Please prepare a summary for each article. (5 articles in total.) Please write down three deep thinking, or question, or both, related to the five articles.

springerternikarpdf2014 Feedingtheimmigrantfamily_Ternikar foodieschap3Exoticfood_20202 RayExoticRestaurants1 Chinesefood_GaryFine.1995

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Chapter Title

Ethnicity, Ethnic Identity, and Food

Particle
Given Name Farha
Suffix
Division Department of Sociology
Organization Sociology, LeMoyne College
Address 19 Salt Springs Road #342, Syracuse,

NY, 13214, USA
Email ternikfb@lemoyne.edu

1 Ethnicity, Ethnic Identity, and Food

2 Farha Ternikar*
3 Department of Sociology, Sociology, LeMoyne College, Syracuse, NY, USA

4 Synonyms

5 Exotic food; Immigrant food; Immigration

6 Introduction

7 This entry explores ethical issues concerning ethnicity, ethnic identity, and food in the United States.
8 This entry focuses solely on the United States because of its large diversity and immigrant
9 population. However, there are parallel cases in Canada and England where ethnicity is tied to
10 multicultural societies, recent immigration, and racial classification.
11 In the US context, food has been used to maintain both ethnicity and symbolic ethnicity for early
12 and more recent immigrants. However, ethnic food can also be a pathway to both understanding new
13 immigrant groups as well as alienating the other, especially racial and ethnic minorities. Ethical
14 debates surrounding how and why we consume ethnic food expand our study of ethnic food
15 especially in the US context.
16 Ethnicity is largely tied to an understanding of race but has been differentiated as based on culture
17 and ancestral heritage, while race is a constructed category based on perceived physical differences
18 (Gans 1979; Lu and Fine 1995). Ethnic food in the United States historically becomes a significant
19 marker of identity for immigrants, Italian and Jewish, by the 1920s (Diner 2001; Gabaccia 1998).
20 More recently, ethnic food is a marker of community ethnic and religious identity for Latina,
21 African, South Asian, and Middle Eastern immigrants.
22 The study of ethnicity and ethnic food is interdisciplinary and includes important philosophical
23 and sociological theoretical frameworks. Narayan’s work problematizes the ethical aspects of eating
24 ethnic food and particularly the food of the “other.” She explores how consumption of ethnic food
25 can be linked to reducing xenophobia. Appadurai examines how the imposed construction of
26 a national cuisine often linked to postcolonial projects and can lead to gastronomic imperialism.
27 Heldke introduces and problematizes cultural food colonialism as the process of eating food from
28 developing or third-world cultures and how sociohistorical processes like colonialism play a role in
29 how and why we exotify food of the other. These social and philosophical discussions of ethnic food
30 are significant to understanding the ethical implications of ethnic food and ethnicity.

31 Exploring Ethnicity, Ethnic Identity, and Food

32 Key concepts and themes in the discussion of ethnicity, ethnic identity, and food include ethnicity,
33 symbolic ethnicity (Gans 1979), immigrant identity (Diner 2001; Gabaccia 1998), food parochial-
34 ism, and culinary imperialism (Heldke 2003; Narayan 1997). Community, solidarity, and identity

*Email: ternikfb@lemoyne.edu

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35 are all important functions of food (Anderson 2005). Abarca (2004) also looks at ethnicity through
36 the lens of authenticity as a creation. This is an ethical issue as it questions who has power in
37 constructing authenticity or who has claim to authenticity?

38 Ethnicity and Symbolic Ethnicity

39 Ethnicity is largely seen as a social construction based on shared cultural heritage, and race is
40 understood as a social construction based on shared perceived physical traits. This section explores
41 how ethnicity and symbolic ethnicity can help frame our discussion on ethnic food, ethnicity, and
42 ethics. How ethnicity is displayed is one aspect of the ethnic dimension of food. Ethnicity of white
43 ethnic groups is often more palatable to the dominant group.
44 Gans historically defined ethnicity in the United States as symbolic ethnicity pertaining to third-
45 generation immigrants and future generations who have been able to successfully assimilate into the
46 dominant culture including Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans (Gans 1979). Symbolic ethnicity
47 refers to an optional ethnicity available largely to white ethnic immigrants in multicultural societies.
48 In this case, we focus on the United States because ethnic identities are often understood, created,
49 and maintained through food, cultural events, and communities (Lu and Fine 1995).
50 Isajiw (1993) and Van den Berghe (1984) explore approaches to the social scientific definitions of
51 ethnicity. Isajiw explains that ethnicity is a social construction based on perceived cultural traits that
52 takes place in everyday life (1993, p. 4). Van den Berghe also understands ethnicity as a social
53 concept and (1984) understands food as an expression of ethnicity. “Our cuisine is the symbolic
54 expression of our sociality, first in the intimate domestic sphere, and by extension with the larger
55 group that shares our specific culinary complex: the inventory of food items, the repertoire of
56 recipes, and the rituals of commensalism. Along with language, the food complex becomes a basic
57 badge of ethnicity” (van den Berghe 1984, p. 392). He also claims that food is easier to maintain and
58 share than an ethnic group’s language or religion, so in many ways, food is the key to cultural
59 transmission (Van den Berghe 1984, p. 393). Van den Berghe ultimately argues that the culinary
60 complex is often the easiest way to reinforce ethnic ties and pass on ethnicity (Van den Berghe 1984,
61 p. 393).
62 Lu and Fine (1995) explore the meaning of ethnic food in their exploration of ethnic restaurants
63 and ethnicity and identity. Their research emphasizes how cultural symbols are used to display
64 ethnicity, and ethnicity “depends on a set of consistent actions that permits others to place an
65 individual in an ethnic category” (Lu and Fine 1995, p. 535). Ethnicity is ultimately realized in the
66 United States through festivals, food, and consumption. Fine and Shun Lu emphasize that like
67 ethnicity, authentic ethnic food is a social construction, and “the secret of the acceptance of ethnic
68 food resides in the harmonization and compromise between seemingly contradictory requirements:
69 being authentic and being Americanized, maintain tradition while unconsciously modifying it”
70 (Lu and Fine 1995, p. 547).
71 Herbert Gans may have once referred to this type of identity maintenance as symbolic ethnicity,
72 but further research on Italian immigrants reveals that food for Italian immigrants includes varieties
73 of ethnic cuisine, structure (meal times), and rituals that continue to reinforce family and community
74 ties. Food is a way to maintain much more than symbolic ethnicity for many immigrants in the
75 United States.
76 Memory food is one way that immigrant women recreate a homeland in the American diaspora.
77 Memory food is both a method for remembering one’s ethnic and cultural heritage through cooking
78 with family members and a technique for preserving culinary skills, through the sharing of food

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79 preparation. Memory foods are the dishes that are passed on from one generation to another often by
80 grandmothers and mothers rather than through recipes (Camargo Heck 2003, p. 216). Memory food
81 allows immigrants to maintain and renegotiate food traditions and ethnic identities but also create
82 ethnic solidarity (Camargo Heck 2003, p. 217). Ray also explains that foodways are a way for
83 society to understand how immigrants and ethnic groups construct class, ethnic, gender, and
84 religious identities (Ray 2012, p. 43). “Q1 The importance of food in immigrant culture makes
85 restaurants, grocery stores, and kitchens important sites where ethnicity is practiced and reproduced
86 on a daily basis (Ray 2012, p. 198).

87 Ethnic Identity, Immigrants, and Food

88 Food has been an avenue for American immigrants to maintain ethnic identities within families and
89 communities. Hasia Diner (2001) and Donna R. Gabaccia’s (1998) historical work on food,
90 ethnicity, class, and immigrant American families demonstrates the significance of food in commu-
91 nity and ethnic identity maintenance for Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants. Gabaccia’s work
92 highlights how food has been a means of ethnic identity building for Italian immigrants through
93 community and shared meals. Diner adds a class and comparative analysis to Gabaccia’s work as she
94 points out how food was a way of breaking down class divisions historically for Italian, Irish, and
95 Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century. Vallianatos and Raine (2008) explore how
96 consuming food is linked to constructing immigrant identities for South Asian and Middle East
97 immigrants. Vallianatos and Raine explain that “Food also connects across time and place, and for
98 many migrants, food is an essential component of maintaining connections to home. How and what
99 kinds of food are consumed recall families and friends left behind, and by continuing to consume
100 both everyday and celebratory food migrants preserve these transnational relationships and enact
101 their companionship with those back home” (2008, p. 357). Food is used to maintain a connection to
102 the homeland, and through the consumption and creation of traditional food, immigrants are able to
103 do this (Vallianatos and Raine 2008, p. 368).
104 Studying food is a way to also study ethnicity, culture, community, and identity. Gabaccia
105 emphasizes that studying food is a mechanism for studying multiethnic societies (p. 9). American
106 immigrants maintained immigrant foodways because food helped maintain tradition, social distance
107 from other ethnic groups, and social status (p. 51). “American food” was ultimately created as
108 a social construction in opposition to ethnic food in the late nineteenth century by American
109 “cultural elites” (p. 125).
110 The first wave of acceptance of ethnic food in the United States occurred during the 1960s and
111 1970s largely because of an increase in immigration and counterculture (Belasco 1989; Johnston and
112 Baumann 2010). However, “ethnic food” must be placed in a contemporary sociocultural context.
113 Hippies and counterculture groups often saw ethnic food as an alternative to imperialism and
114 capitalism (Gabaccia 1998, p. 212). “For some counter-cultural Americans, seeking a healthier
115 way to eat returned them to their own ethnic traditions. Vegetarian and healthful versions of ethnic
116 foods developed alongside the traditional ethnic fare offered at food festivals and featured in
117 community cookbooks in the 1970s” (Gabaccia 1998, p. 214). “By the1980s 10 % of all restaurants
118 in the US were ethnic. The majority of these ethnic restaurants were Chinese, Italian and Mexican”
119 (Gabaccia 1998, p. 218). By the 1990s, foodie tastes favored the natural, organic, and exotic which
120 also welcomed ethnic cuisine (Johnston and Baumann 2010). This was also partly because of
121 globalization and the continuing increase of immigration in the United States. But ethnic food
122 also became one understanding of multiculturalism and symbolic ethnicity. Eating ethnic food was

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Sticky Note
Please add an end quotation here

123 one way that Americans often viewed themselves as multicultural, open, and tolerant. Food can be
124 viewed as a gateway to inclusive cultural practices, perhaps decreasing xenophobia. Abarca’s work
125 examines the ethical dimensions of ethnic food consumption.
126 Abarca’s (2004) research explores and questions how society defines and understands ethnic
127 food. She explores and questions the cultural acceptance of ethnic food into dominant American
128 culture, as well as how ethnic food is perceived in terms of real or imagined authenticity. Who has
129 ownership or access to ethnic and or authentic food is an important ethical and philosophical aspect
130 of studying food and ethnicity. She explains that “Without undermining the positive consequences
131 of ethnic food consumption, an overly enthusiastic focus on these social effects can result in creating
132 a deceiving notion of accepting ethnic minorities into mainstream culture” (Abarca 2004, p. 6). Food
133 is often the one aspect of new immigrant communities that dominant cultures find digestible, but she
134 expresses caution pertaining to this perceived acceptance. Secondly, she calls into question how
135 authentic food is understood. Like ethnicity, authenticity is also a social construction. “Q2 Claims of
136 authenticity in ethnic cookbooks and restaurants demonstrate the ideological complexities embed-
137 ded within the phrase, “authentic ethnic food” (Abarca 2004, p. 10).
138 Johnston and Baumann (2010) explore how ethnic connection is an important aspect of how
139 “foodies” understand authenticity in relation to food. The authors define foodies as those who self-
140 identify as having a strong interest in the “education, identity, exploration, and evaluation” of what
141 they perceive as good food (2010, p. 61). Foodies tend to believe that particular ethnic cuisine should
142 be cooked by specific ethnic groups; sushi should be cooked by Japanese and samosas should be
143 made by Indians. How foodies understand authentic food raises ethical issues about how authentic
144 and ethnic food is defined and who defines these terms. This desire for authentic food often results in
145 reductionist understandings of racial and immigrant groups. Johnston and Bauman emphasize that
146 the ethics in assuming ethnic immigrants or racial minorities can inherently cook the food of their
147 cultural ancestors is problematic and often leads to reinforcing cultural stereotypes.

