Kitchens. Gary Alan Fine
or morally viable in a kitchen. I hope to extend the analysis of the ideology of “art,” addressing the practical doing of aesthetics. The forms of aesthetic negotiation discussed are characteristic of all occupations. All—or at least most—occupations display a sense of the aesthetic, sensory quality of the doing of work. Yet, for all work, those outside the boundary of the occupation and conventions within it constrain legitimate practice. For the fine arts these limits are flexible, unstated but simultaneously ideologically offensive. The illusion is that there are no limits—that art defines itself. In other occupations, such as assemblyline work, the limits are recognized as a legitimate, if unpleasant, part of the job and are rarely explicitly questioned, even as workers complain and evade these restrictions. Cooks fall somewhere in the midst of this continuum of aesthetic workers, and, as a consequence, focusing on these workers encourages an elaboration of the role of freedom and constraint in the workplace.
Specifically in chapter 6, I examine the forms of this aesthetic constraint. In a restaurant, cooks must be aware of the demands placed on them by standards of customer taste, constraints of time, and the economics of the restaurant industry. These features limit what is possible to create. Each constraint is tied to structural and historical dimensions of the larger world, and the complaints of cooks are a response to the structural conditions of restaurants and public taste. Chapter 7 addresses the development of and limits on an aesthetic discourse in the kitchen. In a language that is not conducive to discussions of culinary issues, how can cooks communicate with each other about taste? How is a culinary poetics developed in practice?
I have attempted to write a volume that will be accessible to an audience of nonspecialists. Jargon and technical language has been eliminated wherever possible. Further, while each chapter addresses my theoretical argument, I have attempted in chapter 8, my conclusion, to place my ethnographic conclusions in light of the core sociological concepts of organization, interaction, time, emotion, economics, and aesthetics. Together, these concepts outline an interactionist sociology that takes organizational existence and social structure seriously. While some sociological discussion is necessary in each chapter, hopefully most of this volume will be as lucid to those outside the academy as to those inside. Hopefully this volume will contribute to understanding by cooks and eaters, as well as by researchers and teachers.
This research is based on participant observation and in-depth interviewing in four restaurants of different types, within the Twin Cities. In each restaurant I spent a month observing in the kitchen, during all hours in which the restaurant was open, a total of approximately 50-75 hours in each restaurant. In each restaurant I interviewed all its full-time cooks, a total of thirty interviews, lasting approximately 90 minutes each, with some lasting as long as 3 hours. I describe each of these sites in detail in the appendix, along with a set of methodological issues.
The four restaurants represent a range of professional cooking environments in the Twin Cities. I make no claim that these four restaurants form a representative sample of all eating establishments; clearly they do not. They represent the upper portion of Minnesota restaurants in status; they are not “family,” “fast-food,” or “ethnic” restaurants:
1. La Pomme de Terre is an haute cuisine French restaurant, by all accounts one of the best and most innovative in the upper Midwest.
2. The Owl's Nest is a continental-style restaurant, best known for the quality of its fresh fish. Its primary clientele is businessmen, and the restaurant is a multiyear Holiday Award winner.
3. Stan's Steakhouse is a family-owned steakhouse. It is particularly well known in its neighborhood, a middle-class area not known for the quality of its restaurants. It has received metropolitan awards for the quality of its beef.
4. The Twin Cities Blakemore Hotel is part of a chain of hotels that is not esteemed for the quality of its cuisine. The hotel is modern, catering especially to business travelers. The hotel has a banquet service and operates a coffee shop and dining room.
Although the restaurants vary widely in the number of customers served—from 500 on a busy weekend evening at Stan's to about 75 on the same evening at La Pomme de Terre—each hires from five to ten cooks, of whom usually three or four are working in the kitchen simultaneously.
Several issues of legitimate interest to readers are treated only lightly in this volume. While real differences distinguish these restaurants in the skill and aesthetic orientation of the cooks, my goal in this volume is to explore the similarities among them—those commonalities that might be generalized to the occupation as a whole. I downplay the elements that divide them, preferring to generalize from four cases than to use each restaurant with its manifest idiosyncrasies as a representative of its culinary class. Cooks at La Pomme de Terre certainly had a more profound aesthetic orientation than those at Stan's, but what impressed me was how cooks at each establishment attempted to make aesthetic sense of the food that they produced; and for this reason I feel justified in combining discourse from each kitchen in a single argument. Nor do I compare and contrast differences in organization, since I feel that the structural similarities of these establishments overwhelm their categorical differences.
Examining cooks in a second-tier metropolitan area provides a different kind of sample than one based upon elite chefs in a primary cultural center (e.g., New York, San Francisco, New Orleans), where a more self-conscious aesthetic dynamic occurs. These cooks are sociologically interesting because they are not elite artists. Taught in trade school, where cooking was likened to other industrial work, not other arts, leads them within their habitus to be inarticulate about taste and to produce imprecise classifications of culinary productions (Bourdieu 1984, pp. 170-73). The fact that, even so, they talk about the aesthetics of food preparation suggests the extent to which aesthetic discourse affects the doing of work. An examination of elite chefs would surely produce different results.
Finally I do not address what customers think of these establishments. I am interested in cooking, not in dining. In this regard, I only address the lives of servers as their lives affect those of cooks. Each of these topics—and many others—should be the concern of other researchers.
In this volume the restaurant industry stands as a surrogate for a wide variety of economic spheres. Obviously every organization is idiosyncratic. Yet, idiosyncrasies and all, restaurants and their kitchens provide a setting in which the demands of the external environment affect the interactional order: where microsociology meets structural analysis.
ONE
Living the Kitchen Life
Heaven sends us good meat, but the devil sends cooks.
—David Garrick
The day begins slowly. Entering an empty, clean kitchen on a cool summer morning, one has little sense of the blistering tornado of action to come. That the room has no air-conditioning or windows hardly matters when the door to the dining room and the backdoor are left open. Slowly workers arrive to prepare for lunch. Mel, the day cook, enters at about 9:00. The maitre d' slightly after. Some busboys arrive early to prepare the dining room. Later a pantry worker, another cook, a potman, half a dozen servers, and a bartender show up. Phil, the owner, and Paul, the head chef, appear shortly before lunch.
Mel begins by checking that the restaurant has sufficient ingredients for lunch. He and Paul have already determined what specials will be offered. Since the special is ivory salmon with a beurre blanc sauce, he checks the fish for freshness. He tastes the beef stock that has been slowly simmering for two days and casually tosses in some vegetable scraps. Denise, the pantry worker, is asked to clean the newly arrived asparagus, peel potatoes and carrots, and boil some eggs. If they fall on the floor, no matter, they will be boiled. Mel and Denise prepare anything that once completed can keep. The goal is to be prepared by 11:30 for the first orders. At 11:10, a supplier brings in tomorrow's walleyed pike, and Paul, dressed casually in