tamarind,
Vermillion, Junoon, Tulsi, etc. That trajectory has also provided routes out of
identifiably Indian food, such as by Chef Jahangir Mehta at his miniature
restaurants Graffiti and Mehtaphor, the latter by name and posture trending
more towards Keller, where he serves delicious pork dumplings with crushed
sev (a spicy dried deep-fried lentil paste) on top. Even on the way out, there
are echoes of the old palate and habits of taste, as in the sev for Mehta or in
the burger at North End Grill for Cardoz:

I did a burger at North End Grill that was a short rib burger with onion
chutney, mustard, and pepper with onion rings that were spiced. That’s the
way I’d do a burger. I don’t think a plain patty with salt and pepper does it
for me. There’s got to be flavor in there (Guff 2014).

Here is ethnic flavor and Oriental body creatively posited against Occidental
technique.
Cardoz’s food is plucked straight from the world of Amitav Ghosh’s novels,
global networks before and aside from European hegemony. It is a cuisine
that looks outward from the peninsular subcontinent—or subcondiment, as
Rushdie (1997: 4) remarks!—rather than towards the heartland. It is cooking
from the world of Abraham Ben Yiju, the twelfth-century Tunisian Jewish
merchant from Cairo, and Bomma, the Indian servant and business agent in
the Malabar, commemorated in Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1994). It is the
palatal memory of networks traversing the Arabian Sea that predate European
colonialism, and were inflected by the transient Portuguese dominance that
made Goa a part of the Lusaphone, Catholic empire. Rightly, Cardoz asserts,
“What’s known in the West as fusion food—different cultures together on a
plate—started for me in the cradle, because fusion was, quite simply, a way
of life for our family” (2006: xiii). While making a chicken curry for his father, at
the age of twenty, he

recklessly added . . . rosemary from the farmer’s market and part of a bottle
of Reisling. The fragrance and heat of the rosemary connected with that of
ginger in the sauce and turned into something marvelous. The wine
168 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

smoothed and rounded out the flavors in a way I hadn’t imagined. And my
father declared it the best thing he’d ever eaten (Cardoz 2006: xiv).

From that bastard-but-delectable chicken curry a segue was inevitable to

hotel school in Bombay (now called Mumbai) and Switzerland. He notes,
parenthetically, “(This sort of thing wasn’t really done in middle-class circles in
Bombay. You can imagine what my parents thought of this move). I persevered,
and a few years later I came to America and found an entry-level job in Gray
Kunz’s legendary kitchen at Lespinasse, in New York City” (2006: xiv). Identities
are claimed and maintained in very specific haute cuisine networks: hence
the details of who did what with whom are crucial, as in this case and in the
following cases. The proper prestige and career that could not be accomplished
through medical or engineering school was suddenly opened up again for
Cardoz with the rise of the chef in the American pantheon and the
intermediation of Danny Meyer (for whom he worked for seventeen years).
From Gray Kunz’s Swiss–Singapore trajectory that produced a slice of black
sea bass in a bowl of Thai-inspired kaffir lime leaf emulsion, Cardoz’s long-
suppressed repertoire of the mixed cuisines of the Arabian Sea acquired a
second life and gave him a subsequent opportunity. His first dish at Lespinasse
was the Hydrebadi lamb chops with squash, lentils, carrots, and cracked
wheat. But the cardamom was too strong and the chilis too hot. He had to
cool it down. He came to a very postcolonial conclusion, mixing biomedicine
and Ayurveda, for a Catholic man from Goa: “I wasn’t back in India, where
chilies are needed to aid digestion and circulation, cooling the body down by
perspiration” (Cardoz 2006: xv). From there he quickly moved to green mango-
marinated fluke with pickled daikon and beetroot (with the feisty vim of ginger
and the verve of fenugreek), tuna tartare with apples (with a pinch of chaat
masala and mustard oil), roast lamb with mint-black pepper sauce, veal chops
stuffed with hominy and lemon chutney, Goan spiced crab cakes with avocado
salad, and the spiced shellfish nage. This is where the cuisine of the Arabian
Sea pierces the Mediterranean, and might have produced the Mogor
dell’Amore, the Florentine Mughal of Love, the forsaken child of Qara Köz,
Lady Black Eyes. Qara Köz was the youngest sister of Babur, the founder of
the Mughal dynasty in Delhi, and Argalia a Florentine soldier of fortune,
exquisitely fabricated by Rushdie in The Enchantress of Florence (2009).
The immigrant Cardoz’s food, restaurant (Tabla, White Street), cookbook,
and personality, are a quieter, more conservative, cautious, South Asian
incarnation of the radical new mixing of haute and not-so-haute that David
Chang, a second-generation Korean-American, has mastered in the Manhattan
fine-dining marketplace. Chang’s widely acclaimed Momofuku empire—
Noodle Bar, Ssäm Bar, Ko, Milk Bar and so on—all located within a few blocks
in the East Village (and now replicated in Toronto and Sydney), styles itself
 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 169

as the quintessential network of anti-restaurants. No tablecloth, no wine

glass, no elegant silverware (plain wooden chopsticks), shared tables, no
chairs (backless stools), kinetic, young, inter-racial clientele with a yen for
miscegenated food. The Momofuku Cookbook (2009) written by David Chang
with Peter Meehan, exhibits all the loud, avant-garde, celebrity-focused,
exquisitely delicious, “bad pseudo-fusion cuisine” that is at the leading
edge of American restaurant food today, where “labne and ssämjang and
Sichuan peppercorns and poached rhubarb” all end up on the same plate
(2009: 8). Chang writes, “We were going to serve good food regardless of
the environment, regardless of the paper napkins, the shitty silverware, the
fast food-style condiment island in the middle of the dining room” (Chang
2009: 122).
Chang brings us the possibility of ethnic haute for the first time, quite
different from the properly somber, elite, institutional, Continental, French,
Swiss, or even Japanese cuisines we have seen so far play in the gastronomic
field of Manhattan. This is radical, this alternative route to American haute
cuisine.3 The Momofuku Cookbook, in style, design, and content, lands right
between How to Roast a Lamb and The French Laundry Cookbook. It is a
classic Clarkson Potter book with its clean lines, few colors, close-ups of
ingredients, dynamic and hazy pictures of chefs caught mid-activity, yet
attentive enough to hire a “male hand model” for all those crafty hand-of-the-
chef-as-artisan shots. In substance, what is radical here is that the inspiration
is no longer a restaurant in the French model but the great ramenayas of
Tokyo. “I liked the periphery,” Chang writes, “of the culinary world: fast food,
ramen, subs, pizza. Simple and delicious food people could afford” (2009:
117). Chang comes from the edge, much like another Korean-American chef,
Roy Choi, who revolutionized notions of the restaurant in Los Angeles by
marrying Korean and Mexican fare with the hipster food truck movement,
calling them “loncheros,” building a following on tweets and blogs. Choi,
with a number of Kogi Korean BBQ taco trucks, is one among a number of
radical re-visioners of the urban foodscape that includes Chef Ludo Lefebvre
with his “pop up” restaurants in other peoples’ kitchens, which he characterizes
as a “touring restaurant” or a “travelling circus,” part performance art, part
restaurant (Baertlein 2011). Choi is the master of the new genre of gangster
Asian food, the inverse of the model minority. This is bad-ass, bad-mouthed,
wicked and loud food. Garrulous. Strident.
The traditional restaurant in the Parisian model invented in the eighteenth
century, that so dominated all notions of Western culinarity, is dying right in
front of our eyes, and David Chang and Roy Choi have helped that along in LA
and Manhattan. Through that crack in the edifice a whole lot of ethnic-inflected
food is pouring into the domain of Manhattan haute cuisine, muddying the
turgid classificatory schemas of high and low, erudite and silent cooking.
170 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

But is Chang’s career trajectory and culinary product that different from
what we have come to expect in a fast-moving field? Is his insurrection that
revolutionary? To find out, we have to attend to his precise pathway. He came
to Momofuku via a liberal arts degree (which he says he did not find any use
for, which of course can be attested to only by those who have it), through
training at the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and cooking at Café
Boulud, property of New York’s eponymous legendary French chef Daniel
Boulud, who had himself come through the French stagiaire system working
with the likes of Roger Vergé, Georges Blanc, and Michel Guérard. Then Chang
travelled, lived, and ate through Japanese cities such as Osaka and Tokyo, the
new culinary co-hegemon with France and Italy since the days of the nouvelle
French cuisine of Chef Paul Bocuse (by the late 1970s). This is analogous to
Roy Choi’s trajectory through the Culinary Institute of America, staging at Eric
Ripert’s Le Bernardin, wrestling with Jacques Pepin’s La Technique and the
imprimatur of Japanese Iron Chef Rokusaburo Michiba. What David Chang (or
Roy Choi) has done with East Asian-inflected American cuisine, borrowing
from sources in Japanese and Korean noodle shops, is extraordinarily original,
but his career path has been the standard route of the new American chef
since the late 1980s.4 He received all the help from the right restaurant
reviewers just at the right time, as he willingly acknowledges, such as Frank
Bruni of The New York Times, Joe Dziemianowicz of The Daily News, and
Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite of New York magazine. As Laura Shapiro
noted on Gourmet’s website in 2008:

When Gabrielle Hamilton opened a tiny, uncomfortable place called Prune

in 1999, her idiosyncratic menu caught on, the restaurant became
successful, and today she’s a much-admired figure on the scene. When
David Chang opened a tiny, uncomfortable place called Momofuku Noodle
Bar in 2004, his idiosyncratic menu caught on, the restaurant became
successful, and today he’s a much-admired figure on the scene—with
numerous awards, scads of magazine profiles, two more restaurants and a
public that worships him. However you account for the difference between
these two career trajectories, it’s got to include something besides the
food (Shapiro 2008).

Chang was consecrated quite early by the right set of institutions, such as the
James Beard Foundation (2006 Rising Star Chef of the Year), and Food & Wine
magazine (Best new chefs in 2006). They even gave him room to trip up at
Ssäm Bar, at first producing soggy Asian-Mexican wraps that did not work,
after which he quickly transitioned back to the more sure-fire Asian noodle-
shop theme. He was aided by a small group of powerful Manhattan chefs
such as Tom Colicchio at Craft, Jonathan Benno at Per Se, Andrew Carmellini
 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 171

at Café Boulud. That makes it difficult to classify Chang (or for that matter
Choi) as an outsider in any sense. Chang is perhaps more an imaginative
insider who has rattled the canon of Manhattan haute cuisine, with wide
reverberations in the field. It is important to pay attention both to the specificity
of the culinary idiom and the external sociological critique. Of course, the
nature of such an overheated field is that by the time this is written down and
goes to print we would have moved on to the next iconoclast. Nevertheless,
the dynamic remains the same, although the personality changes. That is
what makes chefing so close today to the world of fashion, the grueling
competition, riffs, and resonant antipathy. Chefs are all talking and
eavesdropping and arguing with each other, just as, say, cultural sociologists
are, to remain within the field.
To map the scope of the David Chang intervention, the scholar Chi-Hoon
Kim, who is working on a dissertation on Korean cuisine at Indiana University,
writes to me that a small number of Korean-American chefs have become
visible in the last five to seven years (looking back from 2015) who can be
regionally grouped in the following way:

East: David Chang (Momofuku empire), Hooni Kim (Danji and Hanjan), and
Jungsik Yim (Jungsik Restaurant)

South: Edward Lee (610 Magnolia and Milkwood)

Midwest: Beverly Kim (Parachute) and Bill Kim (BellyQ and Belly Shack)

West: Roy Choi (Kogi, A Frame, and Pot) (Chi-Hoon Kim 2015: personal
communication).

