Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work

By Gary Alan Fine

Book Overview

Kitchens takes us into the robust, overheated, backstage world of the contemporary restaurant. In this rich, often surprising portrait of the real lives of kitchen workers, Gary Alan Fine brings their experiences, challenges, and satisfactions to colorful life. He provides a riveting exploration of how restaurants actually work, both individually and as part of a larger culinary culture. Working conditions, time constraints, market forces, and aesthetic goals all figure into the food served to customers--who often don't know quite what they're getting.

The kitchen is a place of constant compromise, of quirks, approximations, dirty tricks, surprises, and short cuts, as Fine demonstrates in his deft, readable narrative. He brings to life the complicated relationships among kitchen workers--servers, dishwashers, pantry workers, managers, restaurant critics, and customers--and reveals the effects of organizational structure on individual relations.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520200772
• ISBN13: 9780520200777
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

A Review of Fine's "Kitchens"

There are two reasons to read this book. First, Fine offers an in-depth analysis of the restaurant kitchen life by studying four restaurant kitchens in the St.Paul-Minneapolis area. In a society which is enamored with eating out, this can help us understand what really takes place behind closed doors. Fine has taken the time to understand the kitchen life through the study of the trials and tribulations of chefs, as well as enrolling in cooking classes at a vocational college to understand the training process that many of these individuals have experienced. Second, Fine offers an in-depth analysis of organizations through his study of these restaurants. While this is often lost on those not steeped in the social sciences, scholars interested in the study of organizations and/or the symbolic interaction approach will find it both entertaining and challenging to follow, interpret, and critique this perspective. Overall, this is a lively read that is hard to put down.