148 Culinary Imperialism, Gastronomic Imperialism, Food Parochialism, and
149 the Future of Ethnic Food

150 Ethnic food also has ethical and political concerns. Recent research has shed light on issues of power
151 and privilege as they relate to ethnic and exotic foods. Appadurai introduces the term gastronomic
152 imperialism as a type of cultural imperialism in which dominant forces impose culinary concepts
153 and values onto a subordinate society or culture. Appadurai’s work on Indian cuisine and cookbooks
154 reveals one type of gastronomic imperialism with the British-imposed creation of curry as the
155 national cuisine of India. Indian food became the ethnic other as a result of British colonialism. But
156 curry became a fabricated national cuisine as a result of British rule. Appadurai explains, “What we
157 see in these many ethnic and regional cookbooks is the growth of an anthology of naturally
158 segregated images of the ethnic other, a kind of ethnoethnicity, rooted in the details of regional
159 recipes, but creating a set of generalized gastroethnic images of Bengalis, Tamils etc.” (Appadurai
160 1988, p. 15). These generalizations of the gastronomic other erase the specific details of regional
161 ethnic cuisines.
162 In Exotic Appetites, Heldke (2003) introduces the concept of cultural food colonialism. She
163 explains that this refers to cooking and eating ethnic foods from “economically dominated” or third-
164 world cultures (2003, xv). Cultural imperialism refers to imposing dominant cultural and social
165 practices, while cultural food colonialism refers to appropriating these practices (xviii). Food
166 adventurers are often engaged in food colonialism as they see eating as an expedition (xxiii). Heldke

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q2 please add a quotation here

167 emphasizes that food adventurers come from privileged class and often racial positions, and
168 therefore, the ethics of privilege come to the forefront of her analysis. Ethnic food rather than ethnic
169 peoples is often more welcomed by food adventurers in privileged positions (Johnston and Baumann
170 2010, p. 102; Abarca 2004).
171 Uma Narayan (1997, p. 180) welcomes the eating of other cultures over “food parochialism.” She
172 explains that she grew up in a family and community where strict dietary restrictions associated with
173 caste, class, and religion often reinforced strong boundaries and that eating the food of “others”
174 allows for more openness to other cultures, perhaps allowing for less xenophobia. “Growing up in
175 a context where food was intimately connected to caste status and various regimes of purity, it is food
176 parochialism that tends to strike me as dangerous, while a willingness to eat the food of ‘Others’
177 seems to indicate at least a growing democracy of the palate. While eating ethnic foods in restaurants
178 might result only in shallow, commodified, and consumerist interaction with an ‘Other’ culinary
179 culture, it seems preferable at least to the complete lack of acquaintance that permits the different
180 foods of ‘Others’ to appear simply as marks of their strangeness and’ OthernessQ3 ” (Narayan 1997,
181 p. 180).
182 Kershen’s research highlights that xenophobic attitudes in society were often reflected in food
183 racism, culinary imperialism, and food colonialism, because food can also be a source of racial
184 stereotyping (Kershen 2002 pp. 2–8). Jan Whitaker’s (2005) work on the Anglo-American home
185 highlights themes of race and food purity in the American context.

186 Summary

187 Ethnicity and ethnic food by nature are social constructions and, therefore, will continue to evolve as
188 the makeup of societies and immigrant populations change. In the US context, food has been used to
189 maintain both ethnicity and symbolic ethnicity for early and more recent immigrants and more
190 recently is an avenue for creating community and passing on one facet of ethnicity to the next
191 generation. Ethnic food can also be a pathway to both understanding new immigrant groups and
192 alienating the other, especially in the case of racial minorities. Heldke, Appadurai, Abarca, and
193 Narayan’s theoretical perspectives are important in understanding the ethics of culinary colonialism
194 and ethnic food.

195 Cross-References

196Q4 ▶ Authenticity and Food
197 ▶ Cultural Imperialism and Colonialism in Cuisine
198 ▶ Food and Place
199 ▶ Globalization and Cuisine
200 ▶ Race, Racial Identity and Eating

201 References

202 Abarca, M. E. (2004). Authentic or not, it’s original. Food and Foodways, 12, 1–25.
203 Anderson, E. (2005). Everyone eats: Understanding food and culture. New York: New York
204 University Press.

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Farha
Sticky Note
Otherness should have single quotes and there needs to be end quotation here

205 Appadurai, A. (1988). How to make a national cuisine: Cookbooks in contemporary India.
206 Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30(1), 3–24.
207 Belasco, W. (1989). Appetite for change: How the counterculture took on the food industry.
208 New York: Pantheon Books.
209 Camargo Heck, M. D. (2003). Adapting and adopting: The migrating recipe. In J. Floyd & L. Forster
210 (Eds.), The recipe reader: Narratives, contexts, traditions (pp. 205–218). Burlington: Ashgate.
211 Diner, H. (2001). Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the age of
212 migration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
213 Gabaccia, D. R. (1998). We are what we eat: Ethnic foods and the making of Americans. Cambridge,
214 MA: Harvard University Press.
215 Gans, H. J. (1979). Symbolic ethnicity: The future of ethnic groups and cultures in America. Ethnic
216 and Racial Studies, 2(1), 1–20.
217 Heldke, L. M. (2003). Exotic appetites: Ruminations of a food adventurer. New York: Routledge.
218 Isajiw, W. (1993). Definition and dimensions of ethnicity: A theoretical framework. Paper presented
219 at Joint Canada United States conference on the measurement of ethnicity, Ottawa, 2 April 1992.
220 In Statistics Canada and U.S. Bureau of the Census (Ed.), Challenges of measuring an ethnic
221 world: Science, politics and reality: Proceedings of the joint Canada – United states conference
222 on the measurement of ethnicity, 1–3 April 1992 (pp. 402–27). Washington, D.C.:
223 U.S. Government Printing Office.
224 Johnston, J., & Baumann, S. (2010). Foodies: Democracy and distinction in the gourmet foodscape.
225 New York: Routledge.
226 Kershen, A. J. (2002). Introduction: Food in the migrant experience. In A. J. Kershen (Ed.), Food in
227 the migrant experience (pp. 1–13). Burlington: Ashgate.
228 Lu, S., & Fine, G. A. (1995). The presentation of ethnic authenticity: Chinese food as a social
229 accomplishment. The Sociological Quarterly, 36(3), 535–553.
230 Narayan, U. (1997). Dislocating cultures: Identities, traditions, and third world feminism.
231 New York: Routledge.
232Q5 Ray, K. (2012). Introduction. In T. Srinivas & K. Ray (Eds.), Curried cultures: Globalization, food
233 and south Asia. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
234 Vallianatos, H., & Raine, K. (2008). Consuming food and constructing identities among Arabic and
235 south Asian immigrant women. Food, Culture and Society, 11(3), 356–373.
236 Van Den Berghe, P. (1984). Ethnic cuisine: Culture in nature. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 7(3),
237 387–397.
238 Whitaker, J. (2005). Domesticating the restaurant: Marketing the Anglo-American home.
239 In A. V. Avakian & B. Haber (Eds.), From Betty Crocker to feminist food studies: Critical
240 perspectives on women and food (pp. 89–105). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

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Author Queries

Query Refs. Details Required

Q1 Please provide closing quotes for the sentence starting “The importance of food in. . .”.

Q2 Please provide closing quotes for the sentence starting “Claims of authenticity in ethnic. . .”.

Q3 Please check if “’ Otherness” should be changed to “‘Otherness’”.

Q4 Entry title “Globalization and Cuisine” mismatches with the TOC, Please check.

Q5 Please update chapter title for Ray (2012).

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144 FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES

Van Amsterdam, N. 2013. “Big Fat Inequalities, Thin Privilege: An Intersectional Perspec
tive on ‘Body Size.'” European]ournal of Women’s Studies 20 (2): 155-69.

van Dijk, T. 1993. “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis.” Discourse & Society 4 (2):

249-83.

Vester, K. 2010. “Regime Change: Gender, Class, and the Invention of Dieting in Post-
helium America.” Journal of Social History 44 (1): 39-70.

Wardle,]., A. Haase, A. Steptoe, M. Nillapun, K.Jonwutiwes, and F. Bellisle. 2004. “Gen

der Differences in Food Choice: The Contribution of Health Beliefs and Dieting.” An

nals of Behavioural Medicine 27 (2): 107-16.
CHAPTER 7

Feeding the Muslim South Asian

Immigrant Family: A Feminist Analysis

of Culinary Consumption

Farha Ternikar

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. To apply intersectionality as a theoretical framework for studying

food, especially considering religion, gender, class, immigrant status,

and ethnicity

2. To understand how food is coded with meaning and social statuses

3. To describe a diverse immigrant population that uses food to maintain

collective identity
4. To identify how race, class, gender, and religion all shape foodways for

Muslim South Asian immigrants

KEY TERMS

biryani, Desi, halal, intersectionality, organic, transnational feminism, zabiha

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The globalization of food Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate
Home Cooking: Indian Food in ManhattanThe globalization
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Author: Inglis, David; Gimlin, Debra L Ray, Krishnendu

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Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking: Indian
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Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home
Cooking: Indian Food in Manhattan

Krishnendu Ray
New York University

On 2 November 2005, Julia Moskin, a food critic for The New York Times (NYT)
wrote, ‘New Yorkers have learned to tread fearlessly in the world of real Indian
food. They know pakoras from samosas and dabble in idlis and utthappams’ (2005:
Fl). Frank Bruni, arguably the most influential restaurant critic in the United States,
reviewed the restaurant Mint and found it wanting (2005: E2, 43). But he found the
chole bhature at Tandoori Hut exquisite. In 1998, Danny Meyer, one of New York’s
elite restaurateurs, accelerated this trend by recruiting the Goan chef Floyd Cardoz
to open the most expensive Indo-French restaurant, calling it Tabla. That was right
in the middle of the rising tide of talk on Indian food in Manhattan. The fact that the
NYT has carried about a dozen different stories on fine-dining Indian restaurants
over the last few years tells us something about how trendy Indian food has become
among Manhattan taste-makers.

The Indian Restaurant in Manhattan

Indian food is fashionable but it does not reach the heights of other cuisines. The
2006 Zagat, which is a survey of fine-dining restaurants, listed 43 Indian restaurants,
after Italian at 389, American 270, French 202, Japanese 101 and Chinese at 63.
MenuPages, a more exhaustive listing, identified 163 Indian restaurants out of a total
of 8,561 eateries. To get a perspective on these numbers, it is important to remember
that there are more than 23,000 eating and drinking establishments in New York
City.

In terms of check averages in Zagat 2006—which is good shorthand for the hi-
erarchy of taste-Indian restaurants came in at $33.85, after French at $47.81, Japa-
nese at $46.72, American at $42.83, Italian at $42.27, Greek at $38.71 and Spanish
(as separate from Latino) at $37.73. In general there is an inverse relationship be-
tween the demographic weight of a group and the check average. For example, out of
about eight million people in the five boroughs of New York City, only 52,907 claim

– :.13-

214 • The Globalization of Food

French ancestry, yet French restaurants are among the most popular destinations for
the fine-dining clientele, with 202 French eateries evaluated by Zagat 2006. In ad-
dition, the most high-priced restaurants classify themselves as Continental, French,
Japanese or American. The two most expensive restaurants in Manhattan in 2007
were Masa and Per Se. In contrast, almost two million New Yorkers claim an African
American heritage, and another two million claim Latino ancestry, but fine-dining
restaurants even remotely associated with their identities are among the fewest (11
and 10 respectively out of a total of over 2,000 restaurants evaluated by Zagat in
2006) and by far the cheapest ($24.50 for Soul and $22.00 for TexMex).

Just as there is a social clustering oflndian restaurants in the middle–along with
Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Korean eateries-there is some degree of spatial
clustering in three geographic areas: the stretch of East 6th Street between First and
Second Avenues that houses almost fifteen Indian restaurants run mostly by Bangla-
deshi migrants; the area between 26th and 29th Streets on Lexington Avenue, which
houses about twenty restaurants; and Jackson Heights in Queens, which is popular
among expatriate Indian men and hipster American students with adventurous pal-
ates.1 By the end of the 1990s, the city and its suburbs were also peppered by Indian
and Pakistani grocery stores and bodegas that sell cooked food-such as samosas.
dais and vegetable curries—-0n the side. But such eateries have rarely entered the
rarefied realm of restaurant criticism.

Indian Food Enters the Discourse on Fine-Dining Restaurants

Understandably, Indian food was covered sparingly in the NYT during the first hun-
dred years of its publication (from 1853 to 1953). The first proper discussion of it
appeared in 1876 under the title ‘An Essay on Curry’, which was really a diatribe
against serving Chablis with curry. It ended with the judgement that ‘For, though
curry is a good thing in its place and time … it hardly deserves to win its way, into the
higher domain of the gastronomic art. It still rather deserves the epithet of “barbaric”
than that of “marvellous”‘ (Anonymous, 1876: 2).