She notes that there is a strong, pronounced divide between East and West
coast chefs. The chefs in the South and Midwest are more fluid and flexible,
she avers. The East coast chefs (New York) all have Michelin stars and operate
upscale restaurants. There are some differences as well. David Chang is
Korean-American and defines his cuisine as New American. Hooni Kim was
born in Korea but immigrated to the US when he was ten years old, and
cooks modern Korean food. Jungsik Yim is the most recent transplant from
Korea, cooking New Korean with French influences. The West coast (Los
Angeles) is dominated by Roy Choi, the celebrated food truck legend, who
was born in Korea and immigrated to the US at the age of two. His cooking
philosophy is to bring Korean food to the people in a casual and approachable
way. His style is heavily influenced by Latino and hip-hop culture and he
represents a segment of Korean-American men who are now termed “Bad
Koreans.” The image of Korean-American chefs as “Bad Koreans,” Chi-Hoon
Kim notes, was popularized by Anthony Bourdain in his show “Parts Unknown”.
172 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Bourdain points to male Korean-American chefs as driving American cuisine

(Lee 2014). The differing tactics could reflect differences in the socioeconomic
and political context of Korean immigration in these two cities. For example,
Kim notes, LA has the largest Korean population outside of Korea, where
poorer and middle-class Koreans settled. Korean immigrants to NYC are
mainly upper middle-class businessmen, medical professionals, and students
studying abroad, who are more attuned to upper-class culture and self-
conscious about it.
Inter-Asian competition has also heightened. Outsiders like Eddie Huang,
trying to break in, often target Chang in their construction of more authentic,
ethnic selfhoods. One way of doing that is to play up the race angle and the
lack of culinary training. Eddie Huang screams,

Americans. Americans. AMERICANS. They’ve called me chink. They’ve

treated me like the Other. They laughed at my food, they laughed at my
family, they laughed at my culture, they wouldn’t give me a proper interview
because of my face. Americans. They did that. When 9/11 happened, I was
an observer. I mourned for the victims and felt for the people as individuals,
but this wasn’t my fight (Huang 2013: 223).

He continues:

I always felt as if America took half the good traits of a person and impressed
them on Asians and the other half on black people, since clearly, no person
of color could be a well-rounded, intelligent, confident individual that served
himself or herself. Asian men must be emasculated, Asian women must be
exotic, black men must be dick-slinging thugs, and black women must be
single moms (2013: 235).

These are fighting words, too strident even for the counter-cultural David
Chang. Huang identifies strongly with the subversive, masculine, no-holds-
barred hip-hop scene (before Puffy, Master P, and Eminem), and clothing that
is “transgressive, satirical, do-it-yourself democratic street culture” (2013:
229). Attire and music: two things young (and, following them, old) Americans
are invested in heavily in terms of their identity. He says he gives credit where
it is due, even gets sentimental about New York City, “despite the misfires,
overhyped openings, and super-restaurants that mar the landscape, New York
is the best eating city not Tokyo or Taipei, and we owe it to the people Fresh
off the Boat” (2013: 245). And he is scathing and impolite when he insists that

When foreigners cook our food, they want to infuse their identity into the
dish, they have a need to be part of the story and take it over. For some
 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 173

reason, Americans simply can’t understand why this bothers us. ‘I just
want to tell my story?!? I loved my vacation to Burma! What’s wrong with
that?’ It’s imperialism at work in a sauté pan. You already have everything,
do you really, really, really need a Burmese hood pass, too? Can we live?
(2013: 247–8).

He says he wanted Baohaus to be a youth culture restaurant (2013: 258) and

he finds New York full of restaurants with good food, but few with an
independent mind, and the dining section of the Times a mere stepchild of the
style section.
Then he takes on Chang. “David Chang is the chef who unwittingly
popularized a bastardized version of Taiwanese gua bao. He tells the story of
how he created the Momofuku pork bun in his book Momofuku” (2013: 260).
Huang finds the whole story “ludicrous on a number of levels”: first, in the
authentic eatery the pork belly is served in a pancake, not a bao; second, you
typically eat the skin in the pancake and the body separately by itself.

To this day publications like New York magazine still credit Chang for
introducing New York to the gua bao. I was mad, but I respected the hustle.
The only way to get even was to set up shop myself. I thank David. Just like
he came up on gua bao, I jumped off his success and brought the title
home. A Taiwanese kid makes the best gua bao in New York just like it
should be (2013: 261).

He both acknowledges David Chang and defeats him (at least in his show).
Everyone was comparing Baohaus to Momofuku. “The difference was that
we braised our pork. Although Chang is Korean-American, his technique is
French. Even bo ssam, a Korean pork belly dish, used steamed pork belly.
Asians don’t use the oven for anything” (2013: 264). Huang exposes Chang,
for roasting his pork belly, as just not Asian enough.
Huang tells people he is not a chef. Food isn’t his thing. Baohaus is not a
restaurant, but an idea. “An idea that couldn’t be understood with the language
and vocabulary of traditional restaurants . . . Nothing was inspired by famous
chefs, farms, or trends in food. It was the manifestation of my friends, family,
and memories” (2013: 261). No trained chefs, no restaurant skills, no skilled
staff. Staff, in fact, were picked on the basis of their taste in music and open-
mindedness. A typical advertisement went: “Baohaus Hiring Multi-Tasking
Nice People Who Listen to Ghostface” (2013: 264). And he considered the
Baohaus style of service as the Anti-Danny Meyer. He says that they almost
never hired experienced cooks, “because the goal was to create a team of
artists who just happened to work at Baohaus while pursuing other dreams”
(2013: 268). Yet these quarrels of distinction make it possible to develop
174 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

the imagination, make self-reference, and even acquire a certain degree of

autonomy that outlines a separate field of gastronomy in the current urban
popular cultural terrain. This is how gastronomy fares in regions far from
eighteenth century France that do not replicate the social conditions it was
born in and yet, in some sense, presume.

Ethnic haute cuisine: A category problem

Huang is no haute cuisine buff. He is playing at the frayed edges of the
celebrity market. Ethnic haute is an impossible category to fit into. What is
true about the usual Indian cook in Manhattan can also be extended to a
number of neighboring ethnic sub-fields, such as Thai and Filipino. Chef Martin
and his business-partner wife Julie noted, in a long and revealing discussion,
much about the relationship between ethnicity, authenticity, and haute cuisine.
I present a productive extract below to further that distinction and show its
slow hesitant genealogy.

I: When did all this begin, Martin?

Martin: We moved to New York City in 1979. I was really disappointed by

the food here.

I: Did you work in restaurants in NYC ?

Martin: Yes. It was Continental-style, whatever that was. It was called

Ambrosia.

I: When did you get your own restaurant?

Julie: That did not happen until 1995. I was in Merrill Lynch and he was
working in different restaurants. I enjoyed my ten years there. The boom
and bust of the 1980s disillusioned me. We were afraid that we were
getting older and we wanted to live the life we wanted to. We had to be our
own boss if we wanted to be happy.

I: And that meant owning a restaurant for you?

Julie: Yes.

I: What restaurant did you envision? [Directed to her chef husband].

Martin: I imagined it around my cooking with an Asian base.

I: Did you develop your own identity with your cooking?

Martin: Yes, I developed my own style. I developed my own sensibility.

 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 175

I: Did you cook at home when you were growing up? Did you cook in the
Philippines?

Martin: No. I did not cook at home. I never cooked at home. [Here is a faint
link to Muhammad Rasool’s disavowal of domestic cooking.]

I: Is it because men of your class do not cook?

Martin: No, there are some exceptions. But most did not cook. I did not
cook. Me, I had never cooked before.

I: Not until Philadelphia?

Martin: I started as a dishwasher. One day the chef left with all his cooks.
The owner asked me to help the cook. I had never cooked before. I started
reading cookbooks, the very cookbooks read by people like Alice Waters.

I: So you learned to cook from cookbooks?

Martin: Yes, to imagine what French restaurant cooking was about. To

develop the same vocabulary; know the language of cooking.

[At this point Julie took over the interview as she was intrigued by her
husband’s thinking about cooking. The following questions were asked by
her to her husband].

Julie: Where did that sense come from?

Martin: Food was really not a part of my world. We did a lot of cooking in
the family. We had a large family. I knew how to dress a chicken. But I never
thought I would cook. Until I cooked in Philadelphia.

Julie: So why did they ask you to cook in the restaurant? Why not anyone
else?

Martin: The staff was Thai. The chef was Thai. They asked me perhaps
because I was the only guy available and willing.

Julie: So because you were the only one available! [Both laugh.]

Martin: I would read cookbooks. I was getting interested. I would try it out
and then serve the food to the wait-staff. They liked it because it was done
with some effort and good intent even when the food wasn’t particularly
good. This was food made with care instead of throwaway dishes at the
restaurant.

I: What was your relationship with Filipino food then?

Martin: Nothing. My only encounter with Filipino cooking was with

potlucks. But I never cooked it.
176 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

I: So how did your own taste and technique develop?

Martin: Later on, I started East–West fusion. Putting ginger here, putting
lemongrass there, and wrapping things in banana leaf. But that was a little
later when I became a chef already, when I had some authority.

I: Why did you start adding those things?

Martin: There was this New American cuisine restaurant called Hubert’s
in New York. It was committed to making New American cooking in
general. They were interested in encouraging and experimenting with
new American things. They would do Colonial American cooking. Then
immigrant iterations such as Irish and Italian. Finally, new immigrants who
were not already established, like me, elements that were not part of the
American cuisine yet, were encouraged. He encouraged me to dig into my
background. But I did not know anything at all about Asian cooking or
Filipino cooking! Then I started reading. Going to Chinatown, scavenging
weird stuff.

I: Did you start reading Asian or Filipino cookbooks?

Martin: Not so much. Most of the Asian cookbooks were Chinese and I
was not interested in Chinese cooking. I was interested in Southeast Asian
cooking and there were hardly any cookbooks.

I: So it was your own practical exploration?

Martin: Yes, with the aid of my taste memory. At that time I was still more
French or what used to be called Continental. But I was beginning to dabble
a little into this or that Southeast Asian ingredient.

Julie interjected: This was in the early 1980s, right? You would get gingko
nuts and use them. Fish in banana leaves. At that time it was mind-blowing
for a lot of people.

I: Did you miss Filipino cooking?

Martin: Kind of . . . [drifting away. Julie picked up the thread.]

Julie: Well, the first thing I did was to start cooking. I did not know how to
cook Filipino food. I cooked it here in the US for the first time. Actually, I
learned to cook Filipino food here. [This echoes the experience of upper
class immigrant women such as Cecilia Chiang and Madhur Jaffrey.]

Julie: We wanted to do a few Filipino dishes. We did not want it to be a

Filipino restaurant. We wanted to do French dishes. We knew we would be
in trouble if we called our food Filipino. There is a traditional Filipino home-
cooking and then there are basically diners we call by the generic name
 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 177

Turo-Turo, which is “point, point,” where we point at stuff on the board and
they give it to us. We did not want to do that.

Julie: Filipinos were not used to upscale restaurant cooking. There was no
consensus about what upscale Filipino cooking should be, because it was
just conceptual, ideological, not practical. No one was doing it. That is why
we called ourselves a Pan-Asian restaurant.

At this point Martin interjected: “And also because I did not know anything
about Filipino cooking,” which made Julie impatient. She continued:

Julie: I knew some basic Filipino dishes. I bought this old, beaten up,
Filipino cookbook. I would take a look and see how it was done. The stuff I
was missing. Then I would do it. Approximate it. But when food writers
came to our restaurant I realized that if you are a food writer you cannot say
they are neither this nor that and because we were from Philippines they
started calling us Filipino. And we had Filipinos showing up and giving us a
lot of trouble. They started quarrelling with us and telling us that this is fake
Filipino food. It was a war. They gave us very bad reviews. The Filipinos. Not
the non-Filipinos. The non-Filipinos were happy. We did not like aspects of
Filipino cuisine. It is fatty and soupy. We couldn’t do that in an upscale
restaurant. Home cooking and restaurant cooking are completely different
animals. We did not want to do that.

Julie: But they would like to bring white people, especially white husbands,
to our upscale restaurant because it was stylish and clean, especially
because we had clean restrooms. That is what we were told. One customer
said, “you know, I first came and checked your restroom, before I invited
my husband, because he is white, you know.”

