Skip to main content
University of California Press

Kitchens

The Culture of Restaurant Work
by Gary Alan Fine (Author)
Paperback eBook
Price: $29.95 / £25.00
Publication Date: Dec 2008
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9780520942899
Read an Excerpt(opens in new window)
Recommend to your Library (PDF)(opens in new window)Rights and Permissions

About the Book

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. A new preface updates this riveting exploration of how restaurants actually work, both individually and as part of a larger culinary culture.

About the Author

Gary Alan Fine is John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University.

Table of Contents

Preface to the 2009 Edition 
Preface to the First Edition
Introduction 
Chapter 1. Living the Kitchen Life 
Chapter 2. Cooks'Time:Temporal Demands
and the Experience of Work 
Chapter 3. The Kitchen as Place and Space 
Chapter 4· The Commonwealth of Cuisine 
Chapter 5· The Economical Cook:Organization as Business 
Chapter 6. Aesthetic Constraints 
Chapter 7· The Aesthetics of Kitchen Discourse 
Chapter 8. The Organization and Aesthetics of Culinary Life 
Appendix. Ethnography in the Kitchen:Issues and Cases 
Notes 
References 
Index 

Reviews

“Oozes with enough first-hand accounts of pranks and mishaps to make a customer retch, or at least seriously reconsider swallowing. A busy restaurant serves French toast off the floor. Bored cooks play catch with a steak to kill time. Kitchens jumps between the absurd and the academic. Fine’s book entertains as it enlightens.”
— North By Northwestern
"From the raw to the cooked, Kitchens takes us inside the fascinating world of restaurant work. But be prepared. Abandon preconceptions all ye who enter, for here's an original and important peek into the patois, the pecking order, the profits, and the people who produce what we eat when we eat out. . . . A real by-the-book example of superior occupational sociology, as it was meant to be."—Rob Faulkner, University of Massachusetts

"A carefully researched, brilliantly analyzed and elegantly described study of a major American industry. His negotiated order and combined interactional-structural approach is a model for sociological industries and organizations."—Anselm Strauss, University of California, San Francisco