If Indian food was mentioned in passing and mostly in disdain, it is no surprise
that Indian restaurants in the United States were equally rare, first showing up in the
1920s but disappearing quickly thereafter until the 1960s. On 3 April 1921 Helen
Lowry identified the first Indian restaurant in the NYT in an article titled ‘The Old
World in New York’ (1921: 37). She did not give its name but wrote, ‘Six short weeks
ago an Indian restaurant was discovered on Eighth Avenue near 42nd Street. Grave
Indian gentlemen, with American clothes but with great turbans on their heads, used
to come in for their curry and rice’ (1921: 37). There was one other reference to an
Indian restaurant in New York before that, on 7 August 1912, but it is unclear from
the report whether the restaurant was real or just rumoured:

Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking • 215

Ranji Smile, who said he was a Prince, the fifth son of the late Amcer of Baluchistan …
was married yesterday at the City Hall to Miss Violet Ethel Rochlitz, daughter of Julian
W. Rochlitz of this city … In May, 1910, he [had] obtained a license to wed Miss Anna
Maria W. Davieson, but no return was ever made to the License Bureau to indicate that a
wedding had been performed. At that time the Prince said he had formerly run an Indian
restaurant on Fifth Avenue, between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets. About thir-
teen years ago Mr. Smile was a cuny cook at Sherry’s. (Anonymous, 1912: 11)

The first named restaurant advertising itself as a ‘Magnificent New Indian Restau-
rant’ was Longchamps on Madison Avenue at 59th Street, which was a chain of nine
restaurants that also served Hungarian beef goulash (4 October 1935).

Indian food in America has been covered over a longer duration and in much
greater detail, starting with a reference to make-believe Delhi at Luna Park, in Coney
Island in 1904, where there was a passing discussion of Bombay duck and other
peculiarities of the Indian diet (Anonymous, 1904 ). The next ripple came just ahead
of the 1933 World Fair at Chicago, which included an India pavilion financed by
the Indian cricketing prince Ranji, who promised, to the great delight of Americans,
it would appear from the article, that ‘Indian food, such as rice and curry, will be
featured in the restaurant and served in typical Indian fashion by Indian waiters and
waitresses in native costumes’ (Anonymous, 1932: 17).

One of the earliest discussions of cuny in the context of gourmandise appeared on
12 March 1939. Charlotte Hughes (1939: 53) asserted 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 cuny dishes on their menus’. Unfortu-
nately, she did not list either those restaurants or the menu items. She conceded that
‘Men, it seems, are more likely to be curry fans than women’. She went on to assert
that ‘Curry powder is a blend of fifteen or twenty spices’ that needs proper blend-
ing, as explained by ‘Darmadasa, of the East India Curry Shop, for Ceylon curry of
oysters’.

Jane Holt, working in conjunction with the Civilian Defense Volunteer Office
(with an interest in civilian nutrition, especially vitamin deficiency) and trade or-
ganizations such as the Spice Trader’s Association, wrote a number of articles on
curry in the 1940s. Where 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 7 September 1976. She informed us that ‘Chutney, by
definition, is a relish that is equally sour and sweet, according to the proprietor of the
East India Curry Shop, a restaurant that probably serves the most “authentic” curries
in town’ (Nickerson, 1946: 12). By 1948 India Prince was opened on 47th Street by
C. B. Deva. The new restaurant, ‘neat but unpretentious in appearance, provides an
opportunity for savouring some excellent Indian food, at prices ranging from $1.50
to $5 for a complete luncheon or dinner’ (Anonymous, 1948: 10).

216 • The Globalization of Food

The Hungarian-born chef Ernest Koves at Hotel Sulgrave in New York had to
explain through June Owen of the NYT that ‘Indian or Bengali curry is a very re-
fined dish. You get just a faint taste of the spices’, and curry anyway is a mixture of
‘sixteen or seventeen different spices, with red pepper, saffron, ginger, cayenne and
black pepper predominating. In India, one “rolls one’s own curry,” that is, you place
the whole spices on a stone slab and work over with a rolling pin until they are com-
pletely powderized’. He concluded, ‘To taste a truly fine curry, one must go to India’
(in Owen, 1955: 24). Similarly, Nickerson noted that there was hardly ‘a hint of
curry’ in the cuisine ofDharamjit Singh, a ‘crimson-turbaned Sikh’ who cooked an
Indian meal for some food-minded New Yorkers in 1955 (Nickerson, 1955: 20). He
said, ‘the authentic cooking of his country had a diversity that included many mild
dishes. Mr. Singh observed that curries he had eaten in east Indian restaurants in New
York were hotter than anything he ever had tasted in Delhi’ (Nickerson, 1955: 20).

Until about 1961 an authoritative native interlocutor was always invoked in
talking about Indian food. The informant was often a spice trader, a restaurateur, a
housewife but rarely a cook. Craig Claiborne, who changed the shape of restaurant
reviews and culinary reporting by acquiring an increasingly authoritative posture
towards the food and the audience, initially also depended on the exotic housewife to
vindicate him. On 25 February 1960, perhaps in his first piece on Indian food in the
NYT, Claiborne depended on Manorama Phillips (Claiborne, 1960: 22): ‘Miss Phil-
lips is a diminutive, dark-haired young woman with a mercurial smile who has lived
in the United States for nearly four years’. Phillips worked for the Government of
India Trade Center and roomed with an American woman. Her three-room apartment
was ‘handsomely furnished with Indian accessories’. The article was accompanied
by a six-by-six inch photograph of Phillips in her apartment, clad in a sari and framed
by exquisite Indian hand-crafted textiles.

In 1960 Nan Ickeringill advertised another kind of authority: the Conservative
English knight Sir William Steward-owner of the famous Veeraswammy’s in
London-who was credited with launching a ‘one-man crusade to discover these-
cret of good curries’ (lckeringill, 1960: 41). ‘It was really hard work’, recalled the
tenacious Englishman. Knowledge of curry had to be wrested from the hands of the
inscrutable native. The tenacious knight forced his way into kitchens; none ‘would
tell him how cuny was made, but the kitchen staff let him watch. They did not think
he would be able to solve the puzzle that way. However they sadly underestimated
both Sir William’s diligence and intelligence’. As late as 11 May 1961, Claiborne
depended on the figure of the sahib gone native to flavour his curry. He called on
William Clifford, ‘the young editor with Simon & Schuster’ who ‘is an excellent and
enthusiastic cook who lived in India several years ago’ (Claiborne, 1961 b: 44).

Only by 9 July 1961 did Claiborne let go of such aides as the adventurous knight,
the housewife or the spice trader to give five recipes for chutney (Claiborne, 1961 a:
SM35). By mid-1962 Claiborne’s self-confidence about ethnic food peaked, and he
ranged widely through hot tamale, chilli con came, Senegalese soup, lamb curry

Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking • 217

and chicken curry (Claiborne, 1962a: 148). ‘An enthusiasm for curried dishes’, he
said, ‘seems to be national and curries are as welcome in Wichita as in Westchester’
(Claiborne, 1962b: 32). Then there was the long explanation of what the curry is
not, which we have seen before: ‘It is almost easier to define a curry by what it is
not than by what it is. It is not made from the single spice of a tree, vine or bush. In
the western hemisphere, at least, curry powder is a combination of a dozen or more
spices, the prominent one being turmeric’ (Claiborne, 1962b: 32). This appears to
be an enduring trope of culinary journalism on curry and other ethnic and foreign
things-it is not what you think-asserting an early kind of expertise that came to
bloom slowly among this cohort of cultural experts. This was the beginning of the
process of sacralization of the restaurant critic in American society that had emerged
in full force by the end of the twentieth century.

Claiborne eventually launched an explanation of the authentic thing: ‘In India and
Pakistan, a curry is not a sipgle dish made from a classic formula but is more or less
any spiced sauce made with various meats, fish or fow I. Within the course of a single
meal at an Indian table there may be several cun-ies, none of which will taste the same
because the spices are varied with considerable care and discrimination’. How does
he know all this? We are not told any more. No native is paraded out nor any claims
made about travels in India. Perhaps by now Claiborne is expected to be an expert by
his increasingly cosmopolitan audience and he is therefore supposed to know such
things. As a result he launches into three remarkable recipes that are curries precisely
and only because curry powder is added, presumably the very thing curries in India
do not have, but the recipes are of the universe of sweet and spicy meat sauces with
added fruits, perhaps a curry only in name (Claiborne, 1962b: 32).

Subsequently, he appeared as jaded as the title of the next restaurant review,
‘A Rare Thing: Indian Restaurant with Food to Get Excited About’. In it he was
full of praise for the Gaylord restaurant housed in the Blackstone Hotel, at 50 East
58th Street, for being the ‘only Indian restaurant in the city with genuine tandoors or
tandoori, the authentic Indian hot-fired clay ovens. We find these ovens an enormous
plus, for without them an authentic “tandoori chicken”-and that of the Gaylord
is equal to the best we’ve eaten in New Delhi or London–cannot really be made’
(Claiborne, 1974: 34).

He had recently strengthened his credentials by travelling in northern India (in
1970), in particular Delhi and Agra, and by dining at Moti Mahal, the Moghul Room
(at the Oberoi Intercontinental Hotel), the Tan door (at the President Hotel) and at the
Flora across from Jama Masjid, all in Delhi. He also visited the Clarks Shiraz in Agra.
On his travels, connoting an expanding budget for the coverage of food, Claiborne
momentarily lost his capacity to be critical, and was giddy about hotel cuisine, where
it seemed it was impossible to ‘find a bad native dish’ (Claiborne, 1970: 56). In this
case, the friendly exoticism returned, such that it became impossible to distinguish
the good from the bad. But just because he could not discriminate between various
hotel cuisines, Claiborne did not give up on creating a hierarchy. He maintained his

218 • The Globalization of Food

distance from common Americans, by scolding them: ‘how odd it is that so many
Americans go to foreign countries and ignore the native food of whatever place they
happen to be’ (Claiborne, 1970: 56). How does he know that? We are not told.

The 1974 article is also the first where Claiborne named the chefs-Ram Dass
and Daulat Ram Sharma-neither of whom became celebrities. Claiborne was the
first major restaurant critic in the United States to save the cook from anonymity,
which turned out to be an important step in the making of a self-conscious cuisine.
That trend took another two decades to bloom, and it happened rarely for an ethnic
cook. The next time an Indian chef was named was by Florence Fabricant on 7 May
1978. 2 In 1979, when Mimi Sheratonreviewed Tandoor and Tre Sealini on the same
page, the Indian chef was ignored, but we learn that the Italian chef was Vittorio
Guarini (1979: Cl6). In 1985, even when Patricia Brooks credited improvements in
an Indian restaurant to a new chef she did not find out who it was (1985: CNl 7). In
1986, when Bryan Miller reviewed Akbar and Meridies on the same page, only chef
Susan Sugarman of the latter was named (1986: C24).

In 1984 when Marian Burros wrote that ‘America is flexing its gastronomic mus-
cles, and no where is this more obvious as in California. Here, where chefs are as
glamorous as movie stars … ‘ (1984, Cl) she was referring to named chefs. It is
instructive to see who got named in a December 1985 roundup of notable subur-
ban restaurants in Westchester County by M. H. Reed, who evaluated thirty eateries
by name (1985: WC13). Almost every owner and chef of French and Continental
restaurants–eleven total—was named. Exelusively Italian chefs were not named,
although if they cooked French and northern Italian food they came out of the shad-
ows. Spanish entrepreneurs were named but not the chef (contra Chithelen, 1986:
Ll5). Indian chefs were unknown. Japanese chefs were anonymous, and still are.
This was a stark confirmation of the hierarchy of taste in terms of its relationship to
the ethnicity of the cook in 1985.

Over the next decade some things changed as Italian and Japanese chefs got their
say, but rarely did a Mexican, Korean or an Indian chef. Ethnic cooks generally re-
mained invisible. ‘It’s a rare Indian restaurant’, Eric Asimov noted as late as 2002,
‘that acknowledges the existence of its chef, unless it’s a star consultant like Madhur
Jaffrey or Raji Jallepalli-Reiss’ (2002: FIO). Note the sleight of hand by which he
assigned blame, apparently on Indian restaurateurs, but not restaurant critics for their
complicity in the problem. By the 1990s coverage of Indian restaurants reached new
heights, with 300 articles in the NYT in that decade, at a respectable distance behind
Italian restaurants (1,264), Chinese (840), French (594), Japanese (368), American
(34 7) and Mexican (316). The coverage of Indian restaurants was up from 182 in the
1980s, 100 in the 1970s, 13 in the 1960s and 2 in the 1950s. As coverage intensified,
the associated commentary appropriated a more objective language of critique rather
than just factual information, exotic fascination, or even sneering Orientalism.