Julie: You will not understand if you were not colonized. What it is to grow
up colonized. What it is to grow up in a poor country, filled with brown
people, and your concept of beauty is a white person. Haute cuisine is
white people’s cuisine. “What are you trying to do? You are getting out
there and trying to be one of them.” That was the allegation. That was the
implication. The more exposure we got the more virulent the Filipinos got.
I was talking to a Vietnamese woman and she was saying the same thing
about Vietnamese.

Julie: But at some point we realized we had to be more Filipino.

I: Why?

Julie: I think we hit a glass ceiling. We could not go any further without the
aid of Filipino authenticity.
178 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

Martin [Disagreed quite strongly]: I think we were trying to get back to our
heritage. Before I was coming from a Western point of view. Now my point
of view had changed. I am going to uplift Filipino food to a restaurant
standard. Now I am coming from that direction, asking, “so what are the
flavors of the Philippines?”

I: Was the Filipino audience important?

Julie: About 30 to 40 percent of our audience was Filipino. We could

depend on them. [Here in contradiction to what they had said earlier.] Food
is about sharing, community, and culture. That is why I do not like excessively
stylish and elitist restaurants.

Martin: We are still within the same movement as local, regional, and
sustainable, just like the new American cuisine. We consider ourselves a
part of that. We are trying to use Filipino food. May be a sense of elitism.
[“No,” Julie disagreed again, “we are not elitist, but we use organic because
we want to avoid the chemicals.”]

I: What is the average price-range of a meal at your restaurant?

Julie: $30–35.

Chef Martin eventually acquired a substantial reputation playing in the very

small field of Filipino haute cuisine in Manhattan, after he was granted a role
first in the domain of haute cuisine and then in a version of Filipino cooking. In
2014 there were only four Filipino restaurants in Manhattan. Chef Martin
echoes (without necessarily endorsing) Janer’s claim cited earlier that
standardized French restaurant cooking is not that difficult to learn as a skill
and that “We can understand what French cuisine is all about after reading a
few books . . .” (Janer 2006: 6). Chef Martin’s immersion in nouvelle cuisine
networks allowed him to pick up the new techniques along with the mandatory
new language of sustainability, locality, and organic, by “reading cookbooks,
the very cookbooks read by people like Alice Waters.” Yet, once he mastered
that domain of the chef he felt the pressures of appropriating the skills and
markers of ethnic authenticity, to distinguish his place in the field (as did Roy
Choi in LA with Korean-Mexican tacos). Julie’s rich commentary on color,
colonialism, and taste is insightful. They—this husband–wife team—were
early in breaking into the field of haute cuisine in spite of their Filipino heritage
because of their networks in New American cuisine restaurants such as
Hubert’s. They wedged their way into the field on the back of New American
Cuisine and accidents of biographical proximity, with undoubtedly enormous
effort and imagination. We also have class as a countervailing force to
nationality here. They came with graduate degrees from American universities
 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 179

and globally networked families of physicians. Fields have structure and

relative stability, but they also provide openings to exceptionally networked
and talented individuals. A few exotic others can be, and historically have been
accommodated. Yet, I would say, they never reached the heights they deserved
because of their ethnicity.

Networks, immersion and doing:

Concluding comments
Martin’s and Chang’s career paths and networks are usually unavailable to
cooks confined to the “ethnic” corner of the field, who have to trade more in
the domain of authenticity than the realm of innovation in haute cuisine. For
instance, cooks in most of the Indian restaurants in Manhattan have never
cooked Indian food, not on the subcontinent, not at home, nor in a restaurant,
until they get in the galley of a ship or a restaurant kitchen in Europe or North
America. About one half of Indian restaurant cooks in Manhattan are Sylheti
(after the province of Sylhet in Bangladesh; according to my survey), many of
them were (or their ancestors were) lascars who worked the galley onboard
merchant marine ships. Some eventually cooked in curry houses and acquired
the skills in that genre of cooking. They do not belong to the other network of
cooking-school-trained or European-apprenticed chefs and commentators.
They do not read about them. They do not know about them. They have never
been trained in institutions of haute cuisine (in schools or restaurants) to
acquire the skills and rhetoric of the new American chef.
The mirror-image of the foreign-born, untrained, ethnic cook is the native,
white (and increasingly Asian), Anglophone (and Francophile) chef, trained at
the Culinary Institute of America (CIA ) or the French Culinary Institute (recently
renamed International Culinary Center). The chef occupies the heights of the
culinary field in the USA today, just as the ethnic cook inhabits the bottom
rungs of the hierarchy. To the degree that the foreign-born depends on
everyday experience in both taste and toil, the native-born chef is trained in
schools and restaurants not only to acquire new skills and habits, but also to
be promoted in the class hierarchy. He has to be remade not only with a subtle
palate and hands, but also with a body, posture, and gestures fit for upper-
class consumption, even when he belongs to the iconoclastic avant garde.
The question hinges on expertise, the pathways in which it circulates,
modes of acquiring it, and its associated rhetoric and valuation. It is about
learning the tricks of the trade, maintaining skills, learning from each other,
pressing on each other to acquire more skills, and arguing for one’s position in
a crowded hierarchy of already established professions. There are real
180 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

differences between a native/naïve cook and a professional/ideological chef.

They are produced by two ways of acquiring expertise, one primarily via
explicit instruction, and the other mostly by absorbing implicit knowledge. The
latter route is what Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) have famously
called “situated learning” and “legitimate peripheral participation,” which is
learning by watching, trying out, repeating on one’s own. As a result of
activities of learning and doing in a particular social world, the person is
correspondingly “transformed into a practitioner, a newcomer becoming an
old-timer, whose changing knowledge, skill, and discourse are part of a
developing identity—in short, a member of a community of practice” (Lave
and Wenger 1991: 122). But this is also where achieved, acquired, embodied
skill looks a lot like the ascribed skills of gendered, racialized, and ethnic ways
of being-in-the-world.
At first glance, ethnics and experts appear to be quite different things in
incongruent classificatory systems. In the case of ethnicity, subjects are born
into the category, while professions are made. In the case of professions,
formal training is essential, usually outside the household, and increasingly
certified. Yet, current work on both ethnicity and professions shows that a
subject has to be produced in both instances, with implicit and explicit
systems of training the body to be so. Coming from vastly different research
traditions, Judith Butler (1990) (from postmodern theorizations), and Harry
Collins and Robert Evans (2007) (from realist hypothesis-building agendas),
have concluded that you are mostly what you do, and do well. Others have
elaborated further that the training to be something happens in the triple
register of performance: to do something, to do it right, and to do it for show
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1999). Gender, race, and ethnicity (often already visible
to the audience and hence already assigned), are never without their
performative possibilities, most dramatically coming into view when the act
fails. The process of ethnicity- and race-making is similar, but the outcomes
are different, based on current hierarchies of value. In Bourdieu’s terms, the
ethnic cook is produced at home and in unexplicated communities, and the
new American chef is produced in explicated pedagogical settings such as
schools, restaurants, and self-conscious networks. Most importantly, one
kind of skill is valued more, much more, than the other.
To take one example, the “Indian,” for instance in the case of Cardoz and
Mathur, is produced not only by the injunctions of a nation-state and its
governing claims which are registered in authorized documents such as
passports and birth certificates, but also through tacit practices of long
duration in language, religion, bodily posture, gesture, volubility, taste, morals,
and aesthetics. Some of that training has to be explicated, especially when
immersed in conflictual contexts, with exhortations such as, “As Indians we
don’t do that,” “Indians do this,” “that is what makes us Indians.” Nevertheless,
 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 181

the most important instruction happens at home, at school, and in the

playground, where the insipient and pervasive ways of being-in-the-world are
as completely naturalized as the mother tongue is inscribed on the body as
durable, unconscious habit.
The reverse is the case with professions, where it is assumed that much of
what is learned is taught explicitly in an institution separated from the home,
such as a medical or culinary school, a hospital or a restaurant kitchen. These
specialized institutions teach the requisite skills, usually in much shorter
duration than it takes, say, to teach the mother tongue or chopstick etiquette
at home. Yet professions also train us in ways of being-in-the-world, especially
in the early stage of professionalization (as we saw in the previous chapter).
The instructive title of a highly popular advice book for physicians, written by
a physician, was Aequanimitas (Osler 1906), arguing that “good natured
equanimity” in the face of medical challenges is central to the body-language
of a physician. You are how you act—preferably calmly under pressure.
At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Max Weber
(ca. 1900) was analyzing identities as ascribed or achieved, the fracture-line
between body and profession was the leading edge of the contention around
modes of identification. In that frame of analysis, ascription was the group
assignment, such as race, gender, ethnicity, which was typically based on
visible markers to outsiders, and the achieved or aspirational status referenced
identities such as physician, pastor, lawyer, professor, poet or worker, based
on the social division of labor. Proliferation of professions and semi-professions,
and new biomedical identities, are reconfiguring the relationship between
ascription and aspiration. For instance, biomedicine since the early 1980s has
made it possible to claim gay identities as genetically determined, socially
ascribed, and politically aspired, simultaneously. It has provided new
groundings for tethering the body. Biosocialities are social claims wagered on
the basis of certain kinds of bodies. An ethnic is a bearer of a body marked as
neither fully foreign, nor wholly native, which is evident from looks, accents,
carriage, volubility, and networks of proximity to similar others. A chef also
entails certain kinds of bodily skills, membership in some networks, and
notions of self, based on assertions and quarrels among a relatively small
group of professional chefs, critics, and camp followers in global cities in the
Western world. The difference is that the ethnic cannot avoid being seen,
while the chef can barely restrain himself from claiming the privileges of the
profession he chooses.
In the preceding pages I have illustrated some convergences and tensions
between these two ways of being-in-the-world. Experts on expertise see the
matter less and less as something abstract and conceptual. Instead they see
expertise as something practical and competence based. Something that you
can do rather than something you can learn in abstract. So mastering a field is
182 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

a lot like mastering a natural language, or cooking like a native. Yet, the genre
rules and returns on native home cooking and haute restaurant cooking are
different, which makes all the difference.
With the rise of the modern professional chef at a number of urban,
cosmopolitan, consecrated restaurants, we witness a brutal rhetorical
elbowing out of cooks and housewives because there are no empty social
spaces waiting to be filled by a rising profession. In other words, chefs do not
become chefs by moving into a slot waiting and open for them with the right
skills. They have to dislodge or demean other occupations to make room for
themselves. That explains the professionalism and the masculinity of the
professional chef. Any ascending group has to produce new forms of knowing
and doing, and develop stringent modes of mutual evaluation (as in peer
review) that accentuate knowledge formation and bound the world of the
professed chef, in this case. And that has to be done always at the expense of
others, usually people not already constituted in a bounded, policed, and
networked “world.” Unorganized and unconsecrated cooks and housewives
are easy to bully and displace. That is the nature of professions. For instance,
the physician, nurse, pharmacist, and orderly, with their domains of expertise
were mutually constituted via conflict and alignment. They had to push the
midwife and other experienced practitioners into the abject domain of old
wives’ tales. In the case of the professional chef, the necessary others are
those who have always done all the cooking, always with very low costs of
entry, and without a self-conscious profession and guild-like articulation; in
particular, they are housewives and immigrant cooks, as I have shown here.
All new professions are born by demeaning and destroying old divisions of
labor. It is a process of alignment with some social actors and positions, and an
abjection of other social positions. Chefs are as guilty of it today as disciplined
scholars. They must of necessity express disdain towards unconstituted social
others (cooks and autodidacts in these cases), or preferably ignore them once
their own professional status is consolidated, as evidenced in the current
authoritative calmness of the physician when confronted with the midwife.
Insecure, emergent, and unstable professions (such as chefs and non-scientific
scholars) are typically more virulent towards their unbounded, unconsecrated
others. Stabilized professionals, such as gynecologists and psychiatrists, can
afford to open up again to midwives and talk therapists.
Questions of professional certitude are never permanently settled. The
politics of professions, and the certainty with which their knowledge claims
are made, ebb and flow over time and across national and transnational
spaces. For instance, in the Japanese context, the sushi chef and the Ramen
cook are much better lodged in the hierarchy of Japanese professions than,
say, the Indian or Turkish chef, who must loudly assert his difference in
professionalism from those who do about the same thing under different
 ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE 183

