Fashioning Appetite: Restaurants and the Making of Modern Identity

Joanne Finkelstein, Columbia University Press
Public spaces have become platforms for the invention and display of self-identity, especially in the affluent West where the restaurant, from local café to Michelin-starred establishment, deftly stages these performances. In this follow-up to her classic Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners, Joanne Finkelstein takes a fragment of social life—restaurant dining—and uses it to examine the dramatic effect our public behavior and social habits have on our private desires and sense of identity … READ MORE