For instance, on 13 September 1963 in reviewing the Kashmir Restaurant, an
unnamed correspondent noted the mere facts of its location, price and decor, end-

Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking • 219

ing with a quick judgment–‘it is one of the best Pakistani and Indian restaurants
in town’ (Anonymous, 1963: 51 ). By the 1964 World Fair the critical load was in-
creased when Claiborne (the critic was named by then) noted that ‘The food is ad-
mirably spiced but without the overpowering hotness that is frequently and often
mistakenly ascribed to Indian cuisine … [although] the salad was ordinaty and un-
inspired’ (1964: 16). A touch of the exotic was maintained by reference to ‘the most
incredibly beautiful women, hostesses with delicate faces wearing saris and sandals’.
In a 1969 review of Shalimar, Claiborne explained a new cuisine when he wrote,
‘There’s a very good appetizer called samosas, a pastry filled with well-spiced meat
or vegetable’, and sharpened his critical focus with ‘There are two faults that seem
basic to the Shalimar: The various curries are bland and have a sameness of flavor;
and some of the dishes seem woefully over-cooked, particularly the shrimp’ (Clai-
borne, 1969a: 42). Claiborne had come a long way from 1960 when he had to depend
on Manorama Phillips to help hi~ understand Indian food. He returned to the native
informant once more in 1985 but this time to fathom a regional Indian cuisine-
Gujarati (Claiborne, 1985: Cl). By 1969 he was able to assert with confidence, all on
his own, that ‘There is not a restaurant in New York that prepares food equal to that
in a well-staffed Indian or Pakistani home’ (1969b: 12).

I do not want to insinuate that Claiborne was being pretentious. He was merely
developing a script that distinguished a restaurant critic from others-as every new
profession must-and that developed credibility with the public who had to be will-
ing to pay for it. Practitioners in ‘communities of practice are engaged in the gen-
erative process of producing their own future’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 57-58).
Claiborne in fact hit the perfect note. He came across as someone who knew his stuff
but who could also display humility with a sense of humour. He was even willing to
be corrected about Indian food.

It also appears that for the last 100 years everyone began their coverage of Indian
food with a comment about heat. For instance, an anonymous 1897 piece titled ‘In-
dian Curries’ noted that the curry offered in the West ‘consists principally of turmeric
and cayenne pepper that sacrifices the roof of your mouth and tongue and gives no
pleasure in eating’ (Anonymous, 1897: BR7). Almost 100 years later, on 26 Novem-
ber 1982, Mimi Sheraton writing about an Indian restaurant noted,

Dynamite is merely hot, but double [dynamite] is promised as the real thing, so insist on
it if your tolerance is high. Having had a problem with customers who ask for food very
spicy, then return it because it is too spicy, the owner has become reluctant to add the full
share of chili and pepper, until he is sure of his customer. ( 1982, C 18)

One thing had changed in 100 years: the complaint had been turned on its head.
Sheraton, David Canady and Raymond Sokolov repeatedly insisted on the real thing,
real heat, like connoisseurs. In the process they also incessantly berated the Ameri-
can public for forcing these ethnic folks to tone down the real thing. Why bother to

220 • The Globalization of Food

have Indian food if it did not cauterize your throat, they wondered? Burros composed
a whole piece titled ‘A Quest forthe Hottest of the Hot’ (Burros, 1986: 52). Her com-
plaint was typical: ‘if you can convince the staff at the Indian restaurant Darbar that
you mean business when you say hot, they may make the ghost vindaloo hot enough
to call for a fire extinguisher. Now ifthere were some way to convince the local Thai
restaurants to believe customers when they say they want the food authentically hot’
(Burros, 1986: 52). Heat became shorthand for difference, and tolerating it, nay ap-
preciating it, appeared to be an important way for critics to distinguish themselves
from the run of the mill American.

That act of distinction from the common American was particularly difficult to
pull off until the 1980s because the critics in their reviews did not typically include
any material on the entrepreneurial or production conditions of the cuisine they were
covering. That was a surprise to me, that critics did not take advantage of their access
to the backstage, which is where they could have a clear and easy advantage over
the consumer. Perhaps this was because their public was not interested in the pro-
duction of cuisine, only in its consumption. Attention to craftsmanship and artistry
came later, mostly in the 1990s, by way of display kitchens and celebrity entrepre-
neurs. Instead, in the 1980s, heat became the carrier of a double difference, of ethnic
food from nonethnic, and the taste of the critic from that of the standard American
consumer, so much so that claims of inauthentic mildness of ethnic food were often
repeated, in the exact same words, in reviews of distinctly different cuisines-for
example, Indian, Thai, Mexican, Vietnamese and so on. Thankfully, Claiborne was
never enamoured by heat per se.

What Claiborne set out to do in the 1960s and 1970s became a norm by the new
millennium. Mark Bittman’s 2003 piece on upscale Asian restaurants in London can
be used to mark the apogee of promotion oflndian food and also underline the inter-
national circuit of global cities on which such things get played out. He wrote:

The excitement generated by Tamarind’s opening eight years ago [1995] cannot be over-
stated. Here was an Indian restaurant on a chic Mayfair street charging upscale prices and

serving Indian food in glamorous style. It quickly became not only the talk of the town
but, with Zaika … among the first Indian restaurants in Europe to receive a Michelin star.
Now, the phenomenon is almost commonplace: most major cities in Britain, the United
States, India and elsewhere have similar restaurants (Bittman, 2003: 57).

Many of the ancient formulas have by now been abandoned: (1) the incessant
focus on heat is gone, (2) the endless explaining of what is curry and what it is not
is done with, (3) outsider descriptions of samosas, pakoras, idlis and utthappam are
passe and (4) the backstage is no longer effaced, making the entrepreneur and the
chef visible. The first three transformations are possible because by now the critic
and the public have tightly constituted each other, with less and less that needs to
be explained, hence there is room to delve into design, decor and the making of the

Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking • 221

backstage. As less and less needs to be said, an entire ensemble of assumptions is re-
inscribed in the body of the field ofrestaurant criticism. Furthermore, it is precisely
the invisible networks of affiliation between entrepreneur, chef and menu-invisible
to the mere customer-which become the locus of the critic’s new expertise. It is
the access to the back that now distinguishes the critic. In addition, new expertise is
indicated in having familiarity both with upscale temples of cuisine such as Devi and
cheap, quirky joints at the bottom of the market that might include the Dosa Cart at
Washington Square, which is what others have characterized as cultural omnivorous-
ness (Johnston and Baumann, 2007).

Today food has entered the fashion cycle, at least in Manhattan, and Indian food
is playing its part in it. The process began in the 1960s and 1970s when we witnessed
the birth of a new discourse through the pen of a new kind of expert, the restaurant
critic, that hastened the circulation of cultural capital through the sinews of an urban,
public space, already invigorated by discussion of fashion, movies and music, in the
burgeoning magazine and newspaper trade. But all this is from the perspective of
the connoisseur and critic. What of the Indian immigrant? Unfortunately we know
next to nothing about the Indian immigrant restaurateur or cook or server.3 I am just
beginning the process of interviewing about eighty restaurateurs and conducting a
census of their labour force. Although we will have to wait for the results of that
study, what we do know is that just as Indian-born New Yorkers are overrepresented
as physicians, professors and yellow cab drivers, they are underrepresented as chefs,
bartenders, dishwashers and hostesses. We know very little about them. But we do
know what middle-class Indian professionals eat, especially at home.

Expatriate Home Cooking

To say something about expatriate domestic cookery I have to abandon the cat-
egory ‘Indian’ and look more closely at any of the linguistic subsets such as
Punjabi-American, Gujarati-American, Bengali-American and so on. Since Bengali-
Americans have been most closely studied, I will use their case to illustrate my
points about Indian-American domestic cookery. There are about 100,000 Benga-
lis in the United States. For most of the approximately 30,000 Bengali-American
households, breakfast eaten at home consists of milk and cereal or toast. The ex-
ception is that tea is served instead of the ubiquitous American coffee. Lunch, con-
sumed at or near the workplace, is a salad or a slice of pizza, sometimes a sandwich,
or a packed lunch from home of roti and subgi. It is dinner that remains the realm
of ‘tradition’, where there is still a literal truth to the question asked by a Bengali:
‘Have you eaten rice?’ Rice, dal, and fish cooked in a sauce with panch phoron (a
Bengali five-spice mix of fenugreek, onion seed, fennel, cumin and mustard seed),
is eaten for dinner, more often in the United States than in Kolkata (for details on
methodology, sample size, etc. see Ray, 2004).

222 • The Globalization of Food

It is of course an exaggeration to say that dinner remains wholly ‘traditional’ in
any meaningful sense. For instance, the appetizer for one of the households I ob-
served for a Sunday dinner was turkey pakora cooked with chopped garlic, ginger,
onion and fresh cilantro. Turkey is hardly a traditional Bengali ingredient. Yet it is
cooked in a typically Bengali form, with ground turkey replacing ground goat meat.
Any meat in Bengali cuisine is usually cooked with the trinity of wet spices-onion,
ginger and garlic. It is so in the case of the pakoras. Then there is the more explicit
intermingling of what are self-consciously defined as American and Bengali cui-
sines on Monday night when the menu was roast chicken, steamed rice, American
style salad, sauteed bittermelon, grapes and apple juice. On Tuesday it was a typi-
cally Bengali repertoire, albeit with the exception of strawberry shortcake for dessert
and grape juice as an accompaniment. On Wednesday, dinner was at Red Lobster-
hardly a classical Bengali option.

Nonetheless, there is a pervasive Bengaliness in all this mixing up. Rice contin-
ues to be the core of the evening meal. The animal protein is important but remains
a fringe item in terms of the calorie contribution to the meal. It is usually two small
pieces of fish or a few bite-sized portions of meat. The complex carbohydrate core
and the animal-protein fringe is paired with the third defining element-dal. Dal
is sparsely spiced, which is often a few roasted cumin seeds. The animal protein
fringe, in contrast, is highly spiced, as is typical in Bengali cuisine. The spices and
herbs are drawn mostly from the Bengali repertoire, and the cooking processes
are typically limited to sauteing, stewing and braising-basic Bengali notions of
cooking.

Further, we see the greatest change in the elements that are peripheral to the Ben-
gali conception of the ‘meal’, that is, turkey replacing goat meat in the appetizer,
juices and soda replacing water and strawberry shortcake simulating Bengali des-
serts. It is because the most radical changes are confined to the accompaniments-
the drinks, the dessert and the appetizer–that the ‘meal’ as such can still be defined
as Bengali. Hence, in spite of rampant creolization of ingredients, dinner is perceived
as the realm of traditional Bengali cuisine. What might encourage the perception
of the Bengaliness of dinner is that it is truly so, almost in an exaggerated manner.
Middle-class Bengalis consider rice and fish to be the most distinctive ethnic ingre-
dients of their meal. About 60 per cent of Bengali-American households serve rice
for dinner almost every day. An equally dramatic sign of change is the rate of con-
sumption offish. Almost one-half of Bengali-American households eat fish at dinner
on an average day in a week, while only a third or fewer comparable households in
Kolkata serve fish for dinner on a typical day. Thus expatriate families have become
even more Bengali in their food habits in exile!

In addition, rice and fish have migrated from lunch to dinner, and dinner has
become more important in defining a Bengali culinary identity in the United States.
The heightened valorization of dinner is in itself a product of modem work sched-

Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking • 223

ules, which de-valorize other meals in the enactment of the self, although, in this
case, the same modern transformation is being used to strengthen a tradition-a
dinner of rice and fish. Further, the portion size of fish has almost doubled from
about four ounces on the outside in Kolkata to about six to eight ounces in the
United States, which is also a development that can be seen either as Westerniza-
tion (because of the valorization of the protein component of the meal) or as a
traditional carryover (because of the stress on fish-a self-conscious marker of
Bengaliness). Perhaps a Bengali would not be a Bengali without consuming rice
and fish in one of the main meals of the day. As dinner has come to be the only
cooked meal, Bengali-Americans feel compelled to partake of ingredients that an-
chor their Bengaliness-that is, rice and fish. Thus dinner has changed in two direc-
tions: new ingredients, such as turkey, are absorbed into old culinary paradigms,
and the use of old constituents, such as rice and fish, are insisted upon. One absorbs
change and the other acceptuates tradition.