conditions. It is analogous to the role of the traditional scholar, the Brahmin,

the Imam, and the Vaid, who have paid the price for the rise of the Western-
trained university professor and physician in India. That is the virulent politics
of knowledge production that lends its tempo and character to the social
production of more or less useful knowledge. All professions are made by
unmaking other occupations.
New and old professions produce useful knowledge—useful for many in
society at large and useful for their own careers. The tempo of knowledge
generation is accelerated by competition within new professions. But such
professionalizing moves are also self-aggrandizing moves by those included
within them, and a severe loss to those excluded. The process always
produces losers in the fight to form professions and the losers are usually the
poorer and more disenfranchised segments of the sectors where the new
professions emerge—around cooking in this context. That is a social cost
some people pay for the price of other peoples’ professionalism.
A narrative of dramatic improvement was necessary to First-Wave
Biomedicine as a field, with antibiotics, anesthetics, surgery, antisepsis, and
immunization, which had different degrees of continuity and discontinuity
with older forms of knowing and acting in the world at the end of the
nineteenth century, when modern biomedicine began to emerge, unevenly,
as a profession separate from the everyday care-giving which was within the
ambit of women’s work. We see professional cooking undergoing similar
transformations—from Escoffier’s and Bocuse’s haute cuisines to Adrià’s
techno-emotional cuisine—in some parts of the world, with losers and winners
distributed differently between genders, races, and ethnicities. The Gods of
Food have a particular gender and ethnicity, and that is shaped by global
hierarchies of taste, and professions of paid skill. There is nothing natural
about it. It has to be acquired in virulent contestation with others. There are
losers and there are winners. And it is always skewed in terms of gender,
race, class, and ethnicity.
In this chapter I have used a handful of detailed empirical instances of food-
related ethnic and professional identities, visible in the written record and
sounded in interviews, to argue that it is theoretically and methodologically
productive to illuminate the boundary between the two separate worlds of
ethnicity and expertise that both academic and popular constructions of
identity have safely assumed. This chapter also reveals how the production of
ascribed and aspirational boundaries and notions of self are mutually
constitutive. Finally, I suggest that this improbable twinning of ethnicity and
expertise is central to the fabrication of contemporary identities in urban
settings such as in Manhattan. Almost all the actors that I have touched on
here are ethnics now aspiring to be professionals, or, if already there as
professionals, bending back to catch their own tail so that they can live with
184 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

deep authenticity. Martin, our Filipino chef, had to turn back to Filipino cooking
because no one would take him seriously as a chef without his heritage. He
was tethered to his past, notwithstanding his skill. David Chang might be able
to do it, that is cross over, because he is not an immigrant, unfamiliar with the
habits of being an Anglophone American, with deeply embodied aesthetic
knowledge that includes rich referents to music and youth culture. That is why
Eddie Huang can do it too, especially after he writes a book and has a television
show. Eric Ripert can do it because he is already ensconced in the world of
the French chef, where foreignness is an asset in signaling the profession.
That is what the field of culinary capital now demands of its subjects within
newly consecrated modes of sensory urbanism.

Notes
1 Some of the exceptions are Fine’s work on small-group interaction, workplace
dynamics, and aesthetics of work (Fine 1996), in a field where other related
directions of research have focused on organization theory (Rao et al. 2003,
2005), and field theory (Ferguson and Zukin 1998; Ferguson 2004).
2 Since 2012, Floyd Cardoz was the chef at restaurateur Danny Meyer’s North
End Grill. In 2014 he broke away to open his own White Street with funding
from the producers of the movie The Hundred-Foot Journey. See Guff 2014.
3 In that spirit, see Ivan Orkin (2015) recommending five must-eat ramenayas in
Tokyo.
4 For a recent discussion of ramenayas see Peter Meehan and Jonathan Gold
(2015).
 6
In Closing

New York City and sensory urbanism

S haron Zukin, a long-time resident of New York City and one of its pre-
eminent sociologists, has consistently written about the changing shape
of the culture of the city. She has written about it lovingly, sometimes with
rage about its transformation, often with nostalgia about its gentrification, but
she was one of the few to consistently look at the street-level culture of
restaurants and parks, and make room for them in her work over the last four
decades beginning with Loft Living (1982), through The Cultures of Cities
(1995), to Naked City. The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (2010).
I, on the other hand, am an upstart, a new immigrant to the City, on the
margins of sociology, barely here for a handful of years, yet full of opinions
about it. My New York City is different from Zukin’s. Or more accurately, it
looks different to my eyes, as it has done to the third of New York City’s
residents who have been foreign-born (more than 50 percent if you include
their children) since its very beginnings as a major American city. For one, I am
less nostalgic about it, for I haven’t had time to develop nostalgia. But I am
also less sure about Zukin’s comments on short-term temporal patterns, while
more attuned to longer relationships of the rise and fall of nations and cities
(because of my training with World-Systems theorists). I am surer of what I
can read from the archive—census reports, urban plans, and artifacts—but
less sanguine about what escapes such authorized accumulations as trivia
and ephemera in the near past (such as Zagat surveys). But like every new
immigrant I bring threads of other histories to this site and weave them into
the tapestry of lives on the street, in subway cars, on sidewalks, in homes,
and in restaurants. I also bring longer social memories of colonialism and post-
colonialism that allow me to put things in a different perspective.
Zukin was early to the study of the city’s art galleries, restaurants, and
theme parks, assuming their importance at the same ontological level without
apology or special pleading. She proposed and conducted, with nine graduate
students, an “interesting preliminary study” in the form of the chapter “Artists

185
186 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

and Immigrants in New York City Restaurants” in her book The Cultures of
Cities (1995), where she quickly sketched important themes that needed
filling out. She underlined restaurants as important cultural sites, but only
because they were meeting places “for corporate patrons, culture industry
executives, and artists” (Zukin 1995: 155). She couldn’t yet take a mere site of
cultural consumption seriously without some outsize corporate players playing
in the pool. She was also a harbinger (with Ferguson) of the rise of the high-
status American chef, an observation which is both prescient, but also thinly
sketched. She noticed how restaurants “synthesize global and local cultures,”
receiving culinary styles, entrepreneurs, and skilled workers from the world to
reproduce a cultural artifact on the menu for a local clientele, in a sense re-
territorializing the global. She commented on the cross-fertilization of matter
and sign, culture and commerce, to create both a neighborhood culture and a
sense of the city at large. She noted how a local neighborhood restaurant
could become the focus of “transnational economic and cultural flows” (1995:
159). She noticed that hotels, restaurants, finance groups, and media and
entertainment companies were where the new jobs were accumulating as
the old manufacturing sectors entered a phase of terminal decline. She is
obviously distressed by these developments, and she ought to be, for they
are disruptive and destructive of many working-class lives. But in being an
American and a New Yorker, her horizon only extends across the American
century, and she looks with fondness to its solid post-war years as something
deep and authentic, while all this play with the symbolic economy is figured
as somewhat fake and unsustainable. She writes with a real sense of loss
about how “The metamorphosis of American-made products into Mexican
blue jeans, Japanese autos, and East Asian computers emptied the factories
where those goods had been made” (1995: 8). That is, of course, only the
perspective from the belle époque which is also the twilight of the American
century. At the end of The Cultures of Cities she poses the putatively urgent
question “whether New York City can be maintained as a cultural capital”
and what needs to be done to keep it so (1995: 293). That is both very New
Yorker in its presumption—the claim that it is the cultural capital—and very
American in its insistence that it should remain so. Referencing Disney, Sony,
Seagram’s, and MCA in the closing paragraph of the book, she fears that
the public culture of the city may just be a “residual memory of tolerance
and freedom” (1995: 294). Looking back at her prognosis from about twenty
years later, Zukin’s fears look overwrought and overstated. New York City
survived, although transformed, in spite of the unforeseeable brutal punch
and counterpunch of terrorism and the security state. But it did so well partly
because the city did not have a transcendental common culture, separate
from the immanent everyday culture that she continuously laments in her
books about the city.
 IN CLOSING 187

Furthermore, a forty-year time horizon is too short to pass judgment on the

fate of cities. The United States was not the first nation to lose its manufacturing
core to others and peddle in signs and symbols. Great Britain did so more
than a century ago when it lost its most profitable manufacturing sectors to
the United States. The British, of course, had replaced others before them
(Wallerstein 2003; Arrighi 1994). They had destroyed Indian manufacturing,
especially in calicoes in the eighteenth century, to allow Manchester to nudge
Lucknow out of the reckoning, setting the chikan sellers on their outward
journey to the West. Such post-colonial narratives do not soften the blows of
the current transition on the American poor, but they do cast a new light on
the sense of loss of its middle-class. Eventually,

No longer did the city’s dream world of commercial culture relate to the
bourgeois culture of the old downtown or the patrician culture of art
museums and public buildings. Instead, urban commercial culture became
“entertainment,” aimed at attracting a mobile public of cultural consumers.
This altered the public culture of the city (Zukin 1995: 19).

It surely did. Today, in 2015, that process has gone even further: street fairs
and promenades such as Highline have become common, mixing culture and
commerce in vulgar, democratic, and lively ways. Restaurants have become
even more important to the culture of a city, both in the soft power domain of
haute cuisine, but also as the place for vendors and trucks to compete for
meager commerce and cultural cachet. Zukin hints at it in the Naked City but
she cannot brush off the nostalgic lament of “The City That Lost Its Soul” with
which she begins this, her most recent of volumes (2010: 1–31).
My criticism is not about nostalgia per se, which has generated too much
misplaced attention in critical theorizing. I have always considered some
elements of nostalgia to be productive (as in my first book, The Migrant’s
Table; Ray 2004). At the level of the individual, nostalgia has been misdiagnosed
as a disease, from which we get the word, coined by Swiss doctor Johannes
Hoffer in 1688 to analyze Swiss mercenaries abroad. Recent psychological
research is showing that nostalgia gives our lives roots and a sense of
continuity. As another doctor recently asserted, “It made me feel good about
myself and my relationships. It provided a texture to my life and gave me
strength to move forward” (Tierney 2013). Yet nostalgia can be unproductive
at the social level if we seek to imprison the present in the past and
misrepresent another time and place. Nostalgia can be exclusionary. This city
belongs to those who have been here for a long time. But this city has always
also belonged to people who have just moved in.
New York City retains its soul: it is just a different one, and it can be found
in a different locale, if we are attuned to it. The loss is the loss of power of city
188 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

and national governments, and communities, against the flow of capital and
peoples. But if you come from a place where cities, governments, and
communities never had that kind of power, you cannot fathom the loss. The
sense of loss is also remitted if you look at the city from the bottom up as flesh
and stone, bodies and edifices, building it up one step at a time in de Certeauian
fashion from “an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the
streets” whose murmuring voice comes before text (de Certeau 1984: v).
Everyday food practice as stated earlier “is the place of a silent piling of an
entire stratification of orders and counterorders,” where Giard seeks to
compensate Bourdieu’s reticence on doing cooking, and other feminine
activities which “are a place of silence or disinterest that his analysis does not
trouble to take into account” (de Certeau et al. 1998: 183). This project is an
attempt to understand culture as everyday practice, often beyond the reach
of official valuation, focused on doing, talking, and writing by immigrant
entrepreneurs, American chefs, and scholars listening and provoking them.
This book is an attempt to recuperate the arts of doing against the totalizing
claims of science (on the one hand) and critical thinking (on the other).
We are entering a post-liberal arts era and Food Studies is one of the
symptoms of that transition. It has to reconfigure itself to the transition that
is underway. Conceptually and ideologically, the liberal arts could not survive
the de-legitimation of a Western civilizational project which was mostly
about high-minded reflections of the white, male, high-culture literati. The Civil
Rights and the Feminist Movements in the United States had undermined
the academy’s raison d’être, and the entry of women and colored men into
the liberal arts academy, which those movements opened up, provided the
coup de grâce for what had become an unsustainable project. Post-colonial,
trans-national, migrant intellectuals, are accentuating the crisis of Western
humanism.
The liberal arts are being undermined from the outside with increasing
demands for technical specialization, which are replacing cultural habitus and
social networks among elites as the currency of the realm of professionalism.
Internally, the liberal arts are demanding a reconfiguration, with the decline
of high-minded rationalism and armchair critical thinking. The necessity of
doing, and the realization that both thinking and reason may have been
overrated, are challenging the old-fashioned liberal arts. That realization is
dawning at the heart of the humanities. Cathy Davidson, in her 2013
Presidential address to the Modern Languages Association, noted “we must
redesign our institutions and modes of instruction not just for ‘critical thinking’
but for ‘creative contribution.’ We need to encourage not just a culture of
critique but a culture of making and participating” (Davidson 2014: 5). I see
Food Studies as going beyond the standard vision of the liberal arts to engage
with work, and the science of how objectivity and subjectivity can be done.
 IN CLOSING 189

Our current late-modern doubts can only be resolved via pragmatism and
practice. What is different in this conjuncture is that old epistemological
questions are being reconfigured as ontological assumptions, showing us
how facts are fabricated (Mol 2003: x). In that sense, Food Studies represents
a world that comes after the old-fashioned liberal arts, whatever name we
choose to give it.

