Discriminating Palates: Evaluation and Ethnoracial Inequality in American Fine Dining

Abstract

Elite cultural fields are often not diverse. Existing studies have examined how marginalized cultural producers are actively discriminated against or excluded from positions of prestige, but less is known about how ethnoracial inequality affects the evaluative processes used to assess products in fields of cultural production. This article analyzes 120 in-depth interviews with critically-recognized chefs in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area and 1,380 Michelin restaurant reviews to uncover the system of insidious racial inequality that shapes evaluation in the American fine dining field. I find that there are three logics of evaluation—of (1) technique, (2) creativity, and (3) authenticity—that are differentially enacted for distinct ethnoracial categories of restaurants in the field. I show how these different, racialized evaluative processes result in the systematic devaluation of culinary products categorically associated with non-whiteness, what I call Ethnic restaurants, and disproportionate consecration of products associated with whiteness, which I term Classic and Flexible restaurants. I bring the race/ethnicity and sociology of culture literatures together to illuminate the ways in which inequality infiltrates the logics that organize systems of value in fields of cultural production.

Race and Genre Ambiguity in the Critical Reception of Popular Music

“…An implication of this finding is that white musicians are much more likely to span racialized genre boundaries through participation in multiracial groups than are black musicians. This is consistent with other research that finds racialized symbolic boundaries are more constraining for non‐white actors in cultural fields (Childress and Nault, 2019; Gualtieri 2021) and perhaps even a strategy of “racial evasion” (Oware 2016) that reinforces white privilege in this space.…”

“…Somewhat less attention has been given to how genre identities are racialized in the process of cultural reception. Some notable exceptions are Chong’s (2011) study of literary critics’ use of race and ethnicity to assess novels and Gualtieri’s (2021) work on ethnoracial inequality in American fine dining. In addition to using racial and ethnic identifiers to establish the authenticity of their work, Chong (2011) finds that an author’s ethnoracial identity is used to classify the work into ethnic genres.…”

“…Many notable studies in the sociology of culture have shown how intermediaries—including literary, food, music, and film critics—subtly devalue categories associated with non‐white producers (Childress and Nault, 2019; Chong 2011; Gaultieri 2021) and others highlight the obstacles black performers face in crossing racialized genre boundaries (Erigha 2019; Murray 2021; Orosz 2021; Schaap and Berkers 2020). In contrast, we consider how this is inconspicuously manifest in the discourse of popular music critics when they assign genre labels to musicians and their records.…”

Innovation and creativity in creative industries

“…Cultural genres are categories of creative products classified together on the basis of perceived similarity of artistic content and organizational features (DiMaggio, 1987; Lena & Peterson, 2008). Genres differ in statuses, and creative producers and intermediaries mobilize to increase the status of genres and fields with which they identify (Baumann, 2001; DiMaggio, 1982; Gualtieri, 2021). As creative producers introduce new products and seek to redefine their positions within genres, processes of classification and innovation shape one another.…”

Sonic double consciousness: Public radio voices of color

“…The sociology of evaluation has unsettled assumptions of objectivity in evaluation standards, revealing instead the subjectivity of evaluative practices (Lamont 2012;Chong 2020;Velthuis 2005;Espeland and Sauder 2008), and evaluation's interconnectedness with the entire circuit of a cultural product (Childress 2017). There is a small growing literature on evaluation which shows that racism gets embedded in the consecration of cultural objects (Bledsoe 2021), the legitimation of cultural tastes (Gualtieri 2021), and the formation of entire cultural genres (Lena 2019).…”