Middle-class Bengali men are particularly insistent on a Bengali dinner and that
may be for a number of reasons: (1) their limited social interaction with other Ameri-
cans outside the context of work, hence their unfamiliarity with American food other
than the hotdog, hamburger and salad; (2) as a respite from the American world that
they confront.each day; (3) their culinary incompetence as men-only one man in
126 households cooks regularly-which makes their nostalgia particularly acute and
takes the form of a desperate longing for their mother’s cooking; and (4) the smell
of Bengali food cooking at the hearth confirms their very nature as Bengali men and
is proof of both patriarchal control and containment of polluting American cultural
influences.

With breakfast and dinner, it is as if middle-class Bengali migrants have divided
up the day into what they characterize as moments of ‘modernity’ and moments
of ‘tradition’, both perceived as good and necessary in their separate places. This
complementary duality towards the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’-the former imag-
ined as embodied in something as mundane as industrialized breakfast cereal and the
latter with traditional rice and fish-is central to the identity of the Bengali bhad-
rasamaj. The Indian middle-class has long been both threatened and seduced by the
promise of modernization, and they have acted on those concerns in organizing their
food practices in the United States.

Reprise

There are at least two configurations in which Indian food is served in Manhattan,
one in exotic restaurants to the imaginary voyager, and the other in familiar settings
to the travel-weary expatriate. They are opposite but ·complementary approaches
to home and heritage. The migrant’s search for stringency in home cooking and

224 • The Globalization of Food

the tourist’s quest for authentic ethnic food-where one can distinguish between a
samosa and a pakora or maybe even a singara with the help of the critic-are con-
gruent strategies to still the turbulence of time, one projected on another people, and
the other projected on another place. The cool metropolitanflaneur and the awkward
immigrant are caught in their corresponding quest for authenticity. Both are comple-
mentary considerations about home and heritage, which is nothing more than our
relationship to a place and a past.

Notes

An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘Feeding Modem Desires’ in
Seminm; 566 (October): 30–4, Delhi, India.

1. There are more eateries in Queens than in the other boroughs (perhaps with
the exception of Manhattan), and that is related to the demand for Indian food,
which is partially related to residency of the Indian immigrant population. Ac-
cording to the 2005-2007 American Community Survey of the Census Bureau
of the United States, a total of about 247,292 Indian Americans (alone or in
combination) lived in New York City, of which 65 per cent lived in Queens,
15 per cent in Brooklyn, 10 per cent in Manhattan, 7 per cent in the Bronx, and
4 per cent in Staten Island (Asian American Federation Census Information
Center, 2009).

2. The chefs at Sitar were Ranjit Kundu and Mohan Singh, listed by Fabricant
(1978: LIS). Julie Sahni is probably New York’s first Indian celebrity chef,
named and venerated by Burros (1984: C20).

3. For aggregate data and some interview material, see Fiscal Policy Institute
(2007) and Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (2005).

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The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity:

Chinese Food as a Social Accomplishment

Author(s): Shun Lu and Gary Alan Fine
Source: The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Summer, 1995), pp. 535-553
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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The Sociological Quarterly

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THE PRESENTATION OF ETHNIC AUTHENTICITY:

Chinese Food as a Social Accomplishment

Shun Lu*

Gary Alan Fine
University of Georgia

Ethnic entrepreneurs in American society often carve out an economic niche by means of
business enterprises and cultural events that are open to the general public and showcase
ethnic culture. These locations depend upon a display of the ethnic culture that is simulta-

neously seen as “authentic” and within the bounds of cultural expectations (“American-
ized”). In a society that values toleration and cross-cultural contacts, many consumers
desire a unique, yet comfortable experience, given their own cultural preferences. We focus
on the presentation of ethnic food in four Chinese restaurants in a small southern city.
Ethnic tradition continues but in the context of a continuous process of adaptation. Authen-

ticity is not an objective criterion but is socially constructed and linked to expectations. We

contrast two broad classes of Chinese restaurants–consumption-oriented and connoisseur-
oriented-to describe strategies by which restaurateurs fit Chinese food into market niches.

We conclude by suggesting some directions for the study of public ethnic culture.

In contemporary American society, ethnicity is revealed as much by symbolism through
public display as by any other factor. While the display of ethnicity does not eliminate its
social psychological power to affect self-image, much ethnicity is made real through cultural
transactions: a viable ethnic identity depends on a set of symbols and signs, products of inter-
action with other groups (Royce 1982, p. 6; Gans 1979; Van den Berghe 1984, pp. 393-394;
Isajiw 1990, p. 87). At least in the American context, ethnic identity is socially constructed
and depends on a set of consistent actions that permits others to place an individual in an
ethnic category (Alba 1990, p. 75). This is the case even when such cultural placement does
not do justice to the complex and multistranded lived experiences of contemporary “ethnic”
actors whose ethnic experiences are continually shaped (through acquiescence or resistance)
by the responses of members of the societies in which the ethnic group is embedded (Chow
1993, p. 6; Denzin 1994, pp. 76-77). This process is in actuality quite fluid and negotiated.

The understanding of the dynamics of “ethnicity” is bolstered through an approach that
emphasizes the transactions between the “ethnic group” and its public. Significantly, many of
the transactions by which ethnicity is made “real” are economically grounded: festivals, res-
taurants, art galleries, clothing outlets, and musical venues. Ethnicity often becomes a market-
ing tool, part of an entrepreneurial market.

We aim to advance the sociological understanding of publicly displayed ethnicity, accultur-
ations and cultural pluralism by examining a set of mercantile strategies-specifically, the

*Direct all correspondence to Shun Lu and Gary Alan Fine, Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602.

The Sociological Quarterly, Volume 36, Number 3, pages 535-553.

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536 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 36/No. 3/1995

preparation and sale of Chinese food to American diners.’ We examine the choices of food

preparation and presentation of restaurateurs whose client base consists largely of those
outside the ethnic group.2

We ask how ethnic food, as a readily recognized marker of ethnicity and as a major form of
traditional culture (Goode, Curtis, and Theophano, 1984; Alba 1990, pp. 85-93) is produced
and marketed in contemporary American society. How do Chinese restaurant owners make
their food appealing to those outside their ethnic group? We examine the constructs of authen-
ticity and Americanization as contrasting strategies to create an economically viable market
niche. More generally, we explore the dialectic relationship between the continuity of tradition
and the continuous process of change found in the presentation of “traditional” activities. For
clients outside the ethnic group, novel culinary traditions must be situated so as to seem simul-

taneously exotic and familiar: distinguishable from mainstream cuisine (and thus desirable)
yet able to be assimilated as edible creations (Finkelstein 1989).

In contrast to many ethnic businesses, Chinese restaurants rely primarily on an external
rather than an internal market (Aldrich and Waldinger 1990; Light and Bonacich 1988). Own-
ers are “cultural entrepreneurs,” who use their ethnicity as a “vital part of [their] stock in
trade” (Palmer 1984, p. 85). Their strategies permit clients to believe that they have had an
“exotic encounter,” while keeping the experience within the boundaries of cultural expecta-
tions-strategies also found in the tourist industry and public festivals (Chace 1992). Ethnic
businesses can succeed by providing desired “exotic goods” and opportunities for “internal
tourism” (Van den Berghe 1984, p. 393) that other organizations cannot provide as cheaply or
as authentically (Aldrich and Waldinger 1990, p. 117). The scarcity of the experience contrib-
utes to its marketability (Palmer 1984).

The members of the group recognize that their traditional culture is being altered, but si-
multaneously they believe that they are educating their clients to understand their culture.
Ethnic food both attempts to fit the market (demand producing supply), while altering that
market over time (supply producing demand). As suggested by Frederik Barth (1969), the
question is how much change in a cultural tradition is possible before we claim that the cul-
tural tradition no longer characterizes the ethnic group from which it is supposedly derived.

THE CHINESE RESTAURANT

The ethnic restaurant serves as a propitious setting for observing public ethnicity and the
dynamics of culinary adaptation in contemporary American life. Typically, the examination of
foodways has been in the context of domestic life. Yet ethnic restaurants, as a locus for the
interaction between food production and consumption, provide a significant and unexplored
organizational arena for depicting the conflict between continuity and change of an ethnic
tradition in a market context. How does symbolism become solidified in economic life
(Denzin 1977)? Ethnic dining plays a prominent role in modern American life (Konvitz 1975),
particularly as approximately half of the meals eaten by Americans are consumed outside the
home.3 Moreover, Americans enjoy “gastronomic tourism” (Zelinsky 1985, p. 51).

The Chinese restaurant has become a nearly ubiquitous feature of American urban and
suburban life (Levenstein 1993).4 It has been estimated that there are now over 30,000 Chi-
nese restaurants in the United States,s accounting for nearly a third of all “ethnic restaurants”

(Zelinsky 1985, p. 60), with revenues of $9 billion (Karnow 1994, p. 87). Such figures are
particularly remarkable in that Americans of Chinese descent represent less than one percent
of the population.

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The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity 537

Chinese restaurants serve as a model for the examination of ethnic dining.6 Chinese food is

one of the most popular and sophisticated cuisines in the world and enjoys a long and distinc-
tive tradition. In addition, the success of Chinese restaurants provides a valuable case of the
growth and institutionalization of an “alien” culture. Chinese food has been regarded as “a
taste of success” (Epstein 1993), as the cuisine has become widely accepted. Chinese restau-
rants in the past few decades have increasingly become differentiated according to region,
cuisine, and audience, ranging from run-down storefronts to elaborate temples of culinary
extravagance. Indeed, Chinese restaurants are now found throughout the American landscape,
even in small towns and rural areas.

We describe the food preparation strategies of four Chinese restaurants (China Fast-Food
Restaurant, China Boat, Guangdong, and Sichuan) in Athens, Georgia, the home of the Uni-
versity of Georgia. Athens has a population of 80,000 and is located about sixty miles north-
east of Atlanta. Shun Lu conducted participant observation from April to August of 1992,
observing food preparation, cooking, and serving. She also conducted 26 interviews with
owners, cooks, and customers. Each interview lasted from one to three hours.

The University, with nearly 30,000 students in addition to its faculty and staff, provides a
large proportion of potential customers for local restaurants. Approximately four hundred Chi-
nese students attend the university (largely graduate students), half from the mainland and half

from Taiwan, constituting 1.4 percent of the total student population. These students, on a
tight graduate student budget, typically prepare meals at home rather than eat at restaurants,
and eat at Chinese restaurants less frequently than American students.

Eight Chinese restaurants operate in Athens. Sichuan Restaurant is the oldest one currently
in operation, having opened twenty years ago. By contrast, China Boat opened three years
ago; China Fast-Food Restaurant has been open for seven years; and Guangdong for eight
years. The backgrounds of the owners are characteristic of Chinese who have immigrated
since the 1960s-most either have a college degree or had professional experience before they
entered the restaurant business: the owners of Guangdong are graduates of the University of

Georgia (the male owner is a professor); the owners of China Fast-Food Restaurant are col-
lege graduates from Taiwan; the male owner of China Boat used to be a university professor
in mainland China and has a doctorate from the University of Georgia. Servers in these restau-

rants are either university students who work part-time or students’ spouses who work full-
time but often are preparing to enter a graduate program once they have earned sufficient
income for tuition and living expenses. The cooks are professionals, trained at various Chi-
nese restaurants. The presence of a well-educated staff is a distinctive characteristic of many
Chinese restaurants.

Unlike many older immigrants who live in an urban Chinatown, the Chinese in Athens do
not form a closed ethnic community. They do not rely on mutual help and support from other
Chinese for survival and success. Thus, social ties between Chinese immigrants are looser
than those found in a traditional Chinatown. The existence of these restaurants reflects a

changing settlement pattern by Chinese immigrants outside tight-knit ethnic enclaves. These
Chinese immigrants, unlike their forbears, rely less on their relatives and are less bound by
“blood and land ties” (Light 1972). They are career-oriented and settle in places where they
perceive economic opportunities.

In addition, their attitude toward their cultural heritage differ from the assimilation-oriented

immigrants’ children. The owners are American citizens but believe that they are still Chi-
nese. In other words, they maintain a strong sense of Chinese identity, despite their economic

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538 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 36/No. 3/1995

assimilation. They do not consider these elements-maintenance of cultural tradition and par-
ticipation in a nonethnic market-as irreconcilable (Wang 1991).7

Ethnic restaurants outside a major metropolitan area survive by appealing to an exogenous
client base. Even though university communities are more cosmopolitan than many small
southern cities, they lack a sufficient Chinese and Chinese American clientele for economic
survival. Chinese restaurants surrounded by mainstream American culture necessarily interact
primarily with a “European-American” environment as compared to restaurants located in
“Chinatown.” The reality that more Americans than Chinese are potential customers and that
no closed Chinese community exists suggests that the eating habits and cultural images of
Americans will take priority in organizational strategies.