The ethnic and the making of American culture

There are two subsidiary theoretical transformations proposed in this book.
The first develops Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) insight that the difference between
palatal taste and aesthetic taste is a theoretical subterfuge that does not
account for taste fully in either of those domains. The second confounds Post-
Bourdieuian works, such as Foodies (Johnston and Baumann 2010), that
dominate urban sociological analyses. Bourdieu was right in showing that
highbrow taste is nothing more sophisticated than vulgar palatal preference.
Nevertheless, many of his followers were waylaid into the assumption, which
does not follow, that in every subcultural field, the taste of the dominant class
is dominant, and the subaltern classes have no role in producing culture. The
matter is more contested than that, and it changes over time. That is an
empirical question that needs open-minded and imaginative data collection
and analysis.
What I show in this book is that elite consumers do not control the modes
of reproduction of cultural hierarchies in the culinary field. Professionalism in
cooking and criticism have transformed the field. The aesthetic of the dominant
classes is no longer the dominant aesthetic in urban food consumption. Just
as popular music slipped out of the control of elites in the second half of the
twentieth century, so did palatal taste at the end of the twentieth century. The
habitus of chopsticks and aggressive hip-hop music is not something that
well-bred, traditional, Western humanistic elites are trained in. Second, the
conversion ratio of culinary capital to money capital is no longer one-to-one.
The simplest evidence is that the most expensive restaurants are not
necessarily the most acclaimed ones. It costs about $40 to eat at a David
Chang restaurant. A wide range of classes and occupations can afford such a
bill. In fact, it is the cultural elite that has to play catch-up, as much in the
domain of the palate as they have had to do with music. Of course, the
omnivorousness of elites can cover a lot of ground and money and degrees
help in making cultural claims, but elites are in this case playing catch-up and
they do not set the standard for culinary taste, which is a simple and clear
measure of class hegemony. Chang and his restaurants have a lot more cachet
than other restaurants where the typical cost of a meal for one person would
190 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

run up to over $300. That does not mean it is all a level playing field. As I have
shown previously, that is hardly the case. The chef reproduces the abjection of
the ethnic cook and the housewife. Yet, public culinary culture in American
cities is a domain of the social field where the old elites rarely call the shots.
That is a symptom of the decline of cultural power of established classes.
The dramatic upward trend in talk about restaurants in the United States
by the mid-1970s is symptomatic of something new and different. That is
related to the fact that food has entered the fashion cycle for a substantial
segment of an urban, bi-coastal, American public: the kind of public that would
read The New York Times, or websites such as Lucky Peach and blogs such as
The Braiser and Eater National, and imagine others reading and watching
them; the kind of public that is constituted by a discussion of restaurants
and cuisine, transforming its lifestyle into a stylization of life, and orchestrated
by new kinds of cultural experts such as restaurant critics, bloggers, and
photographers. Born of post-War affluence, it embodies a new way of looking
at the world that aestheticizes elements of everyday life (Bourdieu 1984): a
gaze that is prefigured in the nineteenth century flaneur, but with an important
difference. While the flaneur was a decadent, upper-class, drop-out, the
current analogue is the hipster foodie and the tourist from the metropole, who
travel upwards socially and outwards (remote regions) and inwards (ethnic
enclaves) geographically (MacCannell 1976). On his return, television cameras
accompany him to faraway places and intimate nooks, such as the kitchen, in
the process educating us all to appropriate his gaze (Ray 2007b). That is how
food enters the fashion cycle.
Fernand Braudel noted that in the case of Europe, “one cannot really talk of
fashion becoming all-powerful before about 1700” (1981: 316). Until then, in
housing, furnishing, and attire, he notes the general rule of changelessness,
not because there is no change at all, but because the rate of change is slow.
We have the reign of custom and habit that eventually gives way to a faster
rate of change, self-consciousness about changing style, and the willingness,
nay the imperative, to change. What Urban (2001) has called the metaculture
of newness achieves dominance. Somewhere between the fifteenth (Urban
2001) and the eighteenth century (according to Braudel 1981) the European
world opens up to fashion, at a differential rate for different classes (aristocrats
and peasants), in different places (Paris and the provinces), in different spheres
(clothing and cuisine). What makes it possible to pursue fashion (and, for
instance, discard perfectly usable but unfashionable clothes) is the level
of productivity, which relates to Jack Goody’s (1982) argument about the
means of production. But what changes is also a cultural element that now
values newness more than custom. In addition, there are changes in the
pathways through which culture travels, broadcast through the media, along
with narrow replication in the household. What have to be added now are
 IN CLOSING 191

more numerous players with the changing media ecology, to include

innumerable commentators on Yelp and Facebook and Eater.com.
The world of cultural replication, a world, for instance, of face-to-face,
household-to-household replication of process and product, is supplanted by
a world of cultural dissemination that is broadcast and retorted back. In the
inertial system of habit and custom, change happened but as entropy, or was
explained away as such, while under the new dispensation of late-modernity,
change is not only embraced but exaggerated. In societies built on custom,
fashion does not exist. In the late-modern world everything is susceptible to
fashion, although not always equally or everywhere at the same rate (see
Lieberson 2000).
Fashion is not only behind the cultural impetus of restaurant-going and
restaurant criticism; it also underpins the economic logic of independent
restaurants, the very institutions that are venerated as sites where cuisine is
cultivated. In an economy that has come to be dominated by large corporations
over the last hundred years, small arenas are conceded to the independent
restaurateur, which is the site of most of the cultural discussion about taste.
As Michael Piore (1980) and Roger Waldinger (1986, 1993) have shown, the
dual economy of large corporations and small firms is a characteristic of the
American economy, divided between large, stable markets, and small,
unstable bazaars driven by fickle changes in fashion. “The demand for small-
business activities emanates from markets whose small size, heterogeneity,
or susceptibility to flux and instability limit the potential for mass distribution
and mass production” (Waldinger 1993: 420). In the case of cooked foods, the
greatly fragmented New York City market and its erratic changes over time
protect it from chains and corporations, providing opportunities to new
immigrants and native entrepreneurs, but at the cost of excessive competition,
narrow profit margins, and high risk of failure (especially with rising real-estate
costs). That is where the commodity meets the cultural entrepreneur. It is
the quotidian cultural entrepreneur—in the figure of the restaurateur, the
restaurant critic and the journalist—who stands squarely in the middle of the
discussion about American culture.
My broadest argument here is analogous to the one prefigured in Simon
Gikandi’s recovery of sullied blackness at the heart of eighteenth century
aesthetic in Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011). His study is instructive in
a number of ways. First, his deliberate and detailed elaboration of how
Western culture, even high culture, was never a white, Anglo, monologue is
crucial. That is the central contention that scholars working in the field of
palatal taste must account for, and have missed. Subordinated subjects such
as natives, slaves, women, and ethnics could not be properly excluded, even
from the second-order pleasure of art (in Gikandi’s work), which was in itself a
desperate attempt to return sensuousness to life in the first-order affective
192 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

pleasures of food, sex, shelter, and everyday decoration (in my case). Second,
we continue to find in the twentieth century what Gikandi shows in the
eighteenth: the adamant “desire to quarantine one aspect of social life—
the tasteful, the beautiful, and the civil—from a public domain saturated
by diverse forms of commerce” (Gikandi 2011: 6–7). As I have shown, the
ethnic entrepreneur of taste plays an essential and constitutive role in urban,
American consumer culture, where commerce and culture meet; American
cities cannot sustain one without the other, and they have never done so
without immigrant entrepreneurs.
Nevertheless, Gikandi’s reconstruction is incomplete because he never
enters the domain of everyday cooking, where he could have recovered more
of the depth of activities of the enslaved and the subordinated than he could
ever find in oil on canvas. In the twentieth century, working-class ethnic males
and females, in the cookshop and at home, could develop a counter-poetics of
personhood outside the authorized idiom of taste. They would develop an
allegory of a displaced culture, a forced poetics, as an original creation of the
uprooted, faced with limited linguistic implements imposed on him. Just as
the black body had to develop a double-consciousness of highest joy and
deepest sadness in speech and song, bodily pleasure, and literal taste, the
subordinate immigrant body had to find its place in a hierarchy of sensuousness
and reason (often placing himself in virulent opposition to that very black body
that had provided the openings for his emplacement). Ethnicity would be built
around blackness because it came at a time and was deployed with the
intention of superseding the functions of nineteenth-century racial identity. It
was the carrier of a twentieth-century idea of manageable difference,
aspirational equality with singularity, and democracy with distinction (here the
authors of Foodies are right; Johnston and Baumann 2010).
By the 1960s, at the latest, immigrant entrepreneurs had turned their
familiar foreignness into an object of taste. Their food could no longer be
dismissed as trivial and secondary, for that is the site where cultural value was
created and recalibrated, eventually to become the site from where disdain
could be poured back on the dominant’s everyday practices of good taste. The
ethnic, hence subordinate, immigrant’s notions of pleasure had to be radically
different. His practice of pleasure had to acquire a different form and meaning.
Food, language, and everyday decorative arts such as housekeeping practices,
home-building, furniture-making, religious iconography, attire, pots, pans, and
kitchen tools, those very things exiled from the universe of art in the temple
of reason by dominant male Western philosophers, would come to not only
represent beauty and pleasure, but also secure a measure of reflection, be
connected to cosmologies and genealogies, and carry the mark of the ethnic
as a modern, urban, subordinate, subject. These were concerted attempts to
deploy the fragments of everyday life—chopsticks, the wok, the karai, the
 IN CLOSING 193

