Introduction
1: The Fine Dining Restaurant Industry in Historical
Perspective
2: The Michelin-Starred Restaurant Sector Today
3: Vocation or Business? Competing Organizational Logics and Work
Orientations of Chefs
4: Fine-Dining Chefs: Iconic Figures or Work Horses?
5: Distinctiveness, Homogeneity, and Innovation in Haute
Cuisine
6: Chefs' Culinary Styles
7: Front-of-House Staff: Hosts, Sales Persons, or Communicators of
Expert Knowledge?
8: Supplier Relations: Quality, Price, and Trust.
9: Diners: In Search of Gustatory Pleasure or Symbolic Meaning?
10: Taste Makers: the Attribution of Aesthetic and Economic Value
by Gastronomic Critics and Guides
11: The Transformation of the Fine-Dining Sector
Christel Lane has been a Professor of Economic Sociology at the
University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of St. John's College.
Christel has been working on fine-dining restaurants in Britain and
Germany since 2009. Visiting a large number of Michelin-starred
restaurants and their chefs, she has published articles on this
topic in the journals Food, Culture and Society, British Journal of
Sociology, and Poetics. This work combines her long-standing
interest in
economic sociology with the sociology of culture. Christel's most
recent books are Capitalist Diversity and Diversity within
Capitalism (Routledge 2012, edited with Geoffrey Wood); and
National Capitalism,
Global Production Networks.Fashioning the Value Chain in Britain,
the US and Germany (OUP 2009, with Jocelyn Probert).
"The reader of this book is a guest at Lane's table as she parses
the phenomena of fine dining, encouraging us to critically consider
the gains of culinary exploration and the social organization of
taste. Beyond the restaurant industry, her study of these
"peculiarly outmoded business organizations" adds a comparative,
geographically sensitive perspective to productive ongoing
dialogues among economic, cultural, and organizational sociologists
on the study of contemporary elite taste and cosmopolitanism." --
Administrative Science Quarterly
"Christel Lane has produced an authoritative guide to fine dining
as a social, cultural, and economic institution with complex
systems of support and deeply rooted national differences. We learn
that taste is a contested terrain, where every culinary act reveals
competing values, suggesting that the world of fine cuisine is no
less complex than the world at large." --Sharon Zukin, author of
Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places
"At last! A serious study of one of the most striking changes in
culinary culture since the 1980s: the rise of the cult of 'fine
dining.' In an age of television chefs and cooking as competitive
display, there has often seemed to be an element of spectatorship
or even gastro-pornography in the public's interest. France has had
its haute cuisine for centuries, but neither Britain nor Germany
was previously noted for a robust tradition of high-end eating.
Professor Lane shows that the British and German chefs are no
longer simply following French models: their food also has local
roots. Focusing on chefs and their restaurants that have gained the
coveted Michelin stars, this book is essential reading for all who
take a keen interest in serious eating." --Stephen Mennell,
Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University College Dublin
"Scholars and enthusiasts will profit from this deft comparison of
the development of contemporary fine-dining restaurants and their
chefs in Britain and Germany which offers a thorough account of the
multiple tensions involved in business management, working life,
craft training, and aesthetic inspiration." --Alan Warde, Professor
of Sociology, University of Manchester
"[A] sociological approach lies at the heart of Lane's study of the
world of fine dining, which becomes in reality a study of
economics, work relations, and aspects of English and German
history and culture that drive the public and restaurant workers to
hold particular values and to be trained and work in certain
ways... The Cultivation of Taste is replete with charts and data,
and there is no doubt the author did a large amount of painstaking
research. I may have issue with what she has to say about some of
that research, but there can be little question that she has dug
deep and thoroughly documented a previously under-examined topic...
It is, however, a book dense with information and a real find for
anyone doing research on restaurants or employment, and certainly
of interest to those in the hospitality industry." --ZETEO
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