AUTHENTICITY AND AMERICANIZATION

A prominent feature of much ethnic food in contemporary America is that the ethnic “purity”
of the food has been diluted (Alba 1990, p. 86). As in all cases of cultural diffusion, adjust-
ments are made to accommodate the values of the host society. Yet, degrees of Americaniza-
tion vary by restaurant and by cuisine. By Americanization we refer to the conscious decision
of restaurateurs to transform ingredients and techniques of traditional recipes (Tomlinson
1986) to meet American tastes.8 What constitutes Americanized food is a social construction,
as is what constitutes Chinese food. Despite the changes, food is often presented by the ethnic
restaurant as being “authentic”-for many consumers, a socially desirable image in a compet-
itive and differentiated market. This is not a phenomenon specific only to Chinese restau-
rants-signs proclaim “authentic Italian food” or “authentic Mexican food,” despite market-
based adaptations of these cuisines. Authenticity is typically defined as being that which is
believed or accepted to be genuine or real: true to itself (Taylor 1991, p. 17). Authentic food
implies that products are prepared using the same ingredients and processes as found in the
homeland of the ethnic, national, or regional group. Americanized ethnic food suggests that
the local and traditional characteristics of the dish as indigenously prepared have been modi-
fied or transformed. In this “moral” sense, the food does not deserve the label of being
authentic.

Authenticity as an objective category has become increasingly criticized by cultural ana-
lysts (e.g., Bendix 1992) who claim that authenticity is a discursive strategy for sociopolitical
ends (Berman 1970; Taylor 1991) and that, at best, it is a matter of degree. Authenticity is a
locally constructed folk idea, and those objects that are said to represent authentic experience
may become a site of contention. Just as tradition is mutable and contingent (Hobsbawm and
Ranger 1984; Fine 1989), so is authenticity. Within a culture, different acceptable models
exist for the same practice.

Contributing to the contingent nature of authenticity is that the culture of any social group
is in continual flux. Cultures are never entirely closed systems: external changes affect cul-
tural logics. Nowhere is this more evident than with regard to cuisine. From generation to
generation, some culinary preparations and foodways absorb features of “alien” foods-per-
haps a function of biological succession of foodstuffs, migration, technological change,
shortages, or alterations in food-related ideologies (e.g., increased negative attitudes toward
red meats, sugar, fat, or animal products; increased positive attitudes toward fish, turkey, or
leafy greens). The vitality of a culinary system depends on its adaptability and flexibility. The
maintenance of a food pattern does not depend on whether it is identical with an original
model but on whether the “fundamental” characteristics of the food are defined as being con-

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The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity 539

tinuously present, connected to core cultural beliefs, and recognized as a differentiated food
pattern.

The practice of presenting Americanized ethnic food as authentic raises significant socio-
logical questions about the presentation of ethnicity in the marketplace. Specifically, how is
authenticity framed for an audience? How does authenticity affect the dishes presented by a
restaurant? How does market segmentation affect models of authenticity?

In “Staged Authenticity,” Dean MacCannell (1973; see also 1976) argues that many sight-
seers are motivated by a desire to see the life of natives as it is really lived, a desire for truth,

intimacy, and sharing the lived experience behind the performed scenes. The touristic
(voyeuristic) gaze is only one example of the desire for authenticity in contemporary Ameri-
can life. Motivated by the same desire, a search for authentic experience is also found in
Americans’ interest in ethnic foods (Finkelstein 1989; Shelton 1990). If tourists’ search for
authenticity is reflected by their concern for fabricated scenes, their dislike of the mundane,
and their preference for the exotic, many diners feel that the culinary authenticity of ethnic
food allows them to experience and perhaps identify with the “true foreignness” of the ethnic
group: eating out becomes food for the “soul” (Pillsbury 1990)-a form of identity work
(Snow and Anderson 1987). Through the consumption of ethnic cuisine we demonstrate to
ourselves and others that we are cosmopolitan and tolerant: our character is expressed through

our behavior in the market. In this sense, the clich&–“you are what you eat”-has sociologi-
cal validity. The construction of authentic food responds to American’s quest for authentic
experience and identity transformation (Gergen 1991).

Due to the sensory characteristics of food and dining, demands for authenticity and the
actual, more conventional practices of most diners diverge. Our proclaimed identity may di-
verge from our comfort level. In other words, a discrepancy exists between ideal and accept-
ance, even when diners are unaware of the contradiction in their desires. The seemingly
contradictory requirements of ethnic food-ideally, it should be authentic; practically, it
should be Americanized-make it necessary for the restaurant to construct both the meaning
of authentic food and a market niche, in the process creating an image of their cultural tradi-
tions for their customers, as they create images of their customers. As a result, the naming
practices of owners of Chinese restaurants-Jade Lion, Lotus Flower, Sichuan Gardens, Pearl
River-are strategies designed to reinforce the desire of diners for exotic experience (Karnow
1994, p. 87) and to generate an exotic hyperreality.

In the literature on ethnicity, ethnic food is typically located within families and ethnic
communities. Many social scientists expected that distinctive foodways would weaken or dis-
appear with increasing assimilation and acculturation (Freeman and Grivetti 1981; Jerome
1975). In fact, later generations of immigrants tend in some measure to discard the eating
habits of their parents or grandparents and adopt the standard American diet, saving their
ethnic cuisine for special occasions (e.g., Brown and Mussell 1984). The survival and modifi-
cation of ethnic culture in public life is made possible largely through the continuity of ethnic
food in restaurants and fast-food establishments. While this contrasts with a purist belief in
authentic ethnic experience, it generates a dialectic between assimilation and cultural plural-
ism (Alba 1985; Glazer and Moynihan 1963; Newman 1973).

THE AMERICANIZATION OF CHINESE FOOD

When asked, many Chinese customers comment-not surprisingly-that the food served in
Chinese restaurants in Athens differs from the food they ate in their homeland. These restau-

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540 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 36/No. 3/1995

rants serve “Americanized Chinese food” (Yancey 1992). Given the alien environment, is it
possible to serve authentic Chinese food to American diners? Each owner and cook inter-
viewed answered in the negative.

While American customers explained that they selected Chinese food for its difference
from American cuisine-its otherness-this display of otherness had to remain within the
context of American foodstuffs and presentation. Exoticism was a concept that was not abso-
lute but related to the standards of the American palate. The owner of Sichuan Restaurant
opined:

When we opened the first Chinese restaurant here eighteen years ago many customers had

never eaten any Chinese food. They were attracted by the reputation of the food, but they

would have been disappointed if we had served all those kinds of authentic food. We have
made changes according to their taste. They could not accept our food all of a sudden. But
bit by bit they accepted our tofu, our dishes cooked with green onion and ginger, and even

the hot and spicy dishes. I say, only bit by bit. We must make some changes.

The presentation of authentic Chinese food is prevented by social, cultural, and economic
constraints of the market, coupled with the perceptions of those constraints. In our interviews
and in their talk with restaurant owners, American customers did not complain about the lack
of authenticity of the food and may have been unaware of alterations that would have been
obvious to a Chinese diner. The food fit the definition of exotic cuisine and was accepted as
such. Ethnic food can only be accepted by adapting it into a cultural matrix and by creating a

set of culinary expectations. In most settings, such a process is gradual. While we cannot
know the reaction of local diners to such delicacies as wax gourd and duck feet, the segmenta-
tion of Chinese restaurant markets in larger urban areas with relatively more exotic restaurants
located in “Chinatowns” and areas of cultural and artistic capital and more “Americanized”
Chinese restaurants in suburbs and working-class neighborhoods suggests that the meaning of
appropriate Chinese food is locally constructed. Cultural segments use local criteria for judg-
ing foods, limiting the acceptance of cultural traditions.

Ultimately, the meanings of food depend on the social location of those who consume it. A
prized dish in one culture may be rejected in another due to different habits and beliefs and
different degrees of culinary adventurousness or appreciation of sensory domains, all related
to the habitus of the diner (Bourdieu 1984). For example, while “steamed fish” is a traditional
and frequently ordered dish in restaurants in China, it is absent from the menus of all but a
few Chinese restaurants in the United States. The owner of Sichuan explains:

The steamed fish relies less on the enhancement of spices than other dishes and has a high

requirement on the freshness of the raw material; ideally, it should be alive. Chinese enjoy
the original flavor of the fish and a Chinese gourmet takes the fish’s head and tail as the
most delicious parts. But Americans do not like to eat fish with head and bones; they like
fillet. Besides, they like food with a stronger flavor; the steamed fish is too light-flavored

and too fishy for them. They do not care for the original flavor. That’s why we do not
include it in our menu.

In addition, the tendons of beef or pork and beef tripe are two favorite dishes in Chinese
restaurants on the mainland and in Taiwan. Other dishes using inner organs or extremities of

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The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity 541

animals, such as ox’s tail, pig’s tongue, and duck’s feet, are very popular. Chinese preferences
for dishes of this kind are closely connected to their belief system. They consider these dishes
delicious as well as nutritious, connected to a Taoist belief in the unity of the human body
(Rin 1982). In contrast, Americans define internal organs as dirty, of unpleasant texture, and
unhealthy. The production of authenticity is constrained by aesthetic standards, linked to cul-
tural discourse about health and cleanliness.

Economic reality also constrains authenticity. Ethnic restaurants operate within a highly
competitive capitalist free market (Fine forthcoming). In order to survive, a restaurant must
minimize its fixed, labor, and material costs, while charging enough for what they serve, in
order to make a profit. In doing this the restaurant must balance the cost and quality of their
dishes to maintain a steady and dependable clientele. If the food does not appeal to the cus-
tomers and does not sell, the restaurateur cannot afford to wait for the customers to change
their attitudes.

The restaurant owner who wished to cook food as served in mainland China would confront

a problem of the costs of authentic raw materials. All four restaurants, in spite of their differ-
ences in orientation (discussed below), use “American vegetables”–carrots, snow peas, green
peppers, broccoli, and mushrooms. These vegetables are locally available and preferred by
American customers. In contrast, these restaurants avoid authentic Chinese vegetables. Some
frequently used vegetables in China such as fresh bamboo shoots, hotbed chives, garlic bolt,
and wax gourd are difficult to obtain. Although some are available in Atlanta, they are more
expensive than local American vegetables and are less acceptable to American diners. Since
the acceptance of Chinese items cannot happen “at once,” it is not wise for the restaurant to
cook with authentic vegetables even if they are available and cost efficient. When some au-
thentic vegetables are both more expensive and more likely to be rejected, owners have little
incentive for maintaining their culinary traditions. While some wish to educate the palates of
their customers, this process depends upon a change in taste and has an uncertain outcome as
the competition may be better able to provide for diners.

NEGOTIATING AUTHENTICITY

Culinary activities are socially constructed. The constraints, while present, are not inevitable.
Many customers desire the “illusion of authenticity,” which motivates chefs and owners to
cook according to tradition, even when bowing to customer preferences. Although constraints
cannot be avoided, they can be negotiated. By combining tradition, adaptation, and innova-
tion, continuity of an ethnic food tradition is possible, maintaining for the ethnic group a
distinctive place in the public arena.

While holding to an illusion of continuity, modification and change are crucial for obtaining
culinary acceptance. The strategy of the Chinese restaurateur in modifying the culinary tradi-
tion is to make the unfamiliar seem sufficiently comfortable, thus making the exotic qualities

of the food pleasurable. Consider two examples: Chow Mein and Mongolian Beef, which are
among the entrees most frequently ordered by American customers. They are widely known
markers of Chinese food. Both are traditional Chinese dishes but also have been adapted to
demands of “American taste,” one in the process of cooking and the other in the ingredients.

Chow Mein

In preparing Chow Mein for American tastes, many restaurants alter the process of cooking.
Chow Mein in China is made by boiling oriental-style long noodles, then stir-frying the boiled

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542 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 36/No. 3/1995

noodles. In Athens, noodles are first dry-fried because Americans like fried foods. The noo-
dles are only an inch long–suitable for forks rather than chopsticks. The main entree is
marinated in sauce, which is then poured over the fried noodles. When the dish is served, the
mein (noodle) still tastes crisp.