steamer, the idli maker, the rice cooker, the coconut grater, the boti, and un-
interrogated motions of the body—for an affective possession of otherwise
alien spaces such as the restaurant, the home, and the city. Everyday foods
and goods came to express an aesthetic materiality in simple things, which
were the only things that had the capacity to denote the doubleness of their
own triviality in dominant eyes and yet register their durable bodily
emplacement in the USA . Astonishingly, by the twenty-first century, by their
durable resistance to measuring themselves in dominant academic eyes,
ethnics had turned the tables on the everyday aesthetic of the governing
classes and races, with their leading ideologies of mannered order, restraint,
segregation, essential racial difference, and the fear of the sensual—elements
that the culture of taste had tried to control.
The modern Western notion of art, is too circumscribed in its isolation from
life and outside the framework of first-order enjoyment—in decoration,
worship, touch, texture, and smell—to be of much value to anyone other than
curators and philosophers. The containment of culture in cold and distant
spaces of display, reflection, and cogitation—museums, classrooms, and
libraries—could not match its real implication in the kitchen, in the home, and
on the street corner. That is why the work of chefs, urgently trying to turn food
into art, a second order of representation, presumably to reconcile technique
and emotion, molecules and meaning, temperature and temperament, leaves
me cold. Everyday cooking already contains those prolific polarities. Why
isolate food from life and livelihood, self-care and care-giving? It is in everyday
life, not in museums, where the mundane can become marvelous.
The Enlightenment culture of modernity was articulated in soaring rhetoric
as liberation from tradition, religion and habit, which are all essential to the
domain of food. Furthermore, comestibles could never be registered
adequately in the narrative of migration, although food was one of the most
important and immediate rewards of migration. Good food is what immigrants
were after. Betraying the nation for good food (something which every
historian of immigration and historian of labor has shown to have occurred)
could not be accounted for in the high-mindedness of patriotism and freedom.
The production of the rational subject unencumbered by immediate needs
runs up against the shoals of schnitzel, smoked salmon, meatballs and gravy,
and curried fish, as much as roast beef and apple pie. The modern project of
freeing man from bodily and emotional dependence on others, where
individuals were supposedly trapped in un-interrogated communities of faith,
habit, and everyday practice, has failed dramatically, and the attractions of
ethnic food are a monument to that hubris. The Enlightenment subject’s
ambition, and his modernist progeny’s drive, was to construct a story of
human life as the tale of a mindful subject, freed from the confinements of
mere bodily needs of messy sensuality. Affluent, white, authoritative, thinking
194 THE ETHNIC RESTAURATEUR

men could barely tolerate the unwashed hordes until they had been
individualized, breached from their irrational communities of belonging, and
cured of their smelly propensities of group practice in religion, and in forms
of orality, taste, and talk. For Kant that ambition was to discover rules of
conduct which are logically independent from experience and capable of
rational contradiction. The analytic spirit was to “march triumphant” over local,
contingent, everyday, experience (Gikandi 2011: 7). What made the divergent
philosophers concur was that the qualities that distinguished the modern self
were transcendental of the “array of cultural materials that actually constituted
the modern self” (2011: 7). The ethnic insertion into urban culture is merely
the late-modern acknowledgment, symptomatic in the failure to theorize the
category, of the fundamental social importance of bodily difference, based on
local and fleeting forms of classifications of skin, color, texture, hair, height,
feature, and language in their relationships to race and nation. Ethnicity is not
a thing. It is a relationship of domination and the very grounds on which the
dominated have successfully pushed back.
In the eyes of its central theorists, the culture of modernity was premised
on full and singular national belonging. Within that frame, emigration is a
betrayal of the nation, and ethnicity a residue of un-meltable difference. That
is why the rhetoric of choice and freedom had to be inflated, such that
everyone trying to make a better living was turned into the poor and the
huddled masses, fleeing oppression and tyranny. That was not true of most
migrants, which is precisely why, as we have seen, the migrant had the
resources to turn the table on the dominant culture of taste. Literal taste was
subordinated to aesthetic taste, but the former has always carried the trace of
the subordinate, which is precisely why it has been subordinated in the
temples of high culture—museums, libraries, academies. That consensus is
falling apart today and the air is rife with possibilities. Disputing taste has
become a legitimate and popular activity, some of which is the doing of the
ethnic restaurateur, playing with the presumed triviality of literal taste among
various American publics. Foreigners have always fed Americans, and
Americans have eaten it up, which is unaccounted for in the scholarly
discussion of good taste. And that transaction in taste is central to the kinds
of democratic openings we have in American culture that are tough to match
almost anywhere else in the world, with their preference for roots.
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224
 Index

Abbott, Andrew 124 aspiration, and ascription 181

academic profile, Culinary Institute of Aunt Dinah’s Kitchen 40
America 130 authenticity
Adrià, Ferran 113 and the brown body 52
Aequanimitas 181 of ethnic foods 173, 177, 179
aesthetic taste 194 in expatriate domesticity 162
African-American students 142 search for 8, 38, 51
age, and restaurant choice 78
agency, of migrants 16, 92 baccalaureate program, Culinary
Ali, Mr 41 Institute of America 126
Alimentary Tracts 9 Bachelors of Professional Studies
America Eats project 94 (BPS) in Culinary Science 121,
American Bounty 99 126–7
American cuisine 81, 82, 83, 86, 104, Bacon, Francis 131
169, 170, 172. (See also New Bald, Vivek 16, 40
American cuisine) Baluchi’s 46
American Culinary Federation (ACF) Bangladeshi immigrants 16
132 Bangladeshi restaurateurs 46
American culture 11, 107, 189–94 banking system, intra-ethnic 15
American haute cuisine 104, 106, 117, Baohaus 173
162, 169 Basinski, Sean 28n.1
American Periodicals Series Batterberry, Michael 161, 165
73–4 Baumann, S. 7, 9, 19, 20, 22, 89, 90
American Republican Party 70 Beals, Elizabeth 139–40, 140–1
American restaurants 80, 103, Beard, James 95
104 Bégin, C. 94
Angell, Katharine 132, 145 Belasco, Warren 9
Anglo, and the ethnic 10 Bengal Garden, The 40
Anglo-centricism 7–8 Bengali cooking 35–6, 45
Anglo-conservatism 69 Bengali food 73
anthropophagy 9 Bengali Harlem 16
anti-restaurants 169 Bengali masculinity 59
Appadurai, Arjun 37–8 Benjamin, Walter 24
Appetite for Change 9 Bertolli, Paul 99
Armstrong, Louis 44 Biomedicine 124, 125, 131, 183
art, and food 193 biosocialities 181
ascription, and aspiration blackness, and ethnicity 192
181 Bocuse, Paul 120–1
Asian cuisines 86, 100 Bocuse, The 99, 121

225
226 INDEX

bodies Chang, Misa 91

disciplining of 122–5, 134 Channels of Desire 5
theorization of 27 character
bodily practices, and Bourdieu 18–27 and charisma 148
body, and mind 2 and professionalism 131–7
Body & Society, The 27 charisma, and character 148
Body & Soul 26 chefs
Boisvert, Raymond 25 career trajectory of 170, 179
Boston, Charley 44 celebrity 37, 38, 113, 118
Bottura, Massimo 113 and class 179
Boulud, Daniel 170 and competition 183
Bourdain, Anthony 145, 171–2 and cooks 156, 179, 180, 182
Bourdieu, Pierre 17, 18–27, 150, 180, culture of 147–8
188, 189 East and West coast 171
Brahmanism 2 ethnic 165
Braudel, Fernand 190 and gender 111–13, 115
Bread & Butter 31–5, 43, 46, 48, 58 with haute aspirations 155
brewing 70, 71 Korean-American 171–2
British culinary heritage 69 male 111, 115, 122
Burns, Richard Allen 146 masculinity of 182
business, and culture 35, 36 native-born/foreign-born 179
businessman’s lunchrooms 88 new American 115
butchers, deregulation of 69 professional 149, 182
Butler, Judith 180 professionalism of 115, 128, 133, 182
professionalization of 150, 153n.20
Café Angelica 164 top ranking 111–13, 151
Café Boulud 170 training of 118, 120, 179
cafés 67 white male 111, 122
Cajun/Creole cuisine 105 women 112, 151
California Cuisine 82 Chez Panisse 99, 120
Canadian Chinese restaurants 92 Chez Panisse Paradigm 113
Capatti, A. 25 Chiang, Cecilia 155–6
capital Chicago, popularity of cuisines in 81–2
culinary 184 Chi-Hoon Kim 171
and culture 60, 97, 109 Chinatown, New York City 44
capitalism 37 Chinese Exclusion Act 1882 89, 92
Cardoz, Floyd 37, 48, 50, 155, 165–6, Chinese food, influences on 91
167–8, 184n.2 Chinese immigrants 17–18, 91
career trajectory, of chefs 170, 179 Chinese restaurants 44, 76–7, 80,
Carême, Antonin 136 90–1, 92
Carter, John 39 Chinese restaurateurs and workers
Casanova, Pascale 19, 112 91–2
Cassell, Joan 143, 147 Cho, Lily 91, 92–3
Caterina de Medici 99 chocolate 3
Cathell, D.W. 131 Choi, Roy 155, 169, 170, 171
celebrity chefs 37, 38, 113, 118 chop suey 44–5
Ceylon India Inn 39 Chop Suey (painting) 44
Chang, David 168–9, 170–1, 172, 173, Choudry, Ibrahim 41
179, 184, 189 Cinotto, Simone 17, 97, 98
 INDEX 227

cities cooking
culture of 186–7 Bengali 35–6, 45
segregation of 87 everyday 192
Civil Rights Movement 3, 75, 106, 108 Filipino 176–7, 184
Civilian Defense Volunteer Office 40 French 116
Claiborne, Craig 43, 52, 73, 74, 120, and gender 39, 59, 175
159 German influence on 69
class learning to 34–5
and Bengali cuisine 36 male-centricism in 151
and chefs 179 professional 121–2, 151
and cultural capital 97 professionalism in 189
and culture 19, 97 professionalization of 122, 123–4
and ethnic cuisine 97 ranch style 93
habitus 88, 150–1 reconstructive-cerebral 113
Hindu 41 scientism/masculinization of 115
and Italian cuisine 96 social embarrassment of 39
middle-classes 87–90, 127, 135 and social hierarchies 122
and Otherness 8, 86 cooking schools
and professionalization 145, 149 culture of 143–9
and restaurants 67, 75 and ethnic cuisine 157
and segregation of cities 87 cooks
and taste 19, 189 and chefs 156, 179, 180, 182
and taverns 66 in Indian restaurants 179
classification, of migrants 42 “Cornet Chop Suey” (jazz number) 44
clothing, women’s in masculine corporate nationalization 71
professions 140 cosmo-multiculturalism 7, 8
code of conduct, Culinary Institute of cosmopolitanism 90
America 133 creative contribution 188
co-ethnicity 15 critics
co-ethnics, social relations with 32 constituting a cuisine 51–4
coffee houses 67 and fashion 191
Collins, H. 158, 180 and Indian cuisine 159
colonialism 6, 177 Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants,
commerce, and culture 36, 37, 53, 58 Emigrants and Their Homelands,
commodification 38 The 16
communities of practice 180 cuisine(s)
competition American 81, 82, 83, 86, 104, 169,
and chefs 183 170, 172
inter-Asian 172 Asian 86, 100
consumers, middle-class 87 Bengali 36
consumption Cajun/Creole 105
communities of 5 continental 77, 78, 79–80, 88, 100
cultures of 18–19, 20 critics constituting a 51–4
continental cuisine 77, 78, 79–80, 88, 100 and cultures 25
Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her elevation of ethnic 72
Lover, The 5 ethnic 3, 4, 6–7, 97
cookbooks 161–74, 175, 176, 177, 178 French 81, 82, 83, 106, 108, 157
cookery curricula 100. (See also German 76, 77, 106
curriculum) Greek 83, 163–5
228 INDEX

and immigration patterns 104–5 of chefs 147–8

Indian 108, 157, 159, 165–8 of cities 186–7
Italian 78, 82, 95–7, 98–9, 107 and class 19, 97
Japanese 77, 82, 83, 100, 108 and commerce 36, 37, 53, 58
mainstreaming of 105 commodification of 38
Mexican 77, 94–5 of consumption 18–19, 20
New American 77, 81, 100, 104, 162 of cooking schools 143–9
Oriental 100 and cuisine 25
Peruvian 166 ethnic 194
popularity and prestige of 76–86 Indian street 36
techno-emotional 121 institutional 131
Culinarian’s Code of Conduct, The 132 of masculinity 136
culinary capital 184 of modernity 194
culinary heritage, British 69 and nation 86
Culinary Institute of America Other culinary 7
academic profile 130 of taste 193
African-American students 142 Western 191
code of conduct 133 Cultures of Cities, The 186
curriculum of 116–17, 120–1 Curnonsky 116
dress code 133–4 curriculum
faculty development 130–1 Culinary Institute of America 116–17,
and French cuisine 116 120–1
incarnations of 132 nature and relevance of 129
institution of 150–1 curry 40, 41–2, 51–2
and Italian cuisine 99 curry houses 46
and liberal arts 126 Curtis, Erin 15
military influence on 145–6 customer feedback 57
and oriental cuisine 100
and professionalism 133, 134 Dacca 45–6
and professionalization 11 Dana, Robert W. 42
and social judgement 115 Davidson, Cathy 188
teaching at the 122–5 Davis, J.J. 64
technical standards of 117–18 Dawat 48
white students 142 de Certeau, Michel 5, 10, 22, 26, 188
and women students 137–42 De Voe, Thomas 69
culinary value, fabricating 161 Delmonico’s 67, 75, 95
cultural capital demand, and needs and desires 37–8
and class 97 Derrida, Jacques 9
of ethnic restaurateurs 11, 59 design, of a restaurant 60
of middle-classes 89 desire, across the color-line 5
cultural difference, production of 10–11 diaspora
cultural elites 189–90 Indian 37
cultural experts 190 national cuisine of 72
cultural power 190 power of 93
culture(s) difference
American 11, 107, 189–94 in culinary systems 157
and business 35, 36 framing of 4
and capital 60, 97, 109 gustatory 73–6
and change 190 production of cultural 10–11
 INDEX 229

