The Hidden Rules of Fine Dining

Fine dining restaurants in the U.S. have become more diverse, with the white-tablecloth French restaurant joined by cuisines from around the world and categories like “Californian” and “New American.” As the industry has evolved, so have the ways we talk about restaurants—and research by sociologist Gillian Gualtieri shows that this language can reveal ethnic and racial hierarchies and create economic constraints for some restaurants.

Gualtieri drew on 120 interviews with chefs at top restaurants as well as analysis of 1,380 reviews in the 2016 Michelin Guide, identifying three “logics of evaluation” that chefs and reviewers draw on: technique, creativity, and authenticity. These logics of evaluation correspond with three genres of restaurant: “classic,” “flexible,” and “ethnic.”

Reviews of classic restaurants include explicit references to “technique” or describe dishes as “perfectly executed.” For these restaurants, quality is assessed through adherence to a defined set of rules.

Flexible restaurants, in Gualtieri’s system, “offer distinctive cuisine described using ‘fuzzier’ categories, such as ‘American,’ ‘Contemporary,’ and ‘Californian,’ and are celebrated primarily by the logic of creativity.” Creativity, though, presumes a background in classic technique onto which a personal point of view is added.

“A lot of the chefs that I know it’s almost like that rebellion thing,” one chef said. “We were taught classic French techniques and classic French cuisine, and now we’re like, ‘No. I don’t want to do that.'”

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Gualtieri uses “ethnic restaurants” to refer to restaurants serving cuisines not traditionally represented in fine dining. These restaurants were often evaluated for their authenticity. But chefs told Gualtieri that this standard could be uncomfortable. According to one Chinese chef, authenticity “means what other people’s perception of the cuisine is … It’s a stereotype of what that cuisine is.”

Just as a classic chef would be judged on technique and potentially penalized for creativity, chefs at ethnic restaurants might be negatively judged for food that did not meet the expectations of American diners.

“I serve real Italian food,” one chef said. “New York is full of American Italian food, which is not real Italian food. A couple of customers told me I’m not Italian because I don’t have fettuccine alfredo on the menu. Or spaghetti and meatballs. I said, ‘really?!? I don’t cook Italian food?!’”

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On the flip side, ethnic restaurants faced what one chef called “the mother problem”: negative reactions when people from the same ethnicity found food lacking because it did not meet their expectations based on the food they had been served at home.

Ethnic restaurants faced an economic challenge as well. Because they have not traditionally been associated with fine dining, customers often expect lower prices and resist paying for higher-end ingredients and complex preparations. As a chef at a one-Michelin-star Thai restaurant put it, “We are called to task quite a lot for being an ethnic restaurant that is somehow a little too upscale to be authentic.”

The result, Gualtieri finds, is that “Ethnic restaurants are systematically devalued by the prominence of the logic of authenticity,” without the chance to define the terms on which they are evaluated, while classic and flexible restaurants benefit from association with “standardized institutions of American fine dining.”

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