Mongolian Beef

In contrast, the ingredients of Mongolian Beef have been altered. The basic procedure of
cooking does not differ substantially from traditional stir-fried dishes that emphasize high
temperature and rapid cooking (Sakamoto 1977):

Cooks at Sichuan prepare Mongolian Beef by stir-frying sliced, marinated beef for thirty
seconds, and then draining the oil. They then add mixed spices, mainly sugar, soy sauce,
ginger, water, and cornstarch to oils and bring to a boil. They add the cooked beef and
green scallions, stir-frying for another ten seconds, finally pouring it over fried crystal
noodles. The whole process takes less than three minutes. Since the beef is sliced and stir-
fried in hot oil for a short time it remains tender and not oily. (field notes)

The chef at Sichuan describes his changes in spices and condiments:

Americans like sweet things. They consume much more sugar than Chinese. In Mongolian
Beef we add a lot of sugar-it takes up the largest proportion of the spices. But the combi-

nation of beef, scallion, and sugar works well. You can call this an Americanized dish, but
it really tastes good, and our American customers like it and recognize it as a real Chinese
dish.

By acceding to American tastes, the Chinese cook transforms the alien and unfamiliar to the
conventional and familiar to “assist the customer to relate and interpret what is presented to
him and to appreciate the novelty in a different cuisine” (Rosenberg 1990).

Meal Format

Modifications are not limited to the choice of ingredients and the processes of cooking but
also include the structure of the meal. Each restaurant has adopted an American meal format,
the buffet lunch, and serves soup as the first course of a meal according to American eating
habits (instead of at the end, as in China).

Speed of service has also increased. Chinese not only enjoy eating but also talking at a
meal-talk expands the satisfaction of the restaurant experience. In comparison, Americans
are more “food-oriented” than “talk-oriented.” In China, diners do not mind waiting for an
hour for their entrees, whereas Americans want food served quickly (Hall 1978). One
Guangdong customer explains:

I get cravings for [Chinese food] every once in a while. It takes ten minutes for me to drive

here, but it’s still convenient. Everything comes fast. I have a one-hour break. That’s suffi-
cient for me.

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The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity 543

In meeting Americans’ requirement for speed, Chinese restaurants select equipment, raw
materials, preparation, cooking techniques, and serving styles to maximize efficiency. Many
of these restaurants use powerful gas burners to shorten cooking times. Food preparation now
involves a combination of the elaboration of Chinese food and standardization of American

fast food. For instance, the use of multiple spices is simplified by a “house special sauce” with
many dishes. Although each dish is freshly cooked when ordered, a limited set of ingredients
increases efficiency.

Despite modifications in the food items, spices, processes of cooking, and styles of service,
the fundamental principles involved in Chinese food have been retained. By using multiple
ingredients and mixing of flavors, dishes of various kinds and flavors are prepared. Chinese
principles of abundance, multiple ingredients, and mixing of flavors (Chang 1977; Anderson
and Anderson 1988) remain evident. Another major feature of the Chinese food system, the
separation of the staple (rice or noodles) and dishes (meats and vegetables) in the meal struc-
ture has also been retained. The food served in Chinese restaurants is simultaneously Chinese
and American, traditional and changed.

AUTHENTICITY AND ITS VARIATIONS

Although modifications of a “native” food model are necessary for the success of any Chinese
restaurant outside its indigenous community, the amount of Americanization is situated and
selected by owners to fit into a market niche based on their image of potential customers. The
food in Chinese restaurants in small southern cities may be considered authentic, but in New
York’s Chinatown the same food would be scorned as Americanized; in China, it may be “an
imitation”-or even considered “American” food. Authenticity lies in “its perception in the
public mind” (Shelton 1990) rather than in the food itself.

Authenticity also has a relational character. People define authenticity in association with
their own social experience. Our informants chose these restaurants because they liked and
wanted to eat “Chinese” food, whatever that might mean to them. For those who have been to
China, consumed similar dishes elsewhere, or acquired expert knowledge of Chinese food,
their evaluation of the food occurs largely through a comparison with previous experiences
(Fine 1992a). For those with little experience of eating in Asian climes (the vast majority of
American diners), a comparative basis for questioning the authenticity of the food is lacking,
but all diners with whatever cultural capital want food suitable to their taste. No one claims a
preference for “fake” food, but some diners care more about authenticity than others. The
actual and assumed choices of classes of customers (based on philosophical biases, aesthetic
preferences, economic positions, and temporal demands) affect the strategic choices of
management.

The customers we interviewed share a common realization that affects their choice: they
have selected Chinese food, which they perceive as a distinctive class of cuisine. The success
of an ethnic restaurant does not depend on its capacity to produce the food as consumed in the
home community (cuisine that is itself somewhat variable). Rather, it depends on how much
the restaurant can accommodate local needs while retaining characteristics of the ethnic tradi-

tion-making it “identifiable” (Levenstein 1986). Authenticity thus becomes a potential re-
source to attract customers. To differentiate itself from its competitors, each restaurant
emphasizes the uniqueness and special quality of the food and service it presents.

While a major reason to dine at a Chinese restaurant is that “the food is different,” orienta-
tions differ in choosing restaurants. Some eat primarily as an instrumental act, whereas for

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544 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 36/No. 3/1995

others eating is expressive: eating for the “body” versus for the “soul” (Pillsbury 1990). The
latter emphasizes the sensory characteristics of food (its taste, color, smell, and texture), as
well as the environment in which it is served. Yet, an emphasis on aesthetics does not require
that customers care about the authenticity of the food, essentially an ideological choice.

When asked whether they prefer authentic or Americanized Chinese food, the large major-
ity of customers opted for authenticity, but when questioned further about how authentic they

thought the food was at the Chinese restaurants they patronized, many were uncertain and
claimed they did not pay much attention, and they rejected foods that were defined as “un-
pleasant” and well outside of their experience. Thus, only a small proportion of customers are
highly conscious of authenticity. Elements that affect customers’ orientations include aesthetic

preference, economic status, and activity schedules. These orientations combine to create dis-
tinct market niches and shape restaurants’ business strategies, affecting the construction of
authenticity.

We focus on the culinary strategies of two types of restaurants: consumption-oriented and
connoisseur-oriented.9 The former provides inexpensive food for relatively undiscriminating
palates; the latter considers the aesthetic characteristics of their food (and the overall “dining

experience”) more self-consciously. Obviously these categories overlap and involve a matter
of degree. For instance, even the most connoisseur-oriented restaurant in Athens is relatively
unsophisticated by the standards of large American cities.

China Fast-Food and China Boat are consumption-oriented restaurants and serve the
equivalent of Chinese fast food. Both are located near the University of Georgia. China Fast-
Food operates across the street from the main campus; China Boat is a few blocks away, close
to the student dormitories. The majority of their customers are university students, staff mem-

bers, and workers in downtown government agencies, banks, and stores. Lunch and dinner are
served daily, with weekday lunches particularly busy.

The other two restaurants are connoisseur-oriented, catering to more sophisticated diners,
and are further from campus. At the east end of the town lies Guangdong Restaurant, about
ten miles from the university; Sichuan is five miles to the west. The regular customers of these
two restaurants are professionals, business people, and professors. Although these restaurants
also serve a buffet lunch, their heaviest business is in the evenings, especially during
weekends.

Consumption-Oriented Restaurants

Consumption-oriented service is characterized by efficiency, low price, and informality.
The menus of these two restaurants have fewer categories and entrees, emphasizing the most
popular foods such as Mongolian Beef, broccoli beef, sweet and sour chicken, and egg rolls.
Lunch is served cafeteria-style. Tips are not expected. Lunch dishes in China Fast-Food are
cooked in large batches rather than by the customer’s order:

At 11:30, the ten food containers on the buffet table are filled with seven freshly cooked
dishes, two types of hot soup, and fried rice. The customer picks up a tray and the server

provides two entrees, a soup, and fried rice, according to the customer’s choice. Although
there is always a line of people waiting in front of the buffet table, customers are served
within two or three minutes. (field notes)

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The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity 545

China Boat is a newly opened restaurant. Hardly noticeable in a plain house, the owner
decided to attract customers with the food rather than the decor. Although it serves a limited
number of simple dishes, the owner claims that simplicity should not prevent serving high
quality food. Each dish is freshly cooked according to the customer’s order. The lunch, priced
at $2.69, includes one dish (from a choice of ten entrees), one egg roll, and fried rice. This low
price is based on labor savings-the female owner works as the cook. The tactic of “selling
more through low profit” has been rewarded quickly. Every noon the plain dining area of
China Boat is crowded with a waiting line of diners who are unconcerned with the atmos-
phere, attracted by the value of the food. One student customer comments:

I like Chinese food. I’ve been to several Chinese restaurants here, but you pay the least in
this restaurant. Why do I bother paying twice in a fancier place?

Such customers desire variety, but they also consider their financial need, preferring lower
prices. Their practices reflect “realistic choices.” Guided by the need for “realism,” these
customers do not emphasize the taste of the food or its authenticity. One student customer at
China Fast-Food Restaurant claims:

I like Chinese food. I come at least three times each week…. How authentic the food is?

Well, it does not bother me. I don’t pay particular attention to whether vegetables are fresh
or not either. You have good quantity and price. Mongolian Beef with garlic sauce, hot and
sour soup, and fried rice, costs $3.95, but in Guangdong, the same thing costs $2 or $3
more. I don’t bother about the taste so long as it’s OK.

Some customers are more conscious of the differences in the taste of the Chinese food.

Another student recognized that the food at Guangdong tastes better, but despite this aware-
ness she still comes to China Fast-Food for lunch, because spending almost twice as much on
a regular basis is beyond her budget. The image of authenticity may bow to necessity.

Connoisseur-Oriented Restaurants

In contrast to the consumption orientation, the connoisseur orientation is often found among

diners who have greater temporal and economic resources and more extensive cultural capital.
These consumers are concerned about how the characteristics of the food meets their

expectations.

For instance, one American professor stated that he did not like the food in some Chinese
restaurants because “it has lost the character of the Chinese food.” The main reason he gave
for eating in Guangdong was that

the food is more authentic than the food I eat elsewhere in Athens. It is neither too sweet

nor too salty. It is relatively similar to the food I had in China.

The food presented by these restaurants has an aura of being either more artistic or more
authentic. Accordingly, service at these restaurants is relatively elaborate and formal, empha-

sizing the occasion of dining. The menus of these restaurants have more categories of food
and more entrees under each, providing more choices. In addition to popular entrees, “chef’s

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546 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 36/No. 3/1995

specialties” or “house specials” are presented. Some dishes involving complicated procedures
are served, such as Hot Braised Fish, Double-Sauteed Pork, Peking Duck, and Golden Triple
Delight. The connoisseur orientation is further expressed by the use of spices and sauces that
define the taste of food. Both Guangdong and Sichuan have created their own special house
sauce from a combination of soy sauce, vinegar, preserved or fresh garlic, seafood sauce,
sugar, dried red pepper, white or black pepper powder, oyster oil, plum sauce, cooking wine,
tomato sauce, ginger sauce, and black bean sauce.

The ingredients generally are of a higher quality and price than at consumption-oriented
restaurants. For instance, Shaoxin cooking wine made in Zhejiang, China, is generally consid-
ered to have a better quality than other cooking wines; Kikkoman soy sauce is also favored
because of its quality. Both are more expensive than American cooking wine and soy sauce.
Yet a successful combination does not necessarily imply the combination of the most expen-
sive items. The key to a tasty sauce is to find a pleasing result through experiments, including
a mixture of expensive and inexpensive ingredients-the goal is to find the best outcome at
the lowest cost (Fine 1992b). In order to create a satisfactory and unique house sauce, the
cooks at Guangdong tried more than fifty mixtures, experimenting with different combina-
tions before settling on the final formula. The owner comments:

Before we made our sauce, the quality of our food was not stable. When a cook left, the
newcomer may not produce the same taste because it is hard for two persons to use the
exact amount of spices, even if they observe the recipe strictly. I was troubled by this
problem until an idea occurred to me-an inspiration drawn from Coca Cola. No matter
how many cans and no matter where it is produced it tastes the same because it has a set
formula. Then we experimented with our sauce, Shifu [the cook] and I. In 1987, we tried
different combinations for several months. We used it in some dishes and requested the
customers’ opinion of it. If they said it was not very nice, we continued to change the
formula. Finally, we used the soy bean sauce made in Taiwan, dried red pepper powder in
mainland China, cooking wine in America, et cetera. The formulated sauce has increased
efficiency in cooking and helped to maintain a stable quality, and more important, it has
improved the taste of our food, making it different from others.