Diner, Hasia R. 71–2 enterprises, small 15, 21, 191

Dining in New York 41 entrepreneurs
disciplining, of bodies 122–5, 134 and capital and culture 60, 191
discourse Chinese 92
global culinary 112 ethnic 15, 71
global gastronomic 60 exploitation by 17
of haute cuisine 122 in food business 109
and practice 22, 23, 52 German 70
producing subjects 166 immigrant 191, 192
disdain, and exoticism 76 Italian 98
disembodiment, normative 2 and networks 60, 69
Distinction 19 New York City 21
domination “Entrepreneurs in the Age of
and resistance 10 Exclusion” 92
and taste 95 Erenberg, Lewis 90
white 5 erotics of authenticity 51
Dooley, Carroll F 146 Escoffier 99
Downing, Thomas 67 Escoffier, August 116, 120–1
dress code, Culinary Institute of ethnic cleansing 4
America 133–4 ethnic, term 1, 4, 10
Druckman, Charlotte 112 ethnic cuisine 3, 4, 6–7, 97
D’Souza, Sebastian 46–7, 48 Ethnic Cuisine II 78
ethnic feeders 7
Early Modern European Capitalism ethnic food 4, 73–6
37 ethnic haute cuisine 169, 174–9
East India Curry Shop 40 ethnic restaurants
eateries, New York City 74–5. (See also and middle-classes 87–90
restaurants) New York City 101
Eating Chinese 91, 92 phrase 73
“Eating the Other” 5 ethnic restaurateurs, invisibility of
economic, and the social 15 90–3
economics, and politics 16 ethnic succession 63
economy, symbolic 20 ethnicity
edibility, public 64–9 and blackness 192
Edible History of Five Immigrant category of 180
Families in One New York and expertise 180, 183
Tenement, An 69 and identification 86
education, progressive movement in/ and marketing 37
vocational 129 term 4, 10, 74
El Bulli 113, 114 ethnics, retrospective 69–73
El cocinero español 94 ethnography 26
elites, cultural 189–90 Etzioni, A. 124
embodiment Evans, R. 158, 180
of food 10 Ewen, Elizabeth 5
theories of 27 Ewen, Stuart 5
employees, hotel and restaurant 12 exclusion
Enchantress of Florence, The 168 of Chinese labor 92
enclave eating 71, 75 and nostalgia 187
Enlightenment, the 193 of women 136, 137–42
230 INDEX

Exotic Appetites 6 Spanish-Mexican 94

exoticism, and disdain 76 Tex-Mex 93–4
expertise Food and Wine 161
acquisition of 158, 179–80, 181 Food Arts 161
and ethnicity 180, 183 food businesses, and immigrants 71
experts food colonialism 6
cultural 190 food industry, labor in 108
and ethnics 180 food market, national 71
exploitation food service occupations, and
and co-ethnicity 15 immigrants 11
by entrepreneurs 17 food studies 25, 188–9
of restaurant workers 17–18 Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in
self 15 the Gourmet Foodscape 19, 189
Externship Manual 128 foreign-born. (See immigrants)
Fortune Cookie Chronicles, The 91
faculty development, Culinary Institute Franey, Pierre 118, 119, 120
of America 130–1 Freedman, Paul 96
fashion French cooking 116
and food 190–1 French cuisine 81, 82, 83, 106, 108, 157
and social norms 140 French Culinary Institute 179
Federal Writers’ Project’s (FWP) 94 French haute cuisine 118, 120
feedback from customers 57 French Laundry Cookbook, The 162–3
Felder, Eve 120, 141 French restaurants 45, 76, 77, 79, 103
feminist struggle 139
fictive kin networks 15. (See also Gabaccia, Donna 71, 75
networks) gangster Asian food 169
Filipino cooking 176–7, 184 gastronomic cosmopolitanism 7–8
Filippini, Alessandro 95 gastronomy, curry as 51–2
Fine, Gary Alan 147, 148 gender
flaneurs 190 and Bengali cuisine 36
Flaubert, Gustav 6 and cooking 39, 59, 175
food and Culinary Institute of America 123
aesthetic evaluations of 96 and spaces 87
and art 193 and top chefs 111–13, 115
authenticity of 173, 177, 179 gendered shopping, in public markets
Bengali 73 69
Chinese 91 German cuisine 76, 77, 106
embodiment of 10 German immigrants 12, 69, 70–1, 75
ethnic 4, 73–6 German restaurants 75–6, 77, 88
ethnic and foreign 86 ghettoization 71, 75
and fashion 190–1 Ghosh, Amitav 167
gangster Asian 169 GI Bill 146
and German immigrants 71 Giard, Lucy 5, 26, 188
Italian-American 95–104 Gikandi, Simon 191–2
nationalization of 75 globalization 50
prestige of foreign 83, 86 Golden Venture (ship) 91
Scandinavian 104 Goody, Jack 190
and sex 5–6 Graffiti 167
South Asian 39–40 Greek cuisine 83, 163–5
 INDEX 231

Greek restaurants 164 Hughes, Charlotte 51

Greenaway, Peter 5 Hungering for America 71–2
grocers, Italian-American 12
Guide Culinaire 116 ice-cream parlors 67–8
identification, national 86
habitus 24 identity(ies)
class 88, 150–1 analysis of 181
Hage, Ghassan 7, 8 contemporary 183
Hairspray 5 food related 72, 156
Haley, Andrew 87, 88, 89, 90 racial 192
Hall, Stuart 4 regional 71
Hamilton, Gabrielle 170 and whiteness 109
Handlin, Oscar 16, 17, 107 work-based 156
Hanel, Marnie 151 Immigrant Neighborhood, An 24
Harlem Renaissance 40 immigrants
Harlem Restaurant Owners’ aesthetics of work 20
Association 40 agency of 16, 92
Harris, Barbara 135 attitudes to 89
Hasina, Begum 45 Bangladeshi 16
haute cuisine Chinese 17–18, 91
American 104, 106, 117, 162, 169 classification of 42
discourse of 122 and culture of consumption 20
ethnic 169, 174–9 entrepreneurs 191, 192
excluded cuisines 166 German 12, 69, 70–1, 75
French 120 and housing 71
Indian 159, 165–8 illegal Chinese 91
new 113 and investment 29n.8
social limits of 155 invisibility of 18
Spanish 113 Irish 70, 75
standards for 118, 120 Italian 96, 97
training of chefs 118, 150 Latino 18, 93–5
hegemony, middle-class 87, 90 Mexican 94
Heldke, L. 6 multiculturalism of 8, 20
heritage, and choice of cuisine 86 new 71, 108
Herzfeld, Michael 145 occupations of 11–14, 94
Hindu, classification 41 and reformers 70–1
hipsters 190 and risk 17–18
Holt, Jane 40 transforming palates and food
hooks, b. 6 businesses 69
Hooni Kim 171 immigration
Hopper, Edward 44 and changing cuisines 104–5
hotel employees 12 sociology of 27
Hotel McAlpin 87 structural model of 16
housing, and immigrants 71 In an Antique Land 167
How to Roast a Lamb 163–4 income
Howes, David 23 and choice of cuisine 83, 86
Huang, Eddie 172–3, 174, 184 and eating out 87
Hubert’s 176 inday 36
Huey, Richard 40 India, as a referent 41
232 INDEX

India Abroad 37, 160 kachori 47–8, 52

India Rajah, classification of 41 Kant, Immanuel 194
India Tribune 37 Katz, Fred 123
Indian, category of 180–1 Keller, Thomas 162, 163, 167
Indian cuisine 108, 157, 159, 165–8 kin networks 15. (See also networks)
Indian Home Cooking 161, 162 Kira, K.Y. 39
Indian restaurants 32, 40, 41–3, 45–6, Kitchen Confidential 145
179 Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant
Indian street culture 36 Work 147
industrial revolution 87 knowledge production 183
industrialization 50 Korean-American chefs 171–2
ingredients, and menus 121 Kuh, Patric 95–6
inhabitation 8–9 Kunz, Gray 167, 168
insiders, and outsiders 171, 172
investment, and immigrants 29n.8 La France Gastronomique 116
invisibility labor, in food industry 108
of ethnic restaurateurs 90–3 language, and naming of food 47–8
of immigrants 18 Lasater-Wille, Amy 149, 165, 166
of Latino cooks 93–5 lascars 39, 179
Irish immigrants 70, 75 Latino cooks, invisibility of 93–5
Isnard, Marius 118 Latino immigrants 18, 93–5
Italian American Table, The 98 Lave, J. 180
Italian cuisine 78, 82, 95–7, 98–9, law profession, and women 135–6,
107 137
Italian entrepreneurs 98 Laxmi, Padma 37
Italian immigrants 96, 97 Le Côte Basque 120
Italian restaurants 76, 77, 79, 83 Le Répertoire de la cuisine 120
Italian winemaking 97–8, 107 learning, situated 180
Italian-American food 95–104 Lee, Heather R. 92
Italian-American grocers 12 Lee, Jennifer 90, 91
Italian-Americans, upward mobility of Lefebvre, Ludo 169
107 legislation, race-based 108
Italians, and identity based on food legitimate peripheral participation 180
72 leisure time
and eating out 87
Jacobson, Matthew Frye 97 reconfiguration of 90
Jaffrey, Madhur 43, 48 Lespinasse 168
James, Rian 41–2 Levenstein, Harvey 44, 69, 70
James Beard award 151 Levi-Strauss, C. 26
Janer, Zilkia 93, 157, 178 L’Hôtel Restaurant de la Paix at
Japanese cuisine 77, 82, 83, 100, Bellegarde, 119
108 liberal arts 125–31, 188
Japanese restaurants 80, 83 literal taste 24, 25, 194
Jefferson, Thomas 96 Lobel, Cindy 89
Jews, upward mobility of 107 Lorenzini, Carlo 96
Johnson, Howard 120 Los Angeles, popularity of cuisines in
Johnston, J. 7, 9, 19, 20, 22, 89, 81–2
90 Louie, Edward 92
Jungsik Yim 171 Lowry, Helen Bullitt 75
 INDEX 233

