Transcript

Between 1975 and 2010 the style of gourmet dining, in America and beyond, was transformed.

Increasingly, restaurants of ‘fine’ dining incorporated food, décor, and other elements previously limited to the ‘casual’ dining experience.  The celebrity chef, working in an open kitchen, took over from the Maitre D as the most important player, and in many places starched white tablecloths gave way to scrubbed wooden tables.  Innovation, experiment and diversity (rather than the long established rules of French cuisine) have become the order of the day.

In this podcast Eric Lemay talks to Alison Pearlman, author of Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America (University of Chicago, 2013). It first aired on the New Books in Food channel of the New Books Network .

The gourmet experience, of our imagination – an elegant restaurant with a single candle flickering at the center of a luminous white tablecloth,  a quartet playing somewhere in the background, a waiter slipping a perfectly plated appetizer of escargot before you, which you proceed to nuzzle out of their shells with silver tongs and that dainty fork  –  has changed.

It was, perhaps, when Food & Wine magazine declared Roy Choi one of its “Best New Chefs” of 2010 for the food he was serving up in his Kogi BBQ truck, that this sea change in our idea of gourmet eating was confirmed.

And that’s the very change that Alison Pearlman explores in her book,

Alison describes a gourmet experience “replete with eroded hierarchies and pointed style contrasts, convergences of haute and ordinary.” And, of course, food trucks – they may have started in Los Angeles, but as she points out, they have spread much further.  For example, London street food  is cause for foodie celebration and serious London foodies can be found standing on the windy embankment of the Thames eating a pulled pork roll at the The Real Food Market on the SouthBank.  And do listen to Kieron Yates brilliant podcast, The Best Burger in the World? about a food truck in Paris.

In a keen investigation of every element of the dining experience, from menus to molecular gastronomy, Pearlman’s book reveals the surprising nature of what fine dining means for us today.

 

Tags: Fine dining, Food trucks, Gourmet dining, Roy Choi