The creation of aesthetically pleasing food, while responsive to the taste of their customers, is
not based on an allegiance to authentic recipes or fixed styles of preparation (Lim 1994).
Ultimately, the image of the customers and their responses determine what is served, as the
goal is more a good reputation than good food. The owner of Guangdong notes:

Before we provide new entrees, we often talk with our customers, making improvements
by taking their advice. Take Spicy Vegetables with Tofu for example. At first they say tofu

is too light and the whole dish doesn’t look nice. Then we stir-fry tofu first and apply
spices separately. After several times’ trial, our customers say the dish is really appealing
to the eyes and tastes very well. Tofu is golden, with pepper still green, carrot red, and
onion jade-yellow.

Some infrequently ordered “authentic” dishes have, in fact, also been Americanized. The
cook at Sichuan comments:

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The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity 547

People in Athens do not like braised fish. They find it fishy. You know I cannot always
cook the way I like. I must listen to the boss. He wants me to change according to the
customers. The first time I changed the way of preparing the fish here I tried to bake the

fish first to get rid of the fishiness, then boil in hot sauce for a couple of minutes. It works.
The fish tastes fine.

The creation of more aesthetic or authentic food imposes demands on the cooks. They must be

flexible, cooperative, and creative. Cooks are expected to alter their cooking techniques ac-
cording to the vagaries of customers’ tastes, while simultaneously making the dishes appear
artistic and authentic.

Neither type of restaurant, whether consumption- or connoisseur-oriented, has authenticity
as its primary goal. Tradition as such is not the primary object of concern for social actors
(Shils 1981); most are more concerned with their immediate satisfaction, and few see adher-
ence to tradition as anything but secondary. While the idea of adhering to tradition may bring
some satisfaction, it is not as important as primary sensory satisfactions (or, for restaurateurs,
financial ones). The style of food provided by Chinese restaurants is the consequence of an
adaptation to the demands of a market. The owner of Guangdong illustrates the process:

When we started our restaurant, we heard some complaints about the Chinese food. Some

customers say certain dishes are too sweet or too salty. We realized that we need to have
our own market. We decided to provide something “light.” You know the restaurant busi-
ness has been affected by the economic situation in this country-the customers have been
more cautious and thrifty in spending money, but our business has continued mainly be-
cause of the patronage of our regular customers. They like our food and come regularly.

This strategy of differentiation is common. Some restaurants present their food with a
stronger flavor, others with a lighter one, but in either case, the decision is made on the basis
of customer responses, mediated by servers and interpreted by the owner. Objects acquire
meaning through the responses of those who experience them, not through a global ideology
of how they should “truly” be. Through a process of adjustment, these restaurants have estab-
lished regular clienteles.

CONCLUSION

The social construction of authentic ethnic food is bounded by social, cultural, and economic
constraints. These limits challenge the survival and diffusion of foreign cuisines, but through
cultural modification the limits can be transcended. Some modification is inevitable. Yet,

while a mere transplantation of the original culinary tradition is not feasible, if food is defined
as too Americanized, customers will be dissatisfied, and the food will no longer be seen as

representative of a distinctive ethnic tradition. If the food is totally assimilated into the Ameri-
can food pattern, it will lose the patronage of American clients who like it not only because it
has been made to suit their taste but also because it is symbolically representative of an exotic

other; they experience a self-validating “ethnic experience,” a mark of their tolerance and
sophistication. Ethnic food validates the self, as dining out is identity work.

The secret of the acceptance of ethnic food resides in the harmonization and compromise
between seemingly contradictory requirements: being authentic and being Americanized,
maintaining tradition while consciously modifying it. In other words, the restaurant requires

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548 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 36/No. 3/1995

organizational legitimacy (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978) as a place in which consumers can
encounter the other, while not straying too far from their own tastes.

The focus of our research has been on the typification of customer preference by restaurant
owners and employees, but customers also, if less explicitly or articulately, recognize that the
exoticism and authenticity of their meal contributes to, but does not determine, their satisfac-

tion. The experience of a segmented ethnic restaurant market in large metropolitan areas sug-

gests that customers select the type of “exotic” experience that fits their aesthetic preferences
from a range of possibilities (Lim 1994). The restaurant owner must typify the market niche
and prepare the food accordingly (Fine forthcoming).

Ultimately, food preparation and consumption are social activities. The success of the Chi-
nese in the restaurant world demonstrates that the continuity of a public ethnic culture depends
on the capacity of ethnic entrepreneurs to accommodate themselves to their host environment.
This capacity has several implications:

First, ethnic restaurants are sensitive to desires for variety and diversity. The American
embrace of multiculturalism in the past few decades has fueled the rapid growth of Chinese
restaurants. In spite of substitute food ingredients and changes in cooking techniques, Chi-
nese food remains recognizable as Chinese, an identity that is valued.

Second, ethnic restaurateurs desire to meet the needs of distinct customer groups and there-
fore market to these groups. By their organizational arrangements, Chinese restaurants have
adjusted to conflicts of aesthetic preference, economic status, and activity schedules, gradually
establishing their own market niches.

Third, ethnic chefs and owners modify their cultural resources. The dynamic properties of
ethnic cuisine benefit both the ethnic group and the larger society. As a result, the Americani-

zation of Chinese food is a process of innovation, reinvigorating a dynamic culinary tradition.

All cultural traditions are responsive to their environment. This practice should not be depreci-
ated as a manipulation of ethnic boundaries (Van den Berghe 1981) but as a maintenance of
them in the face of a changing context. Neither can the food be condemned for being in-
authentic; authenticity has been changed. If the construction of the authenticity of ethnic food

is a “lie,” then it is a legitimated lie. Moreover, authenticity is a folk idea, grounded in identity
politics and desires of ethnic differentiation.

The challenge for an ethnic restaurant is to differentiate itself from others, while avoiding
the liability of newness, or customers’ rejection of an uncomfortable strangeness. In other
words, the organization must appear distinctive to capture public attention, but be sufficiently
similar in its core characteristics to promote acceptance (Elsbach and Sutton 1992). Thus, a
restaurant may wish to market itself as more distinctive than it actually is (Robert I. Sutton,
personal communication, 1994).

The success of ethnic food depends on the participation of its audience. Late modernity has
produced certain homogenizing effects as well as strong tendencies toward cultural heteroge-
neity (Tuchman and Levine 1993); it has blurred the borders of ethnic groups but also pro-
vided an open atmosphere for recognizing the value of diversity and the desire to participate
in the cultural life of groups outside our own (Lim 1994, p. 8). Under such conditions an
ethnic culture may be reconstructed, shared, and popularized. Many Americans gain satisfac-
tion from their excursions into a multicultural ethic of consumption. As the most “pleasant
way to cross ethnic boundaries” and with its “shareable” character, ethnic food has served as a

paradigm of ethnicity (Van den Berghe 1984). For an American audience eating ethnic food is

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The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity 549

not a mere reflection of their need for differentiation but also a process of creating shared
symbols of diversity by which they make sense of and embrace their own fragmented culture.

This suggests a direction for addressing issues concerning multiculturalism and fragmented
cultures. Rather than preserving cultures through enforced and artificial incorporation, the
market has demonstrated the potential for generating voluntary inclusion. By this we do not
suggest that governments should reject the incorporation of multicultural models in institu-
tional forums but claim that we can understand the dynamics of cultural integration by exam-
ining the strategies that ethnic entrepreneurs have successfully used to bring their culture to a
larger audience. The richness of cultural traditions, modified though they may be, is evident
through all cultural media-music, film, festivals, clothing, and food. The project is to ana-
lyze those conditions and modifications that promote acceptance rather than rejection or apa-
thy. If we recognize that all cultural traditions are constructed, then the goal of presenting
authentic traditions can be understood as primarily a rhetorical strategy. Presenting our ethnic-
ity in the late twentieth century has increasingly fallen under the rubric of “impression man-
agement.” We can rely upon a variety of ethnic images and claims in which to create a
meaningful and situated public self.

With the emergent questioning of the essentialist character of race and ethnicity, research-
ers should examine those arenas in which ethnicity is displayed and presented in contempo-
rary American life (e.g., ethnic businesses, festivals, political movements). An individual’s
ethnicity is a strategic resource that at certain times and places can generate simultaneously a
sense of “otherness” and “in-group cohesion,” without disclaiming ties to the core values and
traditions of the polity that proclaim one as “American.” Displayed ethnicity links both iden-
tity types of “hyphenated” Americans: here Chinese and American.

The American model of diversity, grounded in public display, permits each ethnic and
racial group to use its culture for economic profit, selling itself in the name of tolerance. Even
when largely excluded from social participation in the past, ethnic groups used their culture
for economic benefit and survival (Light 1974), but today, where there is a “favorable” atmos-

phere, the practice has become more conspicuous and developed. Through our purchases and
presence, we validate the legitimacy of the group and of the American polity, all the while
altering the ethnic culture to make it congruent with mainstream values and tastes. Nowhere is
this process more evident than in our choices of cuisine.

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550 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 36/No. 3/1995

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors wish to thank Richard Alba, Howard Aldrich, Hubert J. Chen, William Finlay,
Barry Schwartz, and Robert Sutton for comments on an earlier version of this article. This
article was completed while Fine was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences. He is grateful for financial support provided by National Science Foun-
dation grant #SBR-9022192.

NOTES

1. In speaking of “American” diners throughout the article, we refer to those Americans who are not
of Chinese American descent. Chinese Americans are, of course, Americans.

2. Our focus becomes the business owner, management, and employees, only touching briefly on the
attitudes of customers and the community base in which the establishment is located. These other groups

are deserving of more explicit treatment than this analysis provides.

3. According to Richard Pillsbury (1990, p. 152), 126 distinct ethnic cuisines are served in Penn-
sylvania alone.

4. The first Chinese restaurant in the United States, Macao and Woosung, opened in San Francisco in
1849. Most Chinese restaurants of the nineteenth century were modest affairs, primarily catering to work-

ing-class diners, and spread throughout the western United States along the rail lines (Pillsbury 1990, p.

51; Karnow 1994, p. 92). The growth and cultural legitimation of Chinese restaurants began in the 1890s
as Chinatowns were transformed from vice districts to tourist attractions (Light 1974, p. 368).

5. Gaye Tuchman and Harvey Gene Levine (1993, p. 397) suggest that there are about 1,500 Chinese
restaurants in the New York metropolitan area, which they label “the Chinese food capital of the United
States.”

6. Obviously, each ethnic group provides its own case. Our model, emphasizing the taming of authen-
tic cuisines, may be more relevant for “exotic” cultures than for Northern and Western European cuisine

(e.g., German or Swedish [Richard Alba, personal communication, 1994]). Chinese cuisine may be the
archetypal example and, therefore, not wholly representative, because it is both widely accepted and
exotic-although Mexican and Italian cuisines also would seem to fit this model broadly.

7. Restaurant owners of Chinese descent may be more or less socially assimilated into their commu-
nity. Many see themselves as “outsiders,” absorbing American customers for economic purposes but not
in their personal lives.

8. Restaurants in other nations alter food to conform to local tastes. Chinese food in Germany does
not taste precisely like Chinese food in the United States. In this case, we might say that the food has
been “Teutonified” (Richard Alba, personal communication, 1994).

9. Chinese restaurants can be divided into many categories or be placed along a continuum; we di-
chotomize Chinese restaurants for convenience, while recognizing that this lumps dissimilar restaurants

together. The dichotomy is multidimensional. The connoisseur-type restaurant is involved not only in
providing more authentic food but is also involved in staged authenticity (Van den Berghe 1984, p. 394)
in the performances by servers as part of a dining experience (Finkelstein 1989). In these restaurants
customers expend more time and resources. In addition, the placement of a restaurant may vary by time

of day, as lunch may be more consumption-oriented than dinner.

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The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity 551

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Contents

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Issue Table of Contents

Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Summer, 1995), pp. 441-628
Front Matter
Social Movements
New Social Movement Theories [pp. 441-464]
The League of Nations and the Irish Question: Master Frames, Cycles of Protest, and “Master Frame Alignment” [pp. 465-481]
Gender, Ethnicity, and Community
“Men I Mess with Don’t Have Anything to Do with Aids”: Using Ethno-Theory to Understand Sexual Risk Perception [pp. 483-504]
The Mother as Consumer: Insights from the Children’s Wear Industry, 1917-1929 [pp. 505-522]
Religious Participation, Ethnic Identification, and Adaptation of Vietnamese Adolescents in an Immigrant Community [pp. 523-534]
The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity: Chinese Food as a Social Accomplishment [pp. 535-553]
Agency, Structure, and Social Organization
Individual Agency, the Ordinary, and Postmodern Life [pp. 555-570]
Dramatic Self Change [pp. 571-586]
The Organization and Consequences of Social Pasts in Criminal Courts [pp. 587-605]
Where Did You Hear That? Technology and the Social Organization of Gossip [pp. 607-628]
Back Matter

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