Lubow, Arthur 113 Metz, President 126

Lucky Ones, The 17 Mexican cuisine 77, 94–5
lunchrooms 88 Mexican immigrants 94
Mexican restaurants 94, 95
Mackall, Lawton 42 Mexicans, marginalization of 95
Making of a Chef, The 143, 146 Meyer, Danny 166, 167, 168
male sojourners 108 Michelin guide 78, 80
male-centricism, in cooking 151. (See middle class(es)
also gender: men) and ethnic restaurants 87–90
male-identified occupations 147 German 88
marginalization, of Mexicans 95 hegemony 87, 90
marketing, and ethnicity 37 and professions 135
Martens, L. 20 training to become 127
Martin, Chef 174–8, 179, 184 women 87, 135
Mary Waldo’s Restaurant Guide to Middle-States Commission on Higher
New York City and Vicinity 43 Education 128–9
masculine professions, women’s migrants. (See immigrants)
clothing in 140 Migrant’s Table, The 72
masculinity (See also gender) migration, patterns of 15. (See also
Bengali 59 immigrants)
of chefs 182 military influence, on cooking schools
and cooking schools 143–9 145
and Culinary Institute of America 123 mind, and body 2
culture of 136 modernity 193, 194
in the professions 136 molecular gastronomy 113, 115
masculinization, of cooking 115 Momofuku Cookbook 169, 173
mass-produced foods, as national Momofuku Noodle Bar 170
icons 71 money lending 15
Mathur, Hemant 37, 159, 160–1 Montanari, M. 25
McDonalds and McDonaldization 90 Moore, Charles 135
media, use of by restaurateurs 57. (See Morgan, Helen 76
also newspapers) Moskin, Julia 112, 156
medical profession 123–4, 125, 152n.6 mother sauces 116
Meehan, Peter 46, 169 Mount Holyoke College 130
Mehta, Jahangir 167 Mukherjee, Chitrita 54–7, 58, 59–60
Mehtaphor 167 multiculturalism
men (See also masculinity) cosmo- 7, 8
American and professionalization 142 of migrants 8, 20
middle-class 135 Mumbai street food 54–7
Menu: The Restaurant Guide of New
York 43 Nagle, James J. 73
MenuPages 61n.6, 79, 80 Naked City 187
menus naming, of restaurants 39–45
hybrid 89 Nandy, Ashis 3–5, 6, 9
Indian restaurants 48 Napa valley wine 97
and ingredients 121 Narayan, Uma 6, 7
themes of 102 nation, and culture 86
Merleau-Ponty, M. 26 national icons, mass-produced foods
Mesoamerican aesthetics 3 as 71
234 INDEX

national identification 86 Osteria Francescana 113

National Restaurant Association 78, Other(s)
100, 101 categories of 4
nationalism and class 8, 86
American 90 culinary culture 7
American gastronomic 83 desire for 5
post-colonial 37, 41 eating the 4–5, 9
nationalization unconstituted social 182
of American food 75 outsiders, and insiders 171, 172
corporate 71
natives, opinions of 160 Pais, Arthur J. 160
networks Pakistanis, cultural capital of 59
of elite regulars 120 palatal taste 1, 189
and entrepreneurs 60, 69 Paris, restaurants in 64
ethnic 98 Parsee 42
kin and fictive kin 15 “Parts Unknown” 171
nouvelle cuisine 178 Passengenwerk 24
of top chefs 113–14 Pavillon de France 120
“Neuva Nouvelle Cuisine: How Spain Peiss, Kathy 90
Became the New France, The” Pellegrini, Angelo 72
113 Pépin, Jacques 119
New American cuisine 77, 81, 100, 104, Per Se 162
162. (See also American cuisine) Perino’s 95
“New Ethnicities” 4 Peruvian cuisine 166
New Haven Restaurant Institute 132, Pham, Vu 36
137–8, 146 phenomenology 26
New Professional Chef, The 116 Phillips, Manorama 52, 159
New York Daily Tribune 74 philosophy, and cooking and eating 25
New York Times 51, 73, 159 Physician Himself and What He Should
newspapers. (See also names of Add to His Scientific
individual newspapers) Acquirements, The 131
coverage of ethnic restaurants 77–8 Pilcher, Jeffrey 95
expatriate 37 Pinedo, Encarnacion 94
Ngai, Mae 17 Piore, Michael 191
Nickerson, Jane 40, 52 Polanyi, Karl 109
Noma 114 politics
Norton, Marcy 3 and economics 16
nostalgia 187 of knowledge production 183
nouvelle cuisine, networks 178 of professions 182
and taste 19–20
occupations pop up restaurants 169
of immigrants 11–14, 94 Porter, Roy 125
male-identified 147 post-colonial nationalism 37, 41
Omni, M. 97 post-colonialism 10
omnivorousness 89, 90, 189 power
One Spice, Two Spice 166 cultural 190
Oriental cuisine 100 and the customer, server,
Orientalism 6 entrepreneur 48
Osler, W. 181 of diaspora 93
 INDEX 235

practice ranch style cookery 93

and discourse 22, 23, 52 Rasool, Mohammad 21, 31–5, 36, 37,
everyday food 26 38–9, 43, 46, 48, 53–4, 58, 59,
and representations 22 60, 108
Practice of Everyday Life, The 22 Ravage, Marcus 72
price, of restaurants 83–5, 86, 95, 103, Ray, Utsa 35
164 reconstructive-cerebral cooking 113
profession, term 131–2 Red Hook vendors 58–9
Professional Chef, The 116, 117 Redzepi, René 114
professional chefs 149, 182 reform crusades 88
professional cooking 121–2, 151. (See reformers, and immigrants 70–1
also cooking) regimes of value 37
professional groups, upward mobility Reinitz, Bertram 45
of 131, 149 representations, and practice 22
professionalism resistance, and domination 10
and character 131–7 restaurant employees 12
of chefs 115, 128, 133, 182 restaurant guides 78–80
in cooking 189 Restaurant Institute of Connecticut
and Culinary Institute of America 132
133, 134 restaurant-keepers 12
and middle-class men 135 restaurants
and whiteness 142 American 80, 103, 104
and women 140 anti-restaurants 169
professionalization Chinese 44, 76–7, 80, 90–1, 92
and American men 142 and class 67, 75
of chefs 150, 153n.20 as cultural sites 186
and class 145, 149 design of 60
of cooking 122, 123–4 emergence of 64
and Culinary Institute of America 11 ethnic 73, 89–90, 101
medical profession 123–4, 125 French 45, 76, 77, 79, 103
of medicine 123–4 German 75–6, 77, 88
and social climbing 145 Greek 164
professions Indian 32, 40, 41–3, 45–6, 48,
nature of 182–3 179
production of 181 Italian 76, 77, 79, 83
and training 124, 181 Japanese 80, 83
and women 136 menu themes of 102
progressive movement, in education 129 Mexican 94, 95
Prune 170 naming of 39–45
Psilakis, Michael 163–4, 165 pop up 169
public edibility 64–9 popularity and prestige of 76–86
public markets, gendered shopping in price of 83–5, 86, 95, 103, 164
69 rise of 67, 68
San Pellegrino list 111–12, 114
Quattrociocchi, Niccola de 72 Soul 83
Quo Vadis 95 table d’hôte 88
Tex-Mex 83
racism 71, 97 Turkish 41–2
Rajah, The 41, 42 retrospective ethnics 69–73
236 INDEX

Revolution at the Table 69 social dimension of professional

Richman, Alan 115 cooking 122, 151
Ripert, Eric 20, 184 social embarrassment, of cooking 39
risk, and immigrants 17–18 social life of things 109
Robuchon, Joël 113 Social Life of Things, The 37
Roediger, David 97 social limits, of haute cuisine 155
Romano, Michael 166 social networks, and butchers 69. (See
Roosth, S. 115 also networks)
Roth, Francis 132, 145 social norms, and fashion 140
Rouff, Marcel 116 social relations, with co-ethnics 32
Roy, Parama 9 socialization, of students 127, 128
Royal British Navy 39 sociological theories of taste 19
Ruhlman, Michael 141, 143, 144, 146, sociology
162 from/of the body 26, 27
Rushdie, Salman 168 of immigration 27
Ryan, Tim 100, 116, 117, 126 sojourners, male 108
Sonar Bangla 46–7
Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures 3 Soul restaurants 83
Said, Edward 6 South Asian food 39–40
Salinger, Sharon 66 South Asian people, classification of
saloons 64–6, 67, 74 41
San Fransisco, popularity of cuisines in spaces, and gender 87
81–2 Spang, R. 64
San Pellegrino best restaurants list Spanish haut cuisine 113
111–12, 114 Spanish-Mexican food 94
Saran, Suvir 161–2, 165 Spivak, G.C. 10
Saravana Bhavan 48–9 Ssäm Bar 170
sauces 116–17 St. Andrew’s Café 99
Scandinavian food 104 standards, French haute cuisine 118,
scientism, of cooking 115 120
segregation, of cities 87 Stoller, Paul 35
self-exploitation 15 street foods 36, 54–7, 59
sensory urbanism, and New York City Street Vendor Project 28n.1
185–9 structural model of immigration 16
sensual theory of bodies 23–4 students, socialization of 127, 128
Sertich Velie, Marissa 140 Sugar Act 1764 66
sex, and food 5–6 Swindler, A. 22
Shapiro, Laura 170 symbolic economy 20
Sifton, Sam 159, 162
situated learning 180 Tabla 166
skills, value of 180 table, as social machinery 5
Slavery and the Culture of Taste 191 table d’hôte restaurants 88
slumming 87 taste
small enterprises 15, 21, 191 aesthetic 194
Smith, Andrew 12, 71 changing 63
smuggling, of people 18 and class 19, 189
social, and the economic 15 culture of 193
social climbing, and professionalization and domination 95
145 and immigrant bodies 17
 INDEX 237

literal 24, 25, 194 Vada Pao 54–7, 60

palatal 1, 189 value
and politics 19–20 fabrication of culinary 161
and toil 17, 69, 179 of things 38
taste-makers, American 86 value production, and ethnic food 51
“Tastes Widening for Kosher Food” “Variety of French Food Sampled on
73 West Coast” 73
taverns 65–6, 67 vindaloo 47, 48
Taylor’s Epicurean Palace 67–8 vocational education 129
teaching
at Culinary Institute of America Wacquant, Loïc 26
122–5 Wadia, Rustom 42
of professional cooking 121–2 wages, of whiteness 142–3
of techniques 120 Waldinger, Roger 16–17, 191
technical standards, of Culinary Warde, Alan 7, 20
Institute of America 117–18 wars, and German cuisine 77
techniques, teaching of 120 Waters, John 5
techno-emotional cuisine 121 We Are What We Eat 71
Tex-Mex food 83, 93–4 Weber, Max 181
things Weir, Richard 76
social life of 109 Wenger, E. 180
value of 38 Where to Eat in New York 42
toil, and taste 17, 69, 179 white domination 5
touch, disdain for 51 white male chefs 111, 122
tourism, urban cross-class 87 whiteness
training ethnic groups acquiring 109
to become middle-class 125 and professionalism 142
of chefs 118, 150, 179 wages of 142–3
and professions 124, 181 Wilensky, H. 128
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 1848 93 Winant, H. 97
Trillin, Calvin 100 winemaking, Italian 97–8, 107
Trotter, Charles 113 Wolfe, Tom 147
Trubek, Amy 141 Woman in the Surgeon’s Body, The 147
Tulsi 159, 160 women
Turkish restaurants 41–2 chefs 112, 151
Turner, Bryan S. 26 and Culinary Institute of America
137–42
Ullah, Habib 40 exclusion of 136, 137–42
Union Square Café 166 and law profession 135–6, 137
United States, food service middle-class 87, 135
occupations 11–14 and professionalism 140
unprofessional behaviour 122–3, 145 and the professions 136
Uprooted, The 16 in the workforce 136
upward mobility working and chop suey 45
of Italian-Americans and Jews 107 Woolley, Mary E. 130–1
of professional groups 131, 149 workforce
Urban, G. 190 immigrant 108
“Use of Native Spices Adds Interest to women in the 136
Unusual Cuisine of Balinese” 73 working class 8, 70, 90
238 INDEX

working-class boys, socialization of 127 Zagat data 82, 83, 86, 100, 101, 103,
World’s Fair 1939 120 104
Zagat Guidebooks 78–9, 80
xenophobia 71 Zelinsky, Wilber 94
Ziegelman, Jane 69, 70
Yee, Shirley 24 Zukin, Sharon 20, 58, 